The show hopscotches between visual gags and arch double-entendre. But the wordplay is as creative as the slapstick, and the most delirious premises come where physical and verbal jokes meet.

It has two great assets in Esther Rolle and John Amos as the sensible, likable parents and such an abundance of good cheer in adversity that they have to be winners in your heart, even though they are losers everywhere else.

It is even better than the first film, and has the greatest single final scene in Hollywood history, a real coup de cinéma.

The Schoolhouse Rock worldview integrates educational principles into the everyday world, as if they were neighbors, or trees visible from a bedroom window. That’s a lesson itself: how to become an integral part of American pop culture.

Foxx is simply a very funny man, and a preview look at the first “Sanford and Son” show would indicate that the writers are supplying him the same sort of blunt but nevertheless winning lines with which he has been charming… audiences for years.

Sharp, entertaining, and convincing—discursive, but with a sense of structure and control that Coppola hasn’t achieved since.