Originally Aired: February 17th, 1973
Written by: Bob Dorough
Performed by: Bob Dorough
Shel's Review
Music: 🎵🎵🎵
Animation: 📺 📺 📺 📺 📺
Pedagogy: 🎓🎓🎓
Accuracy: 🎯🎯🎯🎯🎯
Yikes Factor: 0?
Seven??? Apparently, ABC needs to learn addition before multiplication as they aired these episodes in the order of 3, 0, 2, 4, 5, 7, 6, 8, 9, 11, 12. So yes, it's seven before six.
Lucky Seven Sampson is a tricky one. In terms of animation, I think it's one of the best ones we've seen. The character design of Lucky Seven Sampson is just so delightful. He's so charming and cute and he gets in fights with cops and every little dance he does is so lovingly animated with lots of little details. It's delightful to watch. And, we know from June's survey, that a lot of you on here had childhood crushes on him and his tattooed big paws.
That said, the music itself is pretty middling. It's not bad but it's not really catchy either. Pedagogically, it does a similar thing to I Got Six where it's trying to teach you the distributive property alongside little mnemonic one-liners for the times table. Unlike I Got Six, the one-liners feel completely random and disjointed and don't really connect to the numbers well at all. They also use strangely adult references like "28 more days to pay the mortgage on your store" as if that is at all meaningful to, again, 6-year-olds. I know plenty of adults who don't understand what a mortgage is.
That said, I think that the scene teaching the distributive property is quite effective. By placing the little 70s above the equations from the last verse, it demonstrates visually and through the lyrics that you can derive 7 times 15 by instead multiplying 7 by 5 and adding 70, since 7 times 10 is 70. That said.... when I was a child that flew completely over my head that this is what Lucky was trying to teach me, so I'm not sure how effective it actually is. To be fair though, I am Autistic and as a child couldn't really understand what Lucky was saying at all. His phony southern accent just sounded like simlish to me, at the time. Maybe if I'd had known to turn on the subtitles back then I'd have been better at mulitplication.
I can't really think of any Yikes Factor things here? Lucky said fuck cops. Nice.
June's Review
Music 🎵🎵🎵
This is a solid one. The piano riff is great, and it's got a fun little ditty. It doesn't stand out to me like some of the best do, but it's good! Not much to latch onto, but not much to complain about. (Aside from the same "haha if we just say things really fast that's the same as singing" that happens so often in early schoolhouse rock.)
Animation 📺 📺 📺 📺 📺
Yeah this is just all around great. The video is tons of fun, I love the little guy and wish there was more fan art online of him. C'mon!!!! Give us the good porn of Lucky Seven. I also love the way all the adults in this are drawn in this big blocky way, the way they run; there's something about this style of older animation that I always love. Charming and fun.
Pedagogy 🎓🎓🎓
Yeah, I gotta go with a 3 here as well, especially because, like, holy cow seven is the hardest one to memorize as a kid. 28? 42? 56? There's no simple easy pattern to it like with 5s or something, which makes it so annoying that the song is really long and full of references and not something you can easily reference. Still, the whole thing about "hey 7 × 15 is 7 × 10 + 7 × 5" is illustrated here better then in the other songs, so it gets some points for that.
Accuracy 🎯🎯🎯🎯🎯
I uh, I don't know. It's about a magical rabbit teaching you about 7s. Really the accuracy field is kind of a joke until we get to uh, the next few categories, where it suddenly becomes VERY REAL.
Yikes
Yeah nothing for me here. He even says ACAB, why on EARTH isn't there more porn of this bunny, I'm just saying.
Next Up: June's most favorite Schoolhouse Rock! song!
