When new and foreign trains arrive on the island, they are subject to jealousy and derision, as the Sodor engines are continually made to fear obsolescence. Engines who threaten efficiency with burdensome personalities, such as the criminally giggly “Logging Locos,” are banished from Sodor. Whenever trains express interest in travelling, or doing another job, or flying like Harold the Helicopter, they are mocked and derided until they stop dreaming and accept their station. These rivalries are punctuated by nasty banter (“Thomas knew that Percy was scared, so he teased him even more” doesn’t sound like a very healthy friendship), which fuels the larger system of cruelty. Thomas and Percy are supposedly best friends, but they bicker constantly over those “special special” jobs. The trains, complicit in maintaining this unjust system, humiliate each other for the small scraps of praise the little tyrant doles out rather than banding together (no unions on Sodor). If you observe closely, that destination is a nasty, brutish one. The reverend later reflected on his two vocations, railways and the church, by saying, “both had their heyday in the mid-nineteenth century both are regularly assailed by critics and both are firmly convinced that they are the best means of getting man to his ultimate destination.” West’s A Children’s Tour of British Literature, “in the North Sea … not only set off physically from Britain, but also separated from the modernization that occurred in Britain after World War II.” On Sodor, the messiness of midcentury British class conflicts, civil-rights movements, and post-colonial political struggles never happened, erased by a minister nostalgic for the power and the glory of the British empire. He began to write and publish his stories in 1945, setting his trains’ adventures on Sodor, an island situated, according to Mark I. An Oxford-educated Anglican clergyman, Awdry told his first train story to measles-ridden son Christopher in 1943, while a minister in Birmingham (in exile for his pacifist views on World War II). Wilbert Awdry, certainly idealized the British empire of the 19 th and early 20 th centuries in his Railway Series books. One suspects that Sir Topham Hatt spent some time in colonial India. He and his friends are clearly imperialists. Obviously, it’s foolish to claim that Thomas is a fascist. Given charges that Thomas is anti - Semitic and that Sodor is a fascist paradise, Wilton’s assessment is mild. (Thomas and his “friends” often “tease” like this: ” ‘Wake up lazy bones! Do some hard work for a change!”) Its innate conservatism is as obvious as the liberalism of cooperative, solar-panel-building Bob the Builder and his band of hippie hammer-lovers. But wait: Thomas espouses top-down leadership, is male-dominated, punishes dissent, and is uninterested in the mushy sensitivity of its PBS counterparts. Yet something about Thomas and Friends gives liberal parents the creeps.įor example: In 2009, academic Shauna Wilton wrote that Thomas carried a “conservative political ideology.” Her report was derided as whimsy-hating “ political correctness” by conservative media outlets. There’s none of the blatant racism of early Disney Song of the South or religion delivered through talking produce, as in Veggie Tales. Viewers won’t find guns, violence, or anything even approaching a double-entendre. There is something rotten on the Island of Sodor, home to Thomas the Tank Engine.
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