“Schoolhouse Rock” helped teach an entire generation of kids about civics with “I’m Just a Bill” and grammar with “Conjunction Junction,” among many other classics. But the series, which debuted 50 years ago this month, started with more modest aims.
,” the timing couldn’t have been better to pitch the idea for TV. The network, under pressure from the Federal Communications Commission and parents upset about violent cartoons and incessant ads for sugary cereals, had recently started leaning into more educational programming.The head of children’s programming at ABC was a young executive named Michael Eisner.
At the time, an advocacy group called Action for Children's Television was pressuring the TV industry to clean up kids’ programming, Eisner recalled in a recent telephone interview. “They were a real problem for the three networks, which were doing massive commercialization of children’s programming, violent programming, Saturday morning programming,” said Eisner, who would go on to become chairman and CEO of the Walt Disney Co. “And I walked into this situation and actually had to go to Washington to testify to the FCC.
A half-century later, it’s their kids — now middle-aged Generation Xers — who treasure the memories of such classics as “Eisner said that people in their 40s and 50s bring up “Schoolhouse Rock” in conversation with him more than any other show or film, including blockbuster Paramount Pictures movies such as “Saturday Night Fever” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” which were produced when he was president of the studio.
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