"Schoolhouse Rock!" Lesson

Brian: Y'know, I just realized this [PSA] is like one of those "Schoolhouse Rock!'s". Except... y'know, without the "Rock".
Stewie: Yeah, it's like... school.

— Family Guy: COVID Vaccine PSA

Since its inception in 1973, Schoolhouse Rock! has become an educational staple, with catchy songs and pleasant visuals appealing to children and adults alike.

Schoolhouse Rock! has become such a pop culture icon that other shows will often use its formula — that is, visuals paired with music in order to teach a lesson, whether it be to characters in-universe or the audience.

Overlaps with Educational Song if there's a musical number, obviously.

The trope can either be played straight or parodied. If parodied, it tends to be a parody of the more well-known songs, like "I'm Just A Bill" or "Conjunction Junction", or even utilizes the characters from those songs.

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Examples:

Films — Animation

• The Haunted World of El Superbeasto: Otto explains Dr. Satan's evil plan using a funky Schoolhouse Rock-style animated sequence.

Live-Action TV

• Parodied by Glee's "The Substitute" in which substitute teacher Holly Holliday teaches a lesson by singing a sultry jazz cover of "Conjunction Junction".
• The Season 4 premiere of black•ish features a parody of "I'm Just A Bill" about the slave trade, performed by The Roots.
• Saturday Night Live has the "How a Bill Does Not Become a Law" sketch, a parody of the "I'm Just a Bill" song in which the bill (Kenan Thompson) sits indefinitely on Capitol Hill until he gets knocked down the stairs by an executive order.
• MADtv (1995) had a segment called "Public Schoolhouse Rock" parodying several Schoolhouse Rock songs including Nouns, Interjections, and Lolly, while mocking overcrowded and underfunded inner-city schools.
• Horrible Histories had a musical number about a historical figure or event Once an Episode.

Web Animation

• Homestar Runner: In the Strong Bad Email "for kids", Strong Bad imagines Homsar as the host of an educational TV show called "Whaddaya Know, Haddi-Man?" One segment has a guitar player who sounds similar to Bob Dorough strumming the jingle "Stave it off, 1,2,3, and now you can count to three"
  Homsar: That's a real popular song! Who wants to hear of it fifty times more?
• The early YouTube video "Pirates and Emperors" does a pretty good pastiche of Schoolhouse Rock. The singer even sounds like classic Schoolhouse Rock singer Lynn Ahrens.
• "Conspiracy Rock" is a pastiche of the SHR song "A Noun is a Person, Place, or Thing" done by a college comedy troupe.

Western Animation

• American Dad!: In "Stanny Slickers II: The Legend of Ollie's Gold", Stan teaches Steve and Hayley about Oliver North and the Iran-Contra affair through the song "Ollie North". The song and visuals emulate a Schoolhouse Rock lesson, and the song concludes with Roger as the little girl cheerleader in the "Interjections" song.
  Roger: Crap, that's the end.
• BoJack Horseman: In "See Mr. Peanutbutter Run," Katrina tries to pass an amendment to allow a ski race decide who will be governor of California. To do this, the show switches to a Schoolhouse Rock art style with Katrina taking the anthropomorphic bill to various influential groups, adding amendments along the way to appeal to everybody until the bill is ratified.
• Parodied in a ridiculously (but purposefully) offensive way with the Drawn Together episode "Foxxy vs. the Board of Education"; The Board of Education (a parody of Bill) tells Foxxy through song that in order to make education more profitable, they purposefully keep black's S.A.Ts low as no sensible black person with a high enough education would buy the stereotypical tacky things they manufacture (such as big medallions and gold rims) if they didn't do so. It's really worth a mention that the whole show runs on Refuge in Audacity.
  The Board of Education: Being the genius that I am, I combined two time-honored American methods of achieving wealth: selling stupid stuff to suckers and exploiting the black man.
• Family Guy:
  • In "Mr. Griffin Goes to Washington", the Bill from "I'm Just A Bill" (voiced by Jack Sheldon) is shown singing on the Capitol Hill steps once again, but is interrupted by a cleaner who stabs him with a trash stick.
  • In "Running Mates", Peter highlights the school's new sex-ed curriculum which features a parody of "Conjunction Junction" called "Vagina Junction", complete with the train conductor character from the original.
  • The show released a COVID vaccine PSA in September 2021, in which Stewie and Brian illustrate the vaccine, its mechanism of operation, and its benefits. Towards the end, Brian remarks that this was like Schoolhouse Rock, but without a musical number, which basically means it was just school.
• Johnny Bravo: In the short "The Sensitive Male", Johnny is approached by a man who lectures him that women would prefer him if acted like a sensitive male instead of the blunt Casanova Wannabe he normally is, with said lectures being given in Schoolhouse Rock-style musical numbers (the character is even voiced by Jack Sheldon, the same voice actor who sang some of the better-known Schoolhouse Rock songs). However, Sheldon's character ends up being revealed to be a Corrupted Character Copy, a man who lies about being sensitive in order to attract women (and he's already seeing three women simultaneously). Johnny, who while not a sensitive man, still isn't a lying two-timing scumbag, reveals the truth to everybody, and the girls he's triple-timing immediately take him off for a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown.
• Mike Tyson Mysteries: In "Is Magic Real?", The Wizard's flashback about his poker playing past is shown in the style of Schoolhouse Rock. It is later revealed to be an elaborate comic book placed on the back of his initial note because he presumed Mike was illiterate.
• Robot Chicken:
  • Parodied mercilessly in the skit "Schoolhouse Rock Reimagined". The characters from Schoolhouse Rock are fed up with the kids they taught growing into illiterate adults, so they go around beating random people senseless for making spelling, grammar and math errors, and even for using a calculator to figure out how to split a restaurant check.
    Schoolhouse Rockers: (beating up a waitress for writing "Lunch Special's" on a menu board) Take 5 f***ing seconds to remember basic grammar, you moronic piece of s**t!
  • A sketch from "I'm Trapped" features a SHR-like song about homonyms and how you can use them to get away with saying offensive words.
• In The Simpsons episode "The Day The Violence Died", Bart and Lisa watch a parody of the show (which has replaced Itchy and Scratchy) on TV, which features the song "I'm an Amendment-to-Be" and is a radical-right short about changing the constitution to ban flag-burning and other forms of free speech. Incidentally, Jack Sheldon lent his voice to the character.
  Lisa: So it's true. Some cartoons do encourage violence!
• In the Teen Titans Go! episode "Knowledge", Raven teaches Starfire about how to use colloquial expressions, accompanied by an Art Shift to the Schoolhouse Rock art style.
• VeggieTales once featured an Affectionate Parody of the show in one of its "Silly Songs With Larry" segments. More specifically, Larry performed a song from "Schoolhouse Polka" about homophones.

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