Thomas Foley Sanders (born April 24, 1989), known as Thomas Sanders, is an American singer, actor, scriptwriter and internet personality made famous by Vine and YouTube. He is best known for his Vine career, which lasted from April 2013 until the app was shut down by Twitter in January 2017. After the shutdown of Vine, he continued making videos, long ones on YouTube, and shorter ones in the style of Vine on Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat. His work consists of comedy sketches, pranks, stories, singing and social justice.
Sanders is mainly known for the Vine series Narrating People's Lifes, also known as Storytime, and the YouTube series Sanders Sides. He managed to amass over 7.4 billion loops and 8.3 million followers on Vine, making his career one of the most successful in the app's short history. On YouTube, he has 2.4 million subscribers as of January 2018. Sanders has won two Shorty Awards and one Streamy Award, to best Viner and best YouTube comedian, and has been nominated for a Teen Choice Award to "Choice Viner" among other recognitions.
As a singer, Sanders has published one EP in 2014, one album in 2016, and a single in 2017. He has a career in musical theatre in his native Florida since his teenage years, starring in regional productions of shows like Into the Woods, Singin' in the Rain, The Producers Les Misérables and Heathers: The Musical among others, and starring in a tour through 17 cities in the USA and Canada with his own stage musical, Ultimate Storytime, based on his Vine series. In 2017, he has made an appearance on the Disney Channel show Bizaardvark and co-hosted a special episode of the Disney XD show Walk the Prank.
Video Thomas Sanders (entertainer)
Personal life
Sanders was born and raised in Gainesville, Florida and still lives there today. Although he does not reveal much about his family or personal life, he makes clear his pride of his predominantly Irish Catholic heritage. Sanders has a younger brother, Shea, and two older brothers, Patrick and Christian. His interest in theatre and singing began when he was in middle school, where he started appearing in school plays and singing in several choruses. Sanders later graduated from the University of Florida (which is located in Gainesville) with a Bachelor of Science in chemical engineering. He subsequently combined a daytime job in an engineering firm with his night-time job in theatre, until his success on Vine prompted him to leave that first job and focus on Vine and theatre.
After several years of speculations from his viewers about his sexuality, which, during the Vine era, was ambiguously reflected on his work, on June 12, 2017, Sanders came out as gay, and clarified that all the times he had portrayed straight, gay or bisexual relationships in his videos, he was only playing characters. Sanders said that, although he was "out way before Vine" and he wouldn't have minded going out more clearly earlier, as he answered honestly to anyone who asked him about that, he did not consider showing his real life sexuality on Vine, because he did not consider it relevant for his comedy, preferring instead to "switch roles" any time he had the chance, but also due to Vine limitations, saying that the YouTube platform gave him more freedom to step out of character and talk more freely about himself. Still after coming out, lots of viewers kept on speculating about his hypothetical bisexuality, so he had to clarify many more times that any time he had played any "sexuality that is attracted to women" he was playing characters, making clear again that he was gay, not bisexual, and not "bi-curious", only gay.
Maps Thomas Sanders (entertainer)
Career
Vine
Thomas Sanders made his debut on the internet as "Foster_Dawg", named after his first dog, Foster, on April 14, 2013, when a friend showed him the Vine app. An impression of Stewie Griffin, from Family Guy, was his first Vine to go viral, leading to continued success on the app. He later rebranded his channel to "Thomas Sanders". His channel reached 1 million followers on Vine in October 2013. His biggest success on Vine was the Narrating People's Lifes series, also known as Storytime, where he approached random strangers, comically narrated what they were doing and showed their reaction. Other Vine series he's known for are Disney Pranks with Friends, Pokémon Pranks, Misleading Compliments, Musicals in Real Life and Shoutout Sunday, among others.
By April 2015, Sanders' Vine account had over 5 million followers, which made Thomas Sanders the 17th most followed Viner at the time. On February 24, 2015, Sanders appeared as a guest on The View, on a segment featuring Vine stars, where he was interviewed about his popularity on Vine. When Twitter announced that it was closing Vine down at the end of 2016, Sanders announced that he would continue making Vines until the app's last day. After the end of Vine, which happened on January 17, 2017, Sanders has continued making short videos in the style of Vine on his Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat accounts, which after that date he calls Sanders Shorts. On Instagram, Sanders also encourages his followers, who call themselves "Fanders", to draw fan art inspired on him and his work and send it to him, choosing some of the best examples and releasing weekly compilations under the hashtag "FanArtFriday".
Sanders has collaborated with viners such as Vincent Marcus, Brandon Calvillo and Amymarie Gaertner, and featured cameos and appearances from people such as Sean Bean, Nicolle Wallace, Stacy London, Nick Pitera, Brizzy Voices, Gabbie Hanna, Tara Strong, E. G. Daily, Dan and Phil, Adam Pascal and the main actors from Hamilton, Teen Titans Go! and Steven Universe, among others. He has also featured appearances from a recurrent cast that usually appeared with him in his Vines, usually friends, sometimes family members, and fellow stage actors, such as Leo the Giant, Taylor Shrum, Brittney Kelly, Michael Tremaine, Jonah Stokes (who later renamed themself as Joan Stokes), Terrence Williams Jr., Nicole Visco, Sami Gresham, Dominic Goldberg, Valerie Torres, "That Kenny Guy", Talyn, Susan Shrum, Claudia Garcia, and many others.
YouTube
Sanders posted his first YouTube video on May 1, 2013. Apart from sporadic covers of songs and a few short videos in the style of Vine but longer than six seconds, his channel was mostly inactive until September 2014, when he started publishing monthly compilations of his Vines, vlogs where he talked about various topics, many times about his experiences in theatre, and Q&A's. He had his first YouTube collaborations throughout 2015, consisting on pranks, games and challenges. During 2013 and 2014, his subscriber count grew at a lower rate, with 200,000 subscribers by April 2015. From that date, his user count growth started progressively accelerating, having more than 700,000 subscribers at the end of 2015.
From the second half of 2016, at the same time his Vine activity got slightly diminished, he started posting more YouTube videos in more diverse formats, retaining games and challenges and also the monthly Vine, later Sanders Shorts compilations, but also including song duets, culture and social justice debates with a special support for LGBTQ+ issues among others; short films, comedy sketches, web series like Sanders Sides and Cartoon Therapy, and occasional live broadcasts, among other formats. Sanders' YouTube account surpassed 1 million subscribers around August 2016, and 2 millions in July 2017. As of January 2018, his channel has 2.4 million subscribers.
Thomas made several guest appearances on the Fine Brothers show YouTubers React in 2016. Among others, he has collaborated with Hannah Hart (among other times, on an episode of My Drunk Kitchen), Nathan Zed, Anthony Padilla, Brizzy Voices, Lilly Singh, Jon Cozart, Grace Helbig, Gabe Erwin, Smosh, Michaela Dietz, Meghan Tonjes, Gabbie Hanna, The Gregory Brothers, dodie and Ben J. Pierce, as well as, just like on Vine, Joan Stokes, Talyn, Dominic Goldberg and the rest of Sanders' friends and fellow stage actors.
Sanders Sides
Since October 19, 2016, Sanders runs on YouTube a web series, Sanders Sides, co-written with Joan Stokes, in which he discusses personal or existential issues with four characters, collectively known as the titular "Sanders Sides". On the series, the Sanders Sides are "physical mental projections" of Thomas' mind, and represent different aspects of Thomas' one and only personality. Sanders repeatedly made this clear as he saw some viewers calling them "personalities", as if Thomas was portrayed having dissociative identity disorder, which is something different to what Sanders wants to portray on the series, comparing the series instead to Inside Out, a movie which Sanders claims as an inspiration for Sanders Sides. Sanders Sides consists of two seasons with a total as of January 2018 of 23 episodes released on a variable periodicity, but generally on a fortnightly to monthly average basis. Season 1 has 19 episodes released from October 19, 2016 to July 19, 2017. Season 2 began on September 1, 2017 and as of January 2018, it has 4 episodes. The Sanders Sides are usually all played by Sanders himself, even though on occasion they have also been played by Joan Stokes, Valerie Torres, Terrence Williams Jr. and Talyn. Stokes and Talyn also collaborate extensively with Sanders on the production of the series, researching for the main topics of each episode, making props, decorating sets, designing and hand sewing some pieces of costume, doing some of the makeup, and helping with editing and visual effects. Sanders Sides has featured sometimes appearances of guest stars like Lilly Singh or Butch Hartman who, apart from appearing as himself, created an animated sequence exclusively for Sanders Sides where Thomas and his Sides became cartoon characters.
On the plot of the series, Thomas starts each episode as an ordinary vlog about a certain topic or dilemma. Sometimes he is interrupted by the Sanders Sides who pop up before him, and sometimes Thomas summons them for help. Anyway, this starts a debate where each of the Sides offers his point of view according to the personality trait he represents, until they all reach a conclusion, both for Thomas and for the viewers. All of this is combined with gags and comical, dramatic or thrilling moments that happen between Thomas and the Sides. Some of the dilemmas covered by the series have been, among others, how to bring down anxiety, things and tricks to learn to get a better adulthood, how to approach someone romantically, when to listen to the mind or the heart in our daily life, cognitive distortions and ways to avoid them, causes and solutions for procrastination, how becoming an adult doesn't mean giving up the inner child completely, dealing with changes in life, how anxiety is necessary in the right doses for human life, fitting in in life, and ways to deal with a romantic breakup.
The Sanders Sides' names are Logan, Patton, Prince Roman and Virgil, although at the beginning they were known respectively as Logic, Morality or Dad, Creativity or Princey and Anxiety, until they revealed their names one by one. Logan is Thomas' logical thinking, his intelligence and his acquired knowledge. He is based on the concept of Logos by Aristotle, one of the three modes of persuasion which appeals to logic and reasoning. Patton is Thomas' morality, his sense of right and wrong, his emotions, his feelings and his inner child. He is based on the concept of Pathos by Aristotle, one of the three modes of persuasion which appeals to emotions. Roman is Thomas' creativity, his fancifulness, his hopes and dreams, his romanticism and his love for singing. He is based on the concept of both romanticism for romance and Romanticism, the artistic movement involving tales of knights and princesses as one of its themes. Finally, Virgil is Thomas' anxiety, his fears, his fight or flight reflexes and his survival instinct. His name is based on the Latin name Vergilius which, although it is of unknown meaning, experts theorize it derives from "vigil" or "vigilant", and also on the Roman poet Virgil, who appears as a character on Dante's Inferno, a video game based on Dante's Divine Comedy, where he escorts Dante through the Underworld.
As seen on the first image, Logan, as Thomas' logic, is portrayed as a teacher, always spotting a serious, over-analytic attitude, and with difficulty to process emotions, double meaning expressions and slang words, usually taking things the others tell him too literally, and needing the use of vocabulary cards where he writes their multiple meanings to be able to follow up in conversations. Patton, as his morality, is portrayed as a father, something ironic as, since he also represents Thomas' inner child, he is portrayed with the mind of a playful kid in spite of being the father in the team. He is also portrayed with a love for dad jokes, something that Logan cannot stand. He is portrayed as deeply emotional and is the one among the Sides who loves Virgil more, to the point of unilaterally adopting him as his "dark strange son". Roman, as Thomas' creativity and fancifulness, is portrayed as a Disney prince, always prone to unrealistic behavior and, as he both represents Thomas' masculinity and femininity, usually talking with a theatrical masculine voice, but screaming like a woman when suddenly scared (his screaming voice was provided by Talyn), and sometimes showing a subtle effeminate voice and liking things that society usually consider feminine. He is also portrayed as having quite a narcissistic personality, but constantly working to rein himself in. Virgil, as Thomas' anxiety, is portrayed as a dark emo teenager, being the voice of reason but with a fatalistic attitude, and acting as the antagonist in his earlier appearances, as he represents Thomas' negative thinking about himself. He and Roman are portrayed to have an on and off relationship, where Roman constantly throws insulting nicknames to Virgil and Virgil throws back some at Roman too. Virgil is portrayed as feeling isolated and unwanted by the team and is genuinely thankful to Patton for being the only one of the other Sides who accepted him from the beginning. Among the Sides, Virgil is the one that has the most drastic evolution, starting as an evil antagonistic figure that enjoyed the anxiety he inflicted upon Thomas, and slowly softening up, leaving his earlier menacing behavior, until revealing he really cared about Thomas' well being and that he only intended to protect him, thus being accepted by the group, being this, in Sanders' words, a symbol of Thomas first rejecting then slowly accepting his anxiety as a part of himself.
Sanders Sides is a spin-off from the Vine/Sanders Shorts series, as Patton, Roman and Logan are characters that had previously debuted on Vine in 2014, known there as Dad, Prince and Teacher respectively (these names, as noted above, were also used on Sanders Sides as nicknames, although the Teacher nickname has been far less used than the others and the Prince nickname was shortened to Princey). There, each has their own Vine series. Dad's series began on January 15, 2014, Princey's series began on June 4, 2014, and Teacher's series began on November 3, 2014, and all these series are still running on Sanders Shorts. Virgil has also occasionally appeared on Vine and Sanders Shorts, but he was an original creation for Sanders Sides. Virgil does not have a series of his own and has always appeared as an antagonistic warlock on the Prince's series.
On the first episode of Season 2, apart of a change on the opening song and a new logo specifically designed for Sanders Sides, there was a slight redesign of the characters, who started wearing new costumes that can be seen on the first image. Virgil's new costume was designed, dyed and hand sewn by Talyn and Joan Stokes themselves using existing clothes and pieces of fabric. With the change, the Sanders Sides costumes started spotting individual logos that identified them. Logan's logo consists on a white brain with black glasses, Patton's logo consists on a white heart with black glasses, Roman's logo is a medieval-like heraldic shield that spots a gules background with a castle surrounded by a pit and a sun drawn on it in Or, and Virgil's logo consists on a purple cloud with a thunder coming out of it. Except Roman, whose logo appears on his sleeves, all the rest of the logos appear on their chests. The new logos were officially premiered on a merchandising event that Sanders hosted on Broadway, New York, on August 19 and 20, 2017. These redesigned costumes are seen only on the Sanders Sides series. The Sanders Shorts counterparts keep wearing the season 1 costumes that can be seen on the second image, which they've always used since their first appearances on Vine.
Theatre
Apart from his Internet-based career, Sanders works in musical theatre since he was a teenager. He debuted when he was in seventh grade, in the early 2000s, playing Macduff in a middle school production of Macbeth, and his first role in a musical was as Prospero in The Return to the Forbidden Planet, during high school in the mid 2000s. He then performed in local productions for Buchholz High School, Gainesville High School, and the Gainesville Community Playhouse, where among many others roles, he played Ko-Ko in Hot Mikado (2007), Don Lockwood in Singin' in the Rain (2009), Leo Bloom in The Producers (2010), Phil Davis in White Christmas (2012), The Wolf and Cinderella's Prince in Into the Woods (2014), and Inspector Javert in Les Misérables (2014). Sanders received two Golden Apples, a local award from the Gainesville Community Playhouse, to the best actor in a musical, for Hot Mikado in 2007 and for The Producers in 2010. Other roles include Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar, Troy Bolton in High School Musical and Slightly Soiled in Peter Pan. In 2015, Sanders played J.D. in Heathers: The Musical, in a production performed in Orlando. From August 8 to September 2, 2016, Sanders went on a stage musical tour, Ultimate Storytime, written by Sanders with songs composed by Jacob Fjeldheim, and based on his Vine series Narrating People's Lifes, performing in 17 cities in the USA and Canada, including Toronto and New York City.
Writing for The Gainesville Sun, critic Arline Greer said about Singing in the Rain: "Thomas Sanders is on stage in [Gene] Kelly's place, willingly and eagerly putting himself through Kelly's iconic paces. Your enjoyment of Sanders' performance and of the production in general depends a lot on your willingness to put aside memories of what some have called one of Hollywood's greatest musical motion pictures. If it's indelibly etched in your brain, you may have trouble." Writing about The Producers, the same critic said: "Here, in another stroke of brilliant casting, Thomas Sanders plays the timid, hysterical Bloom, who sings, 'I Wanna Be a Producer' with all the charm of a starry-eyed Josh Groban." Writing for The Gainesville Sun about Les Misérables, critic Ron Cunningham said: "And Thomas Sanders -- a comic standout in "Into the Woods" -- is grim as death in his portrayal of Javert, the self-righteous police inspector who hounds Valjean without mercy." Writing for Orlando Sentinel, critic Mathew J. Palmer said: "Thomas Sanders, who has a huge Internet following for his work on YouTube and Vine, is a charismatic J.D., but as a couple [with his co-star Nicole Visco] they don't generate much heat", remarking also they both were "fine singers", even though some "momentary pitch issues" appeared throughout the cast on the opening night.
Music
Sanders is a bass singer and has sung multiple times in his Vines and YouTube videos, as well as his Tumblr, Snapchat and the rest of his social media accounts. He has performed songs in a wide variety of genres, but he has personally showed a preference towards jazz music, mentioning Nat King Cole as one of his favourite singers. He has also sung duets with dodie, Jon Cozart, Ben J. Pierce, Deedee Magno Hall, Adam Pascal and others. One of these duets, the song "R.I.P. Vine: A Song", performed with Jon Cozart in December 2016, was nominated for a Streamy Award to the best collaboration. He released his first EP on Bandcamp on December 21, 2014, comprising Christmas songs and titled Merry Christmas. In 2016, he released the soundtrack of his Ultimate Storytime stage musical, recorded alongside his co-stars, Terrence Williams Jr., Nicole Visco, Jay Harper (also known as JayIsJo) and Leo Anderson (also known as Leo the Giant). On July 22, 2017, Sanders released on YouTube a new original song titled "The Things We Used to Share" which became available to stream and download on iTunes and Spotify on July 27.
EPs & albums
- Merry Christmas (2014)
- Ultimate Storytime (2016)
Songs
Television
On January 27, 2017, Thomas Sanders guest starred in the Disney Channel show Bizaardvark, in the last episode of the first season, titled "In Your Space!", where he portrayed the titular reality web show's host Ian Finkelman. He also co-hosted a special episode of Walk the Prank, titled "Talk the Prank with Thomas Sanders and David Lopez", which was aired on Disney XD on March 20, 2017.
Awards and nominations
Notes
References
External links
- Thomas Sanders official account on the Vine Archive
- Thomas Sanders' official account on Instagram
- Thomas Sanders on IMDb
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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