‘Schoolhouse Rock’ creator Bob Dorough dies at 94

The creator of “Schoolhouse Rock,” which taught a generation of Saturday-morning cartoon-watching children about legislation and grammar, has died.

Bob Dorough was 94.

Granddaughter Corin Wolf told CNN on Tuesday that Mr. Dorough was diagnosed with cancer last year, but did not specify the exact cause of death.

“Schoolhouse Rock” ran on ABC from 1973 to 1985, turning multiplication tables, American history, scientific concepts and the parts of speech into catchy 3-minute animated videos.

Mr. Dorough, a jazz pianist and vocalist, said he wrote the first “Schoolhouse Rock” song (“3 Is A Magic Number”) in 1971 as a favor to a friend whose sons were having difficulty with their multiplication tables.

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“Even though [the songs] were in a ’rock’ or ’pop’ bag, my jazz sensibilities and the fine musicians I used for the audio recordings made the songs seem unusual to the Saturday morning cartoon listener,” he told CNN in 2013.

The 12 years it ran burned such terms as “Conjunction Junction” and the (almost) exact wording of the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution into a generation of children. And then their children too, as ABC brought the clips back on the air for several years in the 1990s, and they became popular DVD sellers. They are all now widely available on YouTube and similar sites.

Born in Arklansas, Mr. Dorough took up music while serving in the Army bands during World War II and received a music degree from what is now the University of North Texas after the war.

He released several jazz and bebop albums in the 1950s, with the best known perhaps being “Devil May Care,” the title track of which was later recorded and reinterpreted by Miles Davis and became a jazz standard.