My son's favorite ---------> Thomas!

“Pooof…. Pooofff..” toot Thomas.

And my son Virced wakes up early every morning (7 am in Disney Channel) just to watch his favorite cartoon “Thomas and his friends” the first “Railway Series” books published in 1945, and the rest—as they say—is history. It’s a short jump from that to stop-frame animation on PBS, apparently.

I dug around a bit, and I found a pretty good summary of how Thomas and his friends came to be. It turns out that the Rev. Awdry invented these tales to entertain his son Christopher while the boy was recovering from scarlet fever.

My son really loves Thomas. He also memorized the song.. the last part of the word that is.. hehe..

I’m not going to lie to you. I would watch these trains roll their eyes around and talk without mouths in David Archuleta or David Cook’s voice, and I may have wished for the sweet release that only death or a total cable outage and the magical disappearance of our DVD collection could bring. I perhaps didn’t have the same appreciation of Thomas and his pals as my son did.

There are just a few of the timeless lessons Thomas and his cohorts have imparted:
• It’s good to be a very useful engine.
• Hiding in a tunnel to try to keep your paint fresh and shiny can result in getting stuck.
• Being snotty has repercussions.
• It’s not nice to play tricks on your friends.
• It’s uncomfortable to have fish in your boiler.
• Doing as you’re told is probably the wisest choice.

See? Everything we needed to know. My son concurs.