Schoolhouse Rock Series: Scooter Computer and Mr. Chips

I was one of those people who was first exposed to Schoolhouse Rock during its 1990s comeback. Granted, many of its episodes were repeats of those that aired during the 1970s and 1980s, but like many other people, I grew fond of those episodes, and I still get such tunes as Conjunction Junction and I'm Just a Bill stuck in my head from time to time. What I did not see during this run was a series of episodes of what is considered something of a forgotten Schoolhouse Rock series. I am referring to Scooter Computer and Mr. Chips, a pair of characters who were created as a response to the growing use of computers. It was thought that children needed help in finding out how computers could be used, and in a series of four cartoons that aired in the early-to-mid-1980s, these two characters would attempt to do just that.

Whereas other Schoolhouse Rock characters were intended to be one-shot characters, Scooter Computer and Mr. Chips became the only recurring characters in the entire series. Scooter was a young boy who loved skateboarding and was trying to learn all about computers. His friend, Mr. Chips, was a talking computer designed to tell Scooter, and the viewers, how he, and other computers, function. They were first seen in a song simply called Introduction, where Scooter reveals how, every day after school, he looks forward to spending time with Mr. Chips, who could process information at lightning speed. An abbreviated version of this song would play at the start of all four cartoons, though the first cartoon seems to have been lost over time.

The second episode, Hardware, has Mr. Chips revealing that computers like him are not really smart. Rather, they are programmed to utilize software and give information to their users rather than understanding it. The concepts of software, and how the hardware within computers could run them, was explained, and Mr. Chips reveals how his named came from all the chips crammed inside of him. In short, he mentions how computers have no brains, and therefore rely on hardware and software in order to function the way that people want them to work. If this is not a good way to teach people that computers are not all that intelligent, I do not know what is.

In Software, the two characters find ways to better understand each other and to understand computer language. The concepts taught here include how bits and bytes are read as digits to computers and letters and numbers to us, and BASIC (or Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code), in which a computer uses the bits and bytes to understand what a human is trying to tell it. The title derives from the explanation of how instructions given to the computer make it run a variety of programs. In the end, Scooter promises to use BASIC to help Mr. Chips understand his instructions, thus strengthening their friendship.

The idea of computers' ability to process information faster than humans was emphasized in Number Cruncher, the final episode of the four part series and the last new Schoolhouse Rock cartoon until 1993. Scooter, fearing it will take forever to figure out various baseball statistics, learns that Mr. Chips can do the job very quickly. He explains how he can use numbers to measure things, create graphs, and yes, to help Scooter with his baseball statistics. All Scooter would have to do is type the numbers on his keyboard, and Mr. Chips would handle it from there. Indeed, the action of number crunching, if used well, can make difficult math problems trivial. After this episode, Scooter Computer and Mr. Chips never appeared again, and the episodes were not among those that were repeated in the mid-1990s.

The Scooter Computer and Mr. Chips cartoons did a fairly good job in doing what they were intended to do: teaching children how computers function. Nowadays, kids tend to get used to computers with relative ease, and thus watching the cartoons would be a moot point for them. Even so, the episodes, while a bit dated, remain a good way to remind children and adults alike of how computers are not perfect and how they and humans must rely on each other in order to receive the best results. I would like to see a revival of these two characters at some point, teaching advanced concepts that have come along in recent years. For example, they could be used to talk about Internet safety to protect children from cyber bullying, online predators, and other potential dangers, given how such issues could make a child's life worse or result in his or her death.

While the Scooter Computer and Mr. Chips cartoons have not aired anywhere in years, they were finally released in 2002, as part of a special Schoolhouse Rock 30th anniversary two-disc DVD set. Unfortunately, only three of the four cartoons became available: the Introduction has not been seen in years and is presumed to be lost. The three surviving episodes have also appeared on YouTube for those who do not wish to track down the DVD set just to see the cartoons. If you watched these cartoons back in the 1980s, or if you have always wanted to see these otherwise forgotten Schoolhouse Rock segments, be sure to check them out any way you can. Computer technology may have improved substantially in the years since the cartoons aired, but we can always see the Scooter Computer and Mr. Chips segments to witness some of the earlier examples of how children could be taught to use computers to their advantage.