Celebrity Voice Actor: Lily Tomlin was the voice of Ms. Frizzle, Malcolm-Jamal Warner voiced "the (male) producer," and the Theme Tune was sung by Little Richard. And then there's all the celebrities who voiced "guest" characters (Carol Channing, Dolly Parton, Dan Marino, etc).
Thanks to the series' popularity, reruns of the show aired on Fox Kids (as a way for affiliates to fulfill their E/I quotas after The Fox Cubhouse ended), Discovery Kids, and qubo, as well as Netflix (which is also the home of the reboot).
Aired all over the place in Canada. In addition to its PBS and TLC runs (both are available on Canadian cable and satellite systems) reruns also aired on YTV, both versions of Teletoon, TVO Kids, and Knowledge Kids.
Children Voicing Children: Arnold, Carlos, Tim, and Ralphie are voiced by real boys, and all of their voices deepen over the course of the series with their actors hitting puberty.
In syndicated reruns aired on commercial channels, the epilogue segment with the producer (which lasts for a few minutes and appears in every episode) is always cut, which greatly reduces the need to make cuts elsewhere.
In September 1994, McDonald's released a set of four educational toys. These consisted of a trivia card game, a space tracer, an undersea adventure maze, and a geo fossil finder.
In Summer 2021, Burger King sold the The Magic School Bus Gets Recycled book as part of their set of four Scholastic children's books, which also included Clifford: The Stormy Day Rescue, and two I Spy books; I Spy a Penguin and I Spy a Balloon.
Late Export for You: The show first aired in Japan in 1999, 5 years after its' North American debut.
The book The Magic School Bus and the Science Fair Expedition came out 20 years after the first book. As a result, it boasts a holographic cover, and includes appearances from several of history's most legendary scientists.
A DVD box set of the entire series was released in 2014 (20 years after the first episode).
Arnold and Tim were originally voiced by Amos Crawley and Max Beckford, respectively; their voices broke after the first season and they were replaced with Danny Tamberelli and Andre Ottley-Lorant, respectively. (Crawley can still be heard as Arnold in the Title Sequence throughout the show's run.) Oddly, the voice actors for Carlos (Daniel DeSanto) and Ralphie (Stuart Stone) were not replaced after their voices broke later on, and neither were Tamberelli or Ottley-Lorant.
In the French dub, except for Marie-Eugénie Maréchal as Phoebe, all the children had at least two voice actors.
In the Latin American Spanish dub, only Arnold (Enzo Fortuny) and Wanda (Cristina Hernández) kept their voice actors throughout the show.
Out of Order: Season 1 Episode 1, Gets Lost In Space, has Arnold remark that the class had already been inside a rotten log and to the bottom of the ocean. Those field trips aren't actually shown until Episodes 06 and 04, respectively.
Some of the episodes are adaptations of specific Magic School Bus books, but there are obviously quite a lot more TV episodes than books.
The first five computer games were adaptations of specific books. Technically, there were still unadapted books left after that, but none that would've particularly lent themselves to a computer game. From Explores the Rainforest onwards, the games have original storylines.
In And Shine Heaven Now, the kids and Ms. Frizzle were planned to cameo during the '99 storyline. The kids had grown up, gone their separate ways and went to college. However, Ms. Frizzle calls them up, one by one to help defend London and one by one, they all agree and they would have piloted the bus as a giant mecha. The webcomic would have also revealed that Ms. Frizzle had multiple classes over the years but the one from the cartoon would have been the one to be called because they had the most experience with the bus and they knew that the day when Ms. Frizzle would call them would come.
A sketch from "Cake Pillow" involves Ms. Frizzle driving the Magic School Bus off the Grand Canyon a la Thelma & Louise, killing everyone and sending them to Heaven.
A sketch from "We Don't See Much of That in 1940s America" involves Ms. Frizzle crashing the Magic School Bus-turned-airplane in the arctic a la Alive. She and the children survive, and when she teaches the children about cannibalism, they resort to killing and eating her. Dorothy Ann soon points out that they all packed their lunches and could have just eaten them instead, but when she discovers a bologna sandwich in her lunchbox, she continues to eat Ms. Frizzle.
The Simpsons: In "Bull-E", in Otto's second hallucination, he is seen driving the School Train and comes across Ms. Frizzle driving the Magic School Bus. Ms. Frizzle drives the bus into Otto's ear to observe the inside of his head. Otto then takes the bus out and stomps on it, with the kids inside as they try to run away.
Smosh has a video called "ADULT MAGIC SCHOOL BUS", where Ms. Frizzle (played by Ian Hecox) reunites with her class note with Anthony Padilla, Courtney Miller, Olivia Sui, Keith Leak II, Shayne Topp, and Noah Grossman respectively playing Carlos, Dorothy Ann, Wanda, Tim, Ralphie, and Arnold after 20 years, taking them to her ex-husband's house in the Magic Hyundai (due to having lost the Magic School Bus) to pack up her stuff, passing it off as a lesson about gravity. The video ends with Frizzle going inside the body of her ex-husband and then expanding the Magic Hyundai from within him to kill him.
The class is back together now, It's been 20 years, Frizzle lost her job somehow, So she doesn't have the bus! Not the Magic School Bus, (It was repossessed!) It's the Magic Hyundai! (A bit cramped, but it's the best!)
The Resolution Will Not Be Identified: The final episode "Take A Dive" is never identified as such. The only clue that it's the series finale is Ms. Frizzle deciding to retire at the end.
Pluto is still a planet in "Gets Lost in Space". It's also depicted as being rather white, light grey, and blue, when in actuality Pluto is brown◊.
The phone segment at the end of the episode acknowledges that they took some liberties with this because, at the time, no one knew what Pluto really looked like.
Pluto is also missing Nix, Hydra, Styx, and Kerberos.
More moons have also been discovered around the gas and ice giants since the episode and corresponding game debuted.
Post-2006 prints of the Lost in Space book address these facts by including information on Pluto's demotion, Ceres's lesser-known promotion, and the existence of the Kuiper Belt.
In "The Busasaurus," Ms. Frizzle says that Tyrannosaurus rex was the biggest meat-eater of all time. Too bad the discovery of the slightly larger Giganotosaurus was published in the same year the episode aired, although later estimates suggest that Tyrannosaurus was indeed heaviernote Spinosaurus was considered to have been longer than Tyrannosaurus even during that time, but it still wasn't considered as massive. In the same episode, Ornithomimus and Troodon are both portrayed with scales rather than feathers and identified as carnivores rather than omnivores.
Weirdly, "Gets Eaten" has Ms. Frizzle state that all food chains begin with plants, which had been a discredited fact since the discovery of hydrothermal vents in 1977, seventeen years before the episode aired. Even weirder, this error is pointed out in the phone segment, so it's not carelessness. The fictional producer's justification for excluding hydrothermal vents creatures is "Yeah, but they're weird."
The Tongue Map appears in the video game.
Lampshaded in the Dinosaurs computer game. Keesha's report "Dinosaur Myths" discusses discredited theories about dinosaurs, and even mentions that then-current theories about dinosaurs may be disproved in the future. Examples from the game include the use of “Rioarribasaurus” (a deprecated synonym of Coelophysis from a time when it appeared that the latter name would be discarded due to a technicality), plesiosaurs being described as oviparous rather than viviparous and the presence of Allosaurus in Tanzania (which was based on an indeterminate tibia that more closely resembles megalosaurs than allosaurs).
In the Solar System computer game, Arnold's report mentions that Pluto is the only planet in the solar system that has never been visited by a spacecraft from Earth. Setting aside the fact that Pluto is no longer counted as a planet, this ceased to be true when the New Horizons probe visited Pluto in 2015.
Again with "Gets Lost in Space", the caller during the producer segment mentions that Pluto is temporarily inside Neptune's orbit, and would remain so until 1999.note This was done to justify how they passed the planets in sequential order in 1994.
One of the classroom decorations is a poster of the Food Pyramid, which has since been replaced by MyPlate in 2011.
In the Ocean computer game, the sailfish is described as being able to swim faster than the running speed of a cheetah. It is now believed to swim 35 mph, though it's still the fastest animal in the sea.
As with most things of this nature, the computer episode went out of date the moment it aired. The fact that the computer has a "gajillion gigabyte hard drive" AND still has a floppy disk. While "gajillion" is not a number, we do have computers and networks capable of working on Yottabyte levels (10^24 bytes).
Also, WiFi would be used to connect a computer network today, rather than Ethernet cables.
In "Holiday Special," the whole plot revolves around an item being lost while the kids are sorting the school's recycling. As recently as 2007, many modern recycling plants no longer require manually-sorted inputs ("single stream recycling," a.k.a. one big bin for it all).
Unspecified Role Credit: The ending credits list the voice actors, but not which characters they played.
Voices in One Room: All of the children in the voice cast recorded together in Toronto, even after Arnold was re-cast with American Danny Tamberelli (who was especially flown in from New York). This caused no shortage of headaches for the voice directors, as the kids would very often crack each other up and drag out the recording sessions. Averted with Lily Tomlin, who was recorded on her own in an L.A. studio, as were most of the other guest stars.
You Sound Familiar: Amos Crawley (who voiced Arnold in season 1) made return appearances to the series as Harry Arm.
that suggests Arnold's survival of the vacuum of space after quickly rushing him back into the bus may not be nearly as farfetched as the writers presumed.
