Renee Rosenow

It always ended up being a good day in elementary school when part of our class time consisted of watching an episode of “The Magic School Bus.”

I will never forget my favorite episode, “The Magic School Bus gets Lost in Space.” The ever frazzled Ms. Frizzle decides it would be great fun to take her students into outer space to learn about the planets first hand. The Magic School Bus turns into a rocket ship and the class is off to space.

I always liked Ms. Frizzle’s students; they were smart, funny and extremely happy.

Dorothy-Ann was the blonde who was book smart. Arnold was always nervous and wished he stayed at home instead of going on a field trip with the class. Ralphie was the jokester; he wore a backwards hat and was a bit of a rebel.

There was one student who liked to make guest appearances, her name was Janet, and she was Arnold’s cousin.

She was a know-it-all, pompous brat who none of the happy-go-lucky students could stand to have around.

Janet makes an appearance in the “Lost in Space” episode. There is one part of the episode that even after all these years, I will never forget and it is all Janet’s fault.

While the class was hanging out on Pluto, Arnold, so fed up with Janet’s ridiculous antics, decided to take off his space helmet, exposing his head to the freezing weather.

His face turned to ice and the Magic School Bus had to rush him back to Earth. In the end, Arnold was fine, he just ended up with a pretty bad cold, but Janet learned her lesson, don’t be a know-it-all or your cousin will try to commit suicide on Pluto.

While “The Magic School Bus” was entertaining with Ms. Frizzle’s crazy

dresses and Ralphie’s great jokes, it also was educational. In the “Lost in Space” episode, Ms. Frizzle showed how each planet was different and the farther away from the sun, the colder the planets become.

Junior Bridget Simmons remembers fondly the days of watching episodes in her science class. “Those were always the fun days,” she said. “It was really cool concept; we didn’t have to watch boring science movies, we got to watch something we actually wanted to see.”

Kids today don’t have the pleasure of watching “The Magic School Bus” in class, unless they are watching old school episodes. After its premiere in 1994, “The Magic School Bus” stayed on the air for four more seasons, ending in 1998.

After that, Liz the lizard, who was always on Ms. Frizzle’s shoulder, had her own spin-off book series. Eight books were written about her journeys without the class. Ms. Frizzle also had her own book series called “Ms. Frizzle’s Adventures.” She travels back in time to the middle ages or imperial China to teach children about history.

Even ten years after the last episode aired, “The Magic School Bus” still resonates with those who watched episodes after school or in their third grade science class.

Proite is a senior print journalism major and staff writer for The Spectator.