Having recently realized that my "It's America Charlie Brown!" collection glorifies our history a little bit, oversimplifying and always marking Ben Franklin as "the guy with the kite" I sought out new educational cartoons for my classes this year. The goal: something entertaining, educational, and short. I went to the library with this intent, humming the bars to "I'm Just a Bill" and hoping against all hope that no one else had beat me to the Schoolhouse Rock anthology.
They had.
I was able to sweet talk my way into borrowing it for a day, my own copy should be arriving at the public library tomorrow. And so, after making enchilladas for dinner I sat down for my very own screening of "America Rock."
We started out with "No More Kings," followed by "Fireworks," "Shot Heard 'Round the World," and "Preamble." Hokey, but alas what do you expect from ABC programing from the 70s.
I start to wonder, did kids watch these things (I mean, mine will tomorrow) or were they more like extended commercials for kids to refill their bowls of sugar smacks and Lucky Charms? Ben Stein meets folk music. There is certainly a reason these didn't make it to the cartoons I watched in the eighties. As history progressed it only got worse, from an episode entitled "Elbow Room" about Manifest Destiny (which completely ignores the Mexican War) to "Sufferin' till sufferage" the clips are sick propaganda. I wonder what the Russians were putting out? This was our answer to the space race? How the hell did we win the Cold War?
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2 comments:
the staff at my school put on a show every year, and last spring we did "schoolhouse rock." "elbow room" was a hard song to do in good conscience, and we actually changed the words in order to try to be more accurate.
-moy
All I can say about these movies that I still know the Preamble by heart, except for the part that the song leaves out (it says just "We the people," instead of "We the People of the United States"). Which, in addition to being a large oversight, seems a strange thing to do in a tune designed to help things memorizing things.
Still, there it is, still fluttering through my head. "We the PEO-ple, in ORDER to FORM a more PER-fect UN-ion..."
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