Original Release Date: November 23, 2018
Derek the Steam Engine is an adult parody of Thomas the Tank Engine. I actually first developed this concept much earlier in life, probably around my junior year in high school, after hearing of the adult Broadway parody of Sesame Street, Avenue Q. I decided to apply the adult-parody concept to Thomas instead. Now the major question was how to make it adult beyond having characters similar to ones in Thomas just spew out profanities very often. That would be audacious at first, but after a while it would just become repetitive and boring. And as engines don't have genitals, sex jokes probably wouldn't be too easy (and despite the characters basically being Muppets, I think Avenue Q has more room to suspend one's disbelief than trains would).
I was at a loss at how to handle it. But years passed and I discovered YouTube Poop, including KeeperOfBeans' Thomas YTPs, among others. They featured odd humor by means of word salad, silly visuals, and other poopisms. I decided to try handling such humor, normally suited for a video format, and apply it to a written text format and see what the result would be.