^{Originally published on BabyCenter.com September 14, 2013}

When I did my introductory video many months ago, I mentioned that my interest in my son would make sure I had an interest in anything he got involved in, even if it was something totally foreign to me. I was thinking more along the lines of him getting into sports instead of my nerdy activities. I didn’t think I was talking about Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends.

My son’s first big obsession is with Thomas and his friends. It’s really opened my eyes to the sort of all-out blitz kids’ media makes. When the TV is off, he’s reading Thomas books. When the books are closed, he’s playing with his Thomas toys. There are Thomas video games, puzzles, stickers, activity books, gummy candies, and more. It’s pretty much impossible to get away from the character.

On the bright side, the media blitz can be helpful at times. For example, it’s hard to get the boy to brush his teeth…unless I give him a chance to use his Thomas toothpaste.

My initial reaction to seeing a Thomas cartoon was one of mild horror as I considered the deeper implications of the show. There’s this whole island full of sentient trains, all of which have the minds of three-year olds. They’re all under the control of a fat man in a top hat, who chides them that they must be “really useful.” If they’re not really useful, they get melted down for scrap, which is the equivalent of killing them. There’s also some weird racism/classism going on where the steam engines and diesel engines hate each other irrationally, although at least it’s repeatedly pointed out that this discrimination is stupid and not okay.

But because my son had an interest in this show, I did some research out of curiosity. In my search, I found that comedian George Carlin, in one of his unusually wholesome roles, used to narrate the Thomas stories back when they were part of the TV show Shining Time Station. And because that piqued my interest, I wound up doing more research. Now I know so much about the whole series that I want to jam a Q-tip in my brain to get rid of it all.

I know that what we now known as Thomas & Friends began as The Railway Series, which were written in the 1940s by the Reverend Wilbert Awdry, and that between the Reverend and his son there were 42 books in all. I know that Awdry wasn’t happy that Thomas became the main character of the series when it went to TV, since he was just one of many characters in the books. I know that when the shorts became part of Shining Time Station, Ringo Starr did the narration until he went back to doing music and George Carlin took over (for American audiences – the British series had a different Mr. Conductor), and that Carlin was uncomfortable performing as a voice actor and so brought in a teddy bear to serve as his “audience” while he was recording. Shining Time Station was basically killed by the terrible Thomas and the Magic Railroad movie, but the shorts then got their own feature in Thomas the Tank Engine and friends, which moved from using models to CG trains with the made for TV movie Hero of the Rails, and…whew.

You get the idea.

All told, the research has been useful for a historical perspective, but it’s also been able to give me a grudging acceptance of most of the series. While it’s definitely not my bag, it does have good lessons (usually – some episodes are better than others). The nature of the series, especially the older ones that used models instead of CG, makes it less like a traditional TV show and more like somebody reading a story while somebody else plays with toys, which I find fairly wholesome. And the train models are remarkably accurate, meaning that if my son gets into trains and models, I can probably credit that to the Thomas episodes and books that he became obsessed with as a kid.

The whole research thing has also given me enough knowledge for the first official movie ban in our house. Thomas and the Magic Railroad is an unwatchable mess that got wrecked when some Hollywood execs decided to take a sledgehammer to this long-running popular series under the idea that it needed to be dumbed down for kids. So instead of having engines face everyday problems that they resolve through ideas like teamwork and friendship, they have some incomprehensible plot about magic and gold dust. And they have an evil engine that flat out tries to murder people. So congrats, Thomas and the Magic Railroad, you’re on my ban list. (Highlander: the Source, you’re probably next.)

The entire episode has demonstrated that my son is capable of brainwashing me into at least taking an interest in the things he likes. I just hope the next time he does this, it’s with something like baseball instead of a nightmarish scenario that involves an island of sentient trains.