To me, there has always been a firm difference between a work of children’s media, and a family-friendly, universal work…
About a week ago, I took a dip back into an interest of mine that I’ve had since childhood, and that was the LEGO toyline BIONICLE. As an ardent defender of the often-stigmatized animated medium, I often found myself wondering why I still liked this LEGO line of toys meant for boys aged 8 to roughly 16. I swear off nostalgia quite a bit, and I try not to use it to justify my praise for something. To me, having a personal love for something and praising something for its qualities are quite different. I can love the taste of fast food while knowing that it’s unhealthy and likely disgusting in some way or another, doesn’t mean I’m going to praise it as a good food. Anyways, BIONICLE in general holds up for me as a 27-and-three-quarters-year old man because of its rich lore and just how much thought its creators put into its storyline. The immersive and beautifully-realized settings, the utter coolness of the robots, the use of elements and the worldbuilding… To this day, I think it’s of quality and is worth a look if you’re into these kinds of stories. I didn’t grow up with similar stories, and I can get into those anyhow without ANY nostalgic connection with said things… What I also took a look at was a series of three direct-to-video movies that came out when BIONICLE was at its peak, and how those didn’t quite hold up the way the toyline and lore itself did…
Those movies, I felt, were definitely more for a particular target demographic than the toyline itself was. Like, strictly for that demographic. So it begs the question… Can a work of children’s media… As in, media meant strictly for children, be worthy to the adult viewer?
To me, the best children’s media somehow, some way appeals to an adult viewer, mostly because of its substance and execution of the material. This, to me, mostly applies to filmed media and literature.
So, as a child, Disney was always a “special interest” of mine and it’s one that I continue to have. The seasoned Disney lover/historian/what-have-you already knows that the majority of Walt Disney’s work was never intended for one particular age group or type of person. Walt Disney was a filmmaker, an ambitious man who saw more to the animated medium than audiences and maybe even studio heads themselves saw, and as such took animation to staggering heights. While Walt’s work softened a bit after World War II came to close, throughout the majority of his career, Walt was not a children’s filmmaker. The sheer quality and respect for the adult viewer present in the classic Disney animated films, shorts, live-action features, and the parks – and the posthumous works that honor that spirit – are why I still regularly enjoy and remain passionate about Disney.
Disney remains a special interest of mine, a universal special interest that can appeal to just about anybody. BIONICLE might be a little more narrow in that regard, but you could also say the same about LEGO itself. It appeals to me, as an adult, because I really like the lore, the characters, and the world its makers set up.
So, what is another special interest of mine nowadays that I most definitely had as a young child?
A children’s series…
Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends…
While we may know Thomas & Friends today as a harmless, candy-coated, sometimes over-the-top show about happy anthropomorphic trains, its origins have always been far more fascinating.
I grew up on Thomas & Friends, back when it was known by its much-longer and formal title, Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends. The TV series adaptation of Rev. W. Awdry’s The Railway Series, spearheaded by one Britt Allcroft, first aired in 1984. Allcroft had secured the financing to do a TV show, after multiple failed attempts from other people, most famously a botched live BBC program in the mid 1950s and one Andrew Lloyd Webber’s attempt to adapt the series during the 1970s. (Yes, Andrew Lloyd Webber.) Two seasons in, Allcroft repackaged the show for American consumption, for an audience that had no idea who the long-famous tank engine was. The American iteration of the show housed one or two 4-minute Thomas stories within a longer half-hour program, a live-action show of some kids visiting a train station called Shining Time. The show was called, appropriately, Shining Time Station, and narrator Ringo Starr (later George Carlin) would appear as a miniature man named Mr. Conductor. Mr. Conductor told the Thomas stories to the kids, which would always relate to the shenanigans going on at the titular station.
As a young child, I of course caught Shining Time Station, and my earliest memories of the show are me watching it with my late grandfather on my father’s side. I used to draw detailed steam locomotives and trains with him at such an early age, and I would like to think that those early times with him were what helped birth my lifelong love of drawing and making art. I’ll always remember what I thought when I first saw the Thomas segments at that age… “The trains have faces… And no cowcatchers.” I had an ERTL die-cast toy of Edward the Blue Engine, and two black mid-size passenger coaches. Then… It somehow disappeared from my life, I guess at age 2-3, I guess I just couldn’t get into a show about trains with no cowcatchers and near-lifeless faces.
When I was 5 1/2 years old, my late grandmother – on my mother’s side – got a VHS volume of episodes from my aunt. (It was just the episodes themselves, nothing of Shining Time Station) From what I remember, my aunt’s granddaughter couldn’t get into the tape’s contents, so perhaps she thought, “Maybe Kyle might like it.” So that day, my grandmother asked me about it. This had to have been on a summer day, because her house was largely where I went when my mother was at work. I remembered “Thomas the train” from a few years back and enjoying it enough, and figured, “Yeah, I’ll watch it, why not?” We put in the tape, my grandmother and I watched it in the house’s den. So much of my childhood was spent in that room, in that house… The tape contained a few stories, in chronological order, from Series One. Episodes created and aired in 1984. Thomas & Friends was on its fifth season in the UK by 1998. Ringo Starr was the narrator of the episodes on this tape. I learned that someone from this group I liked called The Beatles was narrating this videotape about talking steam locomotives that I… Also happened to really like!
From there on out, I was ALL. ABOUT. THOMAS.
Oh yes, and before you ask, The Beatles are also a special interest of mine.
I perhaps really lived up to that common autistic boy stereotype about being addicted to the world of Thomas the Tank Engine. Many have tried to crack the nut on what it is about Thomas & Friends that specifically appeals to an autistic boy. Well, I am an autistic man… Who was once an autistic boy… Maybe I can tell you. I can’t speak for current autistic boys, who are likely watching the current iteration of the show, which is all in CGI and it is also probably a lot different from what I grew up on in other ways. (I’m aware that the adult Thomas fanbase has actually given the CGI-era seasons a fair shake. I know little to nothing about anything beyond the first five or so seasons of the show.)
As a child, I had various sensory issues. For example, I’d be an utter baby if someone in a movie or a commercial shouted. I hated that. Turn it off! Actually, I’ll give you a very specific example of this.
In 1995, Florida’s tourism division created a 30-second TV commercial that I used to **dread**… And why’s that? Well, watch…
You’re probably laughing right now… You’re probably thinking, “Wait? THAT scared you as a child?”
To 3-year-old me in 1995, this was like those K-Fee commercials. You know, the German energy drink commercials from the early aughts that later became that “scary car video” meme years and years ago? Prolonged focus on a serene and peaceful setting, and then an abrupt scream that comes right out of nowhere. I never liked this “honey, pinch me” ad as a child, or other ads like it, or movies where someone would just shout for no reason or when something loud would just abruptly happen. Did. Not. Like. That.
Even a harmless commercial could reduce me to being frightened or unnerved, or a mere book illustration that I just did not like the look of. Generally loud and confusing things didn’t do it for me back then, either, and let me tell you… The ’90s was all about loud, noisy, flashy things. That was the decade’s whole aesthetic… Ironically, that kind of stuff that bugged me as a kid? I like and appreciate it now, I like good jump scares, I don’t mind when someone shouts in a movie, I crank my loud-ass rock songs up when I’m in the mood… These were sensory-related issues I had when I was really young.
Thomas & Friends was one of the rare shows that I could watch back then without getting a shock from it. The episodes of the first four series were generally quiet, and the show utilized a unique form of visual storytelling you didn’t quite see elsewhere. Dubbed “live-action animation” by its filmmakers, Thomas & Friends for so many years utilized real-life model trains. The engines were remote controlled, emitted steam, and their eyes were the only components that moved. Everything else was completely static. Wooden models of people were… Well… The humans. Same with animals. The faces on the engines were static, and as such, there would be roughly 8-10 different face molds made for each engine to convey an easily-identifiable mood. It is a method of visual storytelling that understandably didn’t sit well with everybody, there are a good many people out there who found the show unsettling or even creepy because of this…
A Series 3 behind-the-scenes still.
Accompanying these largely-static visuals, not to mention the gorgeous and carefully-crafted sets, was a delightful score by Junior Campbell (singer-songwriter best known for his stint in the Scottish rock group The Marmalade) and Mike O’Donnell. Starr, and future narrators, always told the stories with a calmness. No real shouty stuff, no chaos. It’s basically like watching soothing videos of someone’s elaborate model railway, with some narration going on. In other words, it was PERFECT for me back then, and as I continued to love the series, I really came to enjoy it for the variety of characters and just how nice everything looked. It was a big model train set that I wished I could’ve had in my basement! As you can imagine, I had a ton of Thomas toys and train sets, a ton of VHS volumes of the show, and plenty more. A comfort series, if you will. You can only imagine how hyped I was – at age 7 – when I had found out that the characters were getting a theatrical feature-length film, too…
I didn’t, however, keep Thomas with me for a while. While I carried Disney and BIONICLE with me into the next stages of my life, Thomas and his locomotive friends remained at the station. When I was around ten or so, I had finally sort of “moved on” from it. Deep down, though, I knew something was still there that I was still fond of. I didn’t give it much thought…
In my junior year of high school, my grandfather – on my mother’s side – passed away. Same side as my grandmother who had re-introduced me to the series at age 5. I was now without both of my biological grandfathers. The one on my father’s side who had the show on for me when I was 2-3, who drew detailed trains with me in the indoor porch… And now the one who I was also very close with, watched movies with, and did several other activities with. His passing was prolonged and lead to some family drama, and I actually “retreated” to something like Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends. I had to scratch this itch anyways, and see if this show really held up or not.
I realized that it not only held up, but the books? The books that this show was based on? The very book series that began in 1945?
My goodness… The books are wonderful!
I have no nostalgia for or previous connection whatsoever with the original book series, The Railway Series, by Reverend Wilbert Awdry. As a kid, I watched the television series and played with the toys. The only Thomas books I ever read were ones based on the show itself or were newly-written in the late ’90s and early ’00s.
Everything all made sense when I took a gander at the original run of books that were published from 1945 to 1972, and the subsequent volumes written by Awdry’s son Christopher from the 1980s and onward. I’ll tell you why…
Reverend W. Awdry was through-and-through a railway enthusiast. He grew up with railways, he loved them. The first book in his series, The Three Railway Engines, was composed of talking locomotive bedtime stories he told his son, when he was sick with measles during World War II. Awdry wanted accuracy for his stories. Many of them were based on a real-life events and incidents on the British Railway and other European railways, but he wisely set them on a fictional island called Sodor, run by a man known as the Fat Controller – who was initially a hearty poke at railway bureaucrats who never followed through on their directives. Awdry created a believable setting for his anthropomorphic vehicles, with a unique kind of worldbuilding that was all his own. Stories often went into the next, making for overarching volumes with solid continuity. The stories were told with simple and universal morals, really. Nowadays, a lot of people get quite high on interpreting this world – in all its iterations – as some totalitarian hellscape for trains. While some engines got some rather strict and rather surprising punishments for their misbehavior in the books and the earliest seasons of the TV show (which mostly followed these books faithfully), the world of Thomas and his friends is far more utopian than these misguided, reaching people make it out to be. These pundits are, to me, every bit as misguided as someone who calls all the Disney heroines damsels in distress who all sat around like stooges waiting for men to rescue them. I guess everything has its generalizing detractors, huh? Excuse me while I go on an unrelated tangent about how The Beatles were *not* a boy band and how Brian Wilson didn’t “quit” The Beach Boys after SMiLE fell apart…
Awdry’s stories then really grew as time went on. In the 1950s, the British Railway enacted a modernization plan that resulted in steam locomotives being decommissioned, or even worse, destroyed. Awdry then began writing stories about diesel locomotives who came to the Island of Sodor; engines who either bullied the steamers, or didn’t do a job properly whilst acting all high and mighty. Awdry also went as far as telling stories about how steam engines dealt with the concept of being “scrapped”. In the 1960 volume The Twin Engines, Scottish engines Donald and Douglas flee from their region. While the Fat Controller ordered one engine from Scotland, the other stowed away so as not to be broken apart. The whole book is about the mischievous twins’ attempts at staying, fooling the controller and the staff… When all blows up, there’s a palpable anxiety present: Twin Douglas is horrified at the prospect of being sent back to Scotland, and possibly being destroyed by whoever is running things on his former railway.
This is explored even further in the 1963 book, Stepney the “Bluebell” Engine. One of the illustrations within depicts two engines about to be cut up by a blow-torch, wielded by some man who clearly does not care about what he’s about to do to two talking ste- This is very harsh stuff for children’s literature that’s ostensibly about happy talking trains! The same writers that call Thomas’ world a totalitarian nightmare also go after this element of the books and the TV series. Apparently Awdry hated modernity and wanted to hammer the idea into kids that you should never accept anything that is new… Except, there *were* friendly diesels – including diesels that stopped acting like jerks – in this book series. There were steam engines whom said mean things about diesels, and later took such words back. (The character Duncan in particular insults a diesel named Rusty, and after Rusty helps him get out of a wreck, Duncan befriends him.) Awdry himself even noted that he wasn’t attacking modernization or even the British Railway, whom actually did a decent job at preserving several steam engines, Awdry’s theme was more about preservation than it was about rejecting modern advances. Awdry’s stories, more than anything, warn children about destroying the past and traditions in favor of the new. His books wisely refer to the nearby world outside of Sodor as “the Other Railway”. A name like “the Other Railway” gives the rest of the world a mystique of sorts, an almost ominous vibe, and it doesn’t put the blame on any particular national railway for destroyed engines. Sodor, being an island, functions as a safe haven of sorts. Anywhere else in the world, be it England, Scotland, Wales, wherever… It’s not as clear-cut.
This whole scrap arc reached its conclusion with Enterprising Engines in 1968, which was published the same year the British Railway officially abolished the use of steam locomotives. That book hit familiar beats, such as visiting diesels (one a bully, one a friend), and also directly addressed the BR’s decision, and culminated with Douglas bravely rescuing an engine who is to be scrapped on the Other Railway. Afterwards, the stories got lighter once more and focused on the core appealing elements that made the series take off two decades earlier. For me, the stretch of books from 1945 to 1957 are all charming and boast gorgeous illustrations, and can be occasionally heartfelt. Multiple people had hired by Awdry to render his railway stories, and each artist left their own distinctive stamp, and I could go on about those… The run of books from 1958 to 1968, I feel, is when Awdry hit his peak. From the preservation themes to the use of humor to the quality storytelling, Awdry could’ve ended the series at Enterprising Engines with a bang. However, the final run of books were good in their own right, and Awdry then wrapped up writing these stories in 1972, with his son taking up the mantle in 1983, right around the time the television series adaptation was going into pre-production. So the question is… If the books are compelling to this 27-year-old, then how does the TV adaptation hold up?
Series One and Two adapted the books very, very closely, and for the most part, they went in chronological order as well. I can still marvel at the sets the team had created, and how accurate the train models are to the illustrations in the Awdry books, but I give credit where credit is due. Multiple people had tried to do adaptations of The Railway Series prior to Britt Allcroft’s discovery of the books, which she was largely unfamiliar with until researching them for a 1979 railway documentary she was involved with. Allcroft, director David Mitton, and everyone involved at Clearwater Features Ltd. really put their all into this and committed to making what was on screen really capture the charm and compact storytelling of the books. Even the sound score is brilliant, much of the synthesized music and leitmotifs (which emphasize the characters whenever they show up) are executed with chuffing, train-like sounds. Ringo Starr’s narration is as pleasant as ever, because hearing his voice is always a delight. In Series One, he is a bit “there” with his narrating, but in Series Two, he gets into the characters and situations a lot more. Series Two also had a significantly dirtier and more industrial aesthetic compared to the pastoral and bright look of Series One, and rather ominous synth tones came to replace the cheery music of Series One. This season took from some of the stories that involved scrap and haughty diesels, and upped the crash game. Instead of a few de-railings and hitting snowbanks, engines now smashed right through buildings in this season. If kids didn’t watch this show for the trains and scenery, they were certainly there for the accidents!
Off-kilter humor like this scene was a big part of what made the series work so well: A barber puts shaving cream on Duck’s face after the engine accidentally destroys his barbershop.
However, my more critical eye zeroes in on the problems present in Series 3, which was when the producers began to exert more control over the show. Several of Awdry’s stories are either skipped, adapted very poorly (see the episode ‘Tender Engines’ for an egregious example), or shunted aside for original stories whose lack of railway accuracy miffed the author. I loved Series 3 as a child, as it unrolled throughout 1991 and 1992, right before I was born. Naturally, I had A LOT of those episodes on tape. While it is still pretty and glossy to look at, some of the third season stories don’t quite measure up to the first two seasons. As such, I like a chunk of them more on a nostalgic level. Series 4 fares significantly better in the adaptation department, and ups the scenery game once more. However, I don’t find the music in this season to be as strong as it was before. The inventive themes have now become jaunty, bouncy, stereotypically sort-of kids’ show music that isn’t as much to my liking.
Series 5 went into production after the passing of Wilbert Awdry in 1997, and as such, it’s all original stories with all-new characters being introduced. Some of these original stories are utterly preposterous, and because of that, they are pretty amusing! Allcroft, Mitton, and crew decided to take a more Michael Bay-like approach to the series. (Michael Bay and Thomas in the same sentence… Yeesh!) Sets were literally destroyed, explosions even happened in some episodes, they really ramped up the spectacle! Awdry’s quaint and subtly meaningful stories were out, and action-packed crash-laden episodes were in. We’re talking about a season where a supernatural, perfectly-spherical boulder with a frowning **face** chases after engines. It’s so silly that I can’t dislike it. This season was pure and total nonsense, and as such, it makes me smile whenever I watch it. What other children’s show in the ’90s or any other time has something as wild as that? As for the non-action episodes, those are pretty standard friendship and good manners tales. As amusing as anything in the previous two seasons.
No, I wasn’t making that up…
This off-the-wall fifth season was literally just prep work for what would be the biggest undertaking for Britt Allcroft, after over a decade of working with talking trains… The feature film… Thomas and the Magic Railroad…
Allcroft certainly was ambitious with her Thomas feature film, trying to combine the essence of the original stories with the American Shining Time Station (thus turning Sodor into a magical fantasy realm, as opposed to a fictional island off of mainland Great Britain) and apparently, a moody drama about a guy moping inside of a mountain about his late wife and the steam engine he failed to protect. It has all the hallmarks of a weird, late ’90s kids movie and really doesn’t do a good job at combining the three disparate elements, and frustratingly, there’s very little Sodor in this “Thomas” movie. 7-year-old me certainly ate it all up, I even caught it in the movie theaters **twice** and watched it quite a bit on video, but upon revisiting it and the entire franchise in 2009, it was definitely riffing material at that point in my life. Far more captivating was its troubled production, and how much Allcroft’s vision was compromised by studio executives and one test screening at a shopping mall that went over terribly, resulting in multiple changes and revisions that arguably hurt the movie. The leaked deleted scenes and original script became the stuff of legend in the lost media circuits, and apparently the upcoming 20th Anniversary Blu-ray of the movie will include all of the cut stuff in the bonus features selection.
While the franchise as a whole begins to lose me beyond the movie and the subsequent sixth season, I feel that the early seasons still hold up nicely as quality children’s television, which is something I often don’t say about children’s television then and now. For the most part, Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends successfully straddles that fine line between being for young children but also containing enough substance to fascinate an adult, or better yet, someone who is a rail enthusiast. For me, the books are where it is at. Rev. W. Awdry no doubt created a world of great characters and showed readers young and old that even something as seemingly mundane as trains could be quite compelling…