Vintage Dinosaur Telly: The Magic School Bus

Seatbelts, everyone! A few weeks ago I reviewed The Magic School Bus in the Time of the Dinosaurs, and mused at the end that I might have to seek out the TV episode on the same theme…which was in no way an appeal for commenters to do the work for me and provide a link, oh no. (As if I’d be so lazy.) Nevertheless, Zain Ahmed obligingly provided a link to a YouTube video. Thanks, Zain! (Admittedly, it’s not exactly hard to find on there.) As such, I’ve duly given it a watch, and it’s certainly an interesting affair for someone who managed to avoid the franchise as a child. Was Ms Frizzle always this psychotic?

The plot of The Busasaurus has naturally been altered and simplified from the book; whereas the latter had the gang travel through the Late Triassic, Late Jurassic and Late Cretaceous, they only visit the Late Cretaceous in The Busasaurus. The initial premise is very similar, though – Ms Frizzle and the kids visit a dig site where palaeontologists are uncovering a dinosaur skeleton, only here it’s Tyrannosaurus rather than Maiasaura, because T. rex is far sexier and it allows for a much more obvious point to be made later about how dinosaurs weren’t all monstrous. Frizzle’s palaeontologist friend Jeff has also been excised in favour of a lady named Dr Skeledon, which is a very silly name that I don’t approve of. Dr Skeledon also doesn’t refer to Frizzle by her first name (Valerie), which makes her seem even more like a Time Lord. But I digress.

As in the book, Ms Frizzle herds the kids onto the bus and turns it into a time machine, although in the show there seems to be much more of an implication that Frizzle has terrifying godlike powers that she wields with reckless abandon. Frizzle winds the clock back in a quite literal sense until they end up in the Late Cretaceous, at which point the doors are opened and her charges are allowed to wander around at will. But of course.

Naturally, they encounter dinosaurs, the first of which is an unnamed, somewhat generic-looking sauropod. By far the most interesting aspect of these is the way they’re animated – the birdlike head-bobbing motion they make when they walk isn’t something I recall seeing anywhere else, and I do wonder what the decision was behind it. Perhaps it was to emphasise their harmless nature, by making them reminiscent of other harmless animals that children would know from life? If that’s the case, I do commend them for not going with the ‘big cow’ angle, at least.

When quite understandably running in terror from these gigantic creatures, a child named Arnold drops an egg that had been given to him by Dr Skeledon back at the dig site. Naturally, it was a fossil egg, but it somehow became ‘unfossilised’ during the trip back in time in spite of the fact that it was inside the bus, which really makes me wonder what the rules are in this time-traveling-schoolbus scenario. Why don’t the children rapidly de-age and then pop out of existence? (Ms Frizzle, being an ageless godlike being, would obviously be fine.) It’s quite the head-scratcher, I tell you.

In any case, Arnold’s dropped egg is stolen by an ornithomimosaur, and so Arnold and another kid give chase. Naturally, this means that they deserve to meet a horrible death for their foolishness, a fate that the show sadly neglects to mete out to them. Instead, Frizzle and the other children must head out to find them. On the way, they encounter Parasaurolophus, shown with a good old fashioned crest flap a la 1980s and early ’90s palaeoart, another hadrosaur implied to be Maiasaura (as per the book), Triceratops, and some marauding Troodon. For a kids’ cartoon from 1995, the dinosaur designs are really quite decent. The Maiasaura may have beaks that resemble wrinky lips, but they otherwise quite closely resemble depictions in palaeoart of the time. The only really goofy ones are the Troodon, which are peculiarly fat-bodied, pointy-mouthed things without sickle claws (quite apart from the scaliness, but y’know, it was 1995).

Unlike the book, where Frizzle and the kids are mostly passive observers on safari, the TV Frizzle is able to conjure various improbable props to aid the party in their run-ins with the dinosaurs. These include a Parasaurolophus-aping horn and Triceratops shields that deter the Troodon. Incidentally, the reedy noise that the Parasaurolophus make is completely rubbish; everyone knows that they’re supposed to have loads of BASS. Bro.

Naturally, the climax of the dinosaur encounters is with Rexy himself, who is just trying to have a kip when some annoying brats from the far future turn up to ruin his day. Naturally, Tyrannosaurus gives chase, and then starts attacking the bus. (At this point, one can really tell that this was made a couple of years after Jurassic Park, what with the ground-shaking, vehicle-threatening and general appearance of the T. rex.) Apparently unconcerned with her pupils being eaten – perhaps because her terrible powers make her immune to any repercussions – Frizzle initially only responds by checking whether the insurance policy for her magic physics-defying bus covers attacks by Mesozoic wildlife. However, on further prompting from the kids, her solution to ward off the T. rex is to rapidly grow Arnold to an enormous size so that he can fight it. Perhaps because a dinosaur-on-giant-child fight to the death is far more amusing than scaring off the bloody thing through literally any other means.

The most bizarre part of all this is the ‘Arnold meter’ that Frizzle uses to expand and shrink Arnold to the required size. WHY IS THERE AN ARNOLD-METER IN THE BUS? WHAT IS SHE PLANNING? I have a feeling that this sort of thing would bother me a lot less if I’d seen literally any other episode of the show.

In any case, the T. rex is scared off by Honey I Blew Up the Arnold, Arnold is shrunken so that he can fit on the bus, and they all bugger off back to the future (Great Scott! etc.). Once they arrive, they find that the Butterfly Effect is very real and the US is now being ruled over by a bizarre-looking creature that speaks gibberish and commands an army of cult followers. The end.

It’s all good fun. As a kid, I think I’d have been annoyed by the lack of dinosaur-on-human violence (because I’ve always been horrible), but pleased by the depiction of dinosaurs as animals. The Triceratops encircle their young to protect them, the Maiasaura regurgitate food for their babies, and the sauropods are depicted as mostly being interested in filling their stomachs, which is probably fairly accurate. As an adult, I do find the children rather annoying, but that’s par for the course. Would I watch this children’s cartoon again? Quite gladly. Such is my life.

One last thing: as I mentioned last time, I have no childhood nostalgia for this franchise – it somehow passed me by. (My fiancée Agata does remember the TV show, though, albeit as Magiczny autobus of course.) Nevertheless, I was saddened to learn of the recent death of Bruce Degen, the illustrator of The Magic School Bus books, whose work I’d only just discovered. If he produced any more dinosaur-related work, I’d certainly like to track it down and feature it on the blog.