The Magic School Bus Gets Lost in Space

Now, I'm going to review an episode from the award-winning animated television series, The Magic School Bus, starring the voice of Lily Tomlin as Miss Valerie Frizzle. Today, I'm reviewing my favorite episode of the show, which is also the first episode of the series, "The Magic School Bus Gets Lost in Space."

The plot of this story is that Arnold's know-it-all cousin, Janet comes to visit their school. And Miss Frizzle decides to take the class on a 3, 2, 1, field trip! No big shock there. When the space museum is closed, Arnold proves to Janet that nobody is better than Miss Frizzle by asking her to send him and their friends into Outer Space as their field trip, And that's exactly what she did, and Janet remarks "Highly unusual." Most of the episode is them traveling to other planets and Janet finding stuff from those planets to prove she was in outer space, heck, she even goes to far as to make Arnold do the chores for her, this is overkill and then some. It wasn't until the asteroid Janet was trying to bring back accidentally sends Miss Frizzle and Liz flying, and so, the rest of the cast, with the help of Janet's know-it-all experience, figure out where she is by passing Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, and finally, Pluto, where the Frizzle is. But. enough of that, what do I think of the episode?

This episode is great! It taught us a lot of outer space stuff, like the nine planets in particular, not counting the sun, It's educational, funny, and interesting at the same time. The highlight of the episode has to be the part where while on Mars, Miss Frizzle and her class jump off the top of the ice cliff shouting "ICE CREAM!" and landing into the red dust, no wonder why it was called a red planet, and Ralphie mistaking Arnold's silhouette for an alien. If you ask me, I think most of the humor comes from Ralphie and Carlos, whom for some reason didn't get called out for his lame puns like Meteor-wrong.

Interesting fact I should mention is that in the original PBS broadcasts of the Magic School Bus, the show usually ends with the Producer, voiced by Malcolm-Jamal Warner, getting phone calls from fans about the show. These segments were both funny and interesting. Unfortunately, when Scholastic sold this show off to syndication rights, when the show reran on TLC and Qubo, they cut off the Producer segments, to make way for commercial breaks, THEY CUT THE PRODUCER SEGMENTS FOR PETE SAKE! So, the only way to really see them uncut are on DVD, if you have the complete series of The Magic School Bus on Newvideo, you can watch those segments any time you want. This segment had an alien calling about the pile of litter on Pluto.

Okay, final thought, this episode is a whole lot of fun. It's exciting, weird, funny, educational, visually interesting, and has a lot of fun traveling in outer space and giving the kids an adventure. Being someone who's interested in space, I should know. You can watch the episode on Video and DVD any time you want. One more thing I forgot to mention is that this show was actually animated by Nelvana up in Canada. Isn't that ironic? Nelvana producing an American project with American voice actors, I guess it makes sense since Susan Blu, the show's voice director is from America and all that sort of stuff, and Erica Luttrell, the voice of Keesha, would later go on to do voices in America for shows like Dave the Barbarian as Candy as well as Steven Universe.

Okay so, oh, THAT'S THE END!