YMMV / The Magic School Bus Rides Again

• Common Knowledge: A lot of people think the teacher played by Kate McKinnon is a redesign of Ms. Frizzle from the original, leading to criticisms about her supposed radical redesign. It's actually Ms. Frizzle's sister, Fiona Frizzle. The original Valerie Frizzle appears in the first episode, though she's also been slightly redesigned.
• Continuity Lockout: It's a Soft Reboot with enough references to the first cartoon that it'd confuse newer viewers.
• Designated Monkey: Arnold seems to have been upgraded from a perpetual complainer to a complete whiny coward (to the point of believing a horror movie monster is real). Heck, he even assigns himself the role of class worrier in the first episode.
• Genius Bonus: Rabbits are used as an example of an invasive species, brought in to take care of overgrowing plants only to become a pest themselves with no natural predators. While it's left unsaid, this is exactly what happened in Australia in the 1950's.
• Improved Second Attempt: The special The Frizz Connection made Keesha and Tim dark again after the whitewashing controversy.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Several fans are watching the show more for Professor Frizzle than her sister, who hasn't exactly moved far from teaching her old class.
• Memetic Troll: "CARLOS!", as usual, due to his never-ending wordplay.
• Nausea Fuel:
  • Carlos' allergies result in huge mucous spots on his sleeves, which then stay there for the rest of the episode.
  • In Season 2, there is an entire episode about poop. Can't get any more nauseous than that.
• Questionable Casting:
  • While Kate McKinnon is no stranger to Large Ham roles (her tenure on Saturday Night Live is a testament to this, most notable of which is her supervillain-like impression of Hilary Clinton), she isn't the first person most would consider for a potential Ms. Frizzle. Unlike Lilly Tomlin's whimsical Valerie Frizzle, McKinnon's significantly more self-aware Fiona is considered to be a complete contradiction to Valerie's charm.
  • While Lin-Manuel Miranda's rendition of the theme song is considered a huge draw for the show, he's not exactly known as a "singer" as much as he is a songwriter. As such, he's clearly struggling to hit those high notes that Little Richard had no trouble with in the original version.
• Replacement Scrappy:
  • The original Ms. Frizzle being replaced by her sister, Fiona Frizzle. Notably, the original Ms. Frizzle now headlines the end-of-episode lesson segment.
  • Phoebe being written out and replaced with Jyoti. Jyoti is also disliked for her trait of being able to build anything.
• So Okay, It's Average: The general consensus seems to be this. It's not a bad reboot, it does its job of educating children in a fun manner and brings the science up to date in cool, interesting ways, but its stories aren't terribly exciting and its animation is downright ugly.
• Sweetness Aversion: While not overly cutesy, the show has been criticized for going out of its way to be inoffensive by never giving the characters any real conflicts with one another, unlike the original show where they were paired off in rivalries and unafraid to make lighthearted snarky comments. The criticism is that this not only makes the kids seem artificial (even kids who like each other have arguments, you know!) but gives the stories absolutely no drive.
• Tear Jerker:
  • The whole fact the 2020 specials are dedicated to Joanna Cole, who originally created the series.
  • For the same specials, Lily Tomlin's Ms. Frizzle steps away entirely, with the Producer Says segments going back to the original series format, effectively retiring the original entirely.
  • In "In the Zone" when the bus loses its magic and becomes an ordinary school bus. On top of that, Jyoti's thank you video she shows the class afterwards.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • While over 20 years of Art Evolution in the animation industry was undoubtedly going to have an effect on this show no matter what, the particular animation style used was not well received by older fans, who have complained that the heavily streamlined Toon Boom puppet animation is even more limited than the already-limited (though still appealing) animation of the original show. It doesn't help that the original was animated by Nelvana, the premiere Canadian animation studio, while the reboot farms its animation out to 9 Story Media Group, a studio notorious for this particular style.
  • The fact that the Ms. Frizzle in this show is not the same Ms. Frizzle from the original (the original Friz is now Professor Frizzle, and the one headlining the show is her sister) had caused quite an upset with the fans. Similarly, Phoebe transferred back to her old school and was replaced by a new character, Jyoti.
    • The crew clearly knew full well that this would be an issue, and they tackled it in the first episode, which is about the delicate balance of ecosystems and the dangers of invasive species. Arnold spends the whole thing as one of the skeptical old-school fans and ends up learning about how to adapt to a new "ecosystem." In turn, this has led to a fire of discussions about immigration, making it more contentious than it already was.
    • Moving beyond the issues of ecology and immigration, Fiona Felicity Frizzle was quite different from Valerie. Lily Tomlin's Frizzle was upbeat, quirky and witty, but also calm, mysterious and reassuring when necessary. Kate McKinnon's Frizzle tries very hard to be hip, groovy and 'with the kids', but you can tell that she's struggling and doesn't quite have Lily Tomlin's je ne sais quoi. Most significantly, in the first episode, Fiona knows that Arnold doesn't like her and, instead of having a little heart to heart talk with him about change and adjustment, she straight up manipulates and guilts him into accepting her. Here's also where the flat characterization comes into play: children seem all too accepting of this newcomer teacher, whereas they're at the age when any such change should be a quite dramatic event that takes getting used to.
  • The redesigns for Keesha and Tim received some backlash for their noticeably lighter skin.
  • Minor example: Dorothy Ann's distinctive pronunciation of research as "ruh-SERCH" from the original series is changed to "REE-search" in this one, which some fans were annoyed by.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: A show based around an elementary school class getting a sequel nearly 20 years after the original seems like a no-brainer for a "next generation" premise, where a whole new class of students get to experience Ms. Frizzle's teaching style (be it the original Frizzle or Fiona with her newer approach), and the original kids having the potential for supporting roles in their grown-up lives. Rides Again instead doing the complete opposite by keeping most of the original kid cast with modernization tweaks comes off as a misfire in trying to keep status-quo continuity to make the Frizzle change more palatable.

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