Season 3 (1996)
| # | Title | Topic | Written by | Guest star | Original airdate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | "In a Beehive" | Bees | Doug Booth | N/A | September 14, 1996 |
| When Wanda and Tim were delivering honey from Tim's grandfather's bee farm, all the honey went down the gutter in an accident. Tim managed to convince the Friz to take them to get more honey, so Ms. Frizzle drives the class to a field where they find a beehive and learn how honey is made. | |||||
| 02 | "In the Arctic" | Heat | Brain Meehl | N/A | September 21, 1996 |
| Arnold wants to know what happened to the heat from his hot cocoa. Ms. Frizzle thinks it is fitting to learn about heat in the land of ice and cold, so she takes the class to the Arctic. However, she accidentally drives the bus into the water, and the bus freezes. To make matters worse, the bus has been trapped on an ice floe with Phoebe, Ralphie and Liz. The class will have to get to the bus and heat it up to escape. | |||||
| 03 | "Spins a Web" | Spiders | Robert Schechter | Ed Asner | September 28, 1996 |
| The class has gone to a drive-in movie, where the movie featured is Stand by Your Mantis (1953),(A Parody of The Deadly Mantis) about General Araneus (Ed Asner), who is attempting to destroy a giant praying mantis. Carlos and Phoebe aren't enjoying it. Carlos doesn't like insects (and spiders) and Phoebe is upset and declares that if she were in that movie, she'd trap the mantis, and take it somewhere else and free it. Naturally, this gives Ms. Frizzle an idea. So she drives the bus into the movie. General Araneus takes over the bus, kidnaps Liz, and pushes a button that makes the class go back out of the movie and shrink. He wants to use Liz as bait for the praying mantis. Outside the movie, the class encounter spiders a lot, and when Liz pushes a button that pulls them back in the movie, they apply what they've learned about spiders to stop the General from using Liz as praying mantis bait. | |||||
| 04 | "Under Construction" | Structures | Libby Hinson | Rosalind Chao | October 5, 1996 |
| The class is going on a field trip to the new suspension bridge they're building. However, there is a problem, Mrs. Li (Rosalind Chao) (Wanda's mother) needs Wanda to watch her little brother William until she gets off her business call. The class decided to watch William together. William, only an infant, accidentally uses the Porta-shrinker to size down the entire class (without Liz) and the bus and locks the class in the bathroom. The class uses the materials available to them to build structures to escape. This is the first episode where the bus doesn't turn into anything. | |||||
| 05 | "Gets a Bright Idea" | Light | Ronnie Krauss | N/A | October 12, 1996 |
| Janet (from Gets Lost in Space and Butterfly And The Bog Beast) was disappointed by the all-school field trip to a light show, considering that she wanted to see a magic show. She tells the class she could do a magic trick, but she can't because of the ghost that haunts the theater. When the class leaves the theater they find Arnold missing. When they enter the theater again, they see Arnold's "ghost". Keesha, the skeptic, is convinced that it is really a trick done by Janet to scare them. She soon finds out Janet is using the Pepper's Ghost Effect to scare the class. | |||||
| 06 | "Shows and Tells" | Archaeology | John May | Alex Trebek | October 19, 1996 |
| The class is on some kind of show and tell game show, one person shows and the other tells. Arnold will be bringing his rock collection and Dorothy Ann will be doing the "tell" part. However, Arnold arrives without his rock collection. He found a strange object, that he thinks would work much better, but nobody even knows what it is. Ms. Frizzle then takes the class on field trip to find out. She turns the bus into Suppose-O-Tron, that can test their hypothesis. | |||||
| 07 | "Makes a Rainbow" | Color | George Arthur Bloom, Jocelyn Stevenson | Paul Winfield | October 26, 1996 |
| Ms. Frizzle and Liz have invented a magical pinball machine that uses light instead of balls (the light travels much slower than in the real world). The light goes through a prism and the player attempts to bounce the different colored beams of light into the appropriate eye, in order to "make the rainbow." Ms. Frizzle says if she fails to win the game, it will be taken away. The class decides to help, and they shrink the bus and go inside the machine. Mr. Ruhle (Paul Winfield), the principal, shows up, and Arnold tries to stall him. | |||||
| 08 | "Goes Upstream" | Salmon | Ronnie Krauss | N/A | November 2, 1996 |
| Ralphie is wondering what happened to all the salmon. They need them for the school fish fry, but they aren't here. The Friz has decided to take the class on a field trip to find out. She turns the bus into a salmon and puts a compact disk in the bus that makes it think like a real salmon, so it will go wherever Ralphie's salmon went. However, when the bus starts migrating, Ralphie changes his mind about doing anything to find out what happened to the salmon. He and some kids in the class attempt to stop it, but to no avail. | |||||
| 09 | "Works Out" | Blood | Jocelyn Stevenson, George Arthur Bloom, Robert Schecter | Dan Marino | November 9, 1996 |
| At this year's Teacherathalon Ms. Frizzle is competing against Mr. Sinew, the gym teacher with giant muscles. Janet (from Gets Lost in Space, Butterfly And The Bog Beast,Gets A Bright Idea,and Goes Upstream) shows up again and supports Mr. Sinew. The class is convinced that there is no way Ms. Frizzle can beat someone who can destroy shirts simply by flexing his muscles. Ralphie wants to know what lungs have to do with how your muscles work, so they go on a field trip inside the Friz herself. | |||||
| 10 | "Gets Planted" | Plants | Ronnie Krauss | N/A | November 16, 1996 |
| The class is performing a play of Jack and the Beanstalk. As Phoebe gets stage fright, she decides to make the props. However, there is problem with the beanstalk. She tried to grow a real one, but it didn't work. So she tried to build one but that didn't work either. Naturally, the Friz turns her into a bean plant and Phoebe becomes shorter than Liz. However, no one is sure how plants get food. John makes a cameo, since he did not appear with Ms. Frizzle and her class. | |||||
| 11 | "In the Rainforest" | Rainforests | Brian Meehl | Matt Frewer | November 23, 1996 |
| The class has decided to give the Friz a present for Earth Day, a cocoa bean tree in the Amazon (as cocoa beans are used to make chocolate). The day just happens to be the day the first shipment reaches them, but for some reason, the tree has produced no cocoa beans. They go to the rainforest to find the reason and Ms. Frizzle makes Tim and Dorothy Ann "RFI"s (RainForest Investigators.) Ms. Frizzle's tree is in a patch of the rainforest controlled by Inspector 47, who talks with a strong accent and runs around the rainforest in a white suit. He is very proud that he got rid of the mud in his patch of the rainforest, however the class finds out at the end that the mud was what caused the absence of cocoa beans. The mud holes were where the insects that pollenated the cocoa pods lived and it is revealed that Inspector 47 covered the rainforest floor with artificial turf. They explain this to him and he decides to "rip up this filthy artificial turf with my bare hands." | |||||
| 12 | "Rocks and Rolls" | Erosion | Jocelyn Stevenson, George Arthur Bloom, Robert B. Schechter | Jessica Walter | November 30, 1996 |
| The class is building a statue of Captain Walker, their city's founder. Captain Walker left instructions on how wanted this statue made in the form of a poem. Ms. Frizzle's class interprets the meaning he wants it made without the use of hands a little too literally. However, the statue breaks off the top of the mountain, and falls down. The Friz turns the bus into a rock and follows. Water erosion reduces the statue to a head by the time they reach the bottom. Desperate to get to the ceremony, the bus cracks open a dam of rocks that has formed and slides down the mountain. However, they found that somehow they made the mountain into a statue of Captain Walker's head and realize that Captain Walker wanted his statue made through erosion. | |||||
| 13 | "Holiday Special" | Recycling | Brian Meehl, John May | Dolly Parton | December 25, 1996 |
|
It is the day before the winter holidays, and the class is taking stuff to the recycling center (which is run by Murph, one of Ms. Frizzle's relatives.) Wanda is going to see The Nutcracker and is bringing a toy soldier instead of taking money, as they are taking toys to give to homeless children. As usual, something goes wrong. Arnold mistakes the soldier for something being taken to the recycling plant and Wanda's soldier is turned into plastic pellets. Wanda declares she wishes recycling had never been invented. Naturally, this gives the Friz an idea. She turn the bus into an anti-recycling machine, which changes the city to the way it would be without recycling. It cuts down the forest, and turns recycling trucks into garbage trucks. The kids are confused when it turns the swing set in the park into aluminum cans and such. Wanda is still pleased, since if recycling hadn't been invented, then her soldier would be still waiting for them in school. However the bus turns the school into a garbage dump when they get there. Finally, the bus un-recycles itself. Wanda then apologized that she ever wanted to get rid of recycling, and wants it back. The Friz changes the bus so it changes everything back. Wanda makes new toy soldiers from the melted plastic pellets. Arnold has to leave for his sick grandma for Hanukkah. Soon, Arnold's classmates, Ms. Frizzle and Murph appear. This episode is more Hanukkah-oriented than it is Christmas. This episode aired as a special one hour episode during its original airing. The first 30 minutes is the regular episode and the second half of the hour is a behind the scenes look of the series with the voice cast. For subsequent reruns, it aired as a regular 30 minute episode with the behind the scenes segment cut out. The home video release is also missing the behind the scenes segment and only features the 30 minute version seen in syndication. |
Read more about this topic: List Of The Magic School Bus Episodes
Famous quotes containing the word season:
“Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.”
—John Donne (c. 1572–1631)