Thomas & Friends is a children's television series about the engines and other characters working on the railways of the Island of Sodor, and is based on The Railway Series books written by the Rev. W. Awdry. This article lists and details episodes from the twelfth series of the show, which was first broadcast in 2008. This series was originally planned to be narrated by Pierce Brosnan, replacing Michael Angelis and Michael Brandon for the UK and US narrations starting with The Great Discovery, respectively. However, Brosnan withdrew from the series for unknown reasons, and the series was released with Angelis narrating the UK releases and Brandon narrating the US releases. Most episodes in this series have two titles: the titles from the UK broadcasts are shown on top, while the American-adapted titles are shown underneath. This was also the last season of the use of the live-action model animation to the show before switching over to full CGI in 2009, starting with Hero of the Rails. This series managed to spawn a cult internet following early 2019 thanks to the sheer incompentence of Twitter.com user @TheSodorWander.
Production
Filming and animation
Series 12 marked the beginning of the show's transition into CGI. Characters' faces were animated through CGI with the aid of motion capture animation. The physical models' molded faces were replaced by white targets with triangles to fix a computer-animated face in post-production. Static models of people and animals were replaced with 3D animations by using small, metal sticks with coloured points on each end. The animation was provided by Nitrogen Studios, the studio contracted for future full-CGI episodes. This change marked the movement of production of the show from the United Kingdom to Canada, although the model scenes were still filmed at Shepperton Studios. This was the last series where Ed Welch provided the music, while Robert Hartshorne continues to compose the music afterwards until he was took over by Chris Renshaw in . HiT Entertainment's Senior Vice-President of Production and Programming, Christopher Skala, stated that the change, aside from budgetary reasons, was intended to convey more emotion and flexibility through the stories. Skala claimed that, of his focus group, even those who felt that Thomas, as an institution, should not be changed in this way ultimately responded positively to the demonstration of the new animation techniques. Closed captioning for the 30-minute version of the show was produced by CaptionMax.
