The following is a post that has been a long time in the writing, sitting un-finished in the "edit posts" section while I tinkered with it. I mentioned something about it the other day on Twitter and it seemed to gain enough of a reaction to fool me into thinking that it might be of general interest. I've split it into two parts because it seemed rather long. I'll post the second bit in a couple of days.
I spend an awful lot of time watching Thomas the Tank Engine. To be more precise I spend a lot of time with someone who spends an awful lot of time watching Thomas the Tank Engine. My (nearly) three year old son is obsessed by it; he sleeps with his Thomas trains, eats with a Thomas knife and fork and wears Thomas pyjamas. The words to the Thomas songs comprise almost his entire vocabulary. I loved the Railway Series (as the Thomas books used to be known) as a child too, although in a slightly less obsessive and merchandise saturated way. That was in the 1970's when the little landscape format, cloth-bound books already seemed like something from the distant past.
The first Railway Series story was published in 1945 and although the last one to be written by Reverend W. Awdry*, the series' original author, came out in 1972, very little about the world they depicted changed over thirty years. Since then ever more Thomas books have appeared to accompany the TV series, various spin-off movies and a terrifying looking theme park called Drayton Manor. And still the cars in the station car park are 1950's Jaguars and Rovers, the men on the platforms wear hats and the women sport headscarves.
I've spent a lot of time wondering about the roots of my son's obsession. I'm fairly sure that he's unaware of the antiquarian nature of steam trains or that the setting is nominally in a slightly distant past. My son doesn't seem to care that there are aren't any traction engines to be found anymore or that men don't dress in spats and a top hat like the Fat Controller**. In that sense the appeal of the books might genuinely be considered timeless. The world they depict is somehow complete enough in itself to form a hermetic, self-sustaining universe.
As any parent knows, children are Utopians. They construct fantasy worlds that run on rules of their own devising. These rules are often rigidly inflexible and uncompromising. The appeal of Thomas then might lie in the precise logic of an imaginary railway network. The simple rules that underpin the movement and actions of the trains might also be the part that makes them so successful. The engines themselves have very limited scope for independent action. They can move forwards and backwards, speed up and down, occasionally break down or have an accident but that's about it. They can't fight, or dance or play football or run. They don't chase villains or solve mysteries and they have no special powers. Although they have been anthropomorphised they remain far more train than human. They are in many ways merely extensions of the way that we often attribute human characteristics to machines, giving them names and celebrating their faults as charming idiosyncrasies
The engines also depend on humans for operation. In the original stories the relationship of the trains to their drivers and guards is very carefully delineated. It does not intrude so much that the trains become 'simply' machines but neither are they allowed any genuine independence. They can only deviate from the control of their human operators to a limited degree, normally with fairly disastrous results. These limitations also extend to the minimal nature of the stories where a fallen tree or a faulty turntable provides pretty much the only narrative hook. The legendarily boring nature of the stories is actually cleverly consistent with the repetitive nature of the engine's tasks. The text mirrors this, repeating simple phrases in a way that is analogous to the movements of the trains. "Clickety clack went the trucks", "We did it together, we did it together" etc.
Alongside this physically limited universe is an equally restricting moral one. Unsurprisingly perhaps given the identity of the author of the stories, the Thomas books are filled with simple pieties and swift retribution for crimes and misdemeanors. Instructions and justice are metered out by the all-powerful Fat Controller*. Sometimes they get abandoned, like Duke the Lost Engine, or decommissioned or even on occasion cut up for scrap. A bleak Victorian morality hangs over the stories allowing for sentimentality and indulgence but only up to a point and only after the work has been done. The aspiration for the all the engines is to be considered "really useful", a reward that that confirms both their status as machines and their role within an over-arching morality of duty.
The TV series of Thomas remained faithful to both the storylines and the moral universe of the books for some time. The fact that it was filmed using an actual model railway gave it in some ways an even greater degree of fidelity to the concept than the original illustrated books. If the model trains couldn't do something then neither could the ones in the stories. The wobbly, home-made aesthetic of the model railway became part of the series' 'charm', an anachronistic 1950's toy used to recreate the equally anachronistic world of 1950's steam engines.
More recently the series has been introducing new characters, partly as a way of boosting merchandise sales but also in order to create new plot lines. The relatively recent switch to CGI has produced a more decisive shift though. In contrast to the earlier stories, recent feature length Thomas' have involved the discovery of lost towns, psychotically deranged diesel engines*** and journeys to magic islands. This expansion beyond the tightly controlled constraints of the original books pushes the logic of the series' scenario beyond plausible limits.
I spend an awful lot of time watching Thomas the Tank Engine. To be more precise I spend a lot of time with someone who spends an awful lot of time watching Thomas the Tank Engine. My (nearly) three year old son is obsessed by it; he sleeps with his Thomas trains, eats with a Thomas knife and fork and wears Thomas pyjamas. The words to the Thomas songs comprise almost his entire vocabulary. I loved the Railway Series (as the Thomas books used to be known) as a child too, although in a slightly less obsessive and merchandise saturated way. That was in the 1970's when the little landscape format, cloth-bound books already seemed like something from the distant past.
The first Railway Series story was published in 1945 and although the last one to be written by Reverend W. Awdry*, the series' original author, came out in 1972, very little about the world they depicted changed over thirty years. Since then ever more Thomas books have appeared to accompany the TV series, various spin-off movies and a terrifying looking theme park called Drayton Manor. And still the cars in the station car park are 1950's Jaguars and Rovers, the men on the platforms wear hats and the women sport headscarves.
I've spent a lot of time wondering about the roots of my son's obsession. I'm fairly sure that he's unaware of the antiquarian nature of steam trains or that the setting is nominally in a slightly distant past. My son doesn't seem to care that there are aren't any traction engines to be found anymore or that men don't dress in spats and a top hat like the Fat Controller**. In that sense the appeal of the books might genuinely be considered timeless. The world they depict is somehow complete enough in itself to form a hermetic, self-sustaining universe.
As any parent knows, children are Utopians. They construct fantasy worlds that run on rules of their own devising. These rules are often rigidly inflexible and uncompromising. The appeal of Thomas then might lie in the precise logic of an imaginary railway network. The simple rules that underpin the movement and actions of the trains might also be the part that makes them so successful. The engines themselves have very limited scope for independent action. They can move forwards and backwards, speed up and down, occasionally break down or have an accident but that's about it. They can't fight, or dance or play football or run. They don't chase villains or solve mysteries and they have no special powers. Although they have been anthropomorphised they remain far more train than human. They are in many ways merely extensions of the way that we often attribute human characteristics to machines, giving them names and celebrating their faults as charming idiosyncrasies
The engines also depend on humans for operation. In the original stories the relationship of the trains to their drivers and guards is very carefully delineated. It does not intrude so much that the trains become 'simply' machines but neither are they allowed any genuine independence. They can only deviate from the control of their human operators to a limited degree, normally with fairly disastrous results. These limitations also extend to the minimal nature of the stories where a fallen tree or a faulty turntable provides pretty much the only narrative hook. The legendarily boring nature of the stories is actually cleverly consistent with the repetitive nature of the engine's tasks. The text mirrors this, repeating simple phrases in a way that is analogous to the movements of the trains. "Clickety clack went the trucks", "We did it together, we did it together" etc.
Alongside this physically limited universe is an equally restricting moral one. Unsurprisingly perhaps given the identity of the author of the stories, the Thomas books are filled with simple pieties and swift retribution for crimes and misdemeanors. Instructions and justice are metered out by the all-powerful Fat Controller*. Sometimes they get abandoned, like Duke the Lost Engine, or decommissioned or even on occasion cut up for scrap. A bleak Victorian morality hangs over the stories allowing for sentimentality and indulgence but only up to a point and only after the work has been done. The aspiration for the all the engines is to be considered "really useful", a reward that that confirms both their status as machines and their role within an over-arching morality of duty.
The TV series of Thomas remained faithful to both the storylines and the moral universe of the books for some time. The fact that it was filmed using an actual model railway gave it in some ways an even greater degree of fidelity to the concept than the original illustrated books. If the model trains couldn't do something then neither could the ones in the stories. The wobbly, home-made aesthetic of the model railway became part of the series' 'charm', an anachronistic 1950's toy used to recreate the equally anachronistic world of 1950's steam engines.
More recently the series has been introducing new characters, partly as a way of boosting merchandise sales but also in order to create new plot lines. The relatively recent switch to CGI has produced a more decisive shift though. In contrast to the earlier stories, recent feature length Thomas' have involved the discovery of lost towns, psychotically deranged diesel engines*** and journeys to magic islands. This expansion beyond the tightly controlled constraints of the original books pushes the logic of the series' scenario beyond plausible limits.
In Misty Island Rescue, for instance, Thomas is set adrift on a raft at sea, eventually running ashore on an island that appears to be in the deep south of America. Even more bizarrely, when Thomas' raft hits the beach the engine rolls straight onto a conveniently placed set of tracks running directly out of the water. Later on Thomas discovers some kind of portal or short-cut between Sodor and Misty Island via a vast hollowed out tree trunk. In other recent films Thomas discovers lost towns (The Great Discovery), battles evil baddies (Day of the Diesels****) and travels through yet another portal to a contemporary mid-Western village called Shining Time (Thomas and the Magic Railroad*****).
These fantastical adventures cause a kind of conceptual crisis in Thomas' carefully controlled universe. His actions are no longer those of a railway engine stuck shunting trucks but of a buccaneering adventurer. The Reverend Awdry's pedantic fidelity to the movements of steam engines and railway lines is long gone. The driver and guard have become like those film crews accompanying TV explorers, something that it's convenient to forget about lest they spoilt the mystique. It's no coincidence that this capitulation to pure fantasy has come about at the same time as a shift from real-time modeling to CGI. Computer rendering allows Thomas the physical and conceptual freedom to inhabit any kind of environment in more or less any way. Thomas has moved from being an anthropomorphised machine into a human being who just happens to look like a train.
* In the original books the railway has a more complex command structure. As well as the Fat Controller (who was known pre-nationalisation as the Fat Director) there was also the Thin Controller (who occasionally appears in contemporary Thomas adventures as the bowler hatted Mr Percival), The Owner and a shadowy aristocratic figure above him known as His Grace. Various clergymen also appear with unspecified but authoritative roles.
** The Fat Controller's outfit is also interesting, being a kind of post-war parody of a Victorian capitalist. At the time of the book's original issue it must have already been extremely out-of-date. The series' role as an allegory of capitalism and the split between labour and capital is well described by Richard's comment below.
*** The Rev. W. Awdry's son Christopher continued to publish stories through the 1980's and '90's.
**** The role of the diesel engines as some sort of servant class/ethnic minority in the Railway Series books has always been symbolically highly suspect.
***** This last film is worth watching for its sheer bizarreness. Not only does it mix human action with model based animation but it attempts to fuse an American TV series called Shining Time with the Thomas franchise to utterly implausible effect. It also features a memorably awful performance from Peter Fonda.
