Tedious Tales of Sodor is an fan-made parody series of Thomas & Friends created by fan-user Biscuit Cat Productions
. Being a Machinima filmed within the video game Trainz Simulator, the series loosely adapts the stories of Thomas navigating his brand-new life on the Island of Sodor, all while The Narrator plays god and intervenes with the plot of any given story. As you can imagine, hilarity and chaos typically ensues.
Originally, TTOS was merely the continuity reboot and replacement of Biscuits' previous Thomas series, Satirical Tales of the NWR. While the series has the same basic premise of it's predecessor, it's very much it's own separate entity by this point, with a totally different art-style, lore, plotline, and voice cast.
At first glance, TTOS's overall tone and it's more mature, adult, comedically-driven stories may be typically expected from MANY other fan works of this variety, yet the episodes and shorts containing do a fairly decent job of telling a more serious, overarching story admist all of the Forth Wall-breaking and Lampshading to the Thomas franchise at-large.
The series is hosted and uploaded on Biscuits' YouTube channel, and you can find the full playlist of the series here.
Tropes featured in the series:
- Action Prologue: The series literally starts off with Thomas chasing a runaway James in the very first episode.
- Adaptational Dumbass: James gets this after his runaway in the first episode. Averted in the Insightful Examination shorts, as they take place before then.
- Adaptational Gender Identity: Percy is non binary in this and is addressed with They/Them pronouns. This is also the case with The Märklin Engine.
- Adaptational Name Change: Though The Märklin Engine is still referred to as Märklin, they're also referred to by the engines as The Messenger.
- All There in the Script: It seems the more serious, plot-heavy pieces of lore are exclusive to flashbacks in the form of the series' shorts, as the episodes seem to take place of Thomas and the Breakdown Train-onward.
- Fish Eyes: James does this whilst imagining he's Percy and what they would like after Thomas asks this in Percy's First Christmas. Thomas is not amused by it:Thomas: Holy fuck, sorry I asked!
- Mythology Gag: In TTOS: Across The Multi-Verse, Thomas ends up meeting with his Wooden Railway counterpart from STOTNWR.
- Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: In Ep. 3, James ends up crashing a truck into the work shed at Ffarquhar in order to put out a fire. It works, the fire goes out! Well, until it reignites a few seconds later.James: Phew! Well, that was close!(The fire reignites and starts spreading.)James (still smiling): ...Shit.
- Poor Communication Kills: Why there was so much conflict between the big and small engines as they never bothered to talk about their grievances about one another and instead argue and bicker with each other. This stops following the events of Conflict Resolution.
- Sliding Scale of Silliness vs. Seriousness: The overall tone of the series fluctuates. Generally the show is focused more on it's comedy, however things get noticeably more somber and serious whenever "The Messenger" appears.
- Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: In The 75th Anniversary Short, Henry ends up derailing himself upon switching the tracks too quickly. It's certainly more realistic that the alternative outcome, that's for sure...
- "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Thomas gives a pretty vicious one to the narrator in Percy's First Christmas after he's buried in the snow, calling them out for how much they toyed with him and nearly ruining the Christmas party he was trying to arrange for Percy.
- Took a Level in Kindness: After the events of Conflict Resolution, the big engines are far nicer to the smaller engines they used to belittle.
- What the Hell, Hero?: In Ep. 5, Edward (after being the Butt-Monkey for nearly the entire episode), loses all composure and SNAPS at the bigger engines for being so ignorant and disrespectful towards him.
