My eldest nephew is crazy about Thomas the Tank Engine. He can spent hours watching Thomas videos on Youtube, but best not to let him watch this one. Meanwhile, Drew Magary explains what makes it an awful, awful tv show:
Thomas and his friends live on Sodor and spend their days toiling endlessly, “shunting trucks and hauling freight.” (Shunting, by the way, sounds like a great Urban Dictionary term for silent fucking—”We shunted while his parents slept next door!”) The engines are only happy when they are being “Really Useful,” which suggests to me that they have been brainwashed by fearsome tuxedoed railway overlord Sir Topham Hatt to accept the bonds of slavery without question. These poor engines have never known freedom, and so the very idea of it is alien to them. The whole story could have served as an allegory for life under the Russian czars before the rise of the Bolsheviks. But I bet the Rev wasn’t that subtle. I bet he was just a man who thought trains were bitches.
On the whole though the show has an useful message for all kids: shut up, you’re not special, do as you are told. If you don’t we’ll brick you up in an abandoned railway tunnel:
Thomas the Tank Engine: propaganda to get kids used to the awful conditions of the UK railways, or just to get them used to being happy cogs in the capitalist machine?
Rich Puchalsky
August 25, 2013 at 2:19 pmI’m long ahead of you here. After my son’s early fascination with Thomas, I felt compelled to write a poem in which Thomas finds a pamphlet by Bakunin and then goes on a violent, anarchist rampage through the late 19th and early 20th century, accompanied by Emma Goldman, Nestor Mahkno, Hemingway, etc. and with a brief obligatory Iron Council reference.
Martin Wisse
August 25, 2013 at 3:15 pmAs you do…
Chris Williams
September 5, 2013 at 5:41 pmCheck out ‘Oliver the Death Squad Engine’* – trucks resent being shunted, so Oliver, and his brake van conspire to rip the most bolshie truck (‘Scruffy’) to bits. That taught it a lesson, didn’t it?
Awdry was actually a conscientious objector in WW2 on christian pacifist grounds: clearly his opposition to the status quo had limits.
*not its actual name, but the story is real.