Thomas the Tank Engine is now 80 years old, and naturally a lot of Thomas-related media has been released during that time – in the form of books, television and even on the big screen! But of course, some material sadly never makes it to print and is doomed to be left on the cutting room floor. In this blogpost, we’ll take a dive down the rabbit hole of cancelled Thomas media – ranging from scrapped episodes to a full-on spinoff series.
The Missing Coach (1986)
Arguably the most infamous case of cancelled Thomas media there is. The Missing Coach is a cancelled episode from Season 2, in which Donald and Douglas are introduced. The episode was based on the story of the same name from the Railway Series book, The Twin Engines, where Douglas accidentally leaves Thomas’ special coach in a siding and the near-identical twins play a trick on The Fat Controller to avoid getting into trouble – however, he is too clever for them.
The episode was cancelled during production after series creator, Britt Allcroft deemed the plot too convoluted for young children to understand. Several stills from the episode have surfaced online over the years as well as shooting scripts and a handful of footage that was repurposed in other episodes, such as the opening shot of Saved from Scrap.
Barry the Rescue Engine (1980s)
Barry the Rescue Engine is a cancelled Railway Series book that was to be written by Christopher Awdry. The book would have introduced Barry, an Ivatt tank engine rescued from the infamous Barry Island scrapyard in Wales, where several withdrawn steam engines have been saved from the cutter’s torch by preservation groups.
The book was in development in the mid-1980’s, but was swept aside as Christopher Awdry was asked specifically to write more books focusing on Thomas, both by the publishers and the TV series crew. With no demand for new characters, Barry’s stories sadly never materialised and his book was ultimately “scrapped”.
Although, an Ivatt tank engine did eventually make its way into the franchise in the form of Arthur, who was introduced in Season 7.
Season 25 (2021)
Before Mattel pulled the plug on the original TV series, a 25th season was in development. The season was to be part of the ‘Big World! Big Adventures!’ branding and would have followed Thomas’s travels in Japan, joined by Hiro and Kenji. This season would have also featured an episode back on Sodor involving a fantasy sequence where Thomas travels back in time and meets his past-self – a screen-used model of Thomas was to be brought out of storage with hopes of bringing Ringo Starr in to voice him again!
This ultimately never came to be as Thomas & Friends was not greenlit for a 25th series due to the failure of the BWBA rebrand. What a sad state the show was in when the Mattel executives finally put it out of its misery…
Jack and the Pack (2003)
Jack and the Pack, also known as Jack and the Sodor Construction Company, was a planned spinoff of Thomas & Friends that would have revolved around a front-loader digger called Jack and a fleet of construction vehicles as opposed to railway locomotives. Various characters from the main series were planned to appear too, including Thomas, Percy and Trevor.
An entire season’s worth of 26 episodes were planned, with two being released as part of Season 6 of the main series, but only 13 were ever filmed as Gullane was acquired by HiT Entertainment during production, who already had their own construction-themed show in the form of Bob the Builder. Originally slated for release in 2003, Jack and the Pack was quietly shelved and the few episodes that were filmed would eventually be released on DVD in 2006, albeit heavily modified to revolve around Thomas and Percy.
The Pack characters would go on to make numerous appearances in the main series in the following years – not to mention in merchandising.
The Adventures of Thomas (2011)
The Adventures of Thomas was a live-action/CGI-hybrid film planned for release sometime in the early 2010’s. The film would revolve around a young boy and his father who had drifted apart in the midst of World War II. The boy eventually discovers Thomas and his friends on the Island of Sodor, and father and son would bond during their adventure together.
Main series animation company, Nitrogen Studios stated on their website that the script was completed by 2010. However, the film was continuously pushed back until it was finally cancelled amidst the Mattel buyout in 2012. For many years fans wondered what exactly this film would have been like – could it have been a novel take on the franchise or was it destined to fail? They would finally get their answer in 2024 when an outline of the film’s plot surfaced online…
Remember the weird live-action Transformers films? Yeah, that’s what they were going for.
The Island of Sodor was to be portrayed as a dystopian world separate from our own where steam engines and diesel engines are at war with each other, which was alluded to with the WWII setting in the real world. The engine’s faces would have a completely different style from the show, being embedded into their smokeboxes with a mechanical aesthetic to appeal to a slightly older demographic in hopes it would evolve into its own toy line. Among the various new characters to be introduced were a group of French mine carts leading the resistance against the diesels… you cannot make this up.
Maybe it’s best this film never saw the light of day after all.
Thomas the Tank Engine – Andrew Lloyd Webber Adaption (1977)
In the late 1970’s, Broadway musical-writer, Andrew Lloyd Webber acquired the rights to produce an animated TV series based on the Reverend W. Awdry’s Railway Series books, which he had been a fan of as a child. Produced in association with Cosgrove Hall and Granada Television, the series was to be, according to a recently rediscovered newspaper article, “a mix of whimsical fantasy and juvenile rock” – quite a departure from the quintessential Englishness of Awdry’s stories.
A pilot episode was completed and pitched in 1977, but the series was ultimately cancelled for two key reasons – the first of which being that Granada didn’t feel the books were popular enough overseas to warrant a high-budget TV production. The second was that the agreement required Webber’s company to take control over the entire book series, including material that was yet to be published. Reverend Awdry was very much against this idea, claiming that, “Once the Americans get a hold of it, the series will be vulgarised and ruined.”
If Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘Starlight Express’ is anything to go by, I think it’s safe to say they dodged a bullet with this one. Britt Allcroft may have had some unusual ideas at times, but I think her vision for a Thomas the Tank Engine TV series was the best possible outcome.
However, the original 1977 musical pilot may still exist somewhere, and has yet to resurface nearly 50 years later…