I knew this was coming, but now that it’s closer, and I know the Dope has a lot of Schoolhouse Rock fans (I’m one of them), I might as well comment on it: on March 31, Disney is releasing a DVD entitled Schoolhouse Rock: Earth. Obviously, reaction is going to be mixed, I’m sure. The conservatives have already jumped on the bandwagon of bashing anything regarding the Al Gorey message of “the earth is in danger and you need to help”- especially when it comes to children. (They must be forgetting that SHR actually covered it way back in the '70s, in a song that makes an encore presentation here.)
Looking at the clips, it thankfully doesn’t look like a travesty to the Schoolhouse name (other than the music video for a poor Jack Johnson enviro-rewrite of Three is a Magic Number by Hannah Montana’s bushy-haired guy pal)- the familiar voices of Bob Dorough and Jack Sheldon are still there, and all the songwriters have come back, too. The animation doesn’t look too bad, either:
The Trash Can Band (with Dolly Carton
S-A-V-E- the O-C-E-A-N (I like the second part, but could do without the rapping walrus)
Carbon Sasquatch (if anything, the conservatives should at least like the message to buy American)
The Rainforest (this neither looks nor sounds like a Schoolhouse Rock song)
The Little Things We Do (special appearances by The Earth and Mr. Morton and family)
It is somewhat surprising that a serious that was extremely politically incorrect in its treatment of American history is coming back with hyper-PC environment messages, but I guess it’s the “in thing” thanks to Mr. Gore. (Am I the only one who remembers the brief time ecology was hip back in the early '90s long before An Inconvient Truth?) Thankfully, this revival doesn’t look horrible for the most part, and the messages seem good ones to teach children- despite what some may think.