System Never Fails Stone

The Magic School Bus is a series of children's books about science. They feature the antics of Ms. Frizzle, an elementary school teacher, and her class of eight children (in the original books, the class population was at a larger and more standard amount), who board a magical school bus which takes them on field trips into the solar system, under the Bed, into the American Flag, or to other such impossible locations. The books are written in the first person from the point of view of an unnamed student in "the Friz's" class. The class pet, Liz, an anthropomorphic lizard, accompanied the class on their field trips.
Since the Magic School Bus books present scientific facts in the form of stories in which fantastic things happen (for example, a bus turns into a spaceship, or children shrink to the size of blood cells), each book has a page at the end detailing in a humorous manner which parts of the book represented scientific fact and which were fanciful storytelling. In the books' television adaptation, this was replaced by the Producer Says segment at the end of each episode, in which the producer of the show (voiced by Malcolm-Jamal Warner of The Cosby Show fame) receives phone calls from kids complaining about how some things that happened on the show couldn't happen in real life. This allows the show to explain the specific facts in question and why they had to be disregarded to a degree because of the need for dramatic license.

The empathetic, hard-hitting tales told in Die Verrufenene (Der fünfte Stand) (a.k.a. The Slums of Berlin) and Die Unehelichen (a.k.a. Children of No Importance) deal with Germany's disenfranchised in a realistic, gritty manner while still adhering to the melodramatic conventions of the day. Although Lamprect enjoyed a long and varied career behind the camera, he was most active as a passionate movie collector and champion of film preservation. The liner notes accompanying this set make it clear that it's hard to apply the auteur theory to someone like Lamprecht, but these particular films demonstrate handily that the director had a keen interest in the medium. As message pictures, they tend towards the preachy and sentimental, and yet there's also a "try something and see if it works" mentality at play here that makes them of great interest to silent fans.