ThomasNATION Classic Reviews - Thomas Toots the Crows
June 28, 2025
The Island of Sodor is the home of the North Western Railway with engines of all shapes and sizes working hard to deliver goods and passengers to their destinations. Not only are there are branch lines that run along the coast of the island serving the docks as well as the fishing villages and the seaside towns, but there are also branch lines that run to the farms as well as quarries and ancient castles of the island's heartland. Let's talk about the farms because there are lots and lots of farms on the Island of Sodor: there are farms with sheep, there are farms with cows and there are farms with goats. And Thomas likes visiting all of the farms and he likes being busy as well as any other engine on Sodor, but he is about to learn that being a farmhand isn't as easy as it looks especially when it comes to planting time when there's hungry birds waiting to eat some seeds as we recount the tale of when "Thomas Toots the Crows"!
THOMAS TOOTS THE CROWS: Thomas tries to chase crows to keep them away from Farmer McColl's seeds.
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As some of you may remember during my early days on YouTube back when I was still called My Little Engine Productions, I did a riff commentary on this episode as the second season premiere for my series in 2016 by using audio that I borrowed from DaWillstanator (a.k.a. Missoliverandblossom)'s review of the episode from back in 2012. Now, at the time, I had done this in order to achieve a dream that I now realize how foolish it was in order to have my chance at a collaboration with who I thought at the time was one of my big inspirations for creating content in the Thomas fandom in the first place. What's worse is that everyone who had watched the video back when YouTube still allowed you to post comments on people's videos thought it was a real collaboration when it really wasn't as it was just a custom fan edit collaboration. But after the heartbreaking news of a scandal regarding a certain "colt of personality" broke out in 2018 which painted my "heroes" in a new light for me, I took immediate action, deleted it from my channel altogether when I rebranded myself to True Blue in order to start fresh again with a new outlook on life and being more mindful about who I chose to collaborate with again.
So, now that I'm going into this episode from the final season of the Nitrogen Era with fresh eyes and without the...I'm not even gonna go into detail with that, it is a whole can of worms, so let's see what I think about an episode I once thought was enjoyably silly and stupid. Well, for starters, during the scene of the farmers plowing the fields and planting the seeds, I thought that this would be the season where Terence would make a brief comeback. But he sadly didn't as there was no comeback yet, and we all know that he wouldn't properly come back until Season 21's "Terence Breaks the Ice" five years later. The episode itself wasn't that good since it still kept the usual "three strikes, you're out" formula and there was a little bit of your usual alliteration and rhyming from Thomas, like "I must hoot and toot", which I'm surprised that he didn't use that to scare away the crows since that seems to scare everybody away when it comes to the quality of official Thomas & Friends content. However, I will admit that it is not as cringeworthy as Season 15's "Percy's New Friends" was in my opinion since at least Thomas didn't call the crows "Mr. Crows" and that thankfully didn't happen as I feel like it would've just made the episode worse in my opinion.
The writing for this episode is surprisingly not from Sharon Miller this time, but rather from a husband-and-wife duo named Dan and Nuria Wicksman (which, okay, is kinda wholesome) who have both wrote episodes for such shows like "Roary the Racing Car" from Chapman Entertainment. For more information about these writers, you can visit their IMDb page, they got some expeience. And even if it's not their best writing or even the best writing for Thomas & Friends in general, I think they both did a pretty good job by sticking to the "three strikes, you're out" formula at the time while also working in some funny bits as well like the infamous "Gordolf Hitler" scene where the big blue engine is being repainted at the Steamworks when Thomas scares the crows for a second time. But in the end, "Thomas Toots The Crows" is not that good of an episode yet at the same time is not horribly bad and that is why I'm going to give the episode a rating of a 2.5/5. Not the best, but I can't act like I haven't seen worse from this era.
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