If it's not unsettling stop-motion, I don't want to see it.

look how they massacred my boy

Does the real Thomas actually even count as stop motion? I don’t recall a single frame-by-frame in that entire show.

It was more like a narration over a model train set
- Narration by Ringo Starr, no less!
It's live-action with model trains on sets, with narration over it. No stop-motion involved.

1946 is also acceptable

pic from the original book

That first Thomas is what's unsettling.

The 1 on the animated one is backwards because they were too lazy to redraw it for the other side. They just flipped the sprite.

It's possible whoever made the meme just flipped a screen cap, so all 3 Thomas's would be facing the same direction
- Good point. I'll still fault the cartoon for not having good pictures of their character online. A smart TV producer makes it easy for people to meme their show.