A huge staple of Generation X’s upbringing! Seems they remained on the air to influence the first half of the Mills with additions on Economics and Computer Science. However, what ABC was doing via School House Rock wasn’t unique. CBS had their In The News between cartoons to give digestible explanations of the headlines worrying our parents in the tumultuous Seventies and NBC jumped on later the Metric System as superheroes. Guess which of the three won out? I knew by 1984 when a bunch of us were humming the Preamble during a History test in high school!
Much like Sesame Street, these three-minute cartoons set to music succeeded via their repetition a la advertising. I can’t even imagine how many times I watched them. I know the History and Science ones worked on me. I never had trouble with Math and for the life of me Grammar failed; I didn’t make the connection on adverbs until sixth grade when my horrible, unqualified teacher clarified (oversimplified), “it’s just a word with -ly on the end!” What it modified came later and I’m solid now. I’m even good with adverbs in other languages, they have similar patterns!
Could something like this be done again? I’m confident we can. I don’t buy the argument about attention spans being too short. They said such crap about my generation as kids when there were only three choices on Saturday mornings in most markets! If it were true, should’t the MCU flicks be under 80 minutes and book sales killed by the success of pamphlets? Even Jennifer has the fortitude to dig through paperwork when it’s necessary regardless of all those TikTok cat movies (you’ll never find the app on my gear). We’d have to revise History Rock with a ka-jillion trigger warnings for the thin-skinned unless it’s related to the bullshit-ridden “facts” and (c)rap music from the overrated Hamilton musical and an err-plagued Reagan song.