{"id":3428,"date":"2016-05-20T21:23:24","date_gmt":"2016-05-20T20:23:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3428"},"modified":"2016-05-20T21:23:24","modified_gmt":"2016-05-20T20:23:24","slug":"watch-with-father-11-chuggington","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.housetoastonish.com\/?p=3428","title":{"rendered":"Watch With Father #11: Chuggington"},"content":{"rendered":"

So two months ago I said I would\u00a0write something about\u00a0Chuggington<\/em>. \u00a0The thing is,\u00a0Chuggington<\/em> is an above average\u00a0pre-school\u00a0CGI\u00a0cartoon about talking trains. \u00a0But it’s neither\u00a0especially innovative nor is it\u00a0astonishingly good. \u00a0What it is,\u00a0really, is the\u00a0polished modern incarnation of\u00a0one of the classic tropes. \u00a0It’s\u00a0most interesting as a point of comparison.<\/p>\n

Chuggington<\/em> is about\u00a0the adventures of a group of talking trains in a city conveniently built entirely around trains. \u00a0The show follows a group of young trains\u00a0– “trainees”, naturally – as they learn to, well, be\u00a0trains. \u00a0And work together and be good friends and, you know, all that\u00a0sort of thing.<\/p>\n

Now, trains are very popular with\u00a0the very young. \u00a0But they’re also a cornered market. \u00a0If you’re doing a pre-school series about trains then you are going head to head with one of the big guns –\u00a0Thomas the Tank Engine<\/em>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Thomas the Tank Engine<\/em> has been around forever, and is still going strong. \u00a0The TV show\u00a0Thomas and Friends<\/em>\u00a0is still in production,\u00a0though it switched to CGI animation\u00a0a few years ago. \u00a0Season 20 is due out this year. \u00a0But the franchise runs back to the Reverend W Awdry’s\u00a0Railway Series<\/em>, which started in 1945. \u00a0Not only is that\u00a0far enough back for steam engines to be contemporary technology, it’s before the nationalisation of the railways.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Railway Series<\/em> books continued to appear until 2011 – the later ones\u00a0were written by Awbry’s son – and instead of just continuing to set stories in the past,\u00a0they opted\u00a0to treat the Island of Sodor as a last holdout against the march of diesel and electrification. \u00a0Thomas the Tank Engine<\/em> continuity turns out to be more complicated than you’d think. \u00a0The Fat Controller is a legacy character – we’re now officially onto the third. \u00a0In the 1980s, Awdry even published The Island of Sodor: Its People,\u00a0History and Railways<\/a><\/em>, which\u00a0establishes a ludicrously detailed history<\/a> for\u00a0the setting. \u00a0The point being, Awdry\u00a0started out\u00a0writing\u00a0contemporary stories about contemporary trains. \u00a0By rights, the march of time should have killed the franchise long ago, but it survived by gently reinventing itself as\u00a0something a bit more magical and hidden-worldy. \u00a0The appeal obviously can’t be nostalgia – the\u00a0target audience are too young to be nostalgic for steam, and by this stage, so are their parents.<\/p>\n

We have a box set of the “Story Library” Thomas\u00a0<\/em>books, which are cut-down, heavily summarised versions of TV episodes\u00a0for the edification of the very young. \u00a0They make interesting reading. \u00a0Some have been compressed to a truly demented degree – one, adapting a full length DVD special, blithely opens with the news that one day, Thomas was out exploring when he discovered an lost and abandoned city. \u00a0This is quite some achievement when you’re on (a) an island, and (b) rails. \u00a0But more generally,\u00a0from an adult standpoint, there’s something vaguely unnerving about about the Railway Stories. \u00a0They’re big on work ethic. \u00a0All the trains\u00a0are\u00a0obsessed with being Really Useful Engines. \u00a0A typical plot involves an engine being\u00a0vaguely uppity and the Fat Controller sticking him in a shed on his own until he learns his lesson, something which is presented as a paradigm of excellent management. \u00a0Sometimes recalcitrant machines\u00a0are threatened with dismantling, which, by the internal logic of the series, is presumably equivalent to\u00a0execution. \u00a0The story\u00a0about\u00a0Bulstrode the Barge runs like this: Bulstrode is a grumpy barge. \u00a0An accident happens which is manifestly not his fault and he is especially\u00a0grumpy about it. \u00a0This sort of attitude is not good enough, so he\u00a0is dumped on a\u00a0beach to rot. \u00a0The end. \u00a0Don’t be like Bulstrode.<\/p>\n

If you take literally\u00a0the idea that the trains are alive, this is a bit creepy. \u00a0Of course, that’s not what\u00a0Awdry was doing. \u00a0He was playing with the idea that people treat real steam engines (and ships and so on) as if they had personalities, and taking it literally. \u00a0That’s why his\u00a0trains\u00a0still have human crews.<\/p>\n