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???? why is Sodor trending???

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This year, Thomas & Friends: All Engines Go will begin airing in Japan, it marks a “full renewal” of the franchise since ten years ago, when the original TV series made the complete switch to CGI and aired in that country.

To commemorate this renewal, the official Japanese Thomas & Friends YouTube Channel began uploading a live-action mini-series called “Thomas the Salaryman,” featuring a reenactment of classic episodes within the context of an office workspace. Although the episode audio remains unchanged, the reenactment uses onscreen text to provide workplace equivalents for railway terminology that the series frequently uses. It also splices and abridges the episodes so that they more naturally fit the reenactment and context.

If you are not used to the Japanese dub of classic Thomas, you may notice that the dub uses a full voice cast for all the characters, as opposed to just a narrator. It’s quite funny to hear a woman’s voice for Thomas coming out of a grown man, for example.

All three episodes of the mini-series are available on YouTube, complete with English subtitles that translate most of the text and audio. The episodes reenacted are:

“Thomas Falls into a Mobile Game Addiction” (originally “Down the Mine”)

“Trouble in the Staff Toilet” (originally “Trouble in the Shed”)

“Thomas and the Signs of Restructuring” (originally “Thomas and the Rumors”)

What’s also interesting is that, as part of the onscreen text, most of the characters’ English names are localized into Japanese-style ones using kanji, although this is not reflected in the English captions. The names are changed as:

Thomas to “Tōmasu” 

Gordon to “Gotō”

Henry to “Henri”

James to “Jōmu”

Edward to “Edowada”

Percy to “Hashī”

Sir Topham Hatt as “President Hatto”

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Jacob Jarrett (@/FlyingPringle) and his team have been quietly preparing, for the last 2.5 years, a brand new fanmade episode of Thomas & Friends using Gauge 1 model trains, much like the original TV show did up until 2008 and hasn’t been done since. It is under the codename “Project Tiger Moth,” and is filmed in the style of the show’s fifth season.

The pilot episode is set to premiere live at Greenberg’s Great Train and Toy Show at Edison, New Jersey on November 26, 2022. It will also be uploaded to YouTube shortly after, so that everyone has a chance to see it.

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anyone else remember these segments that played with episodes of Thomas on TV?

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The most interesting thing about All Engines Go! is that Gordon’s original voice actor from the Magic Railroad movie came back over 20 years later to reprise his role in the reboot. 

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I haven’t been able to get the full video but we just celebrated one of our steam locomotives turning 145 by chucking a chocolate cake into her firebox

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Video created by @/trackmasterboco on Twitter.

Song: “All My Favorite Songs” by Weezer.

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In addition to the Steamie vs. Diesel war, another iconic scene from “Calling All Engines!” is the one where the steam engines all have nightmares about being repurposed into different non-railway uses. Rather than rely on the obvious dark tone of the engines fearing being scrapped, they went for something more humorous.

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This scene is so absurdly funny, like the idea of “sleepwhistling" being a thing.

[Calling All Engines!]

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“Calling All Engines!” has to be one of the most unintentionally funny Thomas & Friends specials because it had scenes like this where the steam and diesel engines basically start a food fight.

This scene is especially funny because at this point in the series, there are only about four diesels that are hostile to the steam engines: Diesel, Arry, Bert, and Diesel 10. A diesel like Mavis or Salty isn’t going to join in on this war, so you sort of have to feel bad for someone like Diesel who gets into an accident twice by two different engines.

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The people at Thomas the Tank Engine Merchandise have recently uploaded about 30 hours across 19 tapes of most of the footage used for Season/Series 5 of the original Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends. This includes bloopers and behind the scenes footage. The fan group began the process to purchase the tapes from a seller back in 2019, and have since worked to convert the footage into a digitally viewable format. Their YouTube channel, linked here, contains footage from all the tapes, and they have plans to later upload better transfers of them.

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oh shit hey bro that was a crazy party listen uhh some of the boys got really wasted last night and we borrowed your boulder for a bit and well uhh long story short it’s at the bottom of the mountain again. sorry

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I found the font that was used in the sing-along lyrics for the original Thomas & Friends music videos, so as a test for possible future projects, I attempted to recreate some shots using higher quality screencaps as a test. 

The font is Neuzeit Grotesk Black at a size of 45.

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we shoulda stopped at trains all  forms of transit we came up with after trains has been inherently sinful

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Henry gets into a crash.

This was part of a #SixFanarts challenge I did I on Twitter. I asked a friend to draw Thomas as part of their challenge as a “joke”, so they requested me to do Henry back. Drawing locomotives is difficult.