Fictional Women Around the World: Ms. Frizzle

It's back to school time, so let's hop on the Magic School Bus and shine a light on the eccentric and extremely fashionable teacher Ms. Frizzle.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, this is Anny and smithamok of Stuff I Ever
Told You production of iHeartRadio, and today for another sub
sub sub subsegment of fictional women around the world, we
here talking about the iconic professor Valerie Felicity Frizzle, PhD

(00:29):
from The Magic school Bus, more commonly known as Miss
Frizzle or Frizz. I loved The Magic School Bus when
I was a kid. Did you watch it at all?
I remember clips of it. I don't think I fully
watched it. I feel like I was out of that
age range, but I knew who she was for sure.

(00:50):
She was like hugely popular. The show was really really popular.
I read a quote that I think was joking but
maybe semi serious that said it was as cool as
Caprice Son at the time in the nineties. So Miss
Frizzle was a third and fourth grade teacher at Walkerville
Elementary and later became an independent researcher and professor. Her

(01:13):
sister Fiona took over the position. We're going to talk
about that more in a second. The first book, because
the show is based off the book series featuring Miss Frizzle.
The Magic school Bus at the Waterworks, came out in
nineteen eighty six, and then the animated PBS show and
Microsoft game debut in nineteen ninety four. The show was

(01:35):
sponsored in part by the National Science Foundation. It was
one of eight shows I believe that got some of
that funding. It ran until nineteen ninety seven. Lily Tomlin
I didn't know largely provided the voice, and she she
won a Daytime Emmy for it. Okay. There have also

(01:56):
been audiobooks and cassettes, and the theme song was sung
by Little Richard by the I Know, Yes, Yes, they
were really fun. The books were illustrated by Bruce Degan
and written by former grade school teacher Joanna Cole, and
they sold upwards of ninety three million books before her

(02:17):
death in twenty twenty. She wrote the books at the
request of then vice president of Scholastic Craig Walker, who
had heard from teachers wanting more illustrated science books for kids.
And he got this idea for like an illustrated eccentric
field trip type thing, and he approached Cole with it,

(02:39):
and he also had this he wanted it to be
more diverse than a lot of the other stuff that
was being offered at the time. She and Degan found
inspiration in teachers and classmates from their own lives and
put that in there. When the Magic School Bus Books
first came out, one of the things that made them
stand out was their approach to sharing knowledge with kids,

(02:59):
and Foster string a curiosity to learn by combining humor, fantasy,
realistic fiction, and nonfiction because she has a Magic school
Bus but is teaching science. In the beginning, this combination
worried editors who thought that it might be a hard
sell for teachers and librarians unused to this multi cross

(03:21):
genre type of medium. Like at the time, it's a
fantasy book, it's a science book, it's this one thing,
but here comes this series that's all kinds of things.
They're also full of jokes and puns, of illustrations and
speech bubbles. I've never read the books, but they sound
really fun. I'm kind of determined to see if I
can get my hands on one. Yeah, the books tackled

(03:44):
big topics like climate change too, and Cole has an
interesting interview where she says, essentially, I didn't think it
was going to be that controversial, and look here we are,
all these years later, people feel mad about it. Also,
the show wasn't necessarily based completely on the books because
the show sort of outpaced the books, so some of

(04:07):
some of the episodes were based on them and some
of them weren't. The show featured a fun bit after
the episode, but before the credits, where the producer would
answer questions from callers who had they had questions about
the topics covered, and the producer would explain the ways
that they had taken liberties with the science in question,
usually due to time constraints. You know, we only have

(04:29):
this fush time. The producer was voiced by Malcolm Jamal Warner. No, yeah, yep.
And the show boasted massive cameos too, like a huge list.
Some of them that stuck out to me was Dolly
Parton and Tom Cruise as himself. I don't remember the episode, Yeah,

(04:50):
I don't. Okay, interesting, but I'll that to say it
was very popular. This was a popular show, and so
much so. In twenty seventeen, Netflix released the animated follow
up series Magic School Bus Rides Again, which I understand
is pretty divisive. I've found I found myself on a
lot of teachers' blogs where they are arguing back and
forth about it. And as of twenty twenty six, Elizabeth

(05:12):
Banks is still set to play Miss Frizzle and a
live action adaptation. And I say still because I think
it's been delayed for a long time. But she's still
on board. So all of that brings us to Miss Frizzle.
Miss Frizzle is a whimsical, passionate, strange teacher, as she's

(05:32):
often called, who wore subject themed shirt waist stresses that
glowed and changed throughout the lesson. It's iconic. It's so
good that it's so perfect. Yes, you recognize it immediately, immediately,
immediately brings joy to your heart. It's a big it's

(05:53):
a big cosplay at Dragoncommon. The show largely follows her
taking her students on an informal field trip on the
Magic school Bus. Sometimes these field trips go awry, but
she always uses them as learning and teaching experiences, a
curious soul herself, giving space for the students to arrive
at the answers themselves, so she doesn't come in and

(06:15):
explain so much as she's like patient with them and
lets them arrive at the answer. And yeah, she's really kind,
she's very exuberant. Yeah, she's just even thinking back, I'm
like just smiling. Apparently, she's very athletic too, and she
has great lines. Perhaps the most well known one is

(06:39):
take chances, make mistakes, and get messy. According to the show,
she gave up a music career with the Frizzlettes, which
she also toured with singer Molly cle Yes see you
can see ride up your Alley, but she she wanted

(07:00):
to teach instead. Primarily, she focuses on her students, her
lizard Liz, and the Magic school Bus, which itself is
a shape shifting bus that seems to do as it
will sometimes. And yeah, if you haven't seen the show,
it basically follows Miss Frizzle and her students taking your
ride on the Magic school Bus to learn something. I

(07:23):
particularly remember the one about smell. I remember how the
like smell molecules were animated. It's just lives in my
brain forever. It was kind of haunting because it was
a bad smell and it was like really chartouse like
grating color of green like little molecules, and I just

(07:43):
remember it and it got stuck in the nostrils. Yeah, okay,
but they also go into space inside bodies. They go
back in time to the time of the dinosaurs, all
in the name of education and its Frizzle doesn't panic
when things go wrong. She's a source of calm. She's

(08:04):
never worried about seemingly anything she really isn't. Yeah. Yeah,
she was mysterious and fun and the best part of
field trips and classroom experiments. When I think back on
why I loved it so much, that's when you had
a good class with the science experiment. Those were so
fun to me. Those were so exciting. So I think

(08:27):
that that feeling is what the show really encompassed, and
the animation was pretty eye catching for the time as well.
A character like this has quite a legacy for sure,
and some things I wasn't expecting, although I guess I'm
not super surprised. One of them is Miss Frizzle is
viewed as a gay icon. A lot of the internet

(08:49):
and amateur critics view Miss Frizzle as a lesbian. Here's
a quote from auto Straddle about it. While Miss Frizzle's
sexual and romantic leanings aren't revealed in the series, the
woman who played her, Lily Tomlin, has left her own
orientation no mystery. In twenty thirteen, her orientation was publicly
confirmed when it was announced that, at age seventy three,

(09:10):
she would marry her longtime partner, writer Jane Wagner, seventy
seven at the time same year. For decades, Tomlin has
battled the expectations placed upon women by the media and
public alike, famously making Johnny Carson's audience uncomfortable by stating
that she didn't want to have children in nineteen seventy five.
The same year, Time magazine tried to bribe her into
coming out. In their attempt to be the first to

(09:32):
reveal a much roomored part of her they dangled a
juicy carrot in front of her face, her face actually
on the cover of the magazine. I never did not
come out, she told The Washington Post. I wanted to
be acknowledged for my work. I didn't want to be
the gay person who does comedy. So that's very interesting.

(09:52):
I think this is especially since we just did our
episode on like lavender marriages and beards and all that
kind of all those expectations in old Hollywood. Yes, related
fan theory is that she is a sorceress, and there's
I've heard this. I've heard this actually, yes, and it's
related because people have written a lot about it, but

(10:15):
essentially because whiches are often assumed to be lesbians, or
in a lot of media they are. So that's a
popular fan theory that if you want to learn more about,
the Internet has got you covered. Another reason that this
has a lasting legacy is that at the time, oh,
you know, seeing a woman being a science teacher that

(10:36):
wasn't necessarily something people saw very often. And she was
a teacher that was much beloved and was very knowledgeable.
And I think that the magic of teachers, of a
good teacher, a teacher who gives stints room to grow,
that does make a whole world of difference. I think

(10:58):
for a lot of us we can remember the teachers
that stood out and really maybe shifted our lives or
our understanding of things. And there are some really sweet
blogs and essays about how this show and this character
in particular inspired kids to get into science later, something
that they pursued in their adult lives, which really cute.

(11:19):
She was strange, she didn't conform, and she was fun
and her fashion was great. Yes, I'm very glad to
have revisited The Magic School Bus in Miss Ristle brought
back a lot of good memories for me.

Speaker 2 (11:34):
The good old days, the good old days. Yeah, Well, listeners.
If you have any thoughts, if you have read the books,
please let us know.

Speaker 1 (11:45):
You can email us at Hello at stuffhanever told you
dot com. You can find u on Blue Sky at
mom Stuff podcast, or on Instagram and TikTok at stuff
one ever told you. We're also on YouTube. We have
some merchandise at comm Bureau, and we have a book
you can get wherever you get your books. Thanks as
always to our super ducer, Rima and our executive produce
and Maya, thank you and thanks to you for listening.
Stefan never told you this picture of iHeart video. For
more podcasts from my Heart Radio, you can check out

(12:06):
the heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or Rebel listen to
your favorite shows