“Conspiracy Rock” is a 1992 parody of Schoolhouse Rock about the John F. Kennedy assassination directed by Scott Rosann. Our friend Jason Scott worked on the animation and art direction for the film, he has an extensive write-up about it on his blog.
This video debuted at Emerson College in 1992, as part of a live show by the Emerson comedy troupe This Is Pathetic. After making the rounds at several broadcast outlets (including SNL, where it is rumored that Al Franken personally savaged it as unfaithful to conspiracy theory canon), the bit finally aired multiple times on Comedy Central during the week of November 22, 1993.
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That’s Jason Scott (ASCII.textfiles.com, Sockington, etc.) doing the animation:
http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1299
I already mentioned that in the post and linked to Jason’s write-up. Jason’s blog is how I found out about this.
And then book Case Closed by Gerald Posner (UC Berkeley ‘75, UC Hastings/Tenderloin Law ‘78) came out in 1994.
http://www.amazon.com/Case-Closed-Harvey-Oswald-Assassination/dp/0385474466
And that was that.
I went into a lot of details about the making of this video on my weblog, but I didn’t give full context on the show it was related to. This Is Pathetic’s show was called “The Concourse of Humanity” and was loosely themed around how we talk a good game as people but in fact we’re all kind of broken and twisted. I thought the opening film for this was particularly well-done, as it had this wonderful over-arching theme of how Humanity is one of the best things we’ve ever done and then the film breaks and everything goes wrong. As a result, mentioning conspiracy theory as a basic subject taught to children a la schoolhouse rock seemed to be fun. Also, I remember the guys singing parodies of schoolhouse rock around the apartment, probably because the videos for schoolhouse rock were lying about.
People who then go “wow, another chance to talk about JFK” are missing the point. I’ll be amused to see people saying that this was some sort of serious effort to bring up the subject. Hello, people? John-John saluting at the end with it saying Darn, That’s the End?
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