Science Court 2-Disc Box Set DVD

Science Court is the late-1990s ABC Saturday morning educational animated series in which legal cases are tried in front of a courtroom of students, with the central question always being a fundamental science principle that has to be proved or disproved through experiments, expert witnesses, and old-fashioned cross-examination. The show ran on ABC across 1997, 1998, and 1999, with 18 episodes that pair courtroom-drama framing with classroom-friendly science instruction.

What stands out is the show's commitment to its specific educational-court premise. Each episode treats a real scientific concept, like gravity, inertia, or the water cycle, as the actual matter at trial, the witnesses include both human experts and conceptual personifications of the science topics, and the writing leans into actual experimental demonstrations to resolve each case. The animation has the bright, sketchy, deliberately-stylized look that the show built around its classroom register and that helped it travel well into school libraries.

It belongs to a specific late-90s ABC Saturday morning wave of educational-leaning animation, the same family of carefully-produced learning-focused shows that the network was running during that period for households building shelves of classroom-friendly content. For households whose science-class memory includes the Science Court courtroom, this collection captures the version that built the memory.

Highlights in the set include "Water Cycle," "Work And Simple Machines," "Gravity," "Inertia," "Sound," "Heat Expansion," "Electric Current," "Living Things," "Fossils," "Rockets," "Pendulums," "Lightning," "Wings," and "Magnets," episodes that capture both the show's classroom-friendly cases and its biggest experimental setpieces. This 2-DVD collection gathers 18 episodes from the run, the most reliable surviving home for Science Court.