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Original article can be found here

“Thomas the Tank Engine had to shut the hell up to save children everywhere”

So, this is, effectively, the title of this piece. It was written around the time Martin T. Sherman, the voice of Thomas since 2009, quit his job due to a salary dispute and this is what the title is referring to. I’ll give that it’s fairly attention-grabbing (it made me read the damn thing), though I can’t ignore that it’s also clumsily worded and deceptive. Sherman did not quit his job to “save children everywhere”, (nor did his departure slow the success of the franchise, if I’m honest) he quit his job because the company refused to pay him the amount he sought and felt was apropos for the growing popularity of the franchise. He made it quite clear in the follow up of this development that he lamented having to leave the show and blames HiT entertainment for their lack of professionalism, not the Thomas franchise itself (which he still seems to admire for the very themes Van Slyke will go on to criticize); “I find it ironic,” Sherman said, “that most of the shows that Hit Entertainment puts out are about worlds where good people get rewarded, justice happens, and bad things happen to bad people. They themselves don't live up to that world in any way.”

What’s more, Van Slyke only takes the first few sentences of this piece to comment on Sherman’s departure, yet she’s using it as the pulling point to read her article. Already she’s put herself in a less-than reputable position for capitalizing on a very disappointing moment in an actor’s career, while simultaneously refusing to expand on it past its attention-grabbing potential.

My son, now three-and-a-half years old, thankfully never never went through a manic train fascination like so many other children. But once in a while, he'd get a bug in his brain to watch Thomas, and every time I sat and watched with him, I winced and groaned almost as much as Percy.

We have to commend Van Slyke on her heroic amount of patience to sit down and watch something her child enjoys despite the lack of personal entertainment she might find in his choices (such is the life of a preschool parent). That does seem to be the accolade she’s seeking, along with one for her child that he “never went through a manic train fascination like so many other children”. Evidently Van Slyke Jr. is already on the path to moral sainthood and social enlightenment nirvana just like his mother. I’m sure his being spared the Thomas fascination (as the spawn of the rest of us peons so often fall prey to) was just a happy coincidence, a result of his superior breeding and not due to a controlling parent that upholds the values of fascist-like censorship in the household.

When I heard the news this week, that the voice actor behind Thomas's incessant whinging quit the series because he was underpaid, I remembered all of the reasons that I cut my kid off from the show in the first place.

Having read this article already I can promise you that Van Slyke does nothing to connect Sherman’s departure from the show with her reasons for banning Thomas and his steam engine friends from her morally pure, socially enlightened household (begs the question why she had to “cut [her] kid off” from a show that she claims he never really cared for anyway). This makes one wonder why a contract dispute between an actor and a company made Van Slyke remember her own desperate reaching. I’m going to guess that the news simply gave her relevant leverage to alert everyone to her own parental martyrdom- after all, what is an act of heroism if there’s no one there to pat you on the back for it/and or feel inadequate in comparison?

Thomas and those friends are trains that toil away endlessly on the Isle of Sodor – which seems to be forever caught in British colonial times –

This odd little non-sequitur continues to haunt me. While I won’t deny the given fact that the rest of Van Slyke’s points in this article are varying levels of ridiculous, this assertion that the comings and goings on the Island of Sodor are like that of British colonial times is a special kind of strange. What colonial period in British history is Van Slyke referring to? In my US-centric mind I immediately think of our 1700’s colonial period, but that, for obvious reasons, is completely inapplicable. I looked deeper into it and realized oh, of course, British imperialism, how could I forget? “The sun never sets”, the time with India and all of that. And yet...literally nothing about the world of Thomas alludes even indirectly to imperialism or the colonial period (of any country’s history), so far as I can see. Of course, Van Slyke doesn’t mention this again, much less explain where and how she came to this conclusion. Maybe she’s thinking of Misty Island and how Topham Hatt basically helped himself to it after the discovery of the Logging Locos. And, yet, he didn’t really at all. Crash, Bash and Ferdinand pretty much continue on their island as usual and TH occasionally appeals to them for Jobi wood, which they’re happy to provide. Sometimes they come and help out on Sodor which, again, they’re happy to do. Seems like a pretty symbiotic relationship to me. The point is moot, anyway, because I’m willing to bet serious money that Van Slyke is basing this entire op-ed piece off of two or three haphazardly watched episodes from the dismal 15th or 16th seasons and has no idea the Misty Island/Logging Locos thing even exists.

It should be noted, ‘colonialism’ is one of those shock-factor buzzwords people sometimes throw into an argument to make something sound worse and more socially irresponsible than it is, whether it actually applies to the object in question or not (it usually doesn’t).

For one, these trains perform tasks dictated by their imperious, little white boss, Sir Topham Hatt (also known as The Fat Controller)...basically, he's the Monopoly dictator of their funky little island. Inevitably, the trains get in a fight with or pick on one another (or generally mess up whatever job they are supposed to be doing) until Hatt has to scold one of them about being a "really useful engine", because their sole utility in life is their ability to satisfy his whims. Yeah, because I want to teach my kid to admire a controlling autocrat.

Where I will -half heartedly and with much reluctance- concede to understand the point is the troubling nature of the steam engines’ sentience and their devotion to working without pay. There have been nights I, too, have laid wide awake wondering at the moral responsibility of this in a children’s show...and then I remember that we’re watching a show about steam engines. Locomotives. Literally, working and performing tasks is what they were built to do and this doesn’t change just because they’ve been made sentient for the sake of telling a story (how boring would the show be if the engine characters didn’t have personalities just to avoid any allegories to slavery? The show would instead have to be about humans and that defeats the whole purpose of Thomas entirely- unless the show were like my human au fanfic where all the engine characters are, instead, human...but I digress). To the franchise’s credit in this respect, they make it pretty clear that the engines are usually given the choice of whether or not to go work where they get slated to work (in terms of location, like Thomas got to choose to come work on Sodor, Victor received the same offer, when Hiro wanted to leave and go back to Japan he was permitted to do so without argument- even in the very early stories when Topham Hatt first goes and gets Percy, he asks him if he’d like to work for him). Yes, there are the occasional complaints, but such is true in most jobs. The concept of, ‘you don’t always get to do the jobs you like’ is a very universal truth of life and prevalent in Thomas, however bitter a pill that is to swallow for those living in idealistic dream worlds (as I suspect Van Slyke is).

Van Slyke is also wrong in that the steam engines’ “sole utility in life is their ability to satisfy [Topham Hatt’s] whims”. Sir Topham, for all the villain that he apparently is, is as much bound to the duties and obligations of the Sodor economy as the rest of his fleet. Yes, it is true he tasks them with the personal missions of transporting his mother, family members and so on, but most of the jobs we see the engines tasked with are public transportation and shipment of goods- much the opposite of Topham Hatt’s whims.

But, really. If you take honest personal offense with steam locomotives being used for their constructed purpose, I really don’t know what to tell you. Take the protest to an actual railway, I guess.

James is mortified that he has to travel while pink and proceeds to hide from all the other trains along the way. When he's caught, the other trains – including Thomas – viciously laugh and mock him.

Van Slyke is speaking now of the episode where James is tasked with picking up Topham Hatt’s granddaughter while covered in his pink undercoating. James is vain (which Van Slyke also naturally takes issue with- a bit ironic, considering) so he feels embarrassed to have to tool around Sodor while painted such a silly color, a color that is inherently feminine, Van Slyke will later attest: “You think a little boy watching Thomas is going to file away the lesson that pink is OK for boys? No, what kids remember is that James was laughed at, cruelly, over and over again, because he looked different and was clad in a "girly" pink color.” “Girly” is not a label that any of the trains place on James, even during their “vicious mocking” (vicious for Van Slyke apparently equates to good-natured, mild ribbing between friends at the expense of all-too fragile ego) but rather one that Van Slyke invents on account of the fact that Topham Hatt’s granddaughter happens to like pink. Van Slyke’s logic is infallible, folks: if one girl likes pink, then they all must like pink right? What’s more, the fact that girls like pink must indeed be why the engines thought James looked silly and not because, as is evidenced in the episode itself, being that shade of pink means an engine is only half-painted (the steam engine equivalent of moving around in one’s underwear) or that, as an undercoating, this particular shade of pink looks flimsy and dull and unremarkable. No, no, Van Slyke insists, the explanation just couldn’t be that simple.

I think we also need to commend Van Slyke on knowing exactly what each and every child is going to take away from this episode- which is, without a doubt, the fact that pink is not okay! It’s not for boys! Despite the fact that by the end of the episode James accepts his pink proudly because it made someone happy and he doesn’t care what anyone thinks of him, even if they do continue to poke fun. What a terrible message for children.

(For the record, all the "villains" on Thomas and Friends are the dirty diesel engines. I'd like to think there was a good environmental message in there, but when the good engines pump out white smoke and the bad engines pump out black smoke – and they are all pumping out smoke – it's not hard to make the leap into the race territory.)

No, it’s not hard at all, not when you’re explicitly looking for a white versus black allegory, to the point that you’re more than willing to invent one. Once again, Van Slyke’s ignorance of this franchise shows; only two of the many diesels in the show have ever been portrayed as villains and not even entirely shameless or irredeemable ones at that. Diesel is shown to have a heart when he goes to great lengths just to make some school children happy, Diesel 10 (for as Snidely Whiplashian as he can be) only ever acts of malice when he wants equal treatment for the diesels, which he always gets in the end when he makes amends. Most of the time the antagonist role either falls to one of the steam engines or, in the most recent film, Legend of the Lost Treasure, an old white guy. A white guy, Van Slyke! A white old guy who was, without a doubt, one of the most irredeemable and shameless villains the franchise has ever produced (in canon- let’s not forget the ill-fated PT Boomer that was cut from the final version of The Magic Railroad, another old white guy villain though I’m not sure if he counts).

Also, steam engines don’t pump out smoke, they pump out steam (the clue is in the name, Van Slyke, come on). Diesel engines puff out exhaust. If an engine or a diesel were pumping out smoke something would be seriously wrong so, no, they are not “all pumping out smoke”. (Also, there technically is no such thing as “white smoke”)

It’s rather unbelievable how adamantly opposed Van Slyke was to doing any research into any of this whatsoever, despite feeling this article deserved publishing. The future of journalism, everyone.

And that's not even to get started on the female trains. Well, actually it's hard to get started on them, because they barely exist. Take a quick scan of the more than 100 trains and characters in the Thomas universe – it spans multiple books, toys and continents in addition to a TV show – and you can quickly count on two hands the number of lady trains that populate is Isle of Sodor. Emily – the only lady train to get name checked in the opening credits and the only one who regularly hangs out with the boy trains – is said to "know her stuff." That's the sole description of her personality. What does that even mean?

I imagine it means exactly as is written on the packaging, that Emily is knowledgeable about her job. Is that really so hard of a blank to fill in, Van Slyke? The other male engines don’t get much better descriptions in this roll call song either, for whatever that’s worth (apparently nothing). In fact, I personally think Henry and Toby are the ones that get the bum deal as their only character description in this song is “toots and huffs and puffs” and “well, let’s say, he’s square”, respectively. At least Emily’s lyrics give us some insight, however shallow, into her character’s personality. Since Van Slyke is so good at making leaps, I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess that if all the main characters had been made female her critique would be that their 2 second description line in a roll call song was too vague, because characterization in the actual show means nothing in the wake of a minute long theme song. Apparently.

Now, I do have to give that the female presence in Thomas was sorely lacking for awhile. Yes, even in the first few books the cast is entirely male! What Van Slyke doesn’t mention is the effort the franchise has made to introduce more and more varied, colorful female characters to the line up; Marion, the endearing, upbeat, talkative steam shovel with a very active imagination; Caitlin, the lively streamlined engine that can best the speed of the fastest engines on Sodor; Mavis, the stern, matronly diesel engine that even the most fearsome engines on the island fear and respect; Belle, the powerful but kind fire engine that everyone admires (just to name a FEW) and that says nothing of the incoming swath of female characters being introduced in The Great Race later this year.  Last year, we saw the airing of “The Best Engine Ever” which features Emily and Caitlin deriving strength from one another and turning envy into a respectful friendship while realizing their own individual talents and merits (not to be left out is Marion’s cameo encouragement for Emily to be proud of herself and lift her metaphorical shovel high). This 10 minute episode did better at responsibly writing female characters and their relationships than most hour long adult shows I’ve seen recently.  

What I can’t agree with is the assertion that the show is somehow undeserving and lacking in any other value just because the male cast outnumbers the female. The fact that Van Slyke ignores all the things the show does right with the female characters, however small in number, makes this probably the weakest way someone could’ve brought the argument forward. Such can be said of the rest of this article.  

When it comes to female characters with regard to feminist ideals quality is always more important than quantity- after all, what good is an entire cast of female characters if they’re all bland and stereotypical and one-dimensional?

Last year, the British Labour shadow Transportation Secretary even called out Thomas for its lack of females, saying that the franchise setting a bad example for girl wannabe train engineers everywhere.

Though this is one of the only times Van Slyke makes an effort in this article to back up her sources (the first being, simply, the article about Sherman’s departure from the show) she still completely disregards Mary Creagh’s mention of a whole host of other children’s shows that are also, in her opinion, falling behind in female representation. Creagh also commends the Thomas franchise for having “wonderful stories”, something that was suspiciously left out of this mention. Gee, I wonder why Van Slyke so conveniently skims over that part and otherwise colors Creagh as bitter about the Steam Team as she is? For that matter, why would the Transportation Secretary go to the trouble of trying to improve a show that was just an irresponsible, irredeemable garbage heap, like Van Slyke so desperately wants us to believe Thomas and Friends is?  She also neglects to mention the part of the article where HiT entertainment weighs in: “Hit Entertainment, the company which owns the rights to Thomas & Friends, admitted there was a "historical imbalance", but said more female engines are "in development". A spokesman said: "Every engine has a job to do whether that's hauling materials aroudn the Island of Sodor or pulling passengers - gender is irrelevent."

And so it should be. When we start valuing characters more for their decided gender identity rather than the quality of their writing, the integrity of the story and the character falls apart, making it meaningless whether they’re male or female or otherwise. Either way, they’ll still be shoddy.

At first blush, Thomas and his friends seem rather placid and mild. And there are certainly a lot worse shows in terms of in-your-face violence, sexism, racism and classism. But looks can be deceiving: the constant bent of messages about friendship, work, class, gender and race sends my kid the absolute wrong message.

I suppose it depends on what your definition of ‘wrong’ is. Let’s briefly dissect each of these themes into how they pertain to the show, according to someone who is actually familiar with the Thomas universe:

Friendship: No, this is not a show where all the engines are consistently sweet and patient and generous with each other, like in some children’s programming. To do so would mean to water down the Thomas characters to the point of unrecognizability, to make them bland and one-dimensional and boring just in the name of being inoffensive. It wouldn’t make sense for a character like Gordon, for example, to be nice and sweet all the time. Gordon is a haughty, serious, but secretly vulnerable engine that takes a lot of pride in his abilities. To be kind and friendly, to him, means weakness and so he often employs defense mechanisms in the form of boasting, bragging, teasing, etc. For this reason, it’s all the more satisfying when he does humble himself, when he shows avid concern for his friends, when he defends their honor. Gordon is an interesting, well-rounded, well-written character because of his pride, because he’s also an extremely loyal friend with a soft underbelly. The fact that the characters are so layered and unique and well-written is something that sets Thomas apart from many other children’s shows where supporting characters have a tendency to be interchangeable, flat, forgettable, more prop than character...mostly because they always agree, are always sweet to their friends and lack vital conflict. Personally, I’d rather my son see examples of well-written characters at an early age than bland character after bland character just to shield him from the very natural personality conflicts people run into with each other in real life, even with their friends. This kind of complex writing shouldn’t just be reserved for adult-oriented shows. What’s important is that, in the end, Thomas and his friends find ways to work around their differences and continue being amicable. To me, that’s more helpful for developing children and their sense of relationships with people than an unrealistic ideal of everyone being sweet and considerate all the time.  

Work/Class: Van Slyke has already made it pretty clear to this point that she doesn’t appreciate the kind of work ethics that Thomas is promoting. She also doesn’t appreciate that Sir Topham exercises his perfectly legal right to have his engines transport him for personal outings. How dare he be a successful businessman, I guess? How dare he use his steam powered locomotives for exactly what they were built to do! He should just let them run freely out in the track-less fields! (I’m trying to play along, Van Slyke, I really am) While I can sort of understand taking issue with the blind loyalty to the boss thing (and I certainly take my own halfhearted issue with Sir Topham’s lack of professional boundaries in the live action snippets with Perkins- seriously, dude, you were hired as an engine driver, why are you making cakes for this guy? Babysitting his mother’s parrot? Putting on magic shows for him?) I still don’t really agree that caste systems and class discrepancies on Sodor really even play that big of a part. As far as the humans are concerned, Sodor seems to have a thriving economy with a strong middle class. The ‘rich’ characters, the few that there even are, are never depicted treating anyone as inferior or even getting that much more privileges. It bears mentioning that the Earl of Sodor, Sir Robert, only ever takes public transport (apart from his first appearance, in which he seemed pretty uncomfortable in Spencer’s coach), always hangs out with the locals (even rallies and tailgates with them before a soccer match), and made his castle open to the public, for everyone to enjoy. Again though, I don’t think Van Slyke bothered to watch King of The Railway or anything past the handful of episodes that so deeply offended her, so she’s blissfully unaware of the facts outside her own echo chamber. Engine-wise, no one is ever above doing menial tasks. Even Spencer, the private engine of the Duke and Duchess, is occasionally given railway jobs like being a back engine or helping to transport freight. I don’t see the alleged glorified class discrepancy in Thomas, but then again I’m not reaching for it with my football field length pole either.

Gender: For someone like Van Slyke who believes that a feminist narrative is only as good as the amount of female characters rather than the quality of their writing, Thomas is indeed a disappointing show. It really doesn’t matter that the female cast is ever expanding, that each of the lady characters are unique and strong and endearing in their own way, it only matters that there’s simply not enough female character filler to fulfill her arbitrary quota, I guess. For someone that likes to see well-written, important female characters with no specific concern to the exact number, Thomas is a great show. There’s strength and pluck to be found in all of them, along with the same flaws that all of the male characters have too. They’re all factoring in more prominently to the plots, taking on the same tasks as the boys, and are often even seen as smarter and more capable than. Thomas and Friends deserves every accolade for what they’ve been doing to add a female presence and Van Slyke really has no room to be commenting one way or another as Emily seems to be the only female character she’s aware of.

Race: It really takes a special sort of person to find race issues in a show that focuses on steam locomotive characters with grey colored faces but, god bless her, Van Slyke has defied the odds. To put it plainly, the engines do not have assigned races (nationalities, sure, but that’s not the same thing)- and if, for some reason, they do and I missed it, it literally plays no role in how the engines are treated or how they treat each other. As Van Slyke briefly mentioned through that rather silly allegory about the ‘smoke’, there are tensions between the diesels and the steamies (though it’s almost non-existent in the more recent episodes and movies, as the diesels and the steamies seem to get along fine). This is not a race thing, not even in metaphor; it’s a result of the natural progression of diesel engines replacing steam-powered locomotives, a thing that happened in real life. This is something of a moot point anyway because, as stated previously, Sodor has achieved some kind of peaceful, amber-stasis utopia where time doesn’t move in a productive way and the steamies and diesels coexist without much incident anymore.

Listen, I firmly believe a parent is well-within their rights to choose the best programming for their child. A parent is perfectly entitled to not like some of the shows their children do. A parent is also allowed to decide that a certain show or movie or game or toy etc is not conducive to how they’re choosing to raise their child and keep their child from being exposed to that thing. My motive here is not to deny Van Slyke her right as a parent, but rather to challenge her weak, publicly-posted argument that Thomas is a poorly written, irresponsible narrative that encourages things like racism and sexism just because she doesn’t like it.. The fact that she would drum up such an argument with so little of an understanding for how the Thomas universe works is offensive in and of itself.

There are many good, valid reasons not to like something, even Thomas. This article doesn’t present any of them.

And really, that theme song makes me scream. Thomas can just go bust my buffers.

Ah, there it is.