TWIN TROUBLE
Twin engines Donald and Douglas have a tiff after a nasty train accident. They blame each other and Donald decides it's time to split the working relationship and team up with other engines. Will they ever forgive each other, or will they forever be doomed to avoiding each other at family functions? Seems to me like they both have chips on their shoulders and maybe suffer from a bit of latent homosexuality.

This early design for Thomas with Robert De Niro's face was rejected as being to scary.

Salty's Secret
Salty the diesel engine arrives on the island of Sodor and looks forward to working at the dockyards near the sea he loves so much. A bureaucratic paperwork stuff up has him working the quarry well away from the water. He tries to keep his spirits up, but his constant singing of sea-shanty's pisses the other engines off no end, alienating him from his team. Can he earn their respect again and get transferred back to the docks before someone shoves a block of C4 into his furnace?

The Fogman
Fat Controller becomes Fat Bastard in this story about workplace automation. Cyril is a nice bloke, he’s the one who places explosives on the tracks to warn the engines of fog ahead. He likes his job, I guess he has a missus at home, and maybe even a few sprogs at school. One day, Fat Controller replaces him with a new fangled hi-tech fog horn to shave down costs and improve uptime. But when the foghorn's ear-shattering frequency causes a rockslide which destroys it, it looks like disaster for the approaching trains! Will Fat Bastard learn the value of human workers over the drive to increase profits before an engine is scrapped in an horrific industrial accident?

Jack Frost
A storm is approaching and Fat Controller orders Percy and James to pick up a load of coal before the snow sets in. For a bit of a giggle, Thomas warns Percy and James to beware of Jack Frost. Percy gets covered in snow overnight James catches sight of him thinking it was Jack Frost. Not wanting to seem a loser, he tells the others he met Jack Frost, had wild sex with Mariah Carey and beat up a gang of teenage thugs. Next day, Percy exposes his lies much to James' embarrassment.

Scaredy Engines
Set to work in a smelter on Halloween night, Thomas ribs Percy about being a scaredy cat and to beware the ghost engine. When the other engines are sent home and Thomas is left alone, he gets a dose of his own medicine when Michael Myers jumps out of the shadows and stabs him to death with a rusty knife. Percy discovers the mutilated engine of Thomas the next day and laughs.

Percy and the Haunted Mine
Percy, who by now we know is a freaking chicken, is traveling to another town on a dark and foggy night when he sees an industrial chimney stack disappear into the ground. Relating the story to the other engines the next day, they tell him jokingly it was the work of evil gnomes. Will the mystery of the gnomes be revealed in time for the engines to prepare for "The Most Beautiful Station of Sodor" competition, or will Greg Brady crash his surfboard into a reef and die?

This is how a train goes to the toilet, boys and girls!

Middle Engine
Percy cops a severe dressing down from the Fat Controller when workplace bullying from two other nasty engines leads to him being tipped upside down on a coal tipper. A union investigation uncovers unsavoury practices involving the placement of middle engines at the coaling plant. The union steps in to Percy’s defense and threatens Fat Controller with crippling bans unless something is done.

James and the Red Balloon
The engines feel the pressure when a hot air balloon service begins to steal their passengers. They take their issues to Alan Fels at the ACCC hoping to end the monopoly. Fels accepts a bribe from the balloon operators and declares that he has no issue with the situation. Thankfully the popularity of the balloon has attracted so many tourists that the trains are in demand more than ever to cater for all the increased traffic to the attraction, proving that competition is a good thing and the ACCC is a powerless organisation on the take from big business.

I’m assuming that all these episodes are shot for a 4:3 television presentation and the slight cropping (around 1.50:1, not 16:9 enhanced) is just a gimmick they used to make the shooting look more interesting. The picture is nice, with bright colours and naturalistic lighting to mimic the typical island sun of Sodor. Detail is fair, but a long way from the levels achievable by DVD. There’s some minor colour bleed visible in reds, typically on the engines and some signage, but most-if not all three year old children will not give a damn. This is perfectly fine for endlessly replaying to sedate your children when you just can't cope with them smearing shit on the fridge anymore.

The audio relays the narration and the minimal dialogue from the engines very clearly, to the point you'll wish Ringo Starr was never born. Your kids won't have any problem understanding what is said, if they can understand English at all that is. No LFE, no split rears, no holophonic soundstage, the sound design is largely unimaginative and consists of trains shooshing around the island with no real aural distinction between the various engines types and spatial environmental effects.

When you see this DVD features eight episodes you’ll think it's a value packed release. It's only when you realise each episode runs about six minutes that perhaps they could have thrown on a few more to round it out to a complete hour. On the other hand, kids have a very short attention span if my own boy is anything to go by, and after a few episodes he was off to smash one of his toys instead. The stories are simple enough, sometimes they're a little politically incorrect, but that's okay with me because we're in danger of breeding a nation of pansies anyway, so some indiscriminate name calling could be a good thing in my book.

If you're just after something to throw on for the kids and give yourself ten minutes of peace and quiet so you can have a morning scotch, then this will do fine. Just don't kid yourself that they're going to learn anything.