Meaning
What does Thomas The Tank Engine mean?
Thomas the Tank Engine (or Thomas and Friends) is a British stop-motion television series made for children.
The story revolves around anthropomorphized characters of trains or other locomotives, vehicles, their conductor, and tells the stories of their adventures.
The story is set in the fictional island of Sodor, which serves as the home of all the various characters.
Online, especially after 2015, the Thomas the Tank Engine universe has inspired content creators all across the world to utilize many of the series’s scenes as various types of meme content, video/music parodies, and so on.
Origin
What's the origin of Thomas The Tank Engine?
The first season of Thomas and Friends aired in the U.K. in 1984, and was made up of 26 separate episodes.
The next season followed the next year in similar fashion, however the public had to wait until 1991, when the third season came out.
The series had seen 24 consecutive series all together.
The 12th season switched from the original stop motion format, and was produced with modern CGI technology.
Spread & Usage
How did Thomas The Tank Engine spread?
Initially, the Thomas the Tank Engine memes were mostly YouTube Poop parodies during the early 2010s.
These videos were funny edits that were cut out of the early seasons of the series.
Later the Thomas meme trends started to shift towards music remix parodies.
These parodies had the series’ iconic theme tune as their central element.
Internet culture also found a way to implement the phenomenon into gaming communities.
Many modders successfully developed mods to games like Skyrim or Fallout, in order to swap up the characters of the games with characters from the Thomas universe.
There have also been numerous image macros created which are related to Thomas the Tank Engine.
One honorable mention would be it was time for Thomas to leave, which is a reaction image meme.
External resources
- Wikia | Fandom – Thomas the Tank Engine
- Wikipedia – Thomas and Friends