Schoolhouse Rock! - Special 30th Anniversary Edition DVD

Average Rating:

The first DVD has all the original shorts categorized by groups, you can play them by group, or play them all in order or play them all or shuffle. If you choose a particular group, you can pick the ones you want to play in the playlist or select the Play All button. I was having a blast seeing remembering how many of these I could still sing.

The 2nd DVD is the Extra Credit portion of the set. You can watch with Captions or Audio Commentary. I really had fun with the "Earn Your Diploma" Trivia and the Arrange A Schoolhouse Rock song. The Earn Your Diploma gives you a set of questions to answer to each group (Science, Money, etc). When you get them all right, you get a clue which when you solve all the groups you can then solve the Master Jumble to become a Schoolhouse Rock Graduate. The Arrange A Schoolhouse Rock Song has 3 of the Schoolhouse rock songs mixed up and its up to you to get the lyrics in order. When you get them right, the song clip will play. The music videos section was funny - the first 3 had the original animated shorts but the music/voices were redone by Better Than Ezra ("Conjunction Junction"), Lemonheads("My Hero Zero") and Deluxe Folk Implosion("I'm Just A Bill"). I didn't care for the last one by Goodness ("Electricity, Electricity"). That was just a music video but that one doesn't take away from the rest of the DVD.

I saw one review here getting a little too deep in reviewing the american group. I say, don't worry about it - these were meant to help kids learn and I can say they definitely did me good. This collection was well done and it's worth the price :-)

Two minor quibbles:
1) The shuffle feature never worked on my DVD. The songs played in the same order every time - staring with "Unpacking My Adjectives" and then going through each section the same way. This may just be a glitch in my DVD.

2) Since the good people at Disney now own ABC, we are "treated" to eight - count 'em - eight previews for Disney videos, movies, and assorted junk. You can get past these by either hitting the "Menu" or "Title" feature on the remote or Chapter Advancing past them all.

In spite of these, I would still recommend this to anyone feling nostalgic for their youth or needs to teach someone about civics or multiplication. (Come on, do you know anyone who can recite the Preamble to the Constitution WITHOUT singing the Schoolhouse Rock song?)