Pretty sure 75 years is prior to the other three existing, so Thomas & Friends has technically gone longer without dropping an N-bomb.

@snooggums @The_Picard_Maneuver this is in fact correct. Sesame Street started in the 60s

All this means is that the Thomas franchise has existed long enough to be publishing books since when that word was still in common parlance. I'm sure if you looked at anything from that era, it wouldn't take long to find something that appears problematic through a modern lens.

That word was unfortunately rather common in the past:

https://m.youtube.com/shorts/0Nbh9JC3Wgw

I convinced a girl to watch "Battle Of Briton (1969)" with me one time. I forgot to warn her about the dog. She was shocked to say the least.

Does the Nword have the same cultural significance in the UK?

What the filter is that?

I thought vertical videos and word by word transcripts was aweful, now they add shitty filters?

pretty sure that racism in the days of yore was still racist (please remember who decided what was appropriate in common parlance back then)

Okay, I need more context to this. N-word in any of these franchises feels something so far off.

Some youths were throwing rocks at trains going under a bridge, so one of the engines purged soot from its chimney as it went under the bridge as revenge, covering the youths in sticky black stuff.

Boys on a bridge threw rocks at a train, smashing windows. Next time the train made sure to cover them in soot so they were “black as n—“.

You’re thinking of Dambusters.

And it was still derogatory, but not as weaponised as the US. More like how they used the lesser N word.

wtf is the lesser N word can we just write them in quotes? It's not like Voldemort.

(75 years i.e. 1951)

yeah but barney's a dinosaur. he's at least three point something gajillion years old.

the hays code didn't apply to colloquial speech, it applied to movies.

The Hayes Code didn’t apply to books at all, it was movie specific. I assumed they were talking about the dominant culture at the time.

Context: https://www.scribd.com/document/899239966/Henry-the-Green-Engine-1951-Scanned-by-ThatERTLGuy#page=64 page 60 of the book, 64 of the document.

Written version in case someone doesn't want to click on random links:

The Guard's flag waved, his whistle blew, and they were off. Soon in the distance they saw the bridge. There were the boys and they all had stones. "Are you ready, Henry?" said this Driver. "Sneeze hard when I tell you." "Now!" he said, and turned the handle. "Atisha Atisha Atishooooooh!" Smoke and steam and ashes spouted from his funnel. They went all over the bridge, and all over the boys who ran away as black as ####.

Candyman candyman candyman lol.

And nobody denied that. The statement was "racism was normal in those days", and not "the n-word wasn't racist in those days".

And here I thought George Carlin was the hardest Thomas ever went. Turns out he used to roll coal on hooligans 🤣

We do not talk about what Barney was doing during the 1940s.

You're not allowed to criticize or point out Southern Klans members because it was the style of the time.

Lemmy's just becoming worse and worse these days.

Looks over shoulder

Whispers: "numpty"

Runs away

wait what was Barney doing in the 1940s

Oh god, worse than I could possible have imagined D:

he doesn't even look sorry

Believe it or not, it was not "normal" to use slurs in children's books in 1952.

There are Marvel comics from the 1940's with characters straight out of ministrel shows and they still don't use the word. Would you like to guess why?

Edit: not that it stopped Dr Seuss a couple times in the 30's, mind you, but he reserved it for comics and not his children's books, those only got racist caricatures.

it just cracks me up because if you look for Hays violating shit, it's everywhere back then. If they wanted to sing about sex, they sang about food.

fuck censorship. historical context is important when referencing historical facts. society must be reminded of why language like this is no longer acceptable in order to keep it unacceptable, lest we forget.

The TV adaptation definitely glosses things over. For instance, in the show Henry has a big crash and is sent to England to be repaired. In the canon of the books, he was scrapped and swapped out for a better locomotive, who was then given the same name.

They've been doing that for a while to work around copyright claims. And as someone with less than perfect hearing, I always appreciate transcripts/subtitles.

They also punish a locomotive by sealing it behind a brick wall. Considering those things are sentient and basically immortal that's some new levels of fucked up.

That was also Henry I. The whipping boy of Sodor.

No, he’s sent to Crewe for a rebuild and returns with a new shape - mostly changes to his firebox iirc as he’s been struggling to build up enough steam with anything other than high-quality (expensive) Welsh coal.

Source: literally re-read the relevant book over the weekend.

See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_Then_There_Were_None (Agatha Christie, 1939)

...are you okay? automatically assuming the worst possible meaning of ambiguous statements doesn't seem healthy.

what about this: "pointing the klansmen out to people back then was harder because the average person was more racist."

The canonical history book The Island of Sodor expands on this:

Since 1922 there have been two Henrys…

We never saw Henry I, but we talked to men who had crewed him. Henry I had a superficial likeness to Gordon, they said, but that was as far as it went. They remembered hearing rumours of a scandal at Doncaster in 1919 or thereabouts, about the theft of some drawings. Nothing was proved, but it was alleged that a Locomotive Builder with a grudge against Gresley had engineered a "leak" so as to steal a march on him. His spy, however, blundered and took the wrong drawings. The mistake was discovered too late. The locomotive when built, showed so many faults that the builder was glad of chance to unload his "white elephant" on to a desperate customer.

No-one was better pleased than Topham Hatt when the Killdane accident occurred in 1935. At last he had an opportunity of having Henry completely rebuilt at Crewe.

It has been a mystery to many that Topham Hatt was able to send the deplorable Henry I to Crewe in 1935, and receive back a Stanier Class SMT in tip-top condition as Henry II.

So as Henry I was a bootleg Gresley and then a Stanier Black 5, they are two different engines.

The word carried somewhat less of a charge in the UK at the time, where black people were relatively uncommon until waves of labour migration from the Caribbean in the 1950s, than in the US, where it was freighted with the weight of slavery, the KKK, Jim Crow laws and such. Agatha Christie could call a book “10 Little N_s”, alluding to a children’s rhyme. This was an age in which the children who casually sang that rhyme probably had golliwog dolls.

"NOT THE MAMA!"

I grow more and more tired of humanity being a constant idiot parade but that's nothing new.

they do say that if you always expect the worst you're never disappointed... but it definitely won't make you happy.

They really hate that one guy eh?

Lmao that sounds like a python library

He knew

Again, nobody said that. You keep just making shit up.

He was chilling with the Minions.

Yeah this always irks me about english/the anglosphere, people act like mentioning a word is the same as directing it at someone as an insult

I just checked my copy of the book. Even though it was first published in 1939, my copy was still published under the original titlein 1963.

"Hey baby, wanna hear a slur?"