Belated anniversary blog

So I tried to post this on the show's Actual 5th year anniversary but limitations on my PS3 and the console being finicky lead me to have to hold off on it until today so with a very belated wishes let me just say...

HAPPY 5TH ANNIVERSARY FRIENDSHIP IS MAGIC!...now I have a small confession to make to everyone here...in 2010 I didn't care for FIM i didn't hate it...okay I was a little snarky here and there but I was never a troll or bully to anyone who was a fan, I just didn't care for it. Ironically I had just started getting back into cartoons after a rough period of my adolescence spend disliking it and having sworn of it, mostly because the 2000's...wasn't a good time for animation, more on that in a bit.

Around late 2009 early 2010, I was giving a second look to shows I had previous written off as..stupid and terrible, and if I list a few of them...some of you might say...Yes...those are stupid and terrible shows. Well let me say something about myself in regards to that...I can be a very forgiving person, I can look past the flaws of another person's shortcomings or even failures, if there's an element present that I like...take the Spider-Man comics, there are people who have refused to BUY any amazing Spider-Man stories *Cough* Linkara *Cough* since the 2008 story line one more day...I both own the individual issues of O.M.D and have been a follower of every story since it, Because i can look past the series flaws since then and still enjoy it in spite of those flaws.

Now before this blog becomes a novel, where does this fit into FIM? well like I said the 2000's was not a very good decade for animation..but I think only two people can say why far better than i ever could....I give the podium over to Mr. Doug "Nostalgia critic" Walker and Mr.Enter .

Thank you gentlemen, and thanks to anyone still reading this blog at this point. In all seriousness, and this is more in hindsight since had these videos been released five years ago, it would have been very different, I have to semi disagree with them on the whole things being better now than before.. HOLD IT! I'm not going to into some..Teen Titans go Esq rant (looking at you return of Slade) that's one sided and says something like "they WERE better before," or that they "just don't get it," In fact I do agree with them both seeming to dislike Lunatics Unleashed (hell that show almost made me give up on cartoons entirely) I'm just saying that while the decade didn't do my already cynical view of the medium of animation at the time any good, it was more my own decision to give everything about the medium, both the good and bad, on an opinionated or not basis...a second chance...and I'm actually a lot happier I did.

Because when I had finished reevaluating where others saw only failure, I also started looking at where there was genuinely agreed on success. Including the then on it's third season FIM, and let me just say...FIM is perhaps the story that got animation revived the way it did. For anyone that dosen't know; In 2009, Hasbro was looking to get some of their properties back on mainstream network television as opposed to syndication or third party broadcasting. One property they considered getting back on television was their franchise My Little Pony. brainchild of one Bonnie Zacherle in 1983 and first adapted for television a year later. What a lot of people don't know though, is that Ms. Zacherle, originally envisioned her idea as gender neutral, aimed at both genders equally. It was Hasbro coupled with the polarizing veiw on gender even in the 80's, that decided that the toys should be marketed exclusively to girls, she even said almost twenty years later that that she felt bad her passion project became exclusively a "little girls show."

While we may never know just how the world would have been had the idea been what she initally wanted, there was another woman who around that same time was undergoing what could be called a case of, "History repeating itself." Lauren Faust, collaborator and co-creator with her Husband Craig Mccraken, had pitched an idea for a show called Galaxy Girls. Now This blogs starting to ramble, so in short it was a show that was shot down by CN because they said a female focused main character driven show wouldn't be marketable or profitable. (And now next year the powerpuff girls are being brought back from the dead...but I digress) When she tried Hasbro, dispite various others advising her not too because well...with G3 mlp, the Micheal bay transformers movies, and almost no creator respect (up too that point) being a toy company first, it seemed like bringing her idea to them would either be career suicide or they'd run her idea through the ringer and water it down until its not even a ghost of her initial idea.

Thankfully, all Hasbro did was say they weren't interested, but they did show Faust some of the last few projects they had done with the MLP franchise...and Faust took one look at it and practically begged to take on the production task for the new show being developed for television. Faust believed that the stories she made up as a child in the mid eighties where legions better than what "professional" writers and animators had been coming up with over the past decade on the MLP series, and you know what? She was right. like Bonnie Zacherle before her, Faust may have been given a raw deal in that her own original idea was shelved before it even took off, but unlike Zacherle (with all due respect for her) Faust turned her misfortune into an opportunity. It's even believed that like Zacherle, Faust wanted to not just break down gender barriers but age ones too. She had a desire to show the world that just because something had A LOT of baggage holding it back and ostracizing it to no end, Didn't mean you couldn't take that idea and make it appeal across the age and gender demographics.

So with little time, a team of her closest allies in animation assembled, and a desire to make something really great. Faust's project was released in october of 2010, and now Five years and over a hundred eps later, Writers may have come and gone, she's moved on to trying to get her original idea off the ground, but the example set by FIM has opened the doors to many other shows all made by people with a deep love for the medium to break down gender, age and other barriers that have stood in the way of truly artistic and intricate works since then. Is it mere coincidence Adventure time aired the same year? or that FIM has several other shows with similar fan bases? Regular show, Gravity falls, Star vs. the forces of evil (which I'm sorry to say i don't regularly follow...long story I'd rather not say.) all following in it's wake? And what of the show it'self? Well apparently there are at least two or even three more seasons on the way, and because the writers and creative teams rotate the way a comic book creative team often does..it seems like this series will only get better and better and the last sunset over Equestria may not be in the foreseeable future, It's one that will most likely be the one a series like this dissevers...After all Friendship is magic isn't the show people deserved...But the show the world needed most.