Schoolhouse Rock

School­house Rock, the series of 41 car­toon shorts that used catchy tunes and rep­e­ti­tion to teach kids watch­ing Sat­ur­day morn­ing car­toons about math, Amer­i­can his­tory, gram­mar and sci­ence, began as a brain­storm of David McCall when, in 1971, he noticed that his son could sing pop­u­lar song lyrics but couldn’t han­dle sim­ple mul­ti­pli­ca­tion tables. His solu­tion was sim­ple: Cre­ate a catchy way to learn math by fus­ing it with con­tem­po­rary music and, he reck­oned, the kids would be able to mem­o­rize their math through songs.

McCall was chair­man of the New York ad agency McCaf­frey & McCall, and he put the prob­lem to his under­lings. They sug­gested he hire Bob Dor­ough, a Texas jazz musi­cian known for cre­at­ing catchy music to cre­ate the songs. Dor­ough was will­ing to give the idea a shot, and he plowed through his daughter’s math books, mak­ing up tunes on his piano until he’d cre­ated the trippy bal­lad “Three Is a Magic Number.”

McCall loved Dorough’s song, and the tune was even­tu­ally released as a record by Capi­tol Records under the title Mul­ti­pli­ca­tion Rock. A work­book deal fell through, but Tom Yohe, McCaf­frey & McCall’s cre­ative direc­tor, thought that the songs would go well with ani­ma­tion, so, after doo­dling some pic­tures, which McCall once again loved, they put together a 3 minute film to accom­pany “Three Is a Magic Num­ber”, which they showed to ABC’s head of children’s pro­gram­ming, Michael Eis­ner. Eis­ner was recep­tive to the idea and gave McCaf­frey & McCall the go ahead to cre­ate films for the rest of the mul­ti­pli­ca­tion tables. Gen­eral Mills was brought on as the sole spon­sor of School­house Rock.

Eis­ner also demanded that the big ani­ma­tion stu­dios of Hol­ly­wood that made their Sat­ur­day morn­ing car­toons cut 3 min­utes from each show so that the ani­mated shorts could be run. The stu­dios were not too eager to com­ply, but after prod­ding by Eis­ner that it made good busi­ness sense, the relented.

School­house Rock pre­miered on the week­end of Jan­u­ary 6–7, 1973, with the play list being “My Hero Zero,” “Ele­men­tary, My Dear,” “Three Is a Magic Num­ber” and “The Four-Legged Zoo.” The shorts were aired for 12 years, end­ing in 1985.¹

1. The infor­ma­tion for this piece came from the omnipresent Wikipedia and the totally great School House Rock Site. [↩]