Season 16, Episode 5 Review: Ho Ho Snowman

Since his introduction to the series, Charlie the purple fun engine has been greatly hated by many fans, who see him representing everything wrong with the series as it is, I of course don’t hate anything Thomas, but I have deeply asked myself question of what is Charlie’s purpose in the series? Besides being that of all the characters now, as a marketing tool. As everyone knows, most of the Thomas characters were original introduced with a reason for being on The Fat Controller’s railway, they would be given a function you would expect of a real railway engine, the engine was introduced to help in the yard, to work on the quarry tramway, to join another engine on his branch line, ect. Charlie was introduced to tell what he calls jokes, of which many think are more terrible than Christmas cracker jokes, written 50 years ago, by Bruce Forsyth. Despite what us fans think of him, Charlie has been one of Hit’s only characters to have been given as much attention to, just showing how lazy the writing of the show is.

But anyway, many of us could write a whole series on our problems with Charlie, onto what I actually thought of today’s episode. To think after hearing the first line of the episode, I felt really badly, as Sharon Miller would put it, for the episode started with Angelis saying; “On the Island of Sodor, it was wintertime,” when he should have said; “It was wintertime on the Island of Sodor,” he’s the greatest Thomas narrator of all time and you now have him saying lines like that, no wonder he’s no longer doing it in his old enthusiasm.

Moving on, we next see Thomas and Charlie shutting trucks on Gordon’s hill!!!!!!!!!!  We were less than 15 seconds in the episode, before seeing something totally against railway realism. The only positive about this episode was Thomas saying he didn’t like wearing his snow plough, for all the continuity errors in Hit’s version of the show, they can still at least maintain that.

To think today’s episode was based around one of HiT’s greatest, Henry the hypochondriac, the big green engine that was once grumpy, but good hearted, despite feeling sorry for himself when feeling ill in Awdry’s earliest stories, has since series 8, become more scared of everything, and more air-headed, yet, he’s now been given Edward’s old title of the wise old engine, he must have known it was someone pretending to be the snowman, and he must have seen Charlie in the siding, I’ve seen this in many other episodes recently, when one engine is hiding from one engine, behind another’s train, and why is the snowman there? Was it a trainspotter who was tired of having to wait by the siding, for an engine go by, (because he was trying to make his special special look extra special) that he built a whole snowman?

Then after the strikes take place, we see the scene when everything is made up. In it, we see all the engines at the sheds, instead of doing their jobs, and the only time we see Henry’s driver in the whole episode, which was when he opened Henry’s door, once again proving that the driver and fireman are just the human drowns that do the engine’s bidding, and when it happened, we heard the line; “Henry’s driver opened Henry’s door.” To think this whole act at Tidmouth Sheds alone shows how much the Thomas series now is just less than an eco of Awdry’s original work, as kids growing up with the classic Thomas series, we believed that these were talking trains, working on a real railway, and part of this was the clever language Awdry used when writing for the characters that we know and love. We usually hear of the children of today not getting the best schooling, or not being imaginative, and the fact that the modern day incarnation of the most loved children’s character of all time suffers from sleazy, repetitive writing is certainly not helping matters.

I’m very surprised in the fact that no parent, no so called processor of the welfare of children, or any of the people that have claimed over the past few years that Thomas is sexist, Enid Blyton was a racist, or Rastamouse is a stereo­type, hasn’t complained about the terrible grammar and the wrong messages being found in the current series, oh wait, those are the people that only criticize something deeply loved by both children and adults when they can find something in it that’s not there, the ones that never complain if there actually is something racist or inappropriate on television, only something that would get them 30 minutes of fame on The Matthew Wright Show. I was so happy last year when the anti-PC groups and the Awdry family themselves were expressing their anger at HiT referring to Christmas as the Winter holidays in the new episodes, saying it was the political correctness that the great man who gave us Thomas, would have despised, and it creates all the more friction towards the Muslim community in Britain, and as the anti-PC groups were saying, we should be telling our MPs or informing groups if we have a problem with what is considered good programming for children, and they’re right, complain if you think the writers of Thomas are sending messages like it’s alright to think badly of someone else because they’re different in how the steam engines have been towards the diesels in the last few series, or if you think it’s teaching kids bad grammar, for I remember when they were saying that about the Teletubies, (even though that was their way of speaking). You may think what’s the point in doing so? Sharon Miller’s now left, and who knows what’s  going to happen to HiT since it’s now been bought by Mattle, but at least we can make it that what HiT has done to Thomas and the current generation of children will be frowned on forever, and not just by the fan base.