I also got 20 out of 20.
I got my nephew the tapes about 7 years ago but I didn’t know that there was a CD out. Just ran out and got babyjesus a copy of it for Christmas. All my cow-orkers are singing along with it as I type.
It’s the question whose answer is “what’s your function.” I typed in “What’s your function,” but capitalizing the “W” caused it to be read as an incorrect answer.
I gotta admit that the “Three-Ring Government” episode of America Rock (the one that talks about the separation of powers) has a certain appeal.
The parallels between the Federal Government and a 3-ring circus are certainly worthy of note. 
My fourth-grade students have always liked “Three Is A Magic Number.” Every year I use the Schoolhouse Rock videos, that one has the most spontaneous singing-along…plus “Electricity,” and “Ready or Not, Here I Come.”
I personally appreciate the more soul-flavored songs, like “I Got Six” and “Verb.” Something about them brings back nostalgia for the optimism of the Early Seventies, and makes me think of the Jackson 5 and Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Goin’ On.”
I am one of those irritated by the stilted presentation of American History. I don’t care for the caricatures of King George and the Redcoats in “No More Kings”…maybe Mel Gibson drew inspiration from this for “The Patriot”?
There’s practically nothing in there that speaks to the Indian or Black experience…so, needless to say, there are no soul-influenced songs in “America Rock” (unless you count the vocal stylings of “Suffering Until Suffrage”).
I wish someday someone would figure out a way to present history to kids in an entertaining without making it stilted.
My history teacher told us once how when they had to memorize the preamble of the constitution for a test in her senior year history class, you could hear all the students singing the preamble song to themselves.
I like Figure 8 and Conjunction, Junction the best.
I just heard that one of the co-creators of Schoolhouse Rock died over the Christmas weekend.
The fill-in-the-blank answers are case insensitive. You may have put in the question mark, which would’ve thrown off the answer.
I like “Mother Necessecity”, the music changed about seven or eight times in that one song.
Y’all haven’t yet mentioned the Tom Lehrer contribution, “Silent E”. “Who can turn a tub into a tube?”, etc.
I also loved “Figure Eight” and of course sing the Preamble. I also liked the feminist one despite the ultra-70’s costume of the superheroine in it. And “Good, good good good Eleven/never ever gave us any trouble 'til after Nine” whereupon the Eleven Fairy flew smack into “110” after blithely fluttering past “11, 22, 33” and so on.
The Simpsons version of “I’m Just a Bill” can be found in its entirety in this episode synopsis at your source for all things Simpson, snpp.com:
And it was done by the same singer, too!
Lynn Ahrens is a genius. My favorite shows of theirs are RAGTIME and the much lighter LUCKY STIFF. SUESSICAL seems to be an overproduced mess in its current state but it was cute enough in Boston. Her talent came right through all the noise.
“But my friend Sam
Stayed just the same!”
While the three minute length forced over-simplification, these shorts appear to have acheived their goals of enhancing learning or, at the very least, helping kids on tests. The preamble and the counting by 3’s certainly helped me in school. I suspect that to do a event justice, it would have to have it’s own short. You couldn’t just cover the fate of Native Americans or African Americans in one line from “No More Kings” or “Elbow Room”. The creators attempts at historical even-handedness may also have been precluded (by ABC) from covering any injustices, since their audience started at three years of age. (Or, perhaps it was decided that they could not do justice to these weighty topics in three-minute shorts.) Lastly, they didn’t cover these injustices in school, so it may have been outside of their goals. It is a different world these days. I think the answer is to do more shorts to address these issues. While I thought that George III did look particularly nasty, the series, on the whole, proved to be a good starting point for learning and an easy work-around for the rote memorization which was required to do well on tests in tht era.
“Silent E” wasn’t done for Schoolhouse Rock, Lehrer wrote and performed it for a PBS show called “The Electric Company”. That was sort of the show you were supposed to graduate to when you outgrew “Sesame Street”. He did other songs for then too, including “L-Y” and “Snore, Sniff, Sneeze”. Some of them were just released for the first time on a Lehrer box set about a year ago.
When the revue “Tomfoolery” was assembled out of Tom Lehrer’s music, the lyrics for “Silent E” were changed slightly. They added this quatrain:
Once I used to hop,
but now I can hope.
And of course my pop,
turned into the Pope.
I like the noun one. The song gives the Monkees as an example of a noun. And you know how I feel about the Monkees.
D’oh! :o
Robot Arm, thanks for correcting me. I was very very little and after a while it all runs together!
All you Schoolhouse Rock fans out there might want to fire up Napster and look for a song by that name by the group Eddie From Ohio. Lots of fun!