![]() Reruns later aired on Toon Disney in the mid 2000s. The shorts continued airing, now part of the One Saturday Morning block, until 2000. In addition, two new Grammar Rock segments ("Busy Prepositions" and "The Tale of Mr. Chips) and in 1995/96 the original team reunited for the much more successful Money Rock. 1983 saw an earnest but ill-fated attempt at Computer Rock (a.k.a. Taking cues from Sesame Street and other contemporary educational programming, Schoolhouse Rock! avoided the blandness and conformity plaguing most animated shows of the era and instead presented a hip, inclusive, fast-paced, and funny (often downright snarky) attitude to learning.Įpisodes initially fell under one of four headings, in order of production: Multiplication Rock, Grammar Rock, America Rock (history, mostly released around the 1976 American Bicentennial) and Science Rock. Many of the shorts were permanently burned into the minds of young viewers.Īlong with the educational content, the series won accolades for the consistently high quality of the songs - besides Dorough and Ahrens, performers included genre legends Jack Sheldon, Blossom Dearie, Essra Mohawk, and Grady Tate - and the overall cleverness of the lyrics and animation. The Saturday morning format provided a perfect vehicle to repeat the shorts over and over until the lesson was learned from the start, Schoolhouse Rock! was a roaring success as both education and entertainment, running for 37 episodes repeated endlessly over 12 years. Jones loved the concept, Eisner persuaded his regular program lineup to snip three minutes off each program's running time to accommodate it, and a legend was born. The initial pitch was made to Michael Eisner, then vice president of ABC's children's programming, who brought along one Chuck Jones. Thus the idea to introduce basic learning concepts to young minds via simple-but-catchy rock, jazz, folk and pop tunes - most of them written by jazz mainstay Bob Dorough and eventual Broadway lyricist Lynn Ahrens - accompanied by entertaining visuals, animated by a team led by Tom Yohe. Networks couldn't advertise things related to the cartoons they were airing in those timeslots, so there was an opening for educational shorts even after running through cereal commercials.Īt around the same time, advertising executive David McCall noticed that while his son was struggling in school, he had no trouble remembering the lyrics to his favorite songs. He excelled at character sketches and storytelling, developing an eye for geographical and generational details that made his best songs portraits of a particular time and place.Schoolhouse Rock! was a series of educational short cartoons - so short, that they'd fit into the space of a single commercial break - that aired Saturday mornings on ABC, originally between 19 and again from 1993–2000.īack in the day, Saturday morning children's programming was supposed to be at least tangentially educational, and Merchandise-Driven advertising was severely limited. As popular as they are, they don’t necessarily show the full range of Buffett’s skill as a songwriter. “The Big 8,” which include such crowd-pleasers as “Cheeseburger in Paradise” and “Changes in Attitude, Changes in Latitude,” are at the core of Buffett’s catalog and they remain surprisingly resilient, retaining many of their roguish, silly charms after decades’ worth of repetition. Still, he never lost sight of the handful of songs known as “The Big 8” that he had to play at every show. Buffett stayed on the road for decades, establishing new business ventures while also writing and recording fresh material. He’d strike pay dirt with “Come Monday” and, especially, “Margaritaville,” songs that brought him into the pop mainstream and established the foundation of a career that brought him from the beach into Wall Street boardrooms. Jimmy Buffett, who died on Friday at age 76, was the rare singer-songwriter who was keenly aware of the songs that comprised his core songbook.Īlmost all of those tunes were written and recorded in the 1970s, the decade when he carefully assembled his signature beach bum persona by bringing country rock to the Florida Keys.
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