YMMV / Fireman Sam

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Some believe that Norman is acting out because he has a Disappeared Dad and his mother is too busy with her job.
  • Some also add to the interpretation that Sam is, in fact, Norman's dad (Usually citing the red hair as proof) and Norman's arsonist tendencies are either a way to see his dad consistently or to give his dad something to do.
• Awesome Art: Series 5 sees an upgrade in fluidity and detail to the animation, giving the characters new outfits, lip sync, and cleaner walk/run cycles, and looks much smoother and livelier than its preceding seasons.
• Awesome Music:
  • The title theme. No matter which version you grew up with, the tune is likely stuck in your head forever. Special notice for the original extended version.
  • The rescue theme is an urgent but jaunty track that plays almost whenever the fire team goes into action. A vocal version, "The Person In Charge Is Officer Steele", was also made.
  • Trevor's theme from the original seasons also got a fun Calypso-styled vocal version, "The Pontypandy Bus".
• Americans Hate Tingle: Before 2010, the series hardly aired on Television in the Netherlands. It only did in 1990 on the VARA, which pulled the show after airing every episode only once with no repeats whatsoever, and a two-year run on Kindernet in the early 2000s.
• Cargo Ship: Elvis protects Dolly, the fire station training dummy.
• Damsel Scrappy: Norman in the newer series. It doesn't help that he often gets into these situations due to his stupidity.
• First Installment Wins: Though the revival seasons have their defenders, the original series is often considered the best for its cosy atmosphere and John Alderton's narration.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The show's popularity isn't just in the UK; it's also trendy in Germany, Spain and Mexico. The original series was also top-rated in Poland, but the revival show never caught up to similar levels of popularity.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Two portable games consoles used by James and Sarah are rectangular-shaped with the controls on the sides and the screen in the middle. Given the period of the episode airing, it was likely meant to be an Expy of the Wii U and the Nintendo 3DS. Still, there's also a small slot at the top, which resembles a cartridge slot. This description nearly matches one for the portable mode of the Nintendo Switch. This became even more hilarious following the Nintendo Switch Lite's release, where both consoles match the solid non-detachable controller sides and the pastel colours.
• Lady Mondegreen: The name of Sam's invention in "Barn Fire", the Samuel Patent Potato Picker, caused a large chunk of people to believe Sam's full name was Samuel Peyton. His full name would later be canonized as Samuel Jones.
• Memetic Mutation: The Welsh Fireman YouTube Poop videos:
  Get out, get the <bleep> out, and stay out!
  " SPECIAL K!" (with a superimposed image of said cereal's box)
  • Elvis remarking that the phone lines are...DEAD?!
  • Elvis in Norman's Tricky Day: "Elbow grease...?"
  • Pretty much every character's vocabulary is limited to memes. (at least if you remember watching that cartoon when you were a kid) Take a sip every time someone says, "Mama Mia! Cacosa!" "I've done this a thousand times, I have!", "Oh man!", "NORMAN! SCRAM!", "That's uh... a bit torn. Sorry!" or "It's Mr. Evans! He's hurt his arm!" you'll explode with laughter in seconds!
  • Fireman Sam is a viral target for Youtube Poops, sometimes even playing in reverse and giving subtitles to make the characters look like they're burning down the town.
  • Some people make fun of the Welsh accents, notably changing "Hear/Here" to "Yur".
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • The drum beat that opens the theme song, be it a snare or bass drum, sets the viewer up for the following rock number.
  • The sound of Elvis' goofy laugh, or his electric guitar Leitmotif.
• Nightmare Fuel: Now has it’s own page.
• Older Than They Think: The extended lyrics heard in the opening theme of the fifth season onwards were first heard in a rare soundtrack cassette from 1989.
• Seasonal Rot: When it kicks in depends strongly on who you ask, but a common consensus is that it happened when the series transitioned to CGI.
  • For viewers in Wales, still the nominal setting, each successive iteration of the program had fewer distinctly Welsh features than before. The original show was made in Wales and created in Welsh; English studios produced and written subsequent versions. By the CGI era, the characters still have Welsh accents but some changes - for example, moving Pontypandy from the Valleys to the coast, changing the hinterland around the village to be more Ghibli Hills than South Wales, and plot lines featuring things like Morris Dancing, which is English - eroded the distinctly Welsh flavour of the show, even in the Welsh dub, which is now translated from the English rather than the other way round.
• So Bad, It's Good: The live-action adaptation, Fireman Sam In Action, released in 1996. The character designs don't translate well to live-action, the child characters are played by adult women (in fact, Penny is shorter than them), and the whole thing is full of what could most likely scare some viewers.
• Special Effects Failure:
  • In the classic series, Sarah and James looked older than they should be due to the crude nature of the models. From the fifth season onward, they look as young as they should.
  • In "Magic Norman", the portraits of the firefighters on Boyce's sheet is clearly taken from their default pose in animation testing. This is especially noticeable in Sam and Elvis, whose models are rather wall-eyed.
• Tear Jerker:
  • In "Cat Magic", Lion disappears, and the Jones family is devastated by this. Bronwyn sets out a bowl of food for him as a sparse piano tune plays in the background, but he doesn't come home all night. The next day, the family puts up missing posters of him, and in her grief, Sarah lashes out at Bronwyn for bringing Lion out in the first place before crying.
  • The evacuation scene in "The Great Fire of Pontypandy." The music is very melancholy. Dylis has to leave her shop that she just cleaned the windows of. Bronwyn tearfully says, "Bye-bye, little cafe," as they drive toward the dock. It is enough to make anyone tear up.
  • In "Set For Action", Sam is fired after he was framed for overlooking a failed dangerous stunt which was sabotaged. As he looks through his stuff, he recalls working at the fire station. The flashbacks are accompanied by sombre music and will make anyone tear up.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: The CGI redesigns can sometimes invoke this next to the original stop motion ones, mainly due to more realistic facial features like beadier eyes and visible coloured lips.
• Values Dissonance:
  • One episode which has a television explode has a line of "I knew it was too foreign to work properly". This one will confuse modern viewers (since Japanese and South Korean electronics don't have a reputation for being cheap like Chinese electronics) and come off as somewhat racist.
  • Station Officer Steele's initial discomfort with the idea of a female firefighter when Penny debuted in "Dily's Forgetful Day" can come off this way to a modern audience. In the 80s, a female firefighter was still a new concept.
  • Some Moral Guardians (one of them being London's Fire Brigade Commissioner Dany Cotton) once demanded that Fireman Sam be renamed to Firefighter Sam under that "the show reinforces gender stereotypes and turns women off from becoming firefighters!". This is despite the fact that a woman, Penny Morris, is a major part of the cast and is equally as involved with rescues as the firemen; in fact, this controversy happened around 2018, after the series had already introduced another female firefighter, Ellie Phillips, years prior to further promote female empowerment. Additionally, frequently throughout the series, both in the original stop-motion episodes and in the modern CGI era, when a character makes a gender-exclusionary remark, they are swiftly called out on it. Amusingly, this was foreshadowed in the previous example, when Steele realised he'd need to call Penny "Firefighter Morris" instead of "Fireman Morris".

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