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Often viewed with Nostalgia by members of Generation X , ''Schoolhouse Rock!'' has become part of American Popular Culture . ORIGINS Schoolhouse Rock was a commercial advertising venture by David McCall . The first song recorded was ''Three is a Magic Number'', by Bob Dorough . It tested well, so a children's Record was compiled and released. When a print workbook version fell through, McCall's company decided to produce their own animated versions of the songs, which they then sold to ABC (based on a demo animation of the original ''Three is a Magic Number'' for its saturday morning lineup. The network's children's programming division, headed by Michael Eisner , actually made its cartoon-producers cut three minutes out of each of their shows, and sold General Foods on the idea of sponsoring the segments. The series stayed on the air for 12 years. Later sponsors of the Schoolhouse Rock segments included Nabisco , Kenner Toys , Kellogg's , and McDonald's . The last of the original series was the computer segments with Scooter Computer and Mister Chips, which were intended to introduce children to computers, but they were so disliked by the creative team that production copies were not even retained; the first of the four segments is still missing. In the 1990s the team reunited to produce Money Rock, as well as two more Grammar Rock segments ("Busy Prepositions" and "The Tale of Mr. Morton"). EPISODES Titles (and topic) - (link to external page with lyrics): Multiplication Rock
Grammar Rock
Science Rock
America Rock
Money Rock (made in the 1990s)
Computer Rock (aka Scooter Computer & Mr. Chips)
TRIVIA The short "The Preamble," set to highly infectious music, has a slightly abridged wording of the Preamble of the United States Constitution . The song starts, "We the people, in order to form a more perfect union...", but the actual document starts, "We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union...." Along the same lines: a more complete definition of a noun is that it's the name of a person, place, thing, "or idea". Or more completely, that it's the name or title of any object or idea. Love and fear are not things or objects of any kind, but their names are nouns. ''Three Is A Magic Number'' has been adopted by both the Irish television station TV3 Ireland and the British television station BBC Three as their theme tunes. In 2006 , the Blind Melon version of ''Three is a Magic Number'' was used by Three in Australia as part of an advertising campaign. PARODIES AND CULTURAL REFERENCES It has been parodied on shows such as:
In 1996 Atlantic Records released the album ''Schoolhouse Rock! Rocks'', a collection of popular artists, including The Lemonheads , Blind Melon , and Ween each covering a ''Schoolhouse Rock!'' tune (list below). TRIBUTE ALBUM
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