I can get into more about my history with the series later
Okay! My history with Thomas!
It all began with Shining Time Station. Season 1, specifically. In its first run with
this opening:
The first season began in 1989 with this intro, and played in reruns with this one instead:
Since I was born in 1990, I would have been too young at the time to catch the first season when it was first broadcast in reruns on PBS. Luckily, my parents and grandmother had taped all of the first season for my older brother, who was in his toddler years at the time of the first season's broadcast. And it through those VHS tape recordings that I was first introduced to the world of Shining Time Station, and by extension, Thomas the Tank Engine.
My parents continued to record the show on tape into its second and third seasons. To this day, I still have all of those tapes, on which were recorded all of Season 1 (though, the beginnings of "Show and Yell" and "Mapping it Out" got cut off, but I did get to see both in full at least once as a kid), the Christmas special, most of Season 2, and about half of Season 3. And for years, that's all I ever got to see of the show.
But then, when the Family Specials rolled around in 1995... I missed all four of them. By then, I was getting older and into other things (namely The Disney Afternoon), watching PBS less and less (and of course attending day care in the weekday mornings made watching PBS every morning impossible). But the biggest reason I missed the Family Specials was because... I simply didn't know about them. I never knew they existed. We saw no commercials advertising them nor any listings in the TV schedule (which I wouldn't start regularly checking until getting into my Fox Kids years in the late 90s). We thought Shining Time Station had long since ended. So I completely missed out on all four Family Specials in 1995.
However, by sheer happenstance, we managed to catch and record part of the third Family Special, "One of the Family" when a rerun of it aired in 1996! Again, we had no idea the specials even existed, so catching this took us completely by surprise! We got the second half of it recorded on a tape we were using to record episodes of Arthur. And after that, we were sure that Shining Time Station was over for good, never knowing about the "Mr. Conductor's Thomas Tales" episodes that aired in 1997, nor the reruns of Seasons 2 and 3 that later aired on Fox Family and Nick Jr. in the late 90s (and, well, we didn't have cable at the time, so those couldn't have been watched by us anyway).
Outside of Shining Time Station, my parents bought me lots of Thomas toys and videos. My brother originally had wooden railroad track sets of Brio, but only normal non-Thomas engines. But when the Thomas Wooden Railway line came out, we snatched up several those toys since they were compatible with the Brio sets we already had. We also had lots of the metal Thomas models by ERTL, both in the normal scale and the slightly larger scale that used magnets, as well as in the teeny tiny miniature scale. We also had several of the ERTL playsets that the engines could be placed on. To this day, I still have all the Brio and Wooden Railway toys, but of the ERTL toys I only still have the normal and slighty-larger scaled toys. Both the big playsets and the miniatures are long gone.
As for the videos, I had (and still have)
Volume 1,
Volume 2 (both narrated by Ringo Starr; everything afterward is narrated by George Carlin),
Volume 6,
Volume 8,
Volume 10,
Volume 11, the
Christmas volume,
Volume 12,
Volume 13,
Volume 14,
Volume 15, and
Volume 16.
Whew!
For the longest time, those tapes and the extent of Shining Time Station that we had recorded were all the exposure I had to Thomas. Between these, I was able to see all of Series 1, all except two episodes of Series 2 ("Daisy" and "Percy's Predicament"), all except three episodes of Series 3 ("Donald's Duck", "Thomas Gets Bumped", and "Tender Engines"), and all except six episodes of Series 4 ("Four Little Engines", "Special Funnel", "Train Stops Play", "Bull's Eyes", "Paint Pots and Queens/Thomas Meets the Queen", and "Mind that Bike"). All of which were of the US dub narrated by Ringo and/or Carlin.
Then... it happened. Thomas and the Magic Railroad hit theaters in 2000 and I begged my parents to take me to see it. Even though I was pushing 10 years old by then and had seen none Series 5 at the time, never knowing about the change in narrator from George Carlin to Alec Baldwin. My mother took both me and younger sister to see it. I loved it at the time (especially with all the Shining Time Station elements, which were a big surprise for me since I never expected to see anything from Shining Time Station ever again all those years after the show had ended it run on PBS), but now... I have more of a love/hate relationship with that movie. And I'm sure most can understand why.
After that, Thomas kind of retreated into the background of my life. The last Wooden Railway and ERTL toys I got were ones released for the Magic Railroad movie (Wooden Railway Lady, Diesel 10, Splatter, and Dodge; and ERTL Lady), and my parents put their foot down on no more new Thomas VHS tapes or DVDs, since I was supposedly "too old for Thomas". I had gotten into other things by then, anyway, so Thomas pretty much took a back seat to Transformers, Digimon, Power Rangers, Gundam, Pokemon, Bionicle, and more.
Yet, there was still one more Thomas thing I was to get at the time. The 1997 edition of the
complete volume of The Railway Series books, all 26 written by the Reverend Wilbert Vere Awdry himself! I picked this book up from a local bookstore in the early 2000s and was amazed to see stories that I'd never seen in the TV show before, featuring characters who were never on the show but whom I did have toys of, such as the Culdee Fell Railway engines and Diesel 199. This was my first exposure to the original books and to the original UK terminology like "the Fat Controller" and "trucks" instead of "Sir Topham Hatt" and "freight cars". I kept this big book and still have it too, but didn't read it often since, again, I had other interests at the time.
When Thomas made its return to PBS in the US back in the mid-2000s, I took a casual notice and was curious to see what the then-new episodes were like. This would have been around when HiT took over the series and had Michael Brandon as the new US narrator. Checking out some of these episode when I could... I was not impressed. Either I really had grown too old, or the series had gotten much dumber, or both. Years later, after doing the proper research, I'd find out that "the series got dumber" was the real answer. I didn't watch any of the CGI series, not even when the Brenner Era started and people were saying it was good again. I guess I'd just lost too much faith in the series by that point. It didn't help that the one CGI episode I did tune into out of morbid curiosity was a real stinker: Toby tried to find a place for Bash, Dash, and Ferdinand to live. If they've been on Sodor for a while now, they'd have already been living at some place beforehand. Toby's logic made no sense!
Anyway...
