George Carlin was of course the best. Ringo close behind. But lord that Baldwin boy sucks.
And another thing: where the heck did they get the idea and script for this horrible movie earlier this year? They named it Thomas, but it could’ve been about Spiderman for all the relevance it had. Peter Fonda crying in a cave; what’s that all about? And there was Alec, smack dab in the middle of that nonsense. And not as Hatt, who didn’t even show up in the movie if you can believe that, but as some new character who couldn’t stop talking about his gold dust. or something. whatever. The mean Diesel 10 was pretty cool though.
And on a related topic, the boys and I just got a new Thomas video and it’s the best ever! It contains a song called (I think) “Accidents will happen”, but it’s a collection of all the good pileups and wrecks. You know, Gordon going through the wall, Percy going into the lake, Percy pushing the coal cars over the bridge accidentally, etc. Every time there is a wreck, all three of us yell “Ooohh!” while my wife rolls her eyes.
About the movie: what a piece of shit. My boys who love both the books and videos and who would watch them 24/7 if I let them, lost interest in about 15 minutes.
I have a theory about that movie: it was made solely to sell toys. It’s basically one big commercial.
Agreed on the ranking of storytellers – and who’d have though George Carlin would make a great children’s story narrator? I can just imagine the jokes the production staff had to get out of their system before they settled down to seriously consider him: “The Seven Words You Can’t Say on the Island of Sodor”.
(Trivia moment: the Rev. Awdry took the name for the Island of Sodor from the actual Diocese of Sodor and Man, “Sodor” being a variant of the Norse word for the Southern Hebrides.)
But Baldwin’s nowhere near as bad on the videos as he is in the movie. Of course, everyone was bad in it. Even the dog looked like he wanted to kill his agent for hooking him up with that turkey.
I ranted about Thomas and the Magic Railroad earlier, in the thread about “the worst movies you’ve ever paid to see”, so I won’t repeat myself except to ask again what in the name of Skarloey Ms. Britt Alcroft was thinking when she wrote it. The videos ought to have been ample proof that most kids would have been perfectly happy to sit through eighty minutes of miscellaneous footage of Sir Topham Hatt’s rolling stock zipping around the Island of Sodor with no more purpose than usual. Instead, she created the most complex and confusing plot I think I’ve ever seen, with all kinds of new characters who have no reason for being there. I have to believe that Junior is to Mr. Conductor as many “nephews” were to Renaissance popes. Peter Fonda crying the in cave was understandable – the question is why the rest of the cast weren’t in there with him, doing the same.