Schoolhouse Rock/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Crowning Moment of Heartwarming: "The Tale of Mr. Morton" (a Grammar Rock song -- which teaches about subjects and predicates in sentences -- about a man who falls for his female next door neighbor).
    • The ending stanza for "Three Is a Magic Number": "And there were three in the family/ And that's a magic number..."
  • Crowning Music of Awesome: Many people who grew up watching the shorts consider many of the songs to be this. So much so that quite a number of them have been covered by popular artists and bands. A tribute album was released in 1996, Schoolhouse Rock Rocks, which featured 15 cover tracks (plus the original intro) by artists such as Ween, Blind Melon, Moby, Better Than Ezra, Biz Markie, and The Lemonheads.
  • Dork Age: Depending on who you ask, any Schoolhouse Rock songs made in 1993 or later can count as part of this.
  • Ear Worm: The entire point of the project, and as noted they succeeded brilliantly.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: From "Interjections!":
  • Nightmare Fuel: "Figure Eight" and "Little Twelvetoes" have frequently been cited for this.
    • Alternatively, "Figure Eight" can also come off as depressing and cold (as per the winter setting of the short).
  • Painful Rhyme: "Interplanet Janet" uses girl:world; "A Victim of Gravity" uses cup:up.
  • Retroactive Recognition: Lynn Ahrens wrote some songs for this show decades before becoming the lyricist of Ragtime, Once On This Island, Seussical, and Anastasia.
  • Values Dissonance: Some ideas about American history and culture that were popular around the Bicentennial, like Manifest Destiny ("Elbow Room") and assimilation ("Great American Melting Pot"), have since fallen out of favor and/or been deconstructed.
  • Values Resonance: The pleas for conserving natural resources in "The Energy Blues" is as relevant now in the 20-teens as it was in the 1970s (possibly because the need to do so hasn't faded from the public consciousness).