It's nothing more than an on going meme. However the Thomas the Tank Engine meme has survived and been thriving for many years now, much longer than most others of the same type do. Look back at the days of left for dead, people modded all types of characters like the telletubbies and even Hank from King of the Hill into the game. Thomas has a lot of lore and history surrounding it. Notably the "It was time for him to leave, for Thomas had now seen everything" meme. There really isn't a one sentence explanation for it, it's just a part of the meme culture surrounding these types of shows that is very tedious to explain. It's something you grow into, it would be very difficult to understand this if you had no idea or understanding of why these cultures exist.
That was an extremely satisfying mod for someone who got dragged into subbing at a early childhood center when they ran out of staff. That damn purple thing singing is still burned into my memory.
I don't remember that particular mod. I do remember playing Barneysplat![1] on one of the local BBS's I frequented though. It was pretty satisfying for a text-only experience.
In Quake I there was even a fan-made Beavis and Butt-Head model you could use as player model in multiplayer (everyone on the LAN just copied a huge folder of models and skins to their Quake install dirs).
Of course, the model was of both Beavis and Butt-Head, who as a side-by-side pair didn't even come close to approximating the player's hitbox.
> […] characters like the telletubbies (sic) […]
Ideally with the annoying sounds made when hit. Homer Simpson was a popular choice too, especially with the ‘doh!’ he made when shot at.
I believe he played the narrator/conductor guy on the TV show after Ringo Starr (although I don't know what, if any, differences there were between the UK and US versions).
Always thought that was amusing when my little half-brother was watching it during my breaks from college. If only you knew who that guy was, little bro...
I think partially because the modders don't have to animate walk cycles and limbs moving, the train is mostly static. Also it's the contrast between horror and Thomas's squeaky clean branding.
He's also a double non-sequiter in most games he's modded into. Not only are there no trains, there are no trains with faces.
He stands out instantly as out of place in a way that some other in-jokes might not. Hank Hill might not look super weird in Left 4 Dead; presumably a number of middle-aged Southern men with an avid interest in propane were caught in the zombie apocalypse.
Because of this, it's funny even if you don't know who Thomas the Tank is. I think this is part of the reason for Shrek memes persisting as well (in addition to Shrek's extremely dedicated fanbase).
I think there's also the uncanny valley creepiness of Thomas's face, particularly within the context of an actual horror game. Hilarious to think that something so genuinely terrifying could come out of a children's show.
Terrifying for you but my two and a half year old has absolutely loved Thomas for almost half her life. She has Thomas toys, clothes, books, dvds, had a ride-on electric Thomas complete with circular track that took up most of the living room, and we took her on the life-size Thomas train in Pennsylvania twice. Thomas is absolutely her jam, followed by Lightning McQueen and then Elmo. Her nostalgia will obviously be different than our nostalgia, but it's nice to see the joy it brings her.
The RE2 mod footage makes me think about and feel like Silent Hill. Things make no sense in a nightmarish way because wetware tries to process them into something that almost individually makes sense yet violently conflicts with other elements that also almost make sense, but combine into an overarching distressing cognitive dissonance which causes unsettlement and terror.
I think this causes much less distress during youth because you've not been exposed to so many complex things with such regularity and over such a long period as you have later on, so you don't really unconsciously think "this is a face; no, wait, a train. wait, the bars on the wheels, they're kinda like where arms should be. are they arms? no this is a train. no ears, no hair, this is not really a head. Of course it's a train, but it's smiling. so it has a mouth, but no limbs, how does it eat? is someone and feeding it with charcoal by entering it from the back where the butt should be? WHERE ARE THE VISCERAS?"
Just regarding the face, it's kind of like the comment says in this video[0], somehow at 3:19 they're ok because they're abstract enough, at 4:02 they're fully entering the unsettling uncanny valley, but at 5:55 they look fine. And here you can fully extrapolate a matching body in your mind, but not with that hellish train, where the extrapolation projects such a body onto the train thing (and the other way around).
There's an undercurrent of existential horror entirely intrinsic to Thomas the Tank engine which already contrasts with the superficially happy and brightly-colored children's show. Putting Thomas in incongruous or unsettling situations throws this into sharp relief. Just what is Thomas?
I've been watching a lot of Thomas with my kid and yea it seems to somehow be a nightmare dystopia underneath even though nobody can explain why.
Stephen King's The Dark Tower spoiler below:
Stephen King's masterpiece "The Dark Tower" series has an intelligent AI in the third book called "Blain the Train". The dark tower series starts off as a kind of medieval Western in some barren dessert world and pretty soon there are doorways to parallel worlds and times like New York City. One parallel world was once populated by a society that is probably a few hundred years ahead of us technologically speaking, but they were warlike and killed themselves off. All that is left is Blaine the Monorail and Patricia the Train and they are super homicidally insane. I've been scared of Thomas ever since.
"Part of it, perhaps, is that Thomas and his world are innately horrendous, and there’s something horrendous about taking all that off the rails and into a digital space. The original books, penned in the 1940s by the Anglican reverend Wilbert Awdry, now read like an enthusiastic allegory for bigotry and exploitation. The New Yorker, among other publications, has a ghoulish piece of essayistic fiction on the drizzly dystopia that is Thomas’s Island of Sodor, where cheerful anthropomorphic machines are torn apart, worked to death or bricked up in tunnels at the whim of a well-heeled Fat Controller. For all its dark corners and clutching cadavers, Resident Evil 2’s setting can seem almost benign by comparison."
(Another show with cheery, brightly colored human-machine hybrids existing in a highly regulated totalitarian structure is Teletubbies, although it's more of a Brave New World to Thomas's 1984. You do see creepy Teletubby "cursed images" from time to time...)
The bricked up in tunnels example was pretty horrifying. Like I know they want to convey the value of hard work, but that is some Cask of Amontillado level crazy.
My toddler asks to watch that one most days and it is just horrible! Especially when the episode ends with Ringo saying "I think he deserves his punishment, don't you?"
This particular episode horrifies me; I feel like kids will grow up and as adults, look back on this and wonder how they didn't realize how dark it was, much like I do with some parts of things like The Brave Little Toaster.
My son has a Thomas the Tank Engine megablocks set, and he recoiled in terror when he first unearthed the Thomas-face block. Like, inconsolable crying @ 18 months. There is clearly a instinctual aversion to those out of place human features. Reminded me of the scene in Alien Resurrection with the failed clones.
He still has the blocks, but poor Thomas is no more.
Touched on in the article, but some of the storylines are quite disturbing.
In Henry, Henry doesn't want to spoil his paint in the rain, so hides in a tunnel. The Fat Controller then bricks him up in the tunnel.
The Fat Controller. The big tender engines "refuse to shunt like common tank engines"[1]. So the Fat Controller locks them up whilst the tank engines break the strike.
Theres a strange plot point, maybe in The Diesel, where Daisy, one of the very few 'female' trains, 'feels something between her axels', which turns out to be an oil leak, might be reading too much into that though...
[1] Yes that's a direct quote from a Thomas the Tank Engine book, from memory, on HN. Am I 'leet' yet?
If you've been a parent, half in a daze, overtired, seeing insipid Thomas on TV and hoping - or fearing - it will amuse a toddler while you doze, you'll understand. Getting to fight him in a familiar game is a bossfight of a different sort.
People are doing this because they are excited beyond themselves about the next re-skin of Call of Duty 19 or whatever. It's like a virtual graffiti made by bored hackers.
because of overwhelming prevalence of 2chan and nico nico douga(a lot of which is replicated on US/korean/russian social networks either directly or via homage), the Japanese are very clued into the popularity of media in digital culture.
The real life Thomas the Tank Engine is keeping the model railway business alive in the UK. The hobby of model railways is only for 70+ year old retired men with money, it isn't of great appeal to anyone younger. Part of the problem is that a model railway now has to be 'photorealistic' and period accurate. It isn't just 'playing trains', it is historical recreation in miniature. A normal loco is going to cost well upwards of £100 and not be affordable to someone on pocket money, particularly if they want a rake of coaches too.
Thomas the Tank Engine and his friends make it possible to have a train set that doesn't have to be finely modelled. The track doesn't require any scenery and the railway actually can be for 'playing trains'. Costs don't have to be high and Thomas, on a basic oval with a couple of carriages can be £50 affordable and robust.
Model trains are not a global franchise except for when it comes to Thomas the Tank Engine. Nobody outside the UK wants a 'Flying Scotsman' train set as it is a British train that never made it onto the wider European network or further afield. Equally, nobody in the UK wants a Union Pacific 4014 'Big Boy' even if people in the US are going crazy for that recently refurbished 'prototype' right now.
Thomas is therefore not stuck to just the UK. Cheap plastic Thomas the Tank Engine models can be sold all around the world. He isn't even particularly gender stereotyped, a parent can buy Thomas the Tank Engine train set for a daughter, although this is unlikely. Although easy to dismiss, Thomas the Tank Engine is a vital gateway drug for keeping model railways as an option in toy shops and their online counterparts. Without him model trains would have gone the way of so many other historical toys.
What the world really needs are some scale model accessories borrowed from video game franchises for the train set.
> Nobody outside the UK wants a 'Flying Scotsman' train set as it is a British train that never made it onto the wider European network or further afield.
Your point is broadly correct, but I think you chose the wrong example. The Flying Scotsman extensively toured the US, Canada and Australia.[1]
Thanks for that. Seems that The Flying Scotsman locomotive was built for a life of promotional touring.
Didn't know the Flying Scotsman went on a post-retirement tour and I find it typical that the PM of the day thought this relic could be good for promoting British exports. Who would have wanted some outmoded, expensive lump of iron?
This was a time when Concorde was being built, you would have thought UK Plc would have had better goodies than The Flying Scotsman to send off to America.
Different things happen when objects get to be in museum world. If anything there is to learn from the story is the importance of getting stuff into 'museum world', then there are the collaborations, tours and opportunities to shift the merchandise.
I wonder how well the marketing and tour would have gone had 4477 'Gay Crusader' been the one to be spared of its fate on Barry Island (where all trains went to die).
What is also interesting is that the service was called 'The Flying Scotsman'. Yet most people would be quite insistent that it is the locomotive, not the service that the name refers to. I wonder why this is not something done a bit more extensively today. There is no single loco that is synonymous with the channel tunnel service. They could have one 'poster child' loco and make it sound special, to market channel tunnel trips a bit more 'romantically' than how it is done currently with faceless no-name locos.
I suspect some of these mods are used to create fan versions of Thomas videos. My son watches them on YouTube and while I suppose they aren’t considered commercial usage, they can generate millions of views, which could be resulting in substantial YT partner income.
Yeah but the third video is simultaneously hilarious and genuinely terrifying in a kind of weird way - it definitely captures the fear of unstoppable inevitability.
