Welcome to the first post of 2025, the 80th anniversary year of The Railway Series books. After, what is to me, a dismal Season 3 and a very boring Christmas special alongside that could've been an 11 minute episode, we are now at the fourth season of All Engines Go! The only thing new to this season is that Duck and Douglas will be making an appearance, though like with any legacy character that makes their debut they'll just likely show up, have some dialogue and then afterwards they have a cameo here and there and then they are completely forgotten about unless they have some kind of importance in another episode for whatever reason. But apart from those two, nothing else too new or exciting, as if anything AEG related is that exciting.
One thing I would like to point out though is that, as of this post, we haven't got any news about the show's renewal for a fifth and sixth season. In October 2022, Mattel announced S3 and 4 and Corus Entertainment's '2023/24 speciality releases' press release mentioned this season in June 2023. But yet in June 2024, for their 2024/25 slate of announcements, they would've announced S5 but there was no mention of Thomas anywhere and surely we would've gotten news by now of a renewal, right?
Now I heard from TheGermanofSodor through Discord that Mattel had told the people at Nelvana that All Engines Go! is a 'success' and they had also mentioned things like ratings or the Christmas special being placed at number 2 on Netflix US. No disrespect to TheGermanofSodor, but if this was such a success, for Mattel's case, wouldn't their also be a big demand of the toys to sell? How come there is so little at various shops?
The ones that I had been to have stock that goes back to the Thomas, Sandy and Kana variants from 'The Mystery of Lookout Mountain' special from 2022, which by the way is something that I'd discovered recently thanks to the wiki. Great packaging and awareness Mattel, I never realised that it was from that thanks to your wonderful blunder of not putting the logo there to spread actual awareness that such special existed or that it was related to it instead of just being another pointless variant!
But I digress. While some new engines and some new sets have been released, they are hardly restocked after they're gone. I remember seeing the AEG version of Toby once at a Big W when I went shopping most likely around 2023? But after it had been sold, I had hardly seen any of it being restocked.
The reason why I have such strong doubts that AEG was a success at all is because Mattel had said the same thing in the past for Big World, Big Adventures but toy sale numbers told us different and this is the same company that says that the change up for BWBA saw a 40% increase in TV ratings in 2018 but yet that era of the show lasted until 2020 and very likely because the toy sales had not been strong and you can see that through quarterly earnings between 2019-2020, I don't count the 2018 ones because BWBA started around their third quarter and the numbers for the fourth usually tallies up the whole year. Q4 of 2020 as well as Q1-2 of 2021 showcased good numbers likely due to COVID-19 and the lockdowns but sadly it didn't last long in the aftermath.
Big World, Big Adventures had good reception when it came onto Netflix US in early 2020, through the sources of Sodor Island Fansite (SiF), but yet the original show was still canned at the time.
My point is this, Mattel is a TOY company with other interests, particularly media, and while those other interests may see good figures, they would very likely care only about toy sales. Looking at various stores here in Australia and during my occasional visits to the United States, I don't think this reimagining of Thomas had seen so much success. While there had been an increase in sales between 2021 until the second quarter of 2022, though I think MAYBE there had been some toys from the original series still being sold in 2021, things had started to decrease for Fisher Price, the umbrella that Thomas toys are under, from Q3 of 2022, and things hadn't look too handsome since then.
Since it's very likely that S4 of AEG will be the end of the show, I will give my overall view of it as a whole when I'd finish reviewing all 26 episodes. I will, as usual, look over the special as well though as of writing this piece, we don't know what the special will be all about yet.
So enough rambling, here are my views of S4A but first, the usual:
THESE ARE MY OWN OPINIONS AND ARE NOT INFLUENCED FROM THE THOMAS & FRIENDS FANBASE
SHEEP STAMPEDE
Kristen Mcgregor
Directed by
Campbell Bryer
Produced by
Suzie Gallo
Air Date
27/01/25 - UK
Plot
Diesel tells Nia that using her special whistle to find Farmer McColl's sheep isn't fair. So she tries not to use it, even though it is the only thing that can save the delivery.
Like S3's opener, this was another decent one but a bit better than S3's opening episode. Not great or special but decent. The set up was OK with Nia showcasing her sheep whistle and adds a little bit of personality to her which is doing impressions of things like Thomas' whistles, a duck's quack and sheep, though AEG never really does much with the character's quirks for more stories and would usually be more ordinary and boring. Like I do see Nia's impression of things used for other stories like maybe one of the engines have a broken whistle and need to make deliveries so Nia offers into help, don't know what the message would be but with this very likely to be the last season of the iteration for good not much you can do about it now.
The montage of the lost sheep, though done for the purpose of comedy, was good too as it eases the pacing creating more set up for the story and doesn't make it look like pointless filler. The dynamic between Nia and Diesel was nice to see as well and a bit refreshing to see these two interacting because this could've been another Thomas and Diesel being competitive story and from looking at the episode a second time, it could've easily been one but I'm glad it wasn't, though I believe we will get another one of those sometime this season because this show doesn't have much variety, much like its toy line.
I still think the show could've displayed its morals without the need of stating it because I do believe kids know the message without being told what it is because there are kids who are sharp minded than what people give them credit for. The episode also had a song and while it did feel part of the story, I still think they work better without them but Mattel needs them to make a mandated music album that they might, hardly, advertised on their social media pages. You could at least have Nia going around collecting sheep with her sheep whistle and that's it. The songs are just morally forced because they need to tell the child what the lesson is.
So despite that, this episode was decent but I'm not going to remain hopeful that this season will be good.
Series Rating (So far):
Sheep Stampede - 6/10
Overall Rating (So far):
6/10
