Web Video / The Unlucky Tug

I make videos about talking trains... most of the time.

— Channel description

The Unlucky Tug is an American YouTuber who mainly reviews and analyses The Railway Series and Thomas & Friends. Occasionally, he branches out into other media such as Cars and TUGS.

He went on a hiatus in 2018, then returned in late 2020 with a focus on long-form content and retrospectives. In March 2023, his original channel was terminated due to copyright issues, so he made a new channel and reuploaded his 2020-onwards videos there. He also has a side channel, The Lucky Tug.

Series on his channel include:

• Thoughts On: Reviews of Thomas media, usually things that were recently released. He stopped doing these after Journey Beyond Sodor.
• More Than a Kids' Show: He discusses stand-out episodes of Thomas, highlighting aspects such as characterization or cinematography.
• Sodor's Finest: Retrospectives about a specific Thomas character's development.
• Tug's Trains: A showcase of his model train collection.
• Thomas Debunked: Short videos debunking common misconceptions about the franchise, or explaining obscure information. They can be found on TikTok.
• The Thomas Retrospective: An overview of each Thomas & Friends season, with segments about their production histories, which characters got the most focus, noteworthy episodes, and the overall feel.
• TUGS: The US Dub: A fan-made Same Language Dub of TUGS. It went on hiatus after two episodes.

Series on The Lucky Tug include:

• TUGS: The Lighthouse Edit: A Fan Edit of TUGS that replaces most of the dialog with lines from Salty's Lighthouse.

---

His videos contain examples of:

• Adaptation Title Change: Discussed in the season 1 retrospective, where he says that Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends is a much better title than The Railway Series because it conveys more information: it's about a sentient character (Thomas) who is a train (the Tank Engine), and it has an ensemble cast (& Friends).
• April Fools' Day: The Sodor's Finest episode on Peter Griffin, which is much different from his usual work.
• Both Sides Have a Point: Discussed in More Than a Kids' Show. He praises both "Henry's Hero" and "Respect for Gordon" for having conflicts where both parties are right and wrong in their own ways, something that's rare in Thomas. In the former, Hiro is right for persevering on, but Henry is right for being cautious about his health; and in the latter, Gordon is wrong for demanding respect, but the others are wrong for making fun of him.
• Bowdlerise: In his fandub of the TUGS episode "Sunshine", Zorran calls Izzy Gomez a "rusty old piece of scrap metal" instead of a "South American heap of junk".
• Breaking Old Trends:
  • "The COMPLETE History of Cranky the Crane" is the first episode of Sodor's Finest about a character who isn't a steam engine, and the first one where CGI wins.
  • Usually in his Thomas merchandise collection videos, he shows off characters in numerical/introduction order. In the Capsule Plarail video, he decides to switch things up and shows them in alphabetical order instead.
• Censored for Comedy: After talking about Mavis in his season 3 retrospective, he plays several clips of her dialogue with words beeped out to make it sound like she's swearing. The last one ends with Percy staring in silence.
• Change the Uncomfortable Subject: In "UNANSWERABLE THOMAS QUESTIONS 2"^note reuploaded here, Tug and Zeo go on a tangent about TUGS. When Tug asks if the boats get lice, Zeo says they're getting into weird territory and should get back to Thomas.
• Cool Old Guy: Discussed in his Sodor's Finest episode on Toby. One of Tug's friends, wrdukedog, uses an analogy to explain what makes Toby different from Edward.
  wrdukedog: Edward has the kind of wisdom in that he knows just how to advise younger engines and mentor them. Toby has the kind of wisdom where he knows how to get free candy out of the machine if you hit it a certain way.
• Cranial Eruption: In his video on deleted scenes, a photo is shown for an unused prop head of Henry's fireman in "Whistles and Sneezes", which has a protruding bump on his head that has pushed through his cap thanks to a stone hitting him.
• Cutaway Gag: In the model series timeline video, his explanation for why Sir Handel was absent for several seasons is a scene where Sir Topham Hatt banishes him to the Shadow Realm.
• Damned by Faint Praise: At the end of his Thomas and the Magic Railroad review, he says the best compliment he can give it is that it's not Misty Island Rescue.
• Dub-Induced Plotline Change: Done by necessity in TUGS: The Lighthouse Edit due to limitations in the source material. However, it's still far more faithful to TUGS than the original Salty's Lighthouse was.
• Early-Bird Cameo: In the Cold Open for the Sodor's Finest episode about Percy, the first two engines Sir Topham Hatt sees at the workshop are Emily and Arthur (facing away from the camera, David Mitton-style). This scene takes place during season 1; both engines were introduced in season 7.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • The first two episodes of Sodor's Finest were barely over ten minutes long and were general overviews of their subjects, with focus on a few specific events. Starting with the third episode, they're much longer and describe events involving the focus character in chronological order, split between the books, the model series, and the CGI series (when applicable).
  • The first three Thomas Retrospectives didn't have a favourite episode category, and the characters with the most focus episodes were in descending order rather than ascending.
• Enhanced on DVD: Discussed in his Cars review. He shows footage from the 4:3 version of the first movie throughout the video, and explains at the end of its segment that it's because Pixar went through the effort to re-render every frame to add details at the top and bottom of the screen.
• Entertainingly Wrong: Discussed in "10 Hidden Gems of CGI Thomas". One of the things he likes about "Goodbye Fat Controller" is that the engines don't understand human concepts, which is true to the source material. In this case, they assume Sir Topham Hatt is leaving when his office is being cleared because the idea of an office renovation is outside their frames of reference.
• Foil: His discusses this a lot in his Thomas videos.
  • In both the season 6 retrospective and the Sodor's Finest on Cranky, he says Salty is Cranky's foil. While Cranky is snappy and looks down on everyone, Salty is chipper as long as he's by the sea. Tug compares them to SpongeBob and Squidward.
  • In the Sodor's Finest on Diesel, he says the Brenner Era turned Paxton into a foil for Diesel. Both are Class 08s, but Diesel is cunning and manipulative, whereas Paxton is naïve and easily manipulated.
• Foreshadowing: At the end of the characters section in his season 5 retrospective, he says Percy will win an MVP award soon. He gets it in the next season.
• Formula-Breaking Episode: "The COMPLETE History of Hiro, Master of the Railway" is the first Sodor's Finest episode about a character introduced in the CGI series. As a result, the video's segments are about his relationships with specific characters, rather than how he's portrayed in each continuity.
• Full-Name Ultimatum: In Tug's Trains, he says that his model version of Spencer's full name is "Bert Spencer", but he's only called that when he misbehaves.
• Funny Background Event:
  • In his Railway Series ranking video, he explains that More About Thomas the Tank Engine was written so Thomas & Friends could have more Thomas-centric stories to adapt, accompanied by a clip of Thomas disappearing. As he continues talking, Percy and Toby glance at each other and shout "hooray!" in the background.
  • In the Star Wars original trilogy review, some text saying "where is he going?" tracks a character running to the left of the screen in the Rebel Base in A New Hope.
• Inferred Holocaust: Discussed in his review of "Respect for Gordon". He wonders how many casualties Gordon's crash caused, and jokes that the Fat Controller didn't appear in the episode because he was busy dealing with hundreds of lawsuits.
• Ironic Echo: In his Big World! Big Adventures! review, he repeatedly plays the clip of Ian McCue saying "Henry and Edward are still very much part of the show" while showing evidence to the contrary. In the "How to Fix Bwuhba" segment at the end, Tug says he wouldn't write Henry off and he'd be "still very much a part of the show."
• It Was His Sled: Discussed in part one of his Star Wars retrospective. He says that nowadays, everyone knows that Vader is Luke's father even if they've never seen The Empire Strikes Back, including his younger self. However, his fiancée knew the quote, but not the context, so he says she kept second-guessing herself while she was watching it for the first time.
• Malicious Misnaming: In his Journey Beyond Sodor review, he calls Lexi and Theo "Chuggington" and "Fergus" respectively because he doesn't like them. In his Big World! Big Adventures! analysis, he calls Ace "Lightning McQueen". (He doesn't do this in later videos, but he does call Ace a "Lightning McQueen knock-off" during the Big World! Big Adventures! segment of his Thomas movies ranking.)
• Mirror Character:
  • In his "The Complete History of James" video, he points out that Thomas (in his most consistent characterization) and James are pretty similar, being cocky, bratty and looking to one-up the other whenever they go head-to-head in an episode.
  • In multiple videos, he says that Diesel is a mirror of Duck in The Railway Series: both are mass-produced shunting engines who are proud of what they are, but while Duck proves himself a hero at the end of Duck and the Diesel Engine, Diesel learns nothing and is sent away in disgrace.
• Mood Whiplash: In his season 5 retrospective, he goes back and forth between yelling about the more exciting episodes' plots, to describing the slice-of-life ones in a calm tone of voice.
• Never Given a Name: The Cold Open for "The COMPLETE History of Percy the Small Engine" is an extended version of Sir Topham Hat meeting Percy. Topham asks the engine what his name is, and he replies that he was never given one. Topham says that all engines deserve names, so he names him Percy.
• "Not Making This Up" Disclaimer:
  • In the TUGS retrospective, he reassures his viewers that Salty's Lighthouse is real after showing the clip of Burke and Hare as movie producers, and again after Zorran's song.
  • In the lost Thomas media video, Tug describes Institute of Innovation — in which Thomas grows limbs, Percy is injected with Botox, and Sir Topham Hat becomes muscular — and says "this is fucking real."
  • In "The COMPLETE History of Edward the Blue Engine", he says that Edward nearly being Gender Flipped in Shining Time Station may sound fake, but there are several newspaper reports to back it up.
• Opening Scroll: The Big World! Big Adventures! review starts with a Star Wars-esque text crawl, complete with the music, that says Thomas the Tank Engine was found dead in Miami.
• A Rare Sentence: In "The COMPLETE History of Cranky the Crane", he uses the scene from Misty Island Rescue where Cranky reassures Percy that Thomas will be found as an example of Cranky being a Jerk with a Heart of Gold, then says he's surprised he used a scene from Misty Island Rescue (widely considered to be the worst Thomas movie) as a positive example of something.
• Retirony: In the Gag Dub of the TUGS episode "Munitions", Kraka-toa screams that he was planning to retire next week as he capsizes while on fire.
• Rule of Cool: At the end of "EVERY Thomas Movie Ranked", he says that he doesn't mind if the climax is slightly unrealistic as long as it's exciting and wraps up the story.
• Rule of Personification Conservation: He makes a point in several videos, such as "Thomas Embodied the Magic of Steam Engines" and his seasons 14 and 15 re-review, that the whole appeal of Thomas is that the characters are trains, and Mattel missed the point by treating this as a limitation.
• Running Gag:
  • He references Family Guy a lot in his videos, usually in a negative light, and sometimes hides Peter Griffin in the thumbnails.
  • He often calls Flat Characters "NPCs".
  • Whenever he's being snide in "Big World, Big Adventures was an Embarrassing Disaster", he calls the show "Thomas the Train".
  • Three times in the season 6 retrospective, he plays a laugh track after showing a clip where a character says something snarky.
  • He often brings up Henry becoming an Adaptational Wimp in Sodor's Finest episodes, usually accompanied by the clip of him screaming as leaves cover his eyes in "The Three Steam Engines Gruff".
  • In his season 7 retrospective, he repeatedly expresses his hatred of Michael Brandon's Rheneas voice using a clip of Meg Griffin begging Peter not to shoot someone.
• Self-Deprecation:
  • At the start of his Big World! Big Adventures! video, he says he binge-watched all three seasons while in lockdown.
    Tug: I could've read a book, or gotten back into working out, or made some progress on my portfolio... But no, I decided to willingly torture myself with Thomas the Train episodes I knew I would dislike going in. A man has to have his priorities straight, y'know? (I clearly don't.)
  • He starts the first episode of Tug's Trains by saying that between making videos about talking trains... he makes model trains. "I... I swear, I have a life."
• Skewed Priorities: In the Gag Dub of "Munitions", Ten Cents' reaction to Big Mickey's death is to say that Big Mickey owed him money.
• Stylistic Suck: In "EVERY Thomas Movie Ranked", while explaining how he'd attempt to rewrite Misty Island Rescue, he suggests having Diesel rescue Thomas at the end. The accompanying visual shows an render of Diesel pasted on top of Whiff, complete with a chequered transparency background.
• Take a Third Option:
  • When he reaches the #2 spot in "EVERY Thomas Movie Ranked", he builds up suspense about which order Blue Mountain Mystery and Sodor's Legend of the Lost Treasure will go in... then says they both share the #1 spot.
  • In the season 7 retrospective, he says he couldn't get through either English dub, so he watched it in Japanese instead.
• Take That!:
  • In the Gag Dub for "Munitions", Zorran admits he wouldn't mind if Big Mickey fell on him since at least he wouldn't be with the Star Tugs Trust, a fan group in possession of most of the props from TUGS under which said props have sustained extra damages. Later in the same dub, the Fire Tug's order for Sunshine to stop the spread of the fire has him say "Do better than they did with COVID".
  • From "EVERY Thomas Movie Ranked", Unlucky Tug defends the narrow gauge engines getting angry at Thomas by saying "people act irrationally when they get angry. Don't believe me? Just go look at Twitter."
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Discussed in a couple of Sodor's Finest episodes. In the Skarloey video, Tug says he's glad that Blue Mountain Mystery fixed him, but was disappointed that the narrow-gauge engines gradually faded out of relevance in the CGI seasons following. In the Duck video, he says that he used to hate Duck in the Brenner Era because his appearances felt like shoehorned Pandering to the Base, but now thinks the only problem was the writers making him talk about the "Great Western way" too much instead of focusing on his other traits.
• Two Lines, No Waiting: When he describes how he'd rewrite Big World! Big Adventures!, he says he'd have the Sodor and international episodes take place at the same time.
• Waxing Lyrical: In "EVERY Railway Series Book Ranked", he starts the segment on Small Railway Engines by saying, "Never overlook a little Railway Series book!" Cue instrumental version of "Never Overlook a Little Engine".

---