Reviving a dormant thread, but yeah 😅
The BR Continental Train has finally hit it's big time, it's going to be the second Christmas tree train in our house (we have 2 trees so one tree will get the Plarail treatment 😁), so it'll soon be running again lol
The real thing of interest is this commercial that I found 🤪
https://youtu.be/r8uAGkQXqJI?feature=shared
So, here we have a commercial for Ever Ready batteries (y'know, the fossilised relics I found inside the Continental Train when I bought it), with an interesting train-related story that relates to one of the biggest pieces of railway media ever made.
This ad was made by the then-small animation firm 'Clearwater Films', who counted ex-AP Films special-effects technician David Mitton amongst their staff.
Mitton had worked with Gerry Anderson (owner of AP Films) on such legendary titles as Thunderbirds in the 1960's but was at Clearwater in the 1980's producing commercials while working towards hopefully entering TV animation.
The ad itself, from around 1980, was entirely made using models of Ever Ready batteries, culminating in a scene of a city with a flying UFO made entirely of Ever Ready batteries.
This particular ad that he directed, so it is believed, caught the eye of another person in the TV world, who had been in talks with someone very important in the railway world about adapting a series of popular books for TV.
This client was no ordinary one.
They had a bad previous TV experience with their books made by the BBC, where a model derailed and had to be put back on the tracks by a visible human hand, an error they deemed to be an amateur mistake, and which led to the cancellation of further episodes.
Yet, this plucky TV executive who had met our reluctant author was able to convince him to give it another go, with models no less.
But they would need a studio capable of high-level modelmaking, with someone who had experience working on large scale model productions, perhaps those like Thunderbirds?
But she knew who to call, the man who made the Ever Ready advert. If he could make a city of animated batteries, and had the experience of working on Thunderbirds with moving vehicle models, he probably would be able to work something out.
And so in 1984, the creative minds of Britt Allcroft, The Rev. Awdry and David Mitton came together, and the very first episode of Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends came to life on the screens of the UK, kick-starting almost 40 years of now semi-legendary television in the process.
And to think, all that perhaps because one advert for batteries which I found inside a train impressed Britt enough to hire Clearwater for Thomas - Not bad eh?
(Full disclosure, this story may or may not be 100% accurate but it's one I've seen floating around on the internet several times and the dates check out since T&F began production around 1982, with the ad coming out possibly between 80/'82 so yeah 😅 I'd like to believe it's partially true as it would be quite interesting lol)
The BR Continental Train has finally hit it's big time, it's going to be the second Christmas tree train in our house (we have 2 trees so one tree will get the Plarail treatment 😁), so it'll soon be running again lol
The real thing of interest is this commercial that I found 🤪
https://youtu.be/r8uAGkQXqJI?feature=shared
So, here we have a commercial for Ever Ready batteries (y'know, the fossilised relics I found inside the Continental Train when I bought it), with an interesting train-related story that relates to one of the biggest pieces of railway media ever made.
This ad was made by the then-small animation firm 'Clearwater Films', who counted ex-AP Films special-effects technician David Mitton amongst their staff.
Mitton had worked with Gerry Anderson (owner of AP Films) on such legendary titles as Thunderbirds in the 1960's but was at Clearwater in the 1980's producing commercials while working towards hopefully entering TV animation.
The ad itself, from around 1980, was entirely made using models of Ever Ready batteries, culminating in a scene of a city with a flying UFO made entirely of Ever Ready batteries.
This particular ad that he directed, so it is believed, caught the eye of another person in the TV world, who had been in talks with someone very important in the railway world about adapting a series of popular books for TV.
This client was no ordinary one.
They had a bad previous TV experience with their books made by the BBC, where a model derailed and had to be put back on the tracks by a visible human hand, an error they deemed to be an amateur mistake, and which led to the cancellation of further episodes.
Yet, this plucky TV executive who had met our reluctant author was able to convince him to give it another go, with models no less.
But they would need a studio capable of high-level modelmaking, with someone who had experience working on large scale model productions, perhaps those like Thunderbirds?
But she knew who to call, the man who made the Ever Ready advert. If he could make a city of animated batteries, and had the experience of working on Thunderbirds with moving vehicle models, he probably would be able to work something out.
And so in 1984, the creative minds of Britt Allcroft, The Rev. Awdry and David Mitton came together, and the very first episode of Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends came to life on the screens of the UK, kick-starting almost 40 years of now semi-legendary television in the process.
And to think, all that perhaps because one advert for batteries which I found inside a train impressed Britt enough to hire Clearwater for Thomas - Not bad eh?
(Full disclosure, this story may or may not be 100% accurate but it's one I've seen floating around on the internet several times and the dates check out since T&F began production around 1982, with the ad coming out possibly between 80/'82 so yeah 😅 I'd like to believe it's partially true as it would be quite interesting lol)
Been building Plarail worlds since 2001; Building when I can in 2023 
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