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Background Information[]
Bruno is a fictional caboose created by Monica Dennis, Rick Suvalle, Craig Carlisle, Daniel Share-Strom, Peter Gaffney, Joe Sichta and Michael White, with help from the Autistic Self Advocacy Network and Easterseals.
Bruno made his debut in the second series episode, Percy Disappears, which first aired in 2022, and made his final appearance in the 2025 special, Sodor Sings Together.
Creation[]
While the character of Theo was originally introduced with personality traits of autism in the Thomas & Friends special Journey Beyond Sodor, the concept of officially introducing a character with autism into its reboot Thomas & Friends: All Engines Go was the idea of Mattel's Monica Dennis.[1] She had wanted to introduce an autistic character to go along with the impact the original Thomas & Friends series had on members of the autism spectrum. Preliminary development on the character began before late 2020, with Rick Suvalle working with Dennis to create the character. According to autistic writer and consultant Daniel Share-Strom, the character was originally going to be named Bruce the Caboose.[2] However, the name was later changed to "Brake Car Bruno" at some point before June 2021.[3]
Behind the Scenes[]
2D animated rigs[]
Bruno uses a series of complicated 2D rigs created by Nelvana Studio. These rigs are made up of different assets, which can be stretched, squashed and posed to create the desired movements and poses. Bruno's movements are handled by an animation team, with a posing team to create specific poses as required for certain shots.[4]
Originally, Bruno had a slightly different design, which was later finalised for produced episodes. Differences between his original and final designs include:
- His roof, smokejack, lamp and wheels are all grey.
- The outward-facing light on his lantern is blue.
- He has aqua irises.
- The insides of his windows are light blue.
- His handrails, coupling hook base, coupling chain, buffer holds and the edges of his buffers are all yellow.
- He has black and yellow hazard stripes at the back.
- He was originally going to have the letters “BR” and the number “26”, but was changed to the number "43" in the final design.
Texture Variants[]
In addition to his standard livery, several other texture variants exist of Bruno's 2D model. One of them only appeared once. These texture variants include:
(Chaos at Cronk's Crossing)
Pantone colours[]
The following pantone colours are used on Bruno's 2D rigs:
- ■ PMS Warm Red C (red)
- ■ PMS 488 C (red-orange)
- ■ PMS 428 C (light grey)
- ■ PMS Black C (black)
- ■ PMS 116 C (yellow)
Voice Actors[]
- Elliott Garcia (UK)
- Chuck Smith (US)
- Rishi Morar (US; All Aboard!)
- Dalí González (Latin America)
- Christian Peyrano (Latin America; All Aboard!)
- Pietro Takeda (Brazil)
- Kiu Jérôme (France)
- Mattia Gentili (Italy)
- Emiko Takeuchi (Japan)
- Ana Ouro (Spain)
- Leonard van Triet (The Netherlands)