Originally Aired: September 22nd, 1973
Written by: Bob Dorough
Performed by: Zachary Sanders (and uncredited chorus of Black women, again)
Shel's Review
Music: 🎵🎵🎵🎵🎵
Animation: 📺📺📺📺📺
Pedagogy: 🎓🎓🎓
Accuracy: 🎯🎯🎯
Yikes Factor: 😬
This song kicks ass!!! It has so much energy and is just honestly really fun to listen to just as a song. I actually really love the moment where it takes a brief pause to very theatrically speak over the music to define a verb in a way that feels very shakespearean even. It's so clever how they incorporated all the infinitives into the song and it just makes it so well-composed and performed. The animation is also stellar. I love this adorable little kid and his singing and running around and how he hugs his mom at the end; and there is a lot of strong visual cues that teach you more than just what's in the song.
Now, in terms of being educational... there's a lot to say about verbs and this song tries to say maybe more than it has time for, resulting in these rapid fire allusions to concepts that I think come across as a little more confusing than informative. I think it would be better to just not try to explain some of these concepts than to spend so little time on them. Some of them, like verbing nouns, actually I think muddle the overall definition of verb especially because it's only explained visually on screen and not in the lyrics.
Also I have to deduct some accuracy points because there's some linguistics stuff here that is simply false. "What's done to it?" is not a question we should be asking about subjects of a sentence; because that would make the noun accusative e.g. the object. Now, there is passive voice, sure, but there's no passive voice used in this song, so nobody watching would get that understanding and would instead confuse the subject and the object. Likewise, "What is it" does have a verb, "is," but that's just the copula. The copula is in everything in English. The verb is not asking the question, the interrogative is: "what", which is not a verb. In fact, in terms of syntax, "what" is a noun here.
My one yikes point is because once again we have this incredibly important gospel choir of Black women who are very important to this song but they are uncredited. I can't find anywhere who they are.
June's Review
Music 🎵🎵🎵🎵🎵
This song rules. It's loud, it's active, it uses the same thing that my favorite song—I Got Six—does of slowly increasing the background to get stronger and louder. There's multiple key changes! I love it. I love the cuts from the song to the narration because they work so well here—they're just part of the story and they sound great.
Animation 📺📺📺📺📺
Hot damn, this one looks pretty! After the relative snooze-fest that was nouns, this one is so active (More on the meaning of this later). The storytelling all feels really fun too, jumping back and forth between the imagined scenes and the real ones. The idea of this not just being a funny guy interacting with verbs, but rather a film about verbs really lets them get creative with the animation without losing the central conceit. The jokes all land, and the talk bubbles fitting with the lyrics feel great. It feels like every scene of this I could talk about how much I love it. All the kids cheering in the theater, the baseball game, the manhole joke, and most of all the scene with the mom. It's maybe my favorite animated one so far.
Pedagogy 🎓🎓🎓🎓
So, I think all the schoolhouse grammar rock songs struggle with their teaching elements, because they have so much to go over and can only do so in a small time. Thus, I think you have to judge them on two levels: how does it teach through what it says and how does it teach through what it feels like? This video has some great info about verbs that can help a kid, but more then that it conveys the idea of verbs. They're active! They're fast! They play baseball! It may be a bit overloaded with ideas, but you can't come away from it not knowing "Verbs do things," which while not entirely correct, is a solid foundation for a kid to learn on.
Accuracy 🎯🎯🎯
I don't remember grammar class very well, so instead I'm going to just use Shel's number and add that Mr. Verb is absolutely crowding the plate in the baseball scene.
Yikes
This is one of a very small number of schoolhouse rock songs that don't just feel like they're not in the Very White America we see in others (cough cough noun cough), but also actively pushes back against that. Love that for them. Do wish they credited people, but I can't find credits for a lot of schoolhouse rock stuff.
Up Next: Controversial opinions and heated disagreements or just a song that you remember from various commercials.
