Thomas: a defense of the new concepts, a criticism of their implementation, and a ridicule of the new new version.

[RJS1977]

5 hours ago, RichardT said:

Intellectual Property Rights are just that - a sellable piece of property distinct from any original physical piece. Once they’re sold, the new owners can do whatever they (legally) like for up to 70 years after the death of the creator. Don’t want them tinkering with your creation - don’t sell the rights. 

 

Yes, sadly I can't help thinking Wilbert was ill-advised when he negotiated the original contract with Britt Alcroft. Whilst I believe Britt had a genuine love for the stories and wouldn't have perpetrated some of the horrors that more recent rights holders have committed, it appears that the contract was so loosely framed that it has been open to exploitation in ways that both parties probably never envisaged all those years ago.

 

Primarily, I think the two things Wilbert should have insisted on were:

- TV episodes only to be based on his or Christopher's stories, no new stories to be created without their agreement

- The Awdry family to retain the rights to create new stories should they wish.

 

You mentioned 007 as an analogy - one big difference is that the Fleming estate have been able to commission continuation novels, whilst the Thomas rights holders have effectively prevented Christopher from continuing the series.

[Hroth]

6 hours ago, Steamport Southport said:

I think we've got to realise we aren't the audience anymore.  

 

Seems to have a bit of a Wacky Races vibe. I wonder whether it's made more for a US or Far Eastern audience than British/European.

 

 

 

I think most people understand that we're not part of the target demographic. You have to be either the parent of a sub-three-year-old child (and have money to buy merchandise), or be the child and demand Thomas merchandise.

 

It strikes me that the visualisation of "Thomas" in the static film trailer image resembles a wooden "Brio" style toy. I wonder if the key character references were drawn up using one?

 

The "Thomas" above looks as if his fireman has been shovelling magic mushrooms into his firebox, whilst the face of Devious Diesel looks more feminine.

 

Worrying...

 

 

 

[RichardT]

11 hours ago, Steamport Southport said:

 

Seems to have a bit of a Wacky Races vibe

Yes, that struck me too.

 

Richard

[RichardT]

11 hours ago, Pacific231G said:

It does occur to me that, besides the occasional goods train, the average child may never actually see a locomotive.

I suspect that the average child probably sees quite a lot of locomotives, relatively speaking, mainly steam ones, on heritage railways.
 

But (going on the experience of friends and relatives with young children) what they hardly ever see is the current railway: the lives of people with young children now are almost entirely car-centred.  
 

Which is how they get to the heritage railways: restoring heritage railways’ connectivity to the mainline being almost entirely an enthusiast obsession, irrelevant to their main audience.  But that’s another thread!!

 

Richard

Edited September 14, 2021 by RichardT
Paragraphs

[Pacific231G]

43 minutes ago, RichardT said:

I suspect that the average child probably sees quite a lot of locomotives, relatively speaking, mainly steam ones, on heritage railways.
 

But (going on the experience of friends and relatives with young children) what they hardly ever see is the current railway: the lives of people with young children now are almost entirely car-centred.  
 

Which is how they get to the heritage railways: restoring heritage railways’ connectivity to the mainline being almost entirely an enthusiast obsession, irrelevant to their main audience.  But that’s another thread!!

 

Richard

Good point Richard

 

I 've often wondered whether most British children's first experiences of train are now one on heritage railways though for what proportion of all children that is ever a family outing I wonder. 

I live in London where the use of trains of some kind is probably a far more universal experience than in most of Britain but even when I've used the train to get to Brighton for the day, though there were always plenty of other people doing the same, relatively few of them were families with young children. Apart from anything else, the cost of railway tickets for a whole family is almost certainly going to be far more than the marginal cost of using the car and the sheer amount of paraphenalia that seems to go with taking kids out these days would be a real hassle to take by train. 

I'm not sure how that would relate to other countries where heritage railways are far less common. Outside of the largest cities, do children there simply never experience trains at all until their student days?

[Pacific231G]

18 hours ago, RichardT said:

Intellectual Property Rights are just that - a sellable piece of property distinct from any original physical piece. Once they’re sold, the new owners can do whatever they (legally) like for up to 70 years after the death of the creator. Don’t want them tinkering with your creation - don’t sell the rights. 

 

Richard T

Which is why it is always wiser to license any intellectual propery you create than to sell it outright.

[russ p]

13 hours ago, Steamport Southport said:

I think we've got to realise we aren't the audience anymore.  

 

Seems to have a bit of a Wacky Races vibe. I wonder whether it's made more for a US or Far Eastern audience than British/European.

 

 

 

Thomas looks like sid the sexist from viz in this picture. 

I'm surprised they are still allowed to show climate wrecking coal burning locos and carcinogenic diesels to kids ..... come on wokes your missing a trick!

[Legend]

21 hours ago, John M Upton said:

The prosecution enters the following into evidence:

This has been absolutely torn to shreds on social media.  The nail is well and truly in the coffin.

 

I'm just finding my black cap ready to pronouce sentence 

[33C]

4 hours ago, Legend said:

 

I'm just finding my black cap ready to pronouce sentence 

Looks like it's had the "Hotwheels" treatment.........rules and regs right out the (cab) window. Truly Terrible.

[DK123GWR]

6 hours ago, russ p said:

I'm surprised they are still allowed to show climate wrecking coal burning locos and carcinogenic diesels to kids ..... come on wokes your missing a trick!

I would suggest that anything which promotes an appreciation of public transport is probably a good thing - irrespective of the motive power depicted. If you decide to journey from A to B by train, you don't normally choose the motive power, you just get on whatever turns up (which, whether diesel or electric*, will be more environmentally friendly than the equivalent road journey). We might derail the thread if we continue with this discussion though (fortunately, the animators seem to have found a way to return derailed trains to the line by magic).

 

* I'm not sure how the sums would work out for steam but instinctively I would say they will still favour rail

[009 micro modeller]

Having read through this thread and the rationale behind the new stuff (appealing to a younger audience) I’m wondering why it’s necessary for it to be based on TTTE at all. It just seems to annoy those who like the previous iteration (including apparently some kids, as in the original article) and much of the surrounding world-building stuff probably isn’t really needed.

[DK123GWR]

2 minutes ago, 009 micro modeller said:

Having read through this thread and the rationale behind the new stuff (appealing to a younger audience) I’m wondering why it’s necessary for it to be based on TTTE at all. It just seems to annoy those who like the previous iteration (including apparently some kids, as in the original article) and much of the surrounding world-building stuff probably isn’t really needed.

I would guess because its easier to sell merchandise (in most cases) for an established brand.

 

On the other hand, I would probably be quite annoyed if I were responsible for marketing Bachman's Thomas products. The appearance is clearly based on TV series locos rather than the prototypes Awdry was writing about, and so is probably aimed at children and their parents rather than, for instance, your typical RMWeb user. However, Mattel seem to be gradually moving the franchise to target younger and younger children - and the proportion of children for whom a 00 gauge railway would be appropriate reduces every time they do this.

[009 micro modeller]

1 hour ago, DK123GWR said:

I would guess because its easier to sell merchandise (in most cases) for an established brand.

 

True. I’m just thinking that if they’re targeting younger and younger children they’ll be fewer who know the existing series (as opposed to previously, when the age range went high enough that there would be a few slightly older kids who’d grown up with Thomas stuff and knew the characters, but hadn’t grown out of it yet).

 

1 hour ago, DK123GWR said:

On the other hand, I would probably be quite annoyed if I were responsible for marketing Bachman's Thomas products. The appearance is clearly based on TV series locos rather than the prototypes Awdry was writing about, and so is probably aimed at children and their parents rather than, for instance, your typical RMWeb user. However, Mattel seem to be gradually moving the franchise to target younger and younger children - and the proportion of children for whom a 00 gauge railway would be appropriate reduces every time they do this.

 

I always thought this was part of the reason that Hornby were happy to let go of the UK rights (I realise that the rights holders, understandably, wanting to remove the weird situation of a different company holding them in some countries also may have played a part in it). It feels like it used to be that they were targeting the lower end of the age range for which a proper 00 railway could be appropriate, so the competing system was something like Tomica (with the battery powered locos and blue plastic track - don’t know if they still make this). Possibly Tomica etc. was a bit easier for kids to play with independently, and initially cheaper, but the “proper” Hornby/Bachmann sets had the advantage that when they were outgrown you could replace Thomas with more realistic and ‘grown-up’ stock and keep going without having to replace the entire system, if you wanted to. Now they’re seemingly targeting an age group for which Brio is the only obviously suitable option, and I don’t really see where the massive market for 00 gauge stuff is (they can’t ALL be getting sold to parents etc. who are also railway modellers and want a TTTE loco for kids to run on their layout, and I’m sure that at least some of the Skarloeys must be being used as intended, even though I know loads were bought to be altered for more realistic 009 projects).

[Nearholmer]

Granparents, specifically Grandads; they're the ones who buy children slightly misguided presents, based on their own memories of childhood and/or young-parenthood, because they are ever so slightly out of touch with where kids are at these days. They've probably wasted millions on TTTE sets, and Skarloey's that are too small to play with until you've grown out of them.

 

I bet if someone reintroduced Triang Battlsespace, they'd fly off the shelves on that basis, now that guys born c1960 are hitting grandad age in large numbers!

 

Possibly not the toy of choice for parents wishing to inculcate peaceful values in their offspring, though.

[009 micro modeller]

30 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

Granparents, specifically Grandads; they're the ones who buy children slightly misguided presents, based on their own memories of childhood and/or young-parenthood, because they are ever so slightly out of touch with where kids are at these days. They've probably wasted millions on TTTE sets, and Skarloey's that are too small to play with until you've grown out of them.

 

But like I said, is that really a large enough market on its own to justify the continued production of the whole range, especially given this latest development in how the TV show is being pitched?

[Nearholmer]

TBH, it mystifies me. I dont know about whether H0/00 toy trains can ride on the back of the iteration being dicussed here, but Thomas does seem to help sell an enormous amount of plastic stuff. 

 

N gauge (primarily in Japan), G and 0 scales, primarily in the US where both are "toy" scales in a way that they barely are here, Brio etc, and thats just "toy trains"; there's an avalanche of lunchboxes, caps, ride-on toys, colouring books, apps, and goodness knows what else. I get the feeling that toy trains are only a tiny part of Thomas's global cash base. So, maybe if some toy trains fall off the table as a result of the re-imagining, that won't matter much, even to the toy train makers, who've had a good innings on the previous iteration.

[HonestTom]

I gave it a look and... yeah. I'm honestly not surprised they've gone in this direction, even if (as someone who grew up with the books and the TV series) I am a little disappointed. Mattel is a toy company, toy sales have been down, so go with a cheaper-to-produce series

 

I guess my big problem is that I just don't get the impression that the people making it care about the property. It feels lazy. There are quite a few animation and continuity errors. Some of them actually appear deliberate. This is a bit hard to explain, but there are certain shots that are angled in such a way that you can't see how many tracks there are or how close together they are, which appears to have been done purely in order to conceal the fact that what you're seeing doesn't make physical sense. For instance, there are a few bits where an engine nearly runs into another on the same track, only for disaster to be avoided by one of the engines stretching upwards to allow the other to pass beneath, with both characters staying on the rails. There are other errors which seem to have been caused by reusing assets and animation, like points that change direction between shots.

 

There are aspects of the world-building I find confusing. Like, the coaches and trucks can now move on their own - so why do engines exist? Why are there turntables and points if engines can just jump around? Why, for that matter, is there track? I don't know if I'm overthinking this children's TV series, I probably am, but when I was a kid I would definitely have asked questions like that. And that's before we've got on to the railway realism issues, which are so far removed from the creators' priorities that it's hardly worth dissecting them.

 

There was a blog entry a while back that filled me with foreboding. In the press conference, one of the directors seemed to actively dislike the fact that the characters were engines. I got the overall impression that they hadn't actually watched any of the old episodes or read any of the original stories, or even skimmed the wiki. Okay, fine, they're trying to do things differently, but I feel like you can't recapture the appeal of a classic property if you don't know what that appeal was to begin with. 

 

Overall, it doesn't feel like a grand reimagining of a beloved classic property, but Mattel trying to justify their investment with a short lead time, low budget series to make a little bit of cash back before they drop the whole thing.

[Steamport Southport]

6 minutes ago, HonestTom said:

I gave it a look and... yeah. I'm honestly not surprised they've gone in this direction, even if (as someone who grew up with the books and the TV series) I am a little disappointed. Mattel is a toy company, toy sales have been down, so go with a cheaper-to-produce series

 

Have they?

 

Not according to the media they haven't. 

 

https://toyworldmag.co.uk/2021-14-01-breaking-news-uk-toy-market-increases-5-in-value-during-2020/

[APOLLO]

 

Brit15

[DK123GWR]

17 minutes ago, HonestTom said:

There was a blog entry a while back that filled me with foreboding

Here are the highlights:

 

 

 

But remember this:

 

The above could be described as an anagram of this.

[friscopete]

On 13/09/2021 at 13:53, Steamport Southport said:

 

I'm afraid TV and film merchandising pre dated George Lucas by several decades.

 

Even the BBC was a very early adopter with things like Muffin The Mule toys. This is from 1951.

 

 

 

 

Muffin the Mule puppet toy on display at the Museum of Childhood, Edinburgh. Diecast metal, Lesney Products, 1951

 

ISTR there used to be an original Sooty puppet knocking about when I was a kid which dated from the 1950s. No idea what happened to it.

 

 

Jason

I had that very mule  toy ,didnt know it was Lesney.great toy .

[Re6/6]

Proper Thomas! I used to watch it with my son when he was little and wondered about building a Thomas for him in G1!

 

 

[009 micro modeller]

1 hour ago, DK123GWR said:

Here are the highlights:

 

 

 

But remember this:

 

The above could be described as an anagram of this.

 

This is odd because I always thought the idea was that they did have drivers, but that they were only minor characters. Certainly the human characters that appear in some of the books were downplayed even in the original TV series (I do wonder whether this also relates to the difficulty in animating a human figure for a series based on physical and quite realistic-looking models, as it initially was; from memory they only ever seemed to have incidental people standing still). It seems to have ended up halfway between the two extremes of Ivor the Engine, where all the other characters are people or sometimes animals (donkeys and dragons), and something like Cars, in which the characters inhabit a world weirdly similar to ours but containing absolutely no people, even though it contains a lot of other things apparently designed to be used by people. However, I get the impression now that they’re making TTTE into something that just features characters, without really trying to build a world around them.

[Ben B]

In terms of animation style, they seem to be aping the recent "My Little Pony- Friendship is Magical" series, which is no bad thing particularly (cartoony physics, bright colours, etc).  But even MLP has moved away from flash-style animation now to CGI for the latest generation of toy-promoting cartoon series.  Sticking with flash animation seems a bit backwards, the sort of thing that would have fitted with kids telly about 5-7 years ago, and is probably very cheap compared even to CGI.

 

The whole "My Little Pony" thing might be what they're going for, but mis-aiming.  Having been subjected to 7-seasons worth of it by my three Foster Daughters in recent years, I'd say that the most recent series of that cartoon was pretty well produced, quite sharply written (with quite a bit sprinkled through it for the parents to appreciate, film-nods and so on) and attracted quite a sizeable adult fanbase.  The characterisations of the main cast went far beyond just 'cute talking girly horse', with pronounced character-arcs over each season.  But MLP was always at its most basic level about hocking toys, so they had something of a clean slate when it came to making the cartoon, and arguably the creative team made something far better and well-crafted than it needed to be to sell an established brand of small plastic toy horses. Compared to "Thomas" where the adult fanbase they might be potentially hoping to attract/retain are aware of the baggage from multiple decades worth of CGI, models, and written stories, depending on when they were introduced to it.

 

(It's perhaps worth noting that amongst the existing fanbase of My Little Pony, according to Elder Child who is a major fan, the trailer for the CGI reboot has had much the same effect as the trailers for the new Thomas series has amongst us!  At least all the Thomas characters are there, if somewhat messed-around with.  The new series of My Little Pony is explicitly set in the future of the continuity, so the Pony fans are having to come at dealing with the deaths-by-old-age of all the characters they've grown up watching!)

 

Amusingly I've read an interview somewhere (it might even be the one the above extracts are from) where they mention that in the new Thomas they're getting rid of the British voices, as they are unpopular with American audiences; given we are habitually cast as baddies, probably not surprising.  Maybe if Diesel is still the baddy character they should have a given him a monocle, a top-hat, and a redcoat uniform.  But it all does hint that the production company/rights owners probably should have come up with some new intellectual property, but are just sitting back and trading on the brand-awareness of the name.

[009 micro modeller]

38 minutes ago, Ben B said:

In terms of animation style, they seem to be aping the recent "My Little Pony- Friendship is Magical" series, which is no bad thing particularly (cartoony physics, bright colours, etc).  But even MLP has moved away from flash-style animation now to CGI for the latest generation of toy-promoting cartoon series.  Sticking with flash animation seems a bit backwards, the sort of thing that would have fitted with kids telly about 5-7 years ago, and is probably very cheap compared even to CGI.

 

 

I seem to vaguely remember that the original computer-animated TTTE was almost indistinguishable from the older series filmed with models, which I think was the idea at the time (i.e. it wasn’t so much that they wanted a different style, more that it had become easier to do some CGI than have to build multiple variants and models of everything - was the original series also limited in how many sets they could have, a bit like studio-based sitcoms often are?).

 

43 minutes ago, Ben B said:

Amusingly I've read an interview somewhere (it might even be the one the above extracts are from) where they mention that in the new Thomas they're getting rid of the British voices, as they are unpopular with American audiences; given we are habitually cast as baddies, probably not surprising.  Maybe if Diesel is still the baddy character they should have a given him a monocle, a top-hat, and a redcoat uniform.  But it all does hint that the production company/rights owners probably should have come up with some new intellectual property, but are just sitting back and trading on the brand-awareness of the name.

 

This is very odd. They don’t look like American locos for a start. In other contexts people have been able to make the Britishness of various series a selling point for American audiences but I’m not sure that would work for a kids’ series.