Well, I Had a brilliant Christmas, and I hope you all got
lots of Thomas stuff to. One of my presents I got was the Wooden Railway Blue
Mountain Mystery Grinding Gravel Set, of which (ironically after watching The
Christmas Tree Express that morning) came with Rheneas, as you can see above. My
two big presents were Large Scale Bachmann Percy and a Nokia camera(of which I
took the picture with).
But what did I make of The Christmas Tree Express? Yes, it
was very, very sad seeing the end of Nitrogen Studios, who have shown the
greatest dedication they could to Thomas, but it was wonderful to know it was
the last ever of the Sharon Miller regime.
I had already seen the American version over a month ago, and
of course, we knew it was Sharon Miller’s last written episode, because it was
the same old 3 strikes, same old errors, and if it hadn’t been for last year,
it would have been a Winter Holiday episode. For at least it’s now the
Christmas holiday, as those who have also bought the Merry Winter Wish UK DVD
will have already known.
Toby was of course the scaredy engine we now all know him as,
and like with many Sharon Miller episodes, you just think this is the same
episode you’ve seen before with the 3 strike rules, only with a few different
characters, this was just Happy Hiro with Thomas and Hiro replaced by Toby and
Rheneas, and again, if you’ve bought Merry Winter Wish, or got it in your stocking,
you’ll know from Merry Misty Island that Toby had been there before.
But as said, this is the last we will ever see of Sharon
Miller, we’ve had to put up with the pain of seeing what she was doing to our
number one engine for 7 years, but I, like many fans are over the moon with the
news that 2013 will see Thomas’ old friend from his glory days, Andrew Brenner,
become head writer. I wish him the very best, in fact I’ve sent him one of my
Thomas Christmas cards.
Thank you very much as always to all fellow Thomas fans for
reading my review, and I wish you all the best of the rest of your Christmas, and a
happy, brave and safe 2013, with the words BRING ON KING OF THE RAILWAY!!!!!!