A SONG OF PRICE & BUYER
The Shockingly Good Politics of “Recess”
“Recess” is funny, smart, and also rich with commentary on how kids internalize — and challenge — neoliberal hierarchies.
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“And so, the noble Native Americans shared their bountiful food supplies with the undeserving European savages.”
“Great leaders aren’t remembered for the things they build. They’re remembered for the things they do.”
“This ball is property of the state!”
“Fight the power!”
If you were born before the Reagan Era, then you may be surprised to learn that these are quotes from a Disney cartoon that premiered in 1997. But even these surprisingly progressive excerpts don’t capture just how radical Recess is. Its characters engage in collective bargaining, civil disobedience, and dialectical arguments.
In the world of Recess, a strictly enforced order governs virtually all social relations among the students.
Their civilization consists mostly of 9- and 10-year-olds, but The Kindergarteners are incarcerated in a nearby pen.
With painted faces and strange rituals, these tots are akin to the indigenous population of Third Street Elementary School.
But tensions with these so-called “Savages” generally take a back seat to clashes with school disciplinarians.
One such authoritarian, fed up with the protagonist’s myriad hijinks, experiments with a new strategy for juvenile corrections:
Solitary confinement.
Poor T.J. twists himself into knots during his minutes-long stints in “The Box,” for which Episode 17 is eponymously named.
Enduring solitary engenders not only loneliness and anxiety in little T.J., but also vivid auditory and visual hallucinations.
Other episodes feature trading cards that reshape the students’ economic relations, strictly enforced provisions in a makeshift “Recess Constitution,” and formal prosecutions under a legal regime established and managed by elementary students.
But the best way to understand the show is through its characters.
The Characters
I used Google Trends to assess which characters have become cult figures in the two decades since Recess aired.
I was surprised to find that the protagonist — Theodore Jasper “T.J.” Detweiler — is barely among the top five most-searched characters from the show.
In most of the developed world — including dozens of U.S. states — the most-searched character is Spinelli.
Every October since 2011, searches for “Spinelli costume” have spiked, and it’s not hard to see why.
Spinelli is tough, street-smart, and ridiculously cool.
The raspy-voiced heroine’s first line says it all: while her pals complain diminutively about the food in their school’s cafeteria, Spinelli looks into her chili and grunts, “Last time I ate this stuff, my gut was on fire for a week. It’s like acid.”
Whatever Spinelli really is, she doesn’t belong in the body of a 4th-grade girl — and she knows it.
While pummeling her foe — the intolerable snitch Randall Weems — she callously brushes off his pleas for mercy:
I really wanna be a 6-foot bodybuilder named “Moe,“ but we happen to live in a place called reality!
Speaking of Randall (who is inexplicably popular in Michigan and Mexico):
If the Third Street Elementary School student body is meant to be a stand-in for the proletariat, Randall Weems is its foremost class traitor.
He’s a mole for the school disciplinarians — a snitch who jumps at the chance to tattle on any classmate complicit in the smallest infraction.
Randall doesn’t occupy the spotlight until “Randall’s Reform” (Season 01 Episode 20).
In that installment, the main characters try to include him in their friend group.
Randall and his new buddies try to maintain the merger, but in the end, all parties agree that he belongs at the breast of the bourgeoisie.
The social order requires that he remain a rat.
T.J. Detweiler
T.J. is a populist vessel for the democratic will. In “The Great Jungle Gym Standoff” (Season 01 Episode 04), he presides over a movement to block a renovation of the playground — a crumbling fossil known as “Old Rusty” among students.
Under T.J.’s leadership, the faction snowballs across racial, socioeconomic, and ultimately generational lines to form a formidable crusade against progress for progress’ sake.
His advocacy challenges private property itself when Principal Prickly refers to Old Rusty as “my jungle gym”:
YOUR jungle gym? How can you OWN a jungle gym? How can you OWN the way the monkey bars feel in a kid’s fingers when he’s hanging in midair? How can you put a PRICE on the cool clean feel of metal on a guy’s butt when he’s sliding full blast on a slide? It’s like magic. And let me tell you something, Principal Prickly: magic is NOT school property.
(I’m reminded of Stanley Bosworth, the founding headmaster of Saint Ann’s School. Explaining why the school didn’t give grades, he asked this rhetorical question: “How do you give a grade on an oboe’s sweet, beautiful sound?”)
Vince LaSalle
As the token Black character in a 1990s franchise, Vince bears some uncomfortable similarities with Calvin from Freaks & Geeks, Dean Thomas from Harry Potter, and — of course — Token himself (from South Park).
For better or for worse, he more or less embodies positive stereotypes of African Americans. He’s athletic, he’s cool, and he cares deeply about his family. To the show’s credit, they dressed up the “good at sports” trope… kinda.
Vince is good at everything: cooking, golf, and even brand new games invented by classmates. (Perhaps this “finesse,” as he describes it, explains his following in California and Ontario.)
Gretchen Grundler
If Vince is basically just The Athletic One, Gretchen is more or less The Smart One.
In a particularly memorable scene, national security officials burst into class during her science presentation, erase the equations she’s written on the chalkboard, and seize the doodad she’s invented.
But an episode entitled “My Fair Gretchen” (Season 01 Episode 11) shows that she does not see intelligence or learning as some kind of panacea.
Given the opportunity to attend a prestigious, challenging, upwardly mobile school (the ominously named “Oppenheimer Academy”), she and her comrades devise an elaborate scheme to keep her at Third Street where she belongs.
Mikey Blumberg
Mikey provides comic relief, but he is not a goofball in the vein of Neville Longbottom or Steve Urkel. He is an artist, determined to express himself via whichever medium lies within reach.
He’s also a humanitarian. In Season 1, he desperately seeks to join the ranks of the Safety Rangers — crossing guards who dazzle Mikey with banal platitudes about public service.
Later in the season, the school learns that Mikey’s diminutively squeaky speaking voice conceals a gorgeous baritone worthy of an opera theatre.
Gus Griswald
Gus is a sweet, nervous military brat who has had to move frequently due to his father’s rank.
He is the only main character not present in the pilot.
In the second episode, fittingly entitled “The New Kid” (Season 01 Episode 02), Gus arrives at Third Street Elementary School only to learn that King Bob — a sixth-grade student who inexplicably rules over the fourth-grade kids — controls when fresh transfer students can be addressed by their own given names (as opposed to “The New Kid.”)
King Bob
Last but not least, meet “King Bob” — the monarch at the top of the fourth grade class at Third Street Elementary School. King Bob is fully two years older than his royal subjects, but he relishes his leadership role.
Concerned for his legacy, he proclaims himself “Pharaoh Bob” and commissions a pyramid on the Third Street playground. In the end, this close brush with tyranny leads Gretchen to share a few wise words with Bob:
Great leaders aren’t remembered for the things they build. They’re remembered for the things they do.
Recess really is unlike any cartoon of its time. It’s truly appropriate for all ages, devoid of even the sanitized depictions of war that can make Avatar a little too heavy for kindergarteners. I think Recess has done as much as any other mainstream kids’ show to raise class consciousness and illustrate basic principles of economics for children.
But it never feels like a dry lesson in political economy. Every episode is quick, fun, and a just little moving. Recess combines the most watchable elements of prepubescent innocence and shrewd socioeconomic calculations. It is ideal for killing time with a child, but even for adults, it holds up.
