Across the generations · 2:27pm May 12th
Something happened earlier this week that got me thinking.
Even though I have all of G4 on my computer and can watch any part of it any time I wish, back on monday on a whim I clicked on the official MLP stream on youtube. I found myself dropped into the middle of Magical Mystery Cure, just before A True True Friend started playing, and I watched through to the end of the episode.
It made me cry. I always loved Magical Mystery Cure, and it had been a while since I watched it. I don’t watch episodes of the show as much as I did ten years ago, sad to say. And it took me back to the early days, when everything was still fresh and new, and we didn’t know where it was all going to go. And how far away I feel like I’ve gotten from that feeling in the years since.
And that got me thinking about something else I’d been meaning to write about.
This past winter I finally sat down and watched the early generations of MLP, G1 through G3, something I had never gotten around to doing before. In large part because, well, I expected to dislike them a lot. In the end I liked them more than I thought I would, and I could generally find something to enjoy even when on the whole it wasn’t working for me.
I had meant to blog about it then, with a proper Second Thoughts blog, but I didn’t keep good notes and I didn’t feel like watching it again. Also I think google recently changed their algorithm and I now cannot easily find the websites I used back then to keep track of the episodes. So here’s the short version.
I think a lot about how stories age. Beyond the particulars of the shows themselves, I was fascinated to see how elements of MLP had evolved over time. What had changed, what had stuck around. I was quite surprised to see just how much of the earlier shows’ DNA is present in Friendship is Magic.
One of the big things that got people interested in G4 at the start is that there was a lot of epic fantasy adventure in this cartoon for little girls about colorful magical talking ponies, but really that was already true in G1. Rescue at Midnight Castle, the very first MLP cartoon, has ponies abducted and enslaved by monsters, a recurring element across G1. There are a lot of fairytale-style stories. There’s one episode where a portal opens to the land of legends, and Scheherazade, Herakles, Robin Hood and Paul Bunyan come out. From the start, it’s not just birthday parties and talking about your feelings.
(In fact Tirek is far cuter and cuddlier in G4 than he was in G1. In G1 he abducts ponies and transforms them into giant monsters, with a (rainbow) dash of body horror. Compared to that his modern magic-eating schtick is sanitized and child-friendly.)
(Incidentally, I really like that idea of the show as a vehicle to introduce the younger generation to the classics, and I hope that comes back.)
MLP: The Movie (1986) opens with a song about the coming of spring, with the original MLP theme song melody. As someone who gets horrible SAD, that song actually hit me quite hard, and in hindsight it feels like a song about the founding of Equestria after the Windigo Winter. I like this song, I think it’s worth keeping around.
(The song starts soon after the 2-minute mark.)
But the sad truth is that G1 is just quite badly written. This is the height of 1980s cartoons as just half-hour toy commercials, made cheaply and with little care for the craft. We all know the story of Lauren Faust giving her toys personalities as a girl, and being shocked to see the show and see how flat they were by comparison. And it’s true, the characters are particularly weak, barely distinguishable from one another. But also each episode is just very unstructured, a series of vignettes that don’t really add up to anything.
Moving on to G2, aka My Little Pony Tales, it’s immediately clear that this show has a completely different style and tone, and that this is closer to what the cultural impression of MLP had been before G4 showed up. The fantasy adventure angle is more or less completely gone, replaced with a more down to earth school setting and accompanying adolescent social worries. These ponies go to school, cheat on their homework, and bully each other.
I was sad to see the fantasy aspect fade away. But it was clear that the writing got a lot better. The characters were more consistent and distinct, and the stories had more structure and purpose than in G1. But it’s still simple stuff, of course, and a recurring issue is that since these are stories about kids learning not to be mean jerks to each other, the ponies do kinda sorta spend most of the time being mean jerks to each other, and to be honest they aren’t very friendly. Still, it’s clear that G2 is the prototype for G4’s lesson-based episode structure. Also, “Ticket Master” is literally just a remade G2 episode.
G3 continues to develop in the same direction, by at least trying to give the ponies defined personalities and behaviors. They’re also paying more attention to the different pony tribes, making earth ponies, pegasi and unicorns live in different towns and have little contact with each other.
The ponies are no longer jerks, thankfully, and the stories have a bit more of a fantasy flavor again, even as the monsters have disappeared. At this point I started to feel like all the rough edges were getting filed off, leaving it feeling perhaps the most saccharine the franchise has been up to this point. Even though the production values have only gone up so far, it’s hard for me to say it’s an improvement. The stories really didn’t stick in my mind, and a few months later I’m struggling to remember the details.
The trend towards the saccharine continued on from there too. Like Friendship is Magic giving way to Pony Life, so G3 gave way to the even more child-friendly G3.5 and the genuinely awful to look at MLP:Newborn Cuties.
But I was still struck by how much of G3’s DNA went into G4. Take the characters. Rainbow Dash is the most famous, but it’s not just her name and color scheme: she is Rarity, with Rarity’s entire demeanor, down to calling everyone “darling”. We credit Lauren Faust and the cast of G4 with making these characters come alive, but nothing exists in a vacuum, and the earlier generations deserve credit for what they contributed. Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle too were already present and very recognizeable in G3, though of course their relationships are completely different.
They’re also just much closer together in time than I realized. From their reputation I thought the old gens were all in the distant past, and that there had been a long hiatus before the franchise was rebooted in a radically different mode with Friendship is Magic. Actually it turns out G3 kept going right up until 2009. There was very little space between the two generations, even though they feel so different. And many of the same voice actors were in both shows.
(Also everyone talks about how Rainbow Dash always dresses in style, but we’re really sleeping on Rainbow Dash saying she doesn’t think flying ponies are real.)
Those are the general impressions, from memory. Along the way I had a few other observations, of varying depth and substance.
The G4 opening theme song is based on the original theme song from g1, which was also used in every intervening generation. It wasn’t until Pony Life that they made a new theme that wasn’t based on the original, and of course Pony Life wasn’t a full generation either. So either Pony Life or MLP:ANG deserve the distinction of stepping away entirely from a theme that lasted from 1984 until 2019.
I thought there was going to be more of it. It only took me a few weeks to watch it all, and I’m not a very fast watcher. I never knew this before but it turns out that Friendship is Magic – and I feel like this has to be a testament to how much faith Hasbro had placed in Lauren Faust – was the first My Little Pony series to even get a season, period. The first three generations didn’t have “seasons” as we understand them. They were released as stand-alone movies or specials with one or a couple of episodes a year. As a consequence of that G1, G2, and G3 only add up to about one season of FiM each.
Friendship is Magic is frigging huge by the historical standards of My Little Pony, and that would have been true even if the show had ended with season 3. I always assumed that there was a ton of old MLP material out there, because after all, it had been going on for decades before FiM even began. But as far as I can tell Friendship is Magic with its nine seasons is the outright majority of all My Little Pony animation ever made.
Bronies aren’t the first pony fandom. It is known that there was an older MLP fandom that kept the torch burning from the earliest days. And that when FiM appeared the old fandom was thrilled to see the franchise revitalized – but also resentful that an entirely new group moved in and took over, people who were scornful and dismissive of the older generations as garbage that could now finally be swept away. And I sympathize with that, truly. But at this point it can’t really be denied that G4 is My Little Pony. It has overshadowed everything that came before it, and any MLP from now on is going to refer back to G4 above all else.
I guess I just don’t want for things to get lost along the way.
No art exists in a vacuum.
G5 has made its own nods to what came before Old Equestria, from stylistic nods to character and creature retrains (both Posey and the Troggles come to mind) to that admittedly bizarre bit in the movie where TVs in an appliance store were showing footage from My Little Pony Tales. To say nothing of the "reuniting the tribes" concept finding some parallels in G3.
A franchise will rarely forget its roots, if only because it can look to them rather than try to think of something original.
Welp, the makers of G5 seem to disagree ... they've been taking dumps on G4 from the start, apparently in the belief that if they do it long and hard enough, ppl will either agree or accept it.
But yea, G4 is MLP. Too bad nobody told them that.
5780263
Indeed not.
5780264
And of course the rainbow of friendship from G1 appearing in the Night Market and taking down Opaline. Even then it was hard to look past the G4 reference to remember that it was in G1. Or maybe that was just me, because I hadn't watched G1 yet at that point.
5780267
I strongly disagree. If anything I think the big mistake of G5 was in clinging to G4 too much. Because telling more stories in that space requires making changes that many diehard fans find disrespectful. This too is an aspect of how stories age, and something that many long-running series have had to struggle with.
5780270
They didn't cling to it, they used it as nostalgia bait because they weren't confident in their ability to create something that could stand on its own.
That's a huge difference. Just telling more stories would require zero changes. Simply tell more stories.
Or re-boot it, like they were going to, before the execs with money-making degrees and zero actual interest in the IP had a better idea.
5780278
I strongly disagree with all of that. More importantly, I don't know what in this blog gave the impression that this was the place to shit on g5, but it isn't. Kindly take the attitude someplace else.
5780279
Oh I don't know ...
That last line should count for G4 as well then ... but apparently not.
Makes the entire blog rather hollow.
Interesting that G2 had such a tonal swing from G1. As far as I can tell, G1 was a huge success (if you go by toy sales) and why mess with success? I will bet you there are people out there who have been fans since G1 who could track toy sales across the gens, though there might not be strict correlations with the tone of the show.
Something I'd like to point out about G1's admittedly terrible writing is, that though the moment-to-moment dialog and scene work is pretty bad, the story elements are all very solid and part of the mythic structure that Joseph Campbell bangs on about. Yes, the Moochick is painfully unfunny, but he really is a Gandalf/mentor stand-in, giving the ponies secret knowledge and a magical weapon. The teeth-grating awfulness of the seaponies disguise the fact that they are in the place of spirits of the Underworld that shepherd Megan through the Journey Through the Under(water)world part of her shaman's journey.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that despite the less-than-optimal execution, G1 had a very deep resonance.
5780270
Well. Telling the story they wanted to tell in ANG, carrying forward to TYT and MYM, requires state and social collapse to have happened for ANG to carry forward from the status quo at the ending of FiM. But prognosticating state and social collapse from the ending of FiM doesn't have to be disrespectful of FiM or its characters -- holding the state together for several hundred years before it collapses would have been a respectable achivement for instance, as it would be about on a par with the standard previously set. Tack on another couple years of interregnum after that, and you have a perfectly plausible timeline for ANG, which is moreover consistent with and does not contradict the latter.
It is only MYM which sets forth a highly-compressed timeline for the period of transition from FiM to ANG, which in order to fit that transition into the oral tradition of just a couple of generations of ponies the status quo from the ending of FiM is required to have held for a mere few decades (i.e., to have collapsed very shortly after the post-timeskip scenes in The Last Problem, which themselves are set only about two decades after the bulk of FiM). The interregnum can't much longer. This choice was not forced by the storytelling decisions of ANG and as far as I can tell doesn't do anything for MYM story-wise either. And it alone validates every criticism (in-universe and out) of ending FiM with a transition of power. The contrast between a regime which lasted centuries and one which lasted decades is simply too gross to be anything other than a commentary on the latter's lack of merit.
All that said, I don't think ANG was wrong to prognosticate state and social collapse, and I don't even think MYM was wrong to compress the timeline. FiM itself had thoroughly undermined the idea of a transition of power (ar least, to the ponies who ended up receiving it) well before it introduced it, and failed to make up the ground to sell the idea as credible. Picking up on that is no storytelling error.
5780285
Dunno. Probably for the worst of reasons, like pandering to 80s parents who were getting really into the satanic panic and wanted to be reassured their children's entertainment wasn't occult :P
5780292
Again, this is not the place to shit on G5. There is no shortage of places to have those discussions, and I don't find them at all interesting.
I have read all those arguments but all I see are reasons why G5's mistake was in trying to tie itself directly to G4 continuity at all, something they did because they thought that's what fans wanted (or at least because the media trends of the time said that's what would sell). None of it sprang out of dislike or disrespect for G4, that idea is batshit nuts. But there's just no winning there.
5780294
I don't think I was "shitting on G5" by saying that the staff on its various properties were free to do what they wanted and not incorrect in the decisions that they made -- including the decision to problematize FiM's ending. As far as I'm concerned, that's a defense. I certainly didn't suggest there was any animus against FiM, its staff, or its fans on their part. I simply do not think that their various decisions were as constrained as you do by the decision to take FiM as given circumstances.
I agree entirely that there is no pleasing some people regardless of what storytelling choices get made.
5780297
Duly noted. I may have misread your tone.
I am growing less and less interested in lore and continuity as I get older, and more interested in letting the artists tell their story in their own time. It's very disheartening to see a movie or episode that I like get completely torn apart by a fandom outraged that it deviated from a piece of worldbuilding from some other show or movie many years or decades in the past, while what the story was actually about goes completely ignored.
I did not expect to like the earlier generations, but I wanted to give them a chance and try to find something to enjoy in them, if only to appreciate the rich tapestry of history that much better.
excellent :)
This was such an interesting overview. And thank you for sharing that bit of your life with us at the start. I’ve been feeling a similar bit of melancholy because Rooster Teeth’s app and website just went down. I love when people are sharing their earnest emotions in this fandom, with how certain media impacts their lives.