Fireman Sam (Season 6-present)

Fireman Sam (also known as Sam Tân) is a Welsh children's television series. It is based around the inhabitants of Welsh town Pontypandy (a portmanteau of the names of two real-life towns, Pontypridd and Tonypandy), especially firefighter Sam Jones, while the original series ran for 4 seasons, it would later be revived by HiT Entertainment for a 5th season, and after that, the show would be rebooted as a CGI show. While the previous seasons where good, the CGI seasons are not. Consequently, many Fireman Sam fans remained and move back to the original series to this today.

Why It Sucks Now

 * 1) These seasons have little to no connection with the first five seasons of the show as some of the characters look absolutely nothing like they before and Pontypandy’s layout is completely different. Not to mention, these seasons are completely disrespectful to the original source material.
 * 2) * Many elements from the original seasons are non-existent in these seasons, let alone the fact there is no continuity to any of them. The biggest example being Dilys Price and her shop. Dilys doesn’t look anything like she did in the previous seasons and her shop also looks nothing like how it looked in the previous seasons. It was completely redesigned with no rhyme or reason why, it's just now a supermarket, even though a normal supermarket looks about 10x bigger than Dilys' shop.
 * 3) * Much like Barney & Friends from season 3 onwards, Thomas & Friends from season 12-16 and Dora the Explorer from season 3 onwards, the idea of extending a pre-school series sounds good only on paper, as it is poorly executed and heavily crippled, compared to the charm and cleverness of this show's first five seasons.
 * 4) The CGI animation in Seasons 6-10 is by far the most subpar, and the worst in any kids show ever as it looks robotic, jagged, outdated, dull, weak, and lazy and is barely better than the animation in Plotagon. (Even Thomas & Friends' CGI animation in Seasons 13-16, while not the best or the worst, is far better). Thankfully, it has improved a little since Season 11 when DHX took over. However, still the episodes were not great (some episodes were good, but some weren't).
 * 5) Most of the main characters have gotten flanderized horribly:
 * 6) * Norman Price has gone from a mischievous boy who would like to play harmless tricks into an unlikable, loud, whiny and annoying brat who does horrible things for the pettiest reasons, such as tying James to a chair for a stupid stunt video.
 * 7) * Elvis Cridlington has gone from a not so bright, but friendly firefighter into a stupid, annoying man that is scared of being in a helicopter armrest (even though he's a fireman) and feeds Radar the Fire Station Dog chocolate (which can kill dogs), mistaking them for doggy treats.
 * 8) * Sarah and James have gone from caring and loving each other into being problematic siblings who act like idiots to the point they quarrel and fight each other 24/7, and act like this for no reason whatsoever.
 * 9) The voice acting is pretty bad, some of the voices include Norman (UK Version), Elvis, Sarah, James and plenty of other characters because of how annoying they are to listen to.
 * 10) These seasons try too hard to be hip with the kids, such as having the characters use smartphones, which feels quite out of place since the first five seasons rarely tried to be hip.
 * 11) The music is rather bland compared to the previous seasons, even the rescue theme is dull and repetitive too.
 * 12) These seasons gained lots of controversies too. The Season 9 episode "Troubled Waters" was banned due to a scene where Elvis accidentally steps and slips on a page of the Koran. In other words, a very, very good way to invite a terrorist attack. HiT Entertainment later realized this and stated that they would no longer be working with Xing Xing Animation, one of the animation companies for the show since the switch to CGI in the first place back in 2008, causing the show to be animated by DHX instead from Season 11 onwards.
 * 13) Though unintentionally, most of these episodes can show kids very bad morals. For example, in most episodes where Norman starts a fire, steals a vehicle, or even traps another person, he is never given much of a punishment aside from Sam telling him not to do that.
 * 14) Bella is completely absent in seasons 6-9 despite her café still being there. When she returned in Season 10, it's revealed that she moved to Newtown, which does not make sense considering how successful her business was doing in Season 5.
 * 15) * To make things even worse, Bella has still not been seen working at her café since her return to CGI, and has only occasionally been seen helping make pizza.
 * 16) The show was unnecessarily dubbed to American English for American audiences, it is rather pointless and unnecessary since that Fireman Sam is supposed to be a show set in Wales, so why would you even dub a show to American English if it takes place in a country from Great Britain?
 * 17) * In fact, when it aired on Sprout (and Qubo in 2020), the UK dub aired. They didn't dub it into US English until 2014 when it came to Amazon Prime Video.
 * 18) * Even the version aired on Netflix starting in 2020 uses the UK dub and it was still completely understandable.
 * 19) * The original series was localized to the US in a three-episode VHS tape released by F.H.E. (Family Home Entertainment) in 1989, and the UK dub still maintained.
 * 20) * It is also pointless as Season 5 was never dubbed to American English when it was brought over to America.
 * 21) The scripts for each episode are flat, lame, and badly written, the humour is less funny to whereas either a character says an awful pun or the joke comes off as really bland and hard to give a laugh out of.
 * 22) * The worst episode of the series is arguably "Froggy Fantasy".
 * 23) Speaking of Norman Price, in every single episode with Norman as the main character almost always has this ending where Norman apologizes for the irresponsible choices he causes, the team lets him off with a warning and nothing else. In fact, they would have Norman learn that lesson until he forgets it the next episode he's in. It is really predictable and stale at this point.
 * 24) Similar to PAW Patrol, Peppa Pig and Modern Postman Pat, the CGI series commonly introduces new characters, vehicles and locations just to sell toys.
 * 25) * Speaking of which, the toys for the show are very poor quality now, as they have little paint on them, the paint they do have is poor quality and scratches easily and the toys have a very low amount of detailing.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) The show still uses the Season 5 theme song during Seasons 6-9 and the newly re-recorded theme song for Season 10 onwards is pretty good.
 * 2) Not all the new voices are bad, some of them sound okay such as the voices for Sam, Penny, Mike, Trevor, Norman (US dub version) and Station Officer Steele.
 * 3) The animation has somewhat improved since Season 11.
 * 4) Some people consider Season 11 and 12 to be minimal improvements.
 * 5) The rescue scenes have been more satisfying since Season 11.

Reception
While the first 5 seasons were positively received, Season 6 onward were met with overwhelmingly negative reviews.