The series, featuring the eccentric teacher Ms. Frizzle, continues to have a huge following. The TV-cartoon spinoff, for 4- to 7-year-olds, launched on PBS in 1994 and has become the longest-running children’s TV science show ever. The series’ Web site is Scho-lastic’s most heavily trafficked site after Harry Potter; it gets 3 million visitors per month. Scholastic has sold 58 million copies of “Magic School Bus” books and 12 million related videos, DVDs and CD-ROMs over the last 20 years.
Though there have been many spinoffs of the original 10-book series (there are 131 “Magic School Bus”-related books in all), this new title will be the first continuation of the original series since 1999. And there may be even more. “Why should we stop?” says illustrator Bruce Degan. Writer Joanna Cole agrees: “As long as people want them, we’ll keep doing them.”
