Season 3 (The Magic School Bus Rides Again)

‘90s

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Season 2

Season 3

Season 4

Rides Again

Season 1

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MSB 3

Season 1

The Magic School Bus Rides AgainSeason 3
Dedication card to Joanna Cole. This is absent from "Goldstealer" and The Complete Third Season.
About
Total season	7
№ of episodes	4
Original run	August 7, 2020 - November 9, 2021
Production
Directed by	Richard Weston
Producer(s)	9 Story, MSB 2 Productions, Brown Bag
Music composed by	Peter Lurye Fred Barton
Chronology
Previous	Season 2
Next	The Magic School Bus Movie Season 1 (The Magic School Bus 3)

The third and final season of The Magic School Bus Rides Again is the seventh and latest season in The Magic School Bus franchise. It premiered on August 7, 2020 with the Netflix release of "Kids in Space," and ended on November 9, 2021 with the DVD release of "Goldstealer."

It is the shortest season overall, with only four episodes, those being the Joanna Cole specials.

Season 3 also introduces the franchise's fourth art style, a short-lived one courtesy of Brown Bag Films.

Cast

Character	Voice actor
Valerie Frizzle Professor Frizzle	No speaking roles, though in "In the Zone", she appears in recycled footage and is mentioned by Maven, and she is also mentioned by the caricatured Annie Guglia in "Goldstealer".
Fiona Frizzle Ms. Frizzle	Kate McKinnon
Arnold Perlstein (spotlit in "The Frizz Connection")	Roman Lutterotti
Dorothy Ann Hudson	Gabby Clarke
Carlos Ramón	Leke Maceda-Rustecki
Keesha Franklin (spotlit in "Goldstealer")	Mikaela Blake
Ralphie Tennelli (spotlit in "Kids in Space")	Matthew Mucci
Jyoti Kaur (spotlit in "In the Zone")	Birva Pandya
Tim Wright	Kaden Stephen
Wanda Li	Lynsey Pham
Liz Ard
The Magic School Bus
Callers

Guest Stars/Is This the Magic School Bus hosts

Character	Voice	Episode
Commander Hadfield	Chris Hadfield (himself)	"Kids in Space"
The Frizzle Fragments	Kate McKinnon	"The Frizz Connection"
Maven	Lights	"In the Zone"
Annie Guglia	Annie Guglia (herself)	"Goldstealer"

Episodes

Joanna Cole specials ("Kids in Space"–"Goldstealer")

This is the wiki's term to describe the season's four 44-minute episodes. They were dedicated to the late Joanna Cole, the author of The Magic School Bus At the Waterworks and its sequels, who passed away that year. After the credits, a dedication card reading "For Joanna Cole (1944–2020), who educated and inspired us all" appears. The dedication card does not appear in "Goldstealer."

No.	Production No.	Episode name	Topic	Initial Release Date
1	MSB-201	Kids in Space	International Space Station/Astronauts	August 7, 2020
Ralphie accidentally enlarges a tardigrade using the Porta-Shrinker on the International Space Station.
2	MSB-202	The Frizz Connection	Air Currents	October 20, 2020
Arnold's birthday field trip to the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta becomes a quest to reunite Ms. Frizzle after she is split into three parts.
3	MSB-204	In the Zone	Time Zones	December 26, 2020
The Bus needs a software update to run correctly, so it malfunctions during a New Year's Eve world tour with Ms. Frizzle's pop-star cousin.
4	MSB-203	Goldstealer	Speed	November 9, 2021
In a Goldfinger parody, one of Keesha's mothers, world-class bicyclist Angela Franklin, is framed for stealing the gold medal to this year's World Wheel Biking Games, so the class becomes Magical Intelligence 5th Grade (MI5), a band of spies working to uncover who the real gold stealer is.

Credits teasers

The credits of this season feature stills of the theme song and the season's episodes whilst the full theme song plays. The general concepts for The Frizz Connection, In the Zone, and Goldstealer were leaked when Kids in Space released, due to each episode sharing the same credits sequence.

Kids in Space (MSB-201/Season 3, Episode 1)

The Frizz Connection (MSB-202/Season 3, Episode 2)

Goldstealer (MSB-203/Season 3, Episode 4)

In the Zone (MSB-204/Season 3, Episode 3)

Trivia

• This is the shortest season in the franchise, and the first not to have 13 episodes.
  • The fact that this season contains less than 10 episodes and consists mostly of double-length specials makes this season similar to the eighth season of The Fairly OddParents!, the third season of The Owl House, and the fourth season of The Umbrella Academy.
• This is the first season to have a conjectural name of sorts instead of "Season _".
• Its possible that the pseudo-CG animation style of this season was a prototype for the CG animation in the third series.
• The opening theme song is shortened to the final line, "ride on the Magic School Bus". The full theme instead plays in the credits of the specials.
• This is the first season of the 2020s.
• This is the first season to have dedication messages.
• This is the fifth season to have the theme song sung in the credits, after the four seasons of the original series.
• The purple octopus from the "Octopus in the neighborhood" scene in the original series returns in this season, having been replaced by a mimic octopus in the first two seasons of Rides Again.
• The credits shows screenshots from the following episodes, updated in the new Season 3 art style.
  • "Monster Power" (waterfall scenes)
  • "The Frizz Connection" (The Bus flies through the storm)
  • "For Lunch"/Theme song (the Bus navigates through Arnold's small intestine in its Regular Cellinator submarine form)
  • "Kids in Space" (Ralphie and Liz float in zero gravity on the International Space Station)
  • "Carlos Gets the Sneezes" (the Bus is shown inside Carlos' nose)
  • "Gets Ready, Set, Dough/Goldstealer" (One of Keesha's mothers, instead of the baker, makes a pie with the bus in it)
  • "In the Zone" (the kids are shown in their moth forms)
  • "Goldstealer" (the kids ride bikes underground)
• The Bus is in a different form for the longest time in this season, and rarely in its normal bus form.
• This season includes the most specials, those being the Joanna Cole specials.
• As of now, this is the only season not to feature Janet.
• This season makes Matthew Mucci the second PJ Masks voice actor to voice in a Magic School Bus medium after Kaden Stephen.
• Two students got new voices.
  • Miles KV, who was the voice of Arnold, was replaced by Roman Lutterotti.
  • Matthew Mintz, who was the voice of Ralphie, was replaced by Matthew Mucci.
  • Both new voice actors also have roles in fellow PBS series, Arthur, which has been referenced a few times in The Magic School Bus and The Magic School Bus Rides Again, such as in "Janet's Mystery Gene" from the previous season.
• Tim, Carlos, Dorothy Ann, Wanda and Keesha's voices are deepening and teenage-like due to Kaden Stephen, Leke Maceda-Rustecki, Gabby Clarke, Lynsey Pham and Mikaela Blake growing up and going throughout puberty, however they all didn't get replaced.
• A new design era is introduced; this is the fourth major art style of The Magic School Bus franchise after the 2017 RA era, The Magic School Bus (1994), and Bruce Degen's illustrations. Similar to what happened in Season 4 of the original series, the students' designs have been tweaked during the transition from Flash to CGI:
  • Ralphie's eyes are bigger than in the previous seasons.
    • Ralphie now wears his 1970s outfit from The Tales Glaciers Tell from this season onward.
  • Tim's eyes are smaller and are further apart from each other, and his nose and lips have enlarged.
  • Dorothy Ann's eyes are also farther apart from each other.
  • Arnold's freckles are harder to see.
  • The lighting makes Wanda's hair dark brown.
• Arnold turns 11 years old in The Frizz Connection because the students were revealed to be 10 in DA and the Deep Blue Sea.
• According to Wanda, Ralphie's middle names are Alessandro and Giuseppe (Kids in Space).
• On production information by 9Story, the Joanna Cole tetralogy is referred to as "Season 2", referencing this being the second era of Rides Again and third season overall. Furthermore, "MSB 2 Productions" is credited instead of "MSB Productions", signifying the change.
• "Goldstealer" is unique in that...
  • It is not dedicated to Joanna Cole.
  • It does not open with a Netflix vanity plate, instead skipping right to the Netflix Original tag.
  • It never got a trailer, promotional artwork, a synopsis by Scholastic, or a proper Rides Again logo due to its not being on Netflix.
  • It is not available on Netflix or digital platforms aside from the official site for the Canadian channel, Knowledge Network, on which the show currently airs.
• The Joanna Cole Specials bring back guest stars in the Is This the Magic School Bus segments for the first time since the holiday special, as well as Liz's return to the segments since "Takes a Dive" or "Gets Programmed". Furthermore, the Bus and Ms. Frizzle (as the Frizzle Fragments) make their debuts in the segments.
• With the Bus debuting and Liz returning to the ITTMSB segments in this era, one of the two is absent in at least one episode:
  • Liz does not appear for The Frizz Connection.
  • The Bus does not appear for Kids in Space and Goldstealer.
• On TV Tropes, Joanna Cole's season is sorted into "Season 3" of Rides Again.
• This is the series' transition to complete CGI animation.
• Similar to Season 2, there is a switch in production order of Season 3, with Goldstealer being third instead of fourth and In the Zone being fourth instead of third.
• Scholastic confirmed Goldstealer, a fourth special in a The New York Times article. It released on November 9, 2021 to the landlocked The Magic School Bus Rides Again: The Complete Third Season DVD in Canada, and was leaked online to the rest of the world on June 9, 2023. It was originally planned to release on Netflix as the season's third episode in 2020 (as evident by its production code of MSB-203 and its completion date before "In the Zone"), but was delayed to 2021 and released directly to this DVD on November 9 of that year. As of July 2023, this episode has not yet released on Netflix.
• In this season, the opening of Is This the Magic School Bus? does not play before the segments, instead transitioning seamlessly from the main part of the episode, much like in “Frizzle of the Future.”