For me, it was the Micronauts and all things Planet of the Apes. My son, meanwhile, has started his fixations early. Here on the verge of turning three years old, Oliver has become singularly obsessed with "Thomas the Tank Engine." After a well-meaning neighbor graciously gave us an old set of wooden toy train tracks and a few old "Thomas" engines that her own sons had outgrown, my little boy was swiftly indoctrinated into a bit of a vast cult. I'm not even sure if he'd ever even seen the television program before (based on a series of children's books by one Reverend W.V. Awdry and sometimes hosted by unlikely folks like comedian George Carlin and ex-Beatle Ringo Starr), but in disarmingly short order, he learned all the names of all the various characters, their respective numbers and their individual colors. Oliver now is happy to spend hours with his trains and tracks spread out all over our bedroom floor. When we discovered that the dreadful K-Mart only a block away stocked a full supply of "Thomas" trains and their endless associated ephemera, that's when the trouble began in earnest.
It could always be worse, of course. At least he's thrilled by "Thomas the Tank Engine" and not, say, "Dora The Explorer" (which is the worst, most shrill bullshit ever to blight this cursed earth). But as he's waded further into Thomas' neat, tidy and largely conflict-free world (all the characters -- including Henry, Spencer, Murdock, Percy, Emily and Harold the Helicopter -- inhabit a fictitious-albeit-decidedly-British island dubbed Sodor), I started to notice some strange things. I made the mistake of showing Oliver a YouTube clip I'd stumbled upon which displayed a host of "Thomas" toys, all displayed in a proud, colorful array, scored to the slightly cloying theme song of the show. Ever since that moment, Oliver continually pleads with me to let him sit on my lap and watch the clip. That clip, of course, linked to a wide host of other similar clips; video clips made by frothy-mouthed "Thomas" obsessives (i.e. messed-up adults with way too much time on their hands), furtive "Thomas" collectors and zealous Japanese "Thomas" completists. Clearly, the cult of "Thomas" appeals to a wider demographic than simply cherubic little boys.
I'd unwittingly tapped into a shadowy "Thomas" subculture. I have to be careful when perusing the YouTube clips with Oliver in my lap, as for every relatively straightforward video of toy trains running on tracks, there are clips like this one -- which I'm somewhat at a pronounced loss to explain to my little son. These are clips made by, presumably, fully-functioning adults who have strangely steeped themselves in "Thomas" mania. It's all a bit too disconcertingly close to the plushy community, frankly.
At the moment, however, there are few things that make my little boy happier than playing with these things. As my wife suggested, I know it will break our hearts when he invariably outgrows his adoration for "Thomas the Tank Engine." But if he starts dressing like a train conductor well into his teens, that's when I'll start getting genuinely concerned.
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