2026 Reboot First Reactions (Part 2)

Well, this came out of nowhere. I was gonna do a fanstory today.

Last week, we got our first official look at the 2026 reboot, now titled Thomas & Friends: Railway Stories. Not just that, but we also have a release date for the debut special, now titled "Really Helpful Engines". And to give you a refresher on my initial thoughts, I thought the reboot looked...good. The faces looked a little bit off, but the animation looked amazing and it felt like a return to form to the series. It's clear everyone knew All Engines Go! was a dud, so it's nice to see them return to basics. But back in January, all we had was a few toys and six seconds of footage. Now, we have a full minutes worth of footage and more toy listings than you can shake a stick at. Has anything changed since then?

...not much. This still looks pretty good, especially with the animation. Once again, this animation is insane. The detail on the characters especially is astounding - you can see the scuffs on Thomas' buffers, the fabric of the stationmaster's suit, even the plantlife around the engines looks incredible. Like I said in the previous first impressions, the series hasn't looked this good on a visual level since Sodor's Legend of the Lost Treasure. And even better, we get to see more of the locations, like Tidmouth Sheds, which for some reason has a massive sign on top of it, Knapford Station, a shunting yard and a brief glimpse of the docks. They look pretty par the course for what you expect from these setpieces, but hey, I should be glad the shunting yard doesn't have a loop-de-loop. As for the content itself, a part of me is worried that it'll lean heavily toward the "baby fodder" stuff that BWBA leaned toward, but that doesn't seem too prominent here. That, and I'm still not used to Thomas being voiced by a kid. I'm a little too accustomed to John Hasler and Joseph May's voice for Thomas, so it's still pretty jarring.

But speaking of the characters, we have WAY more to discuss than last time. First off, I wanna address that in the last first impression, I mentioned that they redesigned Flynn to look more like a British fire engine. Well...they didn't redesign Flynn at all. Turns out, it's Flynn Jr.! This immediately raises a ton of questions. Is Flynn a dad? Who did he get pregnant? How did he get her pregnant? Or is Flynn Jr. just a replacement? But then that raises another question: is the OG Flynn dead? But we have time to dwell on that later. For now, let's talk about the new characters we didn't mention previously. For starters, I have to say that Harold is now the second worst redesign of the lot. Because...