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The Magic School Bus
1994 · TV series · 25 min episodes · 4 seasons
Created by Bruce Degen, Joanna Cole
AnimationScience FictionFantasyFamilyActionAdventureKids
An eccentric schoolteacher takes her class on wondrous educational field trips with the help of a magical school bus.
5 positive8 neutralfrom 13 commenters
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13 comments on Hacker News
This has Magic School Bus episode written all over it.
I'm from a central European country and my mother always made sure to record episodes of the Magic School Bus shown here on TV for me to watch on VHS. No doubt an influential show even beyond the US.
In regards to criticism that the information is too esoteric for kids and how to make it more appealing, I strongly suggest watching this episode about computers from The Magic School Bus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WHahEKL1v0
It's obviously very dated today, but I really appreciated it as a kid when I saw it on TV.
For those with kids, I recommend this episode of magic school bus. It's for anyone really....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oF7hdM4kdwg
I think a lot of my interest in tech was probably influenced by Michael Crichton movies, Magic School Bus, Critter Gitters, and the like. What little tech content there was in the media really set me up for embedded systems.
I liked the idea of making video games for a bit, until the gaming scene changed and I realized how hard it is to do anything at a pro level. But mostly, I was interested in how devices could integrate with the real world. Cold dead pixels on a screen aren't that interesting unless you're a true intellectual and have a lot of understanding of math and algorithms, probably more than average coders.
Even the early internet, and remaining unshitty forums, are mostly only interesting because there's a real person on the other end, and it gets boring again if all anyone talks about is tech with no connection to anything but more tech.
I think that's probably a lot of what happened and why the internet isn't that exciting to a lot of us anymore.
When all day is JUST phone scrolling, nobody is doing anything to write about. It's like the "AI models eating their own shit" problem, but WE are the being like the AI models and have been since 2008 or so.
Sometimes I wonder if there's something wrong with my mind, since I don't get into the really abstract stuff as much as other devs, I don't spend weekends learning LISP just for fun or writing my own sorting algorithms, everyone else seems to be motivated by logic and simplicity and ideas a lot more.
I remember having that epiphany in 2017, reading the original google transformer press release. I remember thinking “they taught computers to understand!, and someday soon i’ll be able to translate anything into anything.” And not like translating “languages” but translating contexts and concepts.
LLMs really shine when you try and combine two previously untouched things or map one bit of knowledge it a common pattern. Eg “summarize Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein as if it was an episode synopsis of Magic School Bus.” “Now do the same for Dracula.”
I remember my mind racing so much that day. With all the ideas of things it would unlock. And I still managed to under imagine just how many different types of knowledge, and different layers of knowledge and language, they would be able to encode into one compact dataset.
I have a 5 year old son. He has access to an iPad and all of my old game consoles (a Switch, my old PS4 Pro, and my Xbox One X), but he mostly prefers using the iPad.
The iPad is locked down and has a ton of educational apps on it, but the main thing he does on there is watch Youtube Kids or play Minecraft (using an Xbox controller with a bluetooth connection to the iPad).
His Youtube Kids account is locked down to mostly educational content only, with the content restrictions set to 2-4 years old. When I had it set to the 5-7 age range, Youtube kept showing him a lot of inappropriate videos.
He knows how to use the search feature to find videos about just about any topic. I might have a conversation with him about quantum mechanics and then later in the day I will catch him watching a bunch of videos about the topic. He is obsessed with outer space and black holes. He will binge on low quality entertainment like my little pony for a while, and then he will watch some educational videos about math, and then he will switch over to some Kurzgesagt educational videos about outer space or something, and then he might switch to magic school bus.
Any time I see something that I don't like on Youtube kids (like Ryan toys review), I will block the video (or the entire channel). I probably have 30 different channels blocked on Youtube Kids.
I don't know if I'm doing the right thing by letting him watch so much content, but I can definitely say that he knows waaayyy more about the world than I ever did at his age, and he is also a voraciously curious self-educator. He loves math, mainly due to the Number Blocks TV show, for example.
Huh, interesting. It was also used in one of the Magic School Bus books (and maybe a corresponding episode, not sure), to describe the sound made by Carlos' invented musical instrument.
I suspect this is the bikeshed effect at work.
There's an episode of The Magic School Bus (the original one, from the 90s) where a cacao farmer eradicates mosquitos and the cacao trees stop producing cacao beans. The episode ends with the reintroduction of the mosquitoes, and you get to eat chocolate again.
So you've got at least one generation that grew up on the message that mosquitoes are a species that you don't eradicate, or else, no more chocolate. And that's a simple enough message that people would feel comfortable making public comment to that effect.
My kids alternate between episodes of the 90's Magic School Bus and the 2020 reboot, both on Netflix.
I was just talking with my wife about this super cool communication. I learned about it from the Magic School Bus show many years ago - to this day I still have all sorts of interesting science facts I can attribute directly to that show.
Is there anything of that quality and wholesomeness produced for kids today, or am I just going to have to show those old episodes to my kids when they're old enough?
In my high school literature class we were taught that conflict doesn't have to be between individuals. Indeed, Totoro does have conflict by this definition: between the girls and their insecurity about their mother's illness. The conflict is resolved thanks to Totoro and the friendship they developed with him.
I seem to remember The Magic School Bus [1] (kids' science show) having stories – that is, a series of related events – but only sporadic (and generally incidental) conflict. "Magical bus takes school kids on memorable – if ill-advised – journey, and Arnold makes jokes" sums up pretty much every episode.
Seinfeld I would venture to say also deviates from the western norm, in that the conflicts (of which each episode has several) are rarely, if ever, overcome. Half the time the conflict reaches a climax at the end of the episode. In fact the entire series ended with unresolved conflict. But the stories are nonetheless memorable.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_School_Bus_%28TV_series%29
Excited to see this! I have such fond memories of watching Reading Rainbow.
I would love to see a similar kickstarter for other shows I also enjoyed - The Magic School Bus first in my mind. I just rediscovered all the shows on Netflix and I've been watching all the episodes.... I _just_ discovered that a lot of the guests on the show are celebrities like Dom DeLuise, Elliott Gould, Alex Trebek and more, and I can't find another show quite like it. It dates itself here and there - like the series finale was about computers and features floppy drives - but The Friz is unparalleled on so many levels. She was a great role model while I was young.