Move over, Percy ... meet Carlos, Ashima and Raul – Thomas’s very PC new friends!
THOMAS the Tank Engine has had plenty of great days with his old friends such as James, Percy and Gordon.
But cinders and ashes! Seventy years after the fun began in book form and 30 years after it became a staple of children’s TV, it has been deemed he needs to be ‘more culturally aware’ – and make some foreign chums.
So for his latest adventure Thomas, created by the Rev Wilbert Awdry in 1946, will be joined by locomotive friends from outside Britain. There will be 14 of them, in fact, including Raul of Brazil, Yong Bao of China, Ashima of India and Carlos of Mexico.
They will be unveiled in a film called The Great Race, to be released in May. The move by US toy giant Mattel, which bought the firm behind Thomas the Tank Engine, HIT Entertainment, for £426million in 2012, follows criticism from some that the Thomas TV show portrays too narrow a view of the world, is ‘sexist’ and features too many male – and apparently white – characters.
But it also reflects how eager Mattel is to capitalise on its investment by making the franchise, which generates £700million in annual retail sales, more popular in fastgrowing markets around the world.
Vincent D’Alleva of Mattel said The Great Race was made with this summer’s Rio Olympics in mind and aims to help Thomas ‘understand there is a bigger world out there’. A trailer says the film will see ‘the mightiest locomotives from all over the world competing in feats of strength, speed and skill’.
Referring to Yong Bao – one of four girls among the newcomers – Mr D’Alleva said that only three years after they took Thomas to China it is now their second-largest area for sales, behind the US, with Britain third.
Ashima, another girl, is the ‘first one who can take on Thomas in terms of being the fastest engine’, Mr D’Alleva said. ‘It’s not a romance story but it is about how Thomas develops a relationship with someone who looks very different from him and in some cases can do things better than he can.’
The new characters were designed with col- ours and personalities to reflect their country’s culture, Mr D’Alleva told the New York Times, and where possible each was designed after a train from the country it represents.
The late Rev Awdry’s daughter Veronica Chambers, 72, said she did not know if her father would have approved of the changes. But she told Radio 4’s Today programme he would have been glad that Mattel had ‘strictly adhered to the right railway practice’ by basing the new characters on actual locomotives.
‘I don’t know the precise story [of the new film] but I think they have tried to expand Thomas’s cultural outlook,’ she added.
Mattel confirmed that no existing characters were being axed from Thomas’s world.