This week is, of course, the mid-year break at most schools, so my son is home during the day on weekdays. Today he turned on the TV to watch the PBS channel. We've had trouble picking up that station since it went digital, but a few days ago my daughter spent about an hour painstakingly adjusting the antenna, so now we get it again. The images are slightly pixelated, making the cast of Sesame Street look like the suspects on Cops, but it just makes me nostalgic for the days of "snow" and double images on broadcast television.
At one point I asked my son what he was watching, and he replied, "The Dinosaur Train." That made me look up. See, back in 2008 I wrote a short story called "The Dinosaur Train," which appeared in the July '08 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. (You can pick up that issue in electronic format here.) How the heck could he be watching my short story on television?
Well, it turns out that now there's a PBS educational show called The Dinosaur Train, produced by the Jim Henson Company. I've only watched part of an episode, and it seems to be straight dinosaur facts done with cartoony computer animation. No valuable life lessons that I could see, which is always a mercy. Overall it looks pretty good.
No, I'm not suing anyone. You can't copyright a title, and other than the convergence of dinosaurs and trains there's no real similarity between my story and the TV show. Given the amount of time it takes to develop and release an animated television series they must have been working on this before I ever set finger to keyboard. Still, it's a neat coincidence and I doubt I'll be able to resist any requests by my son to watch it.
My train was better, though.
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