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I find it interesting that during @Mattel's entire tenure running #ThomasandFriends, they've relied entirely on the legacy of what came before instead of the strength of their own new content.
When they bought the brand in 2012, they revamped the show with Arc Studios, making
When they bought the brand in 2012, they revamped the show with Arc Studios, making
Seasons 17-20 more tonally and visually consistent with seasons 1-7 and adding in constant references to material long before Nitrogen or HIT were involved. When the 70th anny came around, it was a celebration of the past almost entirely. They brought back old stories, music etc.
Things only started declining when they brought in more new material than old. When the int'l engines were intro'd in TGR, various outlets lampooned the show for its push toward diversity. When JBS came out, they handled subjects like autism and gender nonconformity like a joke.
When S21 shifted away from the Arc-era format and toward the BWBA format, fans and parents alike were annoyed. When BWBA arrived in full, annoyance turned to outrage. When they replaced old mains with new mains, everyone saw it for the sham it was. And for three whole seasons,
They've continued to dig themselves deeper and deeper into a whole instead of listening to what parents and fans want. When we told them we liked the old merch ranges, they changed or canned them in favor of new shit. Remember the disaster that was the Wood unveiling? Now they've
Recanted on that so hard that the Wood range we got was basically just the same WR range as before, and now it's not even being sold after this year. Trackmaster turned into a joke of itself, yet they continue pushing the crappy new toys instead of the stuff people liked before.
All of this should be an indicator to @Mattel that the old formula worked better than the new formulas, but they won't listen. Even when BWBA was the big news of 2018, they couldn't distance it from the more-popular "Thomas and Friends" show of before. The old was too famous.
Now they have the chance to cut their losses and start fresh, so what do they do? Do they make a new show improving on the weaknesses of the old? Do they continue what was working before? No, they decided to announce a worse-quality show under the EXACT SAME NAME as the old one.
Worse still, they have the gall to act like two seasons of crappy flash animation is a continuation of the exact same show from 1984. Literally no one is buying this. This is not seasons 25/26 of Thomas and Friends, they're just using the title and caricatures of the characters.
I think @Mattel knows they can't win by introducing new shit to #ThomasandFriends or changing the old show, but they're too far up their own asses to see that their new attempts are an abysmal failure. So here we are, no one's happy, the brand is nearly dead, and they won't take
Responsibility for the mess THEY created out of their own desires and impatience. Thomas the Tank Engine is a legacy brand, not a flash-in-the-pan soapbox they can use to parrot their own ideologies. But admitting that would be admitting failure, and they can't do that.
