User blog comment:PlantyThePottedPlant/Random Topic Blogging III: Blog Harder/@comment-4037231-20130811214014/@comment-3395649-20130812144721

.....SF, again, you just put the new criteria in so you'd have an excuse not to watch BMM. I'm giving a film that can have different reactions, not utter horror.

And seriously, thinking that Thomas is more childish than MLP?

That is incorrect on multiple levels.

Behold:Twitter

I won't explain things too much, but I doubt you'll see anything REMOTELY childish.

But that's just nitpicking.

SF, I don't know why you're trying to avoid watching the film. You say that MLP was made for all ages and with effort, and a good portion of Thomas material is exactly that.

Plus, you fail to notice the care that went into the franchise.

Back in the model era, David Mitton put a lot of effort into making the sets and models, they worked in a movie studio, just to get things right, they tried their hardest during the first 19 years of the TV Series, they even made their own custom camera that lasted those 19 years, now that's saying something.

And Steve Asquith managed to do a decent job of keeping the models looking stunning after Mitton left, and kept the guard runnning for the next 4 years.

When the model's time ended and Nitrogen Studios of CGI took over, they put in the same amount of effort that the old model teams put in, and brought Thomas to life in the best of ways, even when they had to work with Sharon Miller's awful scripts.

And back in the 1950s, when the Railway Series origin books were in their earlier days, they got darker and darker, they evolved beyond children's books, they were something anyone could enjoy, and both Wilbert and Christopher Awdry put great amounts of care into the stories they wrote, keeping consistent characterisation and making the stories a series grounded into mainly reality, no need for something like magic or goat-heading dragons.

And I'm sure that even though most Thomas fans hate Sharon Miller's childish writing, she still put some effort into what she was making, and as it turns out, she's a great voice director who managed to bring a talented cast into the CGI world.

Even TATMR, the theatrical Thomas film that bombed, had effort into it. Though the usage of high-profile actors like Peter Fonda, Mara Wilson, Doug Lennox, and Alec Baldwin (Though he was already narrating the TV series at that point) is questionable, everyone enjoyed what they were doing, and had the original script gone through before the soccer moms tore out the main conflict, we would've ended up with a decent, everyone film.

And in BMM, Andrew Brenner, who wrote a series of magazine stories to go along with the original books and TV series, put a great of deal of effort, changing many aspects from the original script to prepare for him taking the reins from Miller.

And so far, he's done a great job. The childish aspects of the series are being phased out, with the realism that the series was once known for being injected back in, and the characters regaining their original personas. The fans love the ten episodes so far, and the plots for the next ten have been revealed, and fans are excited for them already. The fact that the stories are becoming more and more creative and using the large cast of characters effectively, is PROOF that Thomas is something more than just for kids.

MLP and Thomas share many parallels in that respect. MLP, a show that many thought was just another of those "Kid shows", has gained an enormous adult male (And female) fanbase, something that no one expected, and why?

It has good writing and animation. Whilst the series isn't for me, I can tell a lot of effort was put into it, and why people like it.

But you refuse to budge, I've given you a film that was made with a lot of effort, with much stronger writing that MIR, and yet you continue to refuse to budge. Everyone else has commented that you're being unfair, and do you so why? Now that my ranting blood is out of me, my reasonable side has presented you with this argument.

Okay SF? Please, for the life of me, please review BMM, the Thomas franchise is trying to regain it's original reputation of being a franchise about the day-in-and-day-out of what it's like to be an engine on a railway, in an era long since forgotten, capable of appealing to just about anyone.

Something that most have forgotten due to HIT's marketing approach, something that's starting to reverse.