The Lion and the Unicorn

"Seatbelts, everyone!"

With that phrase, Ms. Frizzle ushered generations of children into a fantastical science education, on page and screen. The Magic School Bus (MSB), originally authored by Joanna Cole¹ and illustrated by Bruce Degen beginning in 1986, adapted for television by PBS from 1994–98, and, most recently, rebooted by Netflix starting in 2017 as The Magic School Bus Rides Again, has reached millions of children around the globe. MSB follows Ms. Frizzle's third-grade class as they experience hands-on science lessons via a magic school bus that can transport the class anywhere and transform itself, and the students, into anything. The books and series were, and are, so popular that "[f]or kids growing up early in the new millennium, The Magic School Bus was unavoidable" ("Lasting Impact"). Even with this popularity, scholars have not yet explored any of MSB's iterations. MSB is interesting for many reasons, from its popularity, to its combination of education and humor, to its inclusion of characters of color. MSB's racially diverse cast seems a direct response to society's call for more representations of race in children's literature and culture. Scholars such as Michelle Martin, Rudine Sims Bishop, Ebony Thomas, Debbie Reese, Laura Jimenez, Cristina Rodes, Philip Nel, and Katharine Capshaw; authors Walter Dean and Christopher Myers and Nnedi Okorafor; as well as everyone working in and around We Need Diverse Books, #OwnVoices, and the Diversity Jedi have all written about the importance and difficulty of racial representation in media for children.

This article places MSB within these robust conversations by examining how the MSB book series and its two adaptations depict racial diversity. For the purposes of this article, I use Howard Winant's 2004 definition of [End Page 274] race: "Race is a concept that signifies and symbolizes sociopolitical conflicts and interests in reference to different types of human bodies" (x, emphasis in original). Because both picture books and animation rely on the visual depiction of its characters, their representation of race exists at this intersection of sociopolitical difference and the human body, which these media often blend together through the use of their form: Gretchen Papazian argues that "picturebooks are using the literal colorfulness of the format to take on the 'problem of color'—that is, the idea of race—in America" (170). Analysis of racial diversity for these media can thus focus on the thematic and cultural trends surrounding characters of color and the visual codes used to design such characters.

Tracing how three versions of MSB have approached this connection between race and character design reveals that Cole's and Degen's original books engage in a multicultural project that is situated firmly in Whiteness, simultaneously normalizing people of color in STEM fields and erasing difference. Although the PBS series attempts to individualize diversity by more clearly developing characters of color and resisting stereotypes, it is still mired by Whiteness. Finally, the Netflix series marries these two projects, furthering the project of individualization and specifying race as in the PBS series but also nearly eradicating visual diversity as in the books. Consequently, the newest adaptation falls into the same problems as the original book series because Whiteness so thoroughly saturates the creation and framing of all three of MSB's iterations, revealing how certain patently problematic depictions of race are changed during the reboot process even while others remain because they nod toward diversity while still serving the Whiteness still so prevalent in mainstream media.

Like most texts, the MSB books were products of their time, and, unlike many, included a racially diverse class of students. Cole's and Degen's books originally had a 10:7 ratio of White children to children of color that then went to 10:9 when some of the PBS characters, such as Keesha Franklin, were added to the later books.² The students of color included Black, Asian, and Latinx students, as well as students whose race was unclear but non-White. The ratio of White to children of...