#mighty express

I have a reputation for masochistically subjecting myself to train shows aimed at preschoolers. I grew up with Thomas and Friends as a child, and then in grad school - the year I turned 25 - I proceeded to embarrass myself by realizing a human from Chuggington named Eddie was everything I look for in a potential boyfriend. I’ve always loved watching and collecting horrible children’s television and the Chuggington Incident brought me back into that hobby, hence this blog. Anyhow, due to the Chuggington Incident I developed my reputation for watching the weird preschool train shows so other people didn’t have to, and Mighty Express is the latest of those, so here we go.

The first thing you need to know about Mighty Express is that it was made by the same people who made Paw Patrol. That more or less tells you what to expect going in on this one. It’s basically Paw Patrol with trains. There are ten episodes on Netflix right now, and apparently a holiday special is dropping later this year that I unfortunately will also likely make myself watch. (Whatever, it won’t be as bad as Rapsittie Street Kids.) It’s your typical train show on the surface - sentient vehicles with their own personalities doing specialized jobs and occasionally getting help from each other and the humans around them in the vicinity of a town called Tracksville. It also operates like Paw Patrol in that there’s a sort of central command the trains report to which is run by a team of three humans - the leader, a mechanic, and a dispatcher/tech expert.

There’s something very jarring about this universe, though. There are no adults anywhere.

I mean that completely seriously. You don’t see a single adult in any episode of this show. In the original preschool train show, Thomas and Friends, you see people from all walks of life, although you don’t get to know them very well besides Sir Topham Hatt/The Fat Controller. In Chuggington, you do get to know the human citizens of the city better, and some of them play very important roles in the depot, namely ‘train doctors’ Morgan and Lori and maintenance of way master Eddie (aka my boyfriend shhhhh). In Mighty Express, all business is handled by literal children - they run the local farm, the foundry, the port, etc. and serve in jobs like park ranger and lifeguard. This would be significantly less of a problem if they didn’t also show the children attending school during the day - no one is teaching them, and no one is doing their jobs in their absence. It just doesn’t work on any level. I know you have to suspend disbelief for these shows, considering they involve talking sentient trains, but this...no.

The one highlight is that one of these children, Jubilee, is disabled and uses a motorized wheelchair. This is completely normalized. You don’t see too much disability representation on these sorts of shows so it was nice to see her being seen as perfectly competent and nobody doubting her because of her mobility device. I’m a disability rights and neurodiversity advocate in real life so that was refreshing, but that was literally the only bright spot for me besides a cutely animated bat in one of the episodes.

The rest? Well, it’s...it is what it is. You have trains making obvious mistakes that characters on preschool shows normally make so kids can learn, complete with the usual violations of rail safety and logic (including an episode where popcorn is carried in an open goods car/truck instead of in a sealed hopper car and inevitably flies out). The fact that no adult humans are present in Tracksville - and according to the show’s blurb on Wikipedia, have never existed there - is just so, so unnerving. Do these children have to leave when they grow up? Are they physically incapable of aging, like in Neverland? What is going on in this universe? It’s horrifying.