Why are people modding Thomas the Tank Engine into video games?
theface.com
theface.com
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...
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.
tl;dr trains with faces are creepy
This reminds me of one of my favourite Cyanide & Happiness comics:
A Gingerbread man lives in a Gingerbread house. Is the house made of him? Or is he made of house? He screams, for he does not know.
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."
Cracked also articulated it well:
https://www.cracked.com/article_19673_6-insane-but-convincin...
(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...)
https://ttte.fandom.com/wiki/The_Sad_Story_of_Henry
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.
"But I think he deserved his punishment. Don't you?"
Edit: Oh, it's actually from the very first book published 1945.
...speaking as a father who used to take a book with me to read when my daughter used to throw herself to the ground and refuse to walk any further.
He still has the blocks, but poor Thomas is no more.
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).
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).
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?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_the_Green_Engine#Racism_...
There's something to be said for the juxtapositioning of Thomas' face in darker settings.
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.
Your point is broadly correct, but I think you chose the wrong example. The Flying Scotsman extensively toured the US, Canada and Australia.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LNER_Class_A3_4472_Flying_Scot...
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.
Thomas' face, particularly his expression, is what makes these mods amusing.