DVD Watch: Shorts Heard 'Round the World

Hey, parents! Want to teach your kids about American democracy in time for the election but are afraid of revealing your own ignorance? Well, fear no more! Today brings the DVD release of Schoolhouse Rock: The Election Collection, featuring each Bicentennial-era ABC Saturday morning short—from No More Kings to Three-Ring Government—plus a few other government-related Schoolhouse Rock bits.

A couple years back I got a complete set of Schoolhouse Rock DVDs for the Tuned In Jrs., and watching the shorts is nostalgic for more than the obvious reasons. Yes, it's fun to sing along with The Preamble and to watch that little walking roll of toilet paper with the "Bill" ribbon become a law. And it's a trip to hear the Joni-Mitchell-for-kids stylings of Three-Ring or the Helen-Reddy feminism of Sufferin' Till Suffrage.

But the videos are also a kind of social-political time capsule. It's sweetly ironic to watch these optimistic cartoons about America, remembering that they appeared just after Watergate and Vietnam, and the way they portray the Continental soldiers in the Revolution—scrappy rabble fighting the snooty British—is very '70s/Dukes of Hazzard in its populism.

I'm not sure if, a couple decades later after the "era of Big Government is over" declaration, I'd expect a network to make a cartoon for kids like I'm Just a Bill, that portrayed government regulation as an absolute good, even if it did protect those little kids on that school bus. And the message of Energy Blues (originally part of Science Rock but included here)—that we need to deal with the energy crisis by conserving, Jimmy Carter-style—would seem risky, at least until the big green push of the past couple years. (And even now, somebody would wave a tire gauge at it and tell those hippies we need to drill here and drill now.)

Even within the cartoons, you see change over time. The set includes some songs from the later Money Rock series, like Tax Man Max and Walkin' on Wall Street, which seem positively Reaganesque next to the crunchiness of some of the earlier America Rock numbers. Even in the space of 15 cartoons, you can see America changing as it headed into the '80s. It's like watching Boogie Nights, except with cartoon Redcoats.

Sadly, I don't have any non-copyright-violating clips to share, so I leave you with this example of Schoolhouse Rock's cross-platform appeal: