Comments

1 month ago (edited) Report 👍

Just as a follow-up to this now that I've managed to get a copy of all the original Railway Series stories written by Rev. Awdry himself, another thing of note is that the trains in Thomas don't... train anymore. I was very much aware of the Chuggington-ification of the trains' movements, but what's interesting is how even the Driver's and Fireman's roles decreased drastically, to a point where they became irrelevant background characters who merely sit around in the backs of autonomous steam engines. Part of the direction the Americans took, as well as getting rid of the Narrator, is to make them more like cartoon characters than actual trains, which was an integral part of both Awdry's intentions while writing the stories, and part of the original charm of the books: everything that happened in those original stories, if you removed the talking trains parts, were either very likely to happen to a real train, or had actually happened to a real train. There is a real possibility that a train crashed into a cart of boxes and was coated in jam and trousers.