ThomasNATION Reviews - Letting Off Steam
November 04, 2023
If you were to ask any longtime fan of Thomas the Tank Engine what their thoughts were on Christopher Awdry's tenure of the Railway Series as a whole, they would more often than not tell you that the thirtieth book 'More About Thomas the Tank Engine' while having the most unimaginative title has a very fascinating history due to coming out the same year as Season 2 of the original Thomas & Friends television series. What happened was that producers Britt Allcroft and David Mitton asked Christopher Awdry to write enough stories for a book in time for the company to adapt those stories into episodes for that series. This was due to the fact that they were under a contract that every episode of the show had to be adaptations of stories from the book series. But despite many stories being left to choose to adapt, neither of them featured Thomas as a main character. Either way, Christopher wrote four stories for the book: 'Thomas, Percy and the Coal', 'The Runaway', 'Better Late Than Never' and 'Drip Tank'. The first three stories were adapted as the first, tenth and fifteenth episodes for Season 2 whereas the fourth one 'Drip Tank' was left out which was due to the word "drip" meaning someone who is weak and ineffectual which was no longer being used by the time he wrote the story. In fact, the book came out only two days before the first of the episodes aired and there's a good chance kids at the time saw the television adaptations before reading the book - isn't that fascinating?
That being said and perhaps it's childhood television nostalgia seeping in here, but 'More About Thomas the Tank Engine' was an okay book in my opinion since I do like the stories with 'The Runaway' being my favorite of the saga and I like the plot arc with Thomas and Percy which while it only pertains to the first and last story is still fun since I like that their 'best frenemies' relationship in the books is still very prominent with Toby as the neutral chaotic in the middle of everything. While 'More About Thomas the Tank Engine' is not the best of Christopher Awdry's work or anything, it's fine and the stories are fine too but I seriously wish he had picked a better title than that. With that being said, many longtime fans of Thomas the Tank Engine have longed for the day that we would finally our long-awaited adaptation of 'Drip Tank' to finish off the book and it would seem that the current production team for All Engines Go may have finally heard us and given us just we wanted to see.
But did they deliver all the way, the answer to that is...well, they almost did since the concept of Thomas and Percy falling out with each other and the scene where Percy gets hit by a tree branch from the original story are there but yet they didn't go all the way in my opinion due to the limitations that the production team had to work with when this season was made such as having Nia be the one to teach Thomas and Percy how letting off steam can help any argument go away.
So while 'Letting Off Steam' technically isn't the first time that Thomas and Percy have gotten into a fight within the franchise and while it's not the long-awaited 'Drip Tank' adaptation as we were all hoping for, it's the closest we may ever get to one at this point and that is why I'm giving this episode a rating of a 3.5 out of 5. So close and yet so far.
Final Rating: 3.5/5
About the Author: True Blue
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