Film Theory: The DEADLIEST Magic School Bus Field Trip!

[Miss Frizzle]: All right children, who's  

ready to go on a field trip to see the stars? [Arnold]: You mean somewhere like a planetarium or  

a museum? Please let this be a normal field trip. [Keesha]: Psshhh, As if! You know  

that's not how the Frizz rolls. [Dan]: Ah, has anyone seen Matt? 

[Miss Frizzle]: We're going to blast  off towards the heavens for science. 

[Dan]: Miss Frizzle? [Miss Frizzle]: Blasting off in 3.

[Dan]: Miss Frizzle? [Miss Frizzle]: two, 

[Dan]: We're missing Matt! [Miss Frizzle]: one. Blastoff!

Hello Internet. Welcome to Film Theory, where  it's time for a pop quiz. Question one: Do you  

recognize this voice? It's me, Head Editor Dan.  Hi, Hello. Matt lost his voice at VidCon so you  

got me. Question two: Are you subscribed? Are you?  Are you sure? You should probably go double check.

Unknown Good! A+ for you, loyal theorist. Now,  

it probably wouldn't come as any surprise to  you that I liked me some science class in grade  

school. Why else would I edit for these channels?  Fun fact. In the third grade I was so into science  

that they let me go to Challenge, which is  where we just basically made slime for an hour.

Now, if only I had the foresight  to make a YouTube channel. Imagine  

the amount of money I could have made. But anyway,  

you knew a day in science class was going to  be extra special when the teacher wheeled in  

that ginormous CRT TV and popped in a VHS tape  packed with some classic good old edutainment.

*whispers* Yes. Thank you. I'm totally aware  that I just aged myself by mentioning VHS. I'm  

an Internet boomer and I'm DEALING WITH  IT! But something nerds of the nineties,  

aughts and 20-teens can all agree on though,  The Magic School Bus was frickin awesome.  

Miss Frizzle was the embodiment of the perfect  teacher, engaging her class with legitimately  

interesting topics and taking our students on  wacky field trips to give some real hands-on  

learning. Whether it was traveling through  time to visit the age of the dinosaurs,  

or that one time when they traveled inside one  of the students, Arnold, to study the human body,  

or when the whole class got turned into bees. Not the Bees!

Yeah. Okay sometimes those trips were a bit,  um… Well, how do we put this? Mildly dangerous  

and life threatening? But also theorizable? Oh,  definitely. But Matt insisted that he wasn't  

going to ruin his own childhood. That lasted the  whole day before he came in and said, quote, okay,  

fine, let's just ruin everything. So we dusted off  our VCRs, kicked back on the couch. Then Creative  

Director Lee pointed out that we can't watch the  VCR on the modern TV, so we just streamed it.

And from the first episode of The Magic School  Bus, “Gets Lost In Space”. Our theorists'  

sensibilities got the best of us. In this episode,  a mundane trip to the planetarium is scrapped due  

to Miss Frizzle not calling ahead to see if it was  open. She then decides to do the next best thing  

and kidnaps, I mean, escorts the children to the  cosmos and takes a tour around the solar system.

They visit the sun, some of the planets. And the  trip culminates with the gang landing on Pluto,  

which was the ninth and final planet  when the show aired. And as much as it  

hurts that this guy got demoted to a dwarf planet…

It was totally justified. There are five  confirmed dwarf planets in our system,  

and if Pluto's a planet,  they all are. RIP-a-ronis.

Anyway, near the very end of the very first  episode, as the class are exploring the  

surface of the Gimli-sized Pluto, one of the  kids Arnold has had enough. In a fit of rage  

he rips off his space helmet and instantly  freezes. I mean, 1 second and boom. He looks  

like one of those janky Sonic the Hedgehog ice  cream pops you get from an ice cream truck.

Now, hold up, hold up, hold up. I know  I'm trying to enjoy this as some fun romp  

through some Clinton era edutainment, but that  can't be possible, right? I know space is cold,  

but you can't just go from annoying  Arnold to X-Men Iceman in an instant,  

can you? So, like the very normal  human being Matt is, he dove into  

the scientific realism of this nineties  cartoon with a magical type A school bus.

Just a very normal thing to do because while  looking into the truth behind the science here,  

Matt fell into a rabbit hole bigger  than our own solar system. You see,  

loyal theorists. Miss Frizzle's antics would  have gotten the whole class killed many times  

over before they reached the edge of the solar  system, dooming not only Arnold but all of the  

kids in the classroom to painful deaths  worse than what we could have imagined.

Buckle up, friends. This one's going  to be a wild ride. So to explain,  

I guess we should start with the final scene and  move backwards from there. As I just explained,  

after ripping off his helmet, Arnold transforms  into Frosty the Snowman pretty much instantly. So  

would that really happen? Well, at first glance,  it's not as ridiculous as you might think.

See, deep space is cold. Like,  stupid cold. According to NASA,  

the surface temperature of Pluto reaches a  frostbite inducing -400 degrees Fahrenheit.  

That's -240 degrees Celsius. Just  to give you a comparison here,  

the coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth was  in Antarctica at -89.2 degrees Celsius or -128.6  

Fahrenheit. So when Arnold takes  off his helmet, he's a goner, right?

Well, not necessarily. And to understand why, we  need to discuss what temperature is at an atomic  

level. When we talk about the temperature of  something, whether it's the frigid vacuum of  

space or that scalding cup of coffee you spilled  in your lap, what we are actually talking about  

is how much the molecules in said empty space or  boiling seed soup are bouncing into each other.

When two molecules collide, they release  a small amount of energy in the form of  

heat. The more collisions, the more heat is  released and the higher the temperature of  

something is. When something hot makes  contact with something cold. Like say,  

I don't know, the face of a redheaded fourth  grader being exposed to the bleak void of  

space. That energy transfers from the hot  thing to the cold thing until it evens out.

Fun fact, there is a limit to how cold something  can be. This is known as absolute zero,  

which is the point where the molecules don't  move at all and thus don't release any heat.  

And when you look at that number, which is  -273.15 Celsius or -459.67 Fahrenheit or zero  

Kelvin for you nerds out there. It's pretty  close to that surface temperature of Pluto.

However, despite the nearly 500 degree difference  between the average human temperature of 37  

degrees Celsius or 98.6 Fahrenheit. It's not  like all of Arnold's heat is going to rush  

out at once. It would take somewhere between 12 to  26 hours for a human to freeze solid out in space.  

And given that only Arnold's head is directly  exposed, that would likely take much longer.

And thankfully, the kids think quickly and get  Arnold back on the school bus in a matter of  

seconds. So while it wouldn't be comfortable,  Arnold wouldn't be becoming an ice sculpture as  

quickly as we see in the cartoon. And speaking of,  where is the world's best teacher, Miss Frizzle?  

Well, she's standing by as her students are being  the responsible ones in saving their friend.

Her principal is probably going to have to have  a word with her when they get back to Earth. Now,  

while Arnold might survive his brief  encounter with the chill of Pluto,  

this little maneuver still would have  killed him. Just not for the reasons  

you might expect. As soon as Arnold takes  off the helmet, the pressure of the oxygen  

inside his lungs would be released into  space like a shaken up can of Diet Coke.

We briefly touched on this in our episode about  Portal 2's brief pitstop on the moon over on our  

sister location Game Theory, but it's worth  reiterating here. A Dan Seibert survival tip:  

If you’re ever stupid enough to  remove your helmet off in space,  

don't hold your breath. Why? Because, as  I just said, in a vacuum, all the oxygen  

in your lungs immediately wants to  expand and rush out into the void.

And if you hold your breath, then there's nowhere  for that oxygen to go except tearing through  

your lungs. I don't know about you, but if my  choices are gasping for air or ruptured lungs,  

I'm going to pick the option that doesn't  cause one of my major organs to, you know,  

literally explode. It doesn't look like Arnold  makes a point to empty his lungs in this scene.

So while the cold might not have killed him, the  ruptured lungs might have, just might have. But  

even if he did breathe out before taking off his  helmet, the whole no oxygen thing is obviously  

going to be bad news for Arnold. Without  oxygen flowing through your bloodstream,  

your organs and especially your brain would  begin to shut down after about 3 minutes.

But that's three whole minutes to get somewhere  where you can breathe again. The quick thinking  

from the other kids likely did save Arnold's  life here, making most of this memorable scene  

something entirely survivable. But, well,  as I alluded to at the top of this episode,  

Arnold, and the rest of the class  wouldn't have ever made it to Pluto.

Just before the gang reaches Pluto, they  take a jaunt around the outermost planets  

in the solar system, known collectively as  the gas giants. They pass by this planet,  

I'll let you decide if you want  to giggle at Ur-anus or Urin-us,  

as well as Neptune, and observe the  rings of Saturn without much fanfare.

Also worth noting that the children are driving  the bus at this point because Miss Frizzle has  

gone M.I.A. And has turned finding her  within the depths of space into a game.

You know, the more I talk about this,  

the more I’m like, Miss Frizzle was  really irresponsible, wasn't she?

Yeah. It's going to take more than a trip  to the guidance counselors office to work  

through this trauma. Anyway, the gas giant  they actually spend time at is Jupiter,  

the largest planet in our solar system. And  what do they do? They fly right into the  

great red spot. Now, if you've seen a picture  of Jupiter, you probably recognize this thing.

It's one of the planet's most iconic features.  But what you might not know that it's not just a  

cool aesthetic feature or a beauty mark. It's a  massive hurricane-like storm that's been raging  

since at least the 1830s. And what's more, as  of April 3rd, 2017, the storm is approximately  

16,350 kilometers in width, 10,160 miles,  meaning that Jupiter's great red spot is wider  

than the entire earth. And size isn't the only  frightening factor the storm has going for it.

Its speed is also insane. The fastest wind  speed ever recorded on Earth was a blistering  

231 miles per hour, or about 372 kilometers  per hour, recorded on Mount Washington in New  

Hampshire in 1934. But wind speeds in the great  red spot can reach upwards to 400 miles per hour,  

or about 644 kilometers per hour,  just under double the speeds on earth.

Now flying into the dense atmosphere of Jupiter  with speeds that fast would easily tear a typical  

school bus to shreds. But this is a magic school  bus, after all, so I'll leave that be. But magic  

wouldn't protect the kids from letting the storm  in to the bus. In order to collect proof of their  

visit the kids open a spigot that allows the  gasses of the red spot to pour into the bus.

Now, with those 400 miles per hour speeds,  this would be like opening a window on the  

fastest train. But that is nothing compared  to the sheer weight of the atmosphere that  

would begin pouring into the bus at that  incredible speed. Remember earlier when  

we talked about all of the air wanting to get  out of Arnold's lungs in the vacuum on Pluto?

That happens because of air pressure,  basically. How much the air inside of  

something pushes up against the walls  of its container. Since there isn't a  

ton of gas in Pluto's atmosphere, the air  pressure would be higher in Arnold's lungs  

than on Pluto. But on Jupiter? you have  the opposite problem. The air pressure  

on the quote unquote surface of Jupiter  is roughly 5 to 10 times that of Earth.

Or say, the interior of a magic school bus meant  to keep earthlings comfortable. The long and short  

of it is Jovian gas wouldn't just trickle in with  the spigot, it would instantly flood the interior  

of the bus. And that could cause some serious  complications, depending on what it's made of.  

Despite decades of study, scientists aren't  100% sure what the big red spot is made of.

Some theories suggest it's ammonia reacting  to acetylene, both of which would burn  

the inside of your lungs and throw it on  contact. Others suggest that the red spot,  

like the rest of Jupiter, is composed  of hydrogen and helium. Either way,  

this would be awful news for the children  who would likely be thrown around by the  

400 miles per hour wind spewing toxic or  unbreathable gasses into the bus's cabin.

And frighteningly, this would likely  be the least painful cause of death  

for these kids on this field trip from  hell before suffocating on Jupiter.  

The class dodges some asteroids in the asteroid  belt and makes a quick pit stop to Mars. Now,  

without a magnetic field and  a painfully thin atmosphere,  

a prolonged stay on the Martian surface  could be dangerous due to radiation exposure.

But that's nothing compared to the dangers  of the class landing on Venus. Let's just  

say things wouldn't be looking so hot for  Miss Frizzle class after this. Actually,  

scratch that. Things would be looking very  hot. See, despite being further from the  

sun than Mercury, Venus is actually the  hottest planet in the solar system. With  

its average surface temperatures racing 850  degrees Fahrenheit or 454 degrees Celsius.

That's ten times hotter than a painfully warm  85 degree day here on Earth. Why is it like  

this? Well, 96.5% of the Venetian atmosphere  is made of carbon dioxide. And if you know  

anything about CO2 here on Earth, you'll know  that it's a greenhouse gas that means it likes  

to absorb the heat coming from the sun. Earth's  atmosphere is approximately 0.04% carbon dioxide.

So that 96.5% figure, that's insane. And  it's basically turned Venus's atmosphere  

into a giant blanket that's holding in all  of the heat it absorbs over a few million  

or billion years. It's so hot that even metals  like lead start to melt at those temperatures.  

The longest a space probe has ever landed on  the surface of Venus is just over 2 hours.

If something the smartest scientists on the  planet literally built and designed to work  

on Venus couldn't even outlast the runtime  of an Avatar movie. This would mean that  

Miss Frizzle's class would be dismissed  pretty much the moment they step out onto  

the surface. And even if they somehow survived  this hellscape of heat, they'd rather be dead  

the next time it rained because, what  were those clouds made of Miss Frizzle?

Speaking of utterly painful death. Man, what a  transition. You pretty much encounter all of the  

same issues on the bright side of Mercury, which  can reach temperatures of roughly 800 degrees  

Fahrenheit or 427 degrees Celsius. But that. That  would be nothing compared to what comes next,  

since Miss Frizzle decides to start this field  trip of death and destruction by visiting the sun.  

You know how you're told constantly to not look  at the sun without some serious eye protection?

That's because even here on Earth, 92 million  miles away from the sun and with a thick  

atmosphere protecting us from the worst of  it. The star our planet orbits outputs so  

much light and energy that it can permanently  damage your retinas in under 2 minutes. Now  

imagine driving directly up to the sun,  getting closer than any manmade object.

To be fair to Miss Frizzle, she does  realize this and has the class wear...

But your eyes aren't what you should be  worrying about here. It's a bit difficult  

to tell exactly how close the class gets, but  we do see the bus flying close to a plume of  

plasma that blasts off the solar surface.  These are known as coronal mass ejections,  

which can sometimes stretch as far as a  million miles away from the sun's surface,  

which means that at best, the bus just traveled  within a million miles of our local star.

That might sound like it's far, but  in terms of astronomical distances,  

it isn't. The sun is big, loyal theorists. I'm  sure you knew that. And getting that close would  

be devastating. The Parker Solar probe,  which is on its way to the sun right now,  

will be the closest manmade object ever to  go near the sun. It was specifically designed  

to get close to our star, but at its closest  it will still be about 4 million miles away.

At about 3 million miles away the temperatures of  just being near the sun will already be enough to  

cause those NASA's space suits to fail. Basically,  if you were really going to get close to the sun,  

it would look less like a fun edutainment cartoon  and more like the sci fi horror movie Sunshine.  

So every step of the way, every planet these  kids stomped on would have been a death trap  

for them. Except the one that created such a  terrifyingly memorable moment, ironically enough.

But here's the thing, loyal theorists. It's not  just the planets that would have hurt these kids.  

Miss Frizzle doomed these children to a long,  agonizing, painful death before they even set  

foot on another planetary body or flew too close  to the sun. And it all comes down to one thing:  

radiation. See, there's a lot of  radiation in space, and I mean a lot.

But there are special kinds that you  should be extra concerned with if you  

ever find yourself in space. The first is solar  radiation. While we're on earth, we don't have  

to worry about this stuff. As I mentioned  earlier when we briefly talked about Mars,  

an atmosphere or electromagnetic field protects  us from most of this stuff, and even the things  

that get through, the ultraviolet light, can be  negated by slathering on a layer of sunscreen.

But in space? There's nothing to block the  dangerous solar particle events, galactic  

cosmic rays, ionizing radiation like X-rays or  gamma rays that the sun emits. And no, I don't  

mean the sort of gamma radiation that turns you  into the Fantastic Four or the Incredible Hulk.  

The stuff is much less cool, damaging your DNA in  ways that give you cancer instead of superpowers.

NASA specifically builds their spaceships, space  stations and space suits to shield the astronauts  

from this sort of radiation. That's partially why  the suits are so bulky and why they have those  

cool golden visors. Details that the Magic School  Bus space suits don't have. And as a result,  

these particles would be cutting through kids  like a radioactive knife through children's  

shaped butter, likely making the kids very,  very sick just by exiting Earth's atmosphere.

In the end, every decision Miss Frizzle  made along this field trip from allowing  

the kids to collect Jovian gas to stop  by on the surface of Venus and Mercury,  

to flying by the sun and even just exiting  the Earth's atmosphere without the proper  

precautions would have led to the deaths  of these children multiple times over. She  

exposed them to lethal doses of radiation,  subjected them to inhumane temperatures,  

and left them to get crushed and suffocated  in a hurricane literally bigger than Earth.

While I love learning and passing on knowledge,  

doing so in this way was irresponsible.  These kids should have been scared far  

sooner than when Arnold took off his helmet.  The one thing in this trip that ironically,  

they would have survived with minimal injuries.  All in all, Miss Frizzle gets an F for fired.

And yet, despite all of this  information Matt is having me read,  

I would want nothing more than to go on  this field trip. I want to go to space!  

But hey! That's just a theory.  A FILM THEORY! aaaaaaaaaand cut. 

Man kids programs could sometimes be scary. And,  hey, we got some more videos just like that.  

You can go ahead and click this one about Paw  Patrol and how well that one's a little spooky.

And then, oh, what's this? This is a Bluey  episode. It's about why it's kind of spooky,  

despite how much I love this show. Anyway, I…  Um.. Yosi, play me out!