Saddle up, everyone! It’s time to talk about My Little Pony.
If you’ve been with me since the partlydrawn days, you might remember that I liveblogged the first four seasons of Friendship is Magic. I had friends that knew I was a fan of vintage pony content, so they recommended/mentioned the new stuff, and I decided to try it out. It was pretty good, what of it I saw; from what I hear (mostly what I have learned from Jenny Nicholson, the One True Pony Aficionado), it gets… less that, and more fanservice-y toward the brony culture, so I’m not in a particular hurry to finish. I remember that some episodes absolutely ruled (the Shining Armor/Cadence wedding ones come to mind) and some that I found utterly miserable (anything with Discord, ’cause like, honestly, fuck that guy) and mostly it was fine.
The movie is… well.
My Little Pony: The Movie (2017) is a weird experience, particularly for those who haven’t seen much of FIM (heretofore G4). I (drift partner) have a younger brother Brony who insisted my family go as a family outing, which I was amenable to (we watched the first season together and I found it perfectly fine in small doses) but which largely turned into an endurance test for me. I have a pretty high tolerance for animated kids’ movies, but for whatever reason, I found most of this movie intensely unpleasant. It’s difficult for me to put into words — the bones of the story are fine, it’s a basic quest narrative and has a lot of fun worldbuilding elements, but for whatever reason sitting through it was intolerable to me. I gave it another try later genuinely trying to engage with it positively and, no, I just really don’t like it. (My brother loves it, and it seems to have been largely accepted by Brony fandom, so good for them!) At least Tempest Shadow is hilarious.
I know I watched the 80s cartoons as a kid — both of the theme songs live rent-free in my head — and I’ve seen the 80s movie a ridiculous number of times because my dad VHS taped it off the TV for me one time so I’d have it whenever I wanted. Whenever I wanted was apparently a lot. Back when My Little Pony: A New Generation (heretofore referred to as G5) was released on Netflix, I was ambivalent until I heard people complaining that it was too progressive, at which point I decided we needed to watch it immediately, but first let’s watch the original movie.
Then we found out that every episode of the 80s/90s cartoons (My Little Pony ‘n Friends, My Little Pony Tales) are available for free on Tubi and decided that we’d watch them, too, and… yes. My thesis stands: these ponies have always been progressive. (I would even go so far as to argue that a lot of 80s cartoons have progressive themes, if you consider love and acceptance and also environmentalism progressive, but this is about the ponies since that’s what we’ve recently engaged with.)
Let’s start with ‘n Friends (G1, let’s say; Tales will be G1.5). This post got very long, so we’ll be covering Tales in the near future.
Full story here.