![]() Why do the diesels have working class accents?.Why would Sir Toppham trust any of the engines to do anything? They screw up every assignment they’re given.There’s a lot of other peripheral stuff, though. So I have two questions: 1) What would Karl Marx say about all of this? 2) What kind of lessons is this show teaching our children about work? They do it because it fills a psychological need, and more particularly because they want to make the Fat Controller happy. There’s a scene in the movie Hero of the Rails where we learn that engines who aren’t really useful are MELTED DOWN FOR SCRAP.īut this isn’t why the engines usually want to be Really Useful. Now, wanting to be Really Useful is rational. But what they’re doing is recognizably work. The trains have an almost fetishistic attachment to being useful. It’s the “Really Useful Engine” thing that gets me. The Fat Controller says “Hurrah for James!” And then everybody learns a valuable lesson. James is vain, Gordon is proud, etc.) The Fat Controller yells at James for causing “confusion and delay,” and James feels terrible about not being “a Really Useful Engine.” James hustles around to fix whatever problem he caused. (There’s not a lot of consistency in the characterization, here, but some of the engines have habitual vices. “A very special special,” as they like to say. Look, the basic plot of Thomas and Friends works like this: one of the trains - let’s just say it’s James - gets an important assignment. I was thinking of writing a post about this called “Scenes from the Class Struggle on Sodor”. ![]() What’s been on your mind as you’ve een watching it with your 1.5 year-old (or on your own, long after your son has gone to bed)? ![]() Ryan Sheely: Hey Jordan, I hear you’ve been watching a lot of Thomas the Tank Engine lately and have some thoughts on it.
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