Age: 58
male
Ian McCue is an English producer, writer, television executive and voice actor. He is the senior creative executive producer at HiT Entertainment/Mattel Creations for all of its brands, including Thomas & Friends. During the fifteenth series, he served as a line producer alongside Denise Green. He worked alongside Halim Jabbour until Jabbour left the series. He also wrote the Thomas' Comedy Showtime and Meet the Contenders shorts for the official YouTube channel, as well as Thomas & Friends in 4-D: Bubbling Boilers. He served as producer for the sixteenth through twentieth series and all eight specials in that time. He served as "creative executive" during the twenty-first series and twenty-second series, before becoming producer again from the twenty-third series after Micaela Winter left Mattel in August 2018. He joined HiT in 2008. He launched Festivus, an animation networking and social event he ran for years. He has overseen the production of some of the UK's most well known children's TV series. In 2011, he won the Beyond the Call of Duty Award for his time as a children's producer.
Thomas & Friends (originally known as Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends and later Thomas the Tank Engine and Thomas & Friends: Big World! Big Adventures!) is a British children's television series created by Reverend W. Awdry and Britt Allcroft that aired across 24 series between 1984 and 2021. Based on The Railway Series books by Awdry and later his son Christopher Awdry, it follows the adventures of Thomas, an anthropomorphised steam locomotive on the fictional North Western Railway on the Island of Sodor, and other engines including Edward, Henry, Gordon, and James. The series grew to include additional locomotives and other vehicles, all of which work for the Fat Controller who wants his trains to be "really useful engines". In the United States, it had its first broadcasting with the spin-off series Shining Time Station on PBS in 1989. The series also had a short-lived sister series called Tugs in 1989. The rights to the series are currently owned by HIT Entertainment (a subsidiary of Mattel), having acquired Gullane Entertainment in July 2002. Mattel has announced a 2D-animated reboot, Thomas & Friends: All Engines Go, which premiered on September 13, 2021 on Cartoon Network. Originally announced as new series of the original show,[5] it was later designated a new show altogether by Mattel. This is a Australian dub Version of Thomas & Friends.
