Thursday, July 31, 2008

CJ and Thomas

If you have met CJ, you know that he is obsessed with Thomas the Tank Engine and his friends.  Our friend Emi started us on this odyssey when she handed down a huge tub of engines and tracks to CJ.

CJ LOVES Thomas.  We have take along trains, lead along trains (CJ made up that name for the trains that go on the wooden tracks) and battery-powered trains.  We have a huge collection of tracks, as well as books and DVDs.

It turns out that YouTube has a gigantic collection of Thomas movies as well.  On most nights, we let CJ watch a few Thomas movies that have been uploaded by Thomas fans.  There are real episodes (surely illegal), and homemade movies using CGI and real Thomas trains and tracks.  It's obvious that adults and kids alike have gotten into the game of creating their own Thomas episodes.  Some episodes are less than a minute, while some are 8-10 minutes long and quite extravagant in their plot and effects.

Now CJ wants to make his own Thomas movie and "watch it on TV."  Stay tuned for a Thomas movie by CJ and mommy.


2 comments:

aimee said...

We, too, have watched our share of Thomas on YouTube. Sam was also fascinated by the DIY videos -- and he was very upset when he returned to his trains only to find that they could not talk!

If you search enough, you can find some Thomas episodes in Japanese. Always entertaining to see the Japanese spin on things, but perhaps of particular interest to you guys.

Also, I never realized that there are different narrators for Thomas in the U.K. and in the U.S. On YouTube, you're more likely to run into the U.K. versions. It's interesting to compare the subtle differences between the deliveries of Alec Baldwin vs. Michael Angelis. I'm bit of an Angelis fan, myself.

Ah, the things you can learn on YouTube... I think perhaps I know too much about this stuff.

Joanna Pineda said...

I think our favorite narrators are George Carlin and Ringo Starr. Ringo was the original narrator and we love the accent. But George will always be our favorite.

Pierse Brosnan narrated the new movie, The Great Discovery, which we saw in the theater last month, and we didn't think he was great.

We have found a few episodes in Japanese, but only Maki can understand them, so we switch back to the English.