Thomas & Friends and Franchise cleanup

I'm on a bit of a Thomas watching spree as of now, so I think now is the time to make a cleanup thread to The Railway Series, Thomas & Friends, and All Engines Go.

Thomas is one of those kids shows with a significant adult fanbase, so a lot of the problems with other shows of its caliber apply here, which will be cleaned up in addition to updating information to be accurate.

Now, I present an episode that's always been a sticking point for me when it comes to the TV Tropes pages, Thomas Comes to Breakfast:

YMMV.Thomas And Friends S 2 E 18 Thomas Comes To Breakfast:

• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • The stationmaster and his wife. Tying into the anonymous idiot who chose the end of a train track of all places to build their house, they could have avoided their situation if they had foreseen the obvious danger in tracks heading directly towards their house with no buffers for protection and alerted railway workers, which they somehow failed to do.
  • Percy and Toby smiling while Thomas is being scolded after his accident doesn't make them look good.
  • Donald and Douglas come to free Thomas from the wreckage, but they laugh at him while doing so.

Now all of these don't explain how they're meant to be sympathetic, but I have to point out to the first example that like a lot of stories early on, this is based on a real incident with an engine going into a house like this. With a similar incident happening to Duck in A Close Shave, it seems like tracks ending into a house weren't an uncommon thing in the early 1900s. I think the audience not realizing that this was how it is back then seems like a case of Values Dissonance or Fourth Wall Myopia.

Edited by PlasmaPower on Nov 15th 2023 at 9:04:31 AM

Yeah, change the first to Values Dissonance and the second and third ones require expansion or otherwise be deleted.

The second and third points just seem like complaining about the characters making fun of Thomas, there isn’t really much to it otherwise, so they’re going straight to the trash.

Anyways, I want to bring up the character page for Thomas & Friends. Nia and Rebecca were only the main characters for three seasons before the show was cancelled, while Edward and Henry, who’ve been with the show since the beginning and up to that point, and delegated to being former members of the Steam Team. It doesn’t really feel right to me to be honest.

Considering the show isn’t coming back any time soon thanks to a certain Denser and Wackier reboot, I’m thinking of putting Edward and Henry back up with the other members, while putting Nia and Rebecca in their own section as BWBA additions/replacements, and their folders explained who they replaced. Would everyone be alright if I did that?

Edited by PlasmaPower on Nov 16th 2023 at 9:39:27 AM

Yeah, switch them back. Plus, I've been wondering if we should put the stop-motion pictures in the character pages first followed by the CGI ones considering that the stop-motion ones are what people are liable to know about first.

Yeah I think putting the pictures of the model series first makes more sense, not only they’re first chronologically, but they’re more iconic.

Here’s something I found in Gordon's folder:

• Big Bad: Barring the Freight Cars and their usual antics, he was effectively the main antagonist for most of the latter half of Season 1. As his haughty and pompous nature, as well as his influence turning the other big engines, barring Edward, into the conceited jerks they were back then were and the numerous problems that came after were the main focus at the time. Finally coming to a head in "Trouble in the Shed", where he leads the other big engines on strike against the Fat Controller for making them shunt like tank engines.

Gordon ain’t exactly Diesel 10, he’s just a self important Jerkass. And it’s not like you can blame Gordon for the jerkass things that Henry and James do either, they have their own agency. These three just happen to all have common interests.

Edited by PlasmaPower on Nov 16th 2023 at 1:50:47 AM

If Gordon's a Jerkass that just does jerk things, he's not an antagonist. I mean Garfield's a jerk, but he's not labeled as a Big Bad. Besides, doesn't Gordon have a heart of gold as well?

Well, antagonist is just "someone in the protagonist's way", so a jerkass very often is an antagonist. But an antagonist is not the same as Big Bad.

So, Gordon's an antagonist but he doesn't count as the Big Bad.

I think.

IDK the franchise I was just lurking the new posts haha but given the description it doesn't sound like a Big Bad to me.

Yeah, I feel like he makes a pretty weak case because it mentions only the second half of Season 1, as well as it not feeling like he’s looking over us like the typical Big Bad would.

Just some more stuff from Thomas Comes To Breakfast:

• Never Live It Down: The stationmaster's wife berating Thomas for ruining her family's breakfast instead of for wrecking their house.

Wasn’t she just in shock just as much as the rest of the family when Thomas plowed into their house? I think she was angry about the house but just yelled that she was angry about the breakfast in a heat of the moment thing.

Anyways, this is pretty much a ZCE as is. The stationmatser's wife is barely a character. She seems like a One-Scene Wonder.

Edited by PlasmaPower on Nov 16th 2023 at 3:40:16 AM

Do fans latch onto that scene as her only characterization? That's the part that really matters for NILD.

I mean, it’s not like she has any other characterization. She’s already listed under One-Scene Wonder too.

If I remember correctly, the Surprisingly Realistic Outcome page used to have a couple of Thomas fanfics (this was back when we had multiple pages for fanfics before the clean-up) where the wife was called out for caring more about her breakfast than the fact that a train just smashed into her house.

Aren’t those just Accusation Fics? I guess SRO or Reality Ensues back when it used to be called that had more gravias to the average troper and wanted to put it everywhere.

This also feels like a bit of Ron the Death Eater going on here if they’re making her out to be a sociopathic bitch who only cares about her breakfast.

But regardless, I think it’s the problem that a lot of other kids shows have where tropers take silly scenes like this and take them deadly serious.

Edited by PlasmaPower on Nov 16th 2023 at 5:49:43 AM

• scritches head* If I recall correctly, one of the fics was where Thomas and his friends were humans. But regardless, the Never Live It Down should be deleted.

I found this in Edward's character page:

• Silver Fox: Edward is one of the oldest trains on the railway, yet still looks as young as Thomas.

A silver fox is basically an attractive old person, but I don’t know if you can really call a train attractive in the human sense.

Yeah, delete. Reeks of ZCE anyways.

Another from Thomas Comes To Breakfast…

• Artistic License – Physics: It is most likely that the stationmaster and his family would... not have survived Thomas crashing into their house if this was Real Life.

Aside from the fact this is based on a real life incident, it feels like misuse if all it says is "x should have died from that".

I'd say probably the entire page may need a clean-up, but yeah, go ahead and delete.

Recap.Thomas And Friends S 11 E 13 Dont Be Silly Billy

• Karma Houdini: Billy receives no punishment for disobeying Thomas and accusing him of being bossy.
• Laser-Guided Karma: For ignoring Thomas, Billy runs out of coal and water.

Don't you love when examples end up contradicting themselves?

To be fair, karma by the universe is not the same as a literal punishment, but it does imply that Karma Houdini may not be true.

In this case it wasn’t by the universe, his karma was caused by his own actions.

You know what I mean, it's not a punishment so technically the first example isn't wrong. But Karma Houdini still doesn't apply.

I see, yeah I’ll go ahead and delete Karma Houdini from the page.

YMMV.Thomas And Friends S 20 E 13 The Railcar And The Coaches

• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Some feel that Daisy, Annie, and Clarabel should apologize to each other for their rudeness in the ending instead of having Diesel carry Annie and Clarabel.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Annie and Clarabel. One can't help but feel satisfied to see them get back at Daisy for more or less bullying them, yet Daisy is never shown to get into trouble with The Fat Controller for what she did in the first place. Perhaps because what Annie and Clarabel did resulted in a passenger train being delayed. The ending (which comes quite out of nowhere) where they have to spend a day with Diesel doesn't help.

First one is misuse of the trope clearly.

The second one, there's a reason they’re presented as unsympathetic, for saying mean things to Daisy in retaliation for being mean to them (which isn’t mentioned in the entry for some reason), but I don’t know if that goes under Informed Wrongness of Unintentionally Sympathetic (I find it difficult to tell the difference between the two, since they often overlap).

The part regarding the audience feeling satisfied at Annie and Clarabel getting back at Daisy should go under Catharsis Factor.

EDIT: Funnily enough, the one place where Karma Houdini would apply, Daisy getting no punishment for being mean to Annie and Clarabel in the first place, isn’t on the main page.

Edited by PlasmaPower on Nov 24th 2023 at 8:32:55 AM