When I was very young we had Thomas The Tank Engine books in my primary school.
Nice drawings, simple, child-like stories.
By the time I had my own children, the books had been made into little, five minute films.
Same stories, very basic animation, Ringo Starr’s voice-over.
Thomas and his friends were always doing something naughty, and always getting taught a lesson.
In one story it’s raining and Henry, the green engine, doesn’t want to get his paint wet.
So he stops in a tunnel and won’t come out to do his work.
To teach him a lesson, the Fat Controller has him bricked in.
Henry can see out, but he can’t come out.
Meanwhile all the other engines are having to do his work.
Henry is stuck in the tunnel but the Fat Controller won’t let him out until he’s learned a lesson.
The lesson is not to be vain and selfish.
Eventually, Henry gets out and he’s happy to go back to work with his friends.
Fair enough, or so I thought.
But the New Yorker magazine has an online article titled “The Repressive Authoritarian Soul of Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends”.
The author has a twitter link to the article: “Thomas the Tank Engine is super fucked-up.”
They write that Thomas the Tank Engine stories are “worse than any horror stories”.
That the show is “a depiction of a premodern corporate-totalitarian dystopia.”
Discussing the episode in the tunnel, one of the readers says: “What moral lesson are kids supposed to learn from this? Do as you’re told or you’ll be entombed forever in the darkness to die?”
Other readers say: “Trains work hard because they fear a violent death” and: “The trains have been given the gift of life but they exist only to serve” and: “The trains were basically slaves to the people that owned the train company – they had no rights.”
Yet another adds: “This is manipulation, a traditional tactic used by psyop social engineers in order to reinforce group think in order to steer you around like cattle.”
Suddenly I wondered if I was on the wrong planet.
Who were these people?
To everyone I knew, Thomas had always been harmless, kiddy stories.
To these people, Thomas was dangerous brainwashing, the equivalent of Kim Jong-Un.
But it’s comments like the next one I found really worrying:
“I use this episode when teaching media studies as an introduction to the concept of social values. You can see the worrisome message the dominant political ideology was imparting via children’s TV to the next generation.”
What’s worrying is that this person is teaching Media Studies.
And they are teaching the next generation of communications professionals.
The people that will be working in mass media.
And they will bring this kind of learning into their thinking on communication.
They will be implementing strategies and writing briefing documents.
They will be overseeing advertising campaigns.
They will be dictating the way we talk to bus drivers, office workers, housewives, shop staff, factory workers.
And just how far removed is their thinking from the reality of ordinary people’s lives?
These people who are being taught that Thomas the Tank Engine is “a depiction of a premodern corporate-totalitarian dystopia.”
Do we really think these people are capable of simple common-sense thought?
The sort of everyday thinking that’s going on in the minds of normal human beings.
Who can they possibly be capable of understanding or talking to?
What are we training and recruiting?
And then we wonder why advertising is no longer relevant to ordinary people
Surely the same kind of twittery that drives people, out of frustration, to vote for “straight-talking” lunatics. It’s absolutely imperative we bridge the divide and find some sort of shared/common sense. That’s a proper creative goal.
Spot on Mr Trott and this reaches far wider than advertising
I suppose these are the same people who think Callou is the perfect child. Agree with Antony — this is not simply an advertising issue, there are far reaching affects on society, too
People who take ‘Media Studies’ courses probably aren’t going into advertising, Dave. They want to become film critics, so they can write more of this sort of stuff.
They are Educated Idiots Dave. My brother calls them the ‘Chattering Classes’. They are incapable of thinking for themselves. Everything has to be liked to a Grand Theory because they have no ideas of their own. Their aim is to destroy independent thinking so that they can dominate everything. They are control freaks who live and survive by sound bites and snippets of information. They usually wear big glasses, have daft haircuts too young for them, wear silly suits too tight for their guts, shoes that hurt but look good and gather their evidence up by reeling it in from every distant vague corner of the planet to proclaim their own omnipotence and fail every time: Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, et al. We’ve seen them all. They are a waste of space. Destroy. BREXIT.
We call them ‘cleversillies.’ It takes a lot of patience, training, and dedication to be that obtuse.
Oh my goodness!!! Anyone who thinks Thomas is Fascist propaganda should walk back into the copy of Fahrenheit 451 that they emerged from…