Originally Aired: September 20th, 1975
Written by: Lynn Ahrens
Performed by: Lynn Ahrens and Bob Dorough

Shel's Review

Music: 🎵🎵🎵
Animation: 📺📺
Pedagogy: 🎓
Accuracy: 🎯
Yikes Factor: 😬😬😬😬

American Rock! Here we Go! Lynn and Bob team up for the season premiere with a mediocre song with mediocre animation, confusing pedagogy, historical inaccuracies, and shocking innovations in being racist.

Honestly with this song it might be easier to do a verse-by-verse breakdown of the inaccuracies.

Shel Does a Verse-By-Verse Breakdown of Inaccuracies

The pilgrims sailed the sea
To find a place to call their own
In their ship Mayflower
They hoped to find a better home
They finally knocked
On Plymouth Rock

So, first of all, I love that we are ignoring that Plymouth Colony is actually the second English colony in North America because Jamestown was a catastrophe. Anyway, I don't think they really cared about finding a better home. The main issue was that they hated the Church of England and wanted to separate from it due to their strongly held anti-Catholic sentiment. They initially moved to the Netherlands to practice their version of Puritanism since the Dutch are Calvinists, but when England and the Netherlands made an alliance against Spain, the Netherlands outlawed English people practicing religions other than the Church of England which is so funny like dude, James, the Dutch and the English are the most closely related Europeans how are you going to tell who's English.¹

Anyway, the inaccuracy here is that Plymouth Rock is a tourist attraction. The legend of landing on Plymouth Rock originated 121 years after the founding of Plymouth Colony.²

Oh, they were missing Mother England
They swore their loyalty until the very end
Anything you say, King
It's OK, King
You know it's kinda scary on your own
Gonna build a new land
The way we planned
Could you help us run it till it's grown?

Yeah so the Mayflower Compact of 1620 pretty firmly establishes Plymouth Colony as a permanent subject of the English Monarchy. There's really no ambiguity here about their intentions. At no point was like, a letter written back to the King like "could you please temporarily govern us while we build a new land?" The plan was to be a self-governing colony subject to the King's rule but far away from the Church of England.³

They planted corn, you know
They built their houses one by one
And bit by bit they worked
Until the colonies were done

Pilgrims didn't built shit. America was built by slaves. I don't even need to cite this. Next.

They knew that now they'd run their own land
But George the Third still vowed
He'd rule them till the end
Anything I say, do it my way now
Anything I say, do it my way
Don't you get to feeling independent
'Cause I'm gonna force you to obey

So here the song is collapsing a huge span of time. The monarch in 1620 was King James I, who is the king they swear allegiance to in the Mayflower Contact. King George III ascended to the throne in 1760. That's a leap of 140 years!⁴ Completely different settlers and completely different king (despite what's depicted on screen.) Between 1620 and 1760, the English Civil War happened. By the time King George III took the throne, The Kingdom of Great Britain had become a constitutional monarchy with all meaningful powers held by Parliament. King George III was not issuing royal edicts to the pilgrims nor was he issuing royal edicts left and right. In fact, satirists went after King George III for his notable disinterest in politics and governing.⁵

He taxed their property
He didn't give them any choice
And back in England
He didn't give them any voice
(That's called taxation without representation
And it's not fair!)
But when the Colonies complained
The king said: "I don't care!"

OK so besides that the King never literally said "I don't care." The king didn't do any of this because England was a constitutional monarchy. Parliament set taxes and so forth. Frederick North, 2nd Earl of Guilford was the elected prime minister during the American revolution (which, wow, we've really jumped ahead in time now). When the continental congress petitioned for representation in parliament, it was parliament that argued that the colonies didn't need to elect their own MPs because of "virtual representation" meaning all MPs can speak for all royal subjects regardless of who elected them.

He even has the nerve
To tax our cup of tea
To put it kindly, King
We really don't agree
Gonna show you how we feel
We're gonna dump this tea
And turn this harbor into
The biggest cup of tea in history!

The Tea Act of 1773 was an act of Parliament (not a royal edict). It also was not a tax. It allowed the British East India Company to directly export tea to North American colonies without going through the old process of auctioning tea off in London to middleman companies and smugglers who would then bring the tea to North America. The taxes paid on this tea in the colonies were preexisting taxes spearheaded by Chancellor Charles Townshend a decade earlier. The upset over this was that the middleman companies were out of business due to not being able to compete with direct sales from the British East India Company so obviously all the shops would buy their stock from the monopoly.

The Biggest Cup of Tea in history was brewed in Saudia Arabia on Setepmber 30th, 2022.

And we're gonna run it all our way
With no more kings...
We're gonna elect a president! (No more kings)
He's gonna do what the people want! (No more kings)
We're gonna run things our way! (No more kings)
Nobody's gonna tell us what to do!

Rockin' and a-rollin', splishin' and a-splashin'
Over the horizon, what can it be?
Looks like it's going to be a free country

The United States of America did not abolish slavery until 1863 and only land-owning males of exclusively European descent of at least 21 years of age could vote until 1792. This was only 6% of the population. After 1792, the property owning requirement was abolished state-by-state over the course of the next hundred years. Full enfranchisement of citizens aged 21+ was not established in the United States until the Voting Rights Act of 1965; and the voting age was universally lowered to age 18 in 1971—meaning before 1971 most drafted soldiers could not vote. In fact, it was 1986 when overseas soldiers could vote. Since then, all sorts of more sneaky voter disenfranchisement practices have been enacted across the country to prevent people of color from voting, even though they have had the legal "right to vote" for the past 58 years. I just want to emphasize that only for the past 58 years has there been any legal conceit that "the people" elect the president. Puerto Ricans and residents of the District of Columbia still cannot vote and in many parts of the country those who are incarcerated or have ever been incarcerated cannot vote.

Also the cops tell you what to do all the fucking time and minors have no rights and about 1% of all adults are incarcerated. I don't think it's much of a "free country," Lynn and Bob.

Anyway. How about that depiction of King James I???

An effeminate lazy fat man eating fried chicken with huge lips? The real King James I looked nothing like that; for one, he had a beard, and was notably slender for a king. I'm not a fan of the British Monarchy at all, but this just isn't accurate and also punches down at queer people and... somehow... Black people... like this is minstrel imagery isn't it? The ways that they depict someone as "lazy" is with imagery that comes from minstrel shows. How do we know that King James I is lazy and bad, kids? Because he's fat, effeminate, has big lips, and eats fried chicken. Geebus cripes! And when we get to King George III, he's dressed in hot pink and wearing pink makeup! While, yes, British aristocrats might wear blush and the like, so did George Washington but it's a trait uniquely associated with the bad guy here.

Also, they depict a few Wampanoag people wearing a Cheyenne war bonnet, which is both inaccurate and a Yikes.

Anyway, uh, what else is there to talk about.

The music is fine. I don't think it's bad but it's not catchy either. The animation is better than a lot of previous seasons but it's also boring. I like how the British soldiers are colorized like that it's vaguely visually interesting and I like when they rearrange the union jack into the stars and stripes. Pedagogically it's just awful. Besides being historically inaccurate and offensive, it does a really bad job of demonstrating the passage of time and the visual metaphors are likely to be taken literally by children and misinterpreted. As a kid, I thought all of the kings over that 140 year period were the same king and that this whole thing basically happened over 10 years at-most. I also thought that Great Britain and North America were much closer together than they really are, because of this song, and for a long time thought that the image of Cape Cod on the horizon off Boston's shoreline was actually Europe. In general I think if a kid is taking a school test on the history of the Mayflower that this song would be more likely to cause them to fail the test than to pass it.

June's Review

Before we get started, I want to say that i'm going to do my best with these to score on animation, music, and even pedagogy occasionally without considering how evil some of these are. It's not always gonna be possible, but it's only fair to the rest of the scores, I think. I just want to make it clear, the following scores are me trying to be as unbiased by the evil shit in here as possible.

Music 🎵🎵

I don't like this song. I'm sorry I just... this is the same problem I had with nouns, I just don't like this sort of music, and this one grates on me. and the sound effects are awful. The raspberry, the king's laugh, it's awful.

Animation 📺

I have hated this cartoon's animation since I was a fuckin' kid. I don't really know why, but it just grates on me! The weird coloring thing that worked so well in other cartoons just bothers me here. The way the ocean doesn't move when they pan across feels Wrong. The way the king's guys were all the same color—I hated it. There's some really fun jokes in the animation, like the teabags turning into flags, the guys in barrels, or the king tearing down the animations covering the screen—but none of that can save this from the reason I have to give it a 1.

This guy.

WHY IS HIS TONGUE LIKE THAT. This bothered me so much as a kid. That's not a tongue! That's a weird fucked up growth on his face! AAAAAAAAAAA GET RID OF IT GET RID OF IT I'M MOVING ON TO PEDAGOGY

Pedagogy 🎓🎓

Once again, I am made bitter by the fact that this cartoon lied to me. You can't look across the ocean in a telescope to see America! Yes, I know it's a visual device, but that's one of the main things I learned from this song!

On a more serious note, I don't think this cartoon is trying to teach actual history as opposed to getting kids on board with a specific vibe of history. They call her "mother England" for a reason, I think. It's about making kids think that the American revolution was about "nobody telling us what to do" and that we were Cool Rebels who wanted Freedom unlike those Shitty British People. It's supposed to make kids think America is cool and England sucks ass. At best, it's mediocre at this, and it nearly completely fails to teach anything else, so it gets a two.

Accuracy 🎯

See above

Yikes 😬😬😬😬

Shel described the specific historical inaccuracies, so I want to talk about a specific weird thing: this cartoon hates England so fucking much? In trying to reduce the story of the American revolution to a quick two minute song for kids it just decides to make England the bad guy at every opportunity. This has always been an element of American exceptionalism that fucking baffled me. Like sure, I support making fun of British people, but that's because I've seen the inside of the British museum and they're evil colonizing fucks, not because they're "just like our annoying mom." (Note: they should make fun of us in return. We're both evil colonizing empires. We both deserve it.) Getting 'em early with the bad ideology, here on Schoolhouse Rock!

Up Next: "How do we make the American Revolution relatable for children?" "How about child soldiers!"

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1. Fraser, Rebecca. The Mayflower, St. Martin's Press, N.Y. (2017)

2. Gambino, Megan (November 22, 2011). "The True Story Behind Plymouth Rock". Smithsonian Magazine.

3. "Mayflower Compact : 1620. Agreement Between the Settlers at New Plymouth : 1620"

4. This is demonstrated on screen by having identical kings wearing different colors of clothing, but as a kid I just thought that that was the same king dressed differently because, you know, people change outsides day to day.

5. Carretta, Vincent (1990). George III and the Satirists from Hogarth to Byron. Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press. ISBN 0-8203-1146-4.

embarrassingly, I actually DIDN'T know the role of parliament in this whole conflict or the specific role of the east india company as import monopolist here. this could be case in point for how incredibly propagandized this history is in the US.

...oooor it's my own fault for having terminal art history brain and the conflict being sort of a distant backdrop to the IMPORTANT stuff (what people were painting and architecting)