If you like your history bitchy, look no further than the ‘Girt’ series by David Hunt! Here is a fun excerpt from his most recent volume, Girt Nation, where, within the context of Australian history, he lays into Thomas the Tank Engine
[ … Thomas & Friends is capitalist, colonialist, classist, ageist, racist, sexist, fattest, homophobic, transphobic and climate change denying. 27
27 Thomas and his friends live on the island of Sodor, a society that runs entirely on diesel and coal. There they are conditioned by an authoritarian Englishman, The Fat Controller, to believe they are living in a working train’s paradise. Sodor is a much better place than the rest of the world, as Gordon, an over-confident Scottish engine, discovers in ‘Gordon Goes Foreign’. Thomas the Tank Engine is a collaborator train who keeps the other trains in line, and regularly does them in to the Controller. The Controller rewards Thomas by giving him women, Annie and Clarabel, who are forced to roll behind him and do whatever he tells them to do. Thomas is also allowed significant autonomy in running the Ffarquhar Branch Line. The trains compete with each other in being ‘Really Useful’ because the Controller sends old trains, and other trains unable to work, to the Smelting Yard. Any trains who do unauthorised jobs are punished, as are trains who refuse to work when the Controller tells them to (in ‘The Sad Story of Henry’, Henry is bricked into a dark tunnel for refusing to work in the rain). The trains are not paid, but compete for new paint jobs, and make fun of trains with old or damaged. The steam engines are superior to the ‘dirty diesels’. The main diesel is not given is a name - he is just called Diesel, or sometimes Devious Diesel. He comes from ‘the Other Railway’, is black and steals jobs wood, a valuable Sodorian export. Bad engines can be identified from the black smoke the emit and, in the original version of ‘Henry’s Sneeze’, Henry sneezes on two naughty schoolboys who ‘ran away as black as n*****s’. In ‘Tickled Pink’, the trains mock James for a pink paint job, but James picks up the Controller’s granddaughter and her friends who, being girls, all love pink, so James feels better about himself. Female engines are under-represented and there are no trans trains. The Thomas franchise has recently introduced new lady trains and trains of colour to improve Sodor’s diversity. Latin Gina is a stylish head turner, if you are into lady trains. Ashima is a ‘fun and feisty’ hot-pink lady engine with henna-like decorations, who says, ‘Just because we’re well painted doesn’t mean we can’t do anything else’ - she wins the Shunting Challenge at the Great Railway Show (an international exhibition for trains), but submissively defers to Thomas in letting him share first place. Frieda is reminiscent of an East German shot putter - a big grumpy German lady train who likes to compete in feats of strength and is mistaken for a male train. Do not let your children watch Thomas & Friends.