Life Goes On · 6:18pm Jun 21st, 2020
So. I've located and watched the first installment of Pony Life, and...
Well, it's honestly not that bad.
Is it as good as Friendship is Magic coming out the gate? Definitely not. The world lacks the same feeling of depth and reality that FiM's Equestria had. There's no setup or introduction; we open with the Mane Six in Ponyville, hanging out at Sugarcube Corner, with no sign of anyone else who isn't immediately relevant to the plot. No Cakes, no Starlight, not even Spike. Pinkie's the proprietress, and she apparently branched into alchemy at some point, since the characters sling back magic potions like they're sodas.
Indeed, there's a weird blend of new and missing magic on display. Unicorns don't seem to have telekinesis, though Rarity can still summon her fainting couch. Pinkie can explode and reconstitute at will like a blend of a dismissed Mirror Pool clone, a phoenix, and a piñata. Fluttershy can alter her size like her blood is made of Pym particles. And out of all the main cast, it's Applejack who seems the most fourth-wall aware. Yes, really. And no, none of this is explained.
Sugarcube Corner also appears to be the center of the universe. We see no sign of the others doing much of anything elsewhere beyond Dash winning an unspecified race and Pinkie trying out for a baking TV show hosted and judged by Princess Celestia.
Again, yes, really. And no, it's not clear whether Celestia actually raises the sun; what history the Mane Six may have with her, Twilight included; or where Luna is in any of this. Twilight's an alicorn, but that doesn't seem to mean anything.
Also, Rainbow Dash has a random fan pony, and it isn't Scootaloo, which just seems like a waste.
... I'm not selling anyone on this, am I? Likely because I'm not sold myself. But I'm not walking out of the store either. This is still better than I feared, and I'm curious to see where it goes from here. That said, there's just not enough here for me to make card blogs out of it. Not from a single episode, anyway.
This does nicely solidify my headcanon for fitting this into a wider scope. In the Pathfinder RPG, the plane of the fey is known as the First World. It is literally the first draft of the universe, the sandbox and testbed the gods used to nail down species, materials, laws of physics, ethical concepts, and everything else that went into the Material Plane. It is the conventional universe with the color intensity turned up to eleven and logic brought down to zero, where things happen because they feel like happening, and some of them happen quite aggressively to unwary visitors.
I think you see where I'm going with this. We've gone from the finished product to the cutting room floor. There's still interesting things to be found. Just don't expect them to make much sense. Or react well to cold iron.
I guess i just missed them so much
Bring our tire iron then, got it!
I honestly forgot this existed. My expectations are low, but I guess even a chance at more good pone is worth checking out?
5290013
Then bugger off. Hasbro does not care about you and never did. This is just them being more blatant about it than they've been since Fame and Misfortune.
Wait, it's out now? Where'd you find it? <.<
5290008
Same. It's the same voice cast, so it's definitely nice to hear from them again.
5290011
Tire iron, not torch and pitchfork. Important distinction.
5290013
Fair enough. That's your choice. I'm waiting for more data before making my final decision.
5290015
I wouldn't say it's good yet, but I believe the potential is still there.
5290032
It aired in Canada today. Check the Pony Discussion forum on Derpibooru. You should be able to figure it out from there.
I only caught about half of it and it's exactly what I expected. It's a gag series in the same vein as RWBY Chibi where the characters are a bit more exaggerated but still recognizable (unlike in say Teen Titan Go where all the characters are basically interchangeable with one another).
There are definitely weird aspects but if you remember not to take this show too seriously as just a gag spin-off and not a replacement for G4 or even a continuation (because it was never gonna be those things) I can see it being pretty enjoyable.
The question becomes whether or not this is something older fans will enjoy in the long run to which I say give it the standard 4 episode test before making a verdict.
So pinkie is a drug dealer now, cool, cool.
Lemme get some of those dank potions.
The only thing I care about is if their still friends? A lot of shows with this kind of style fall back on the everyone-is-mean-to-each-other type of humor. And really as long as they arent doing that and the main six are all still actually friends then I'd be willing to give it a chance.
Also from the promos I've seen spike will be there and he has the best character design of them all
Haven’t seen it yet, but based on your description, it sounds like a concept for a different show with an MLP veneer plastered over top. I’ll still definitely give it a chance, but it doesn’t sound like it fits quite right.
Ponies as fey makes way too much sense anyway.
>Bright colors
>strong magic focus, but equally strong nature focus
5290066
Bold of you to assume she wasn’t in FiM.
5290033
Thanks for the location hint. I have watched them.
...I hope there's still a G5 coming. This wasn't bad. It was a fun diversion for 22 minutes. But if that's all it's aiming to be, and since this is the premiere it's easy to imagine that it's not aiming higher than this... I can appreciate this as an amusing addition. But stripped of the fantasy adventure, take-it-even-a-little-bit-seriously aspect I struggle to imagine it carrying its own weight as a full show.
5290099
1.) That would explain a lot.
2.) I suspected as much but people insisted that was Zecora's job.
5290099
5290110
To be fair, she's always come off as more of a user than a dealer.
Breaking Pink? Pinking Bad?
5290116
I've found there is a lot of overlap between the two. Keeping up yr drug stash is expensive and selling is an easy out.
5290039
The issue is that I derive most of my enjoyment of FiM from going too deep and taking it too seriously.
5290073
Oh, they're definitely all still friends. The conflicts of the first episode revolve around everyone accidentally throwing Pinkie off her baking groove with some well-meaning but misguided advice and Rainbow Dash getting into a competition with an objectively horrible person. Rest assured, the girls all still care for and about one another.
5290097
Hmm. You're not far off the mark there, come to think of it. It remains to be seen how much more of Friendship is Magic it brings in or if this really is just a different series in pony's clothing.
5290098
Right? They're actually classified as fey in Ponyfinder, part of what brought me to this conclusion.
5290108
I remain cautiously optimistic. Even Teen Titans Go! had its deeper moments, or so I've been told. But that does look like the most probable assessment. Fingers crossed for a more deeply written G5.
5290013
Good grief, stop spitting your vitriol all over every site you can. We've all seen your opinion of this many times and can quote it back to you. We get it, you're not interested. You can stop now because none of us care. In other words...
5290013
That's it, I'm convinced. Go home, TwiPieCheese.
I may not like the new style. But I can always appreciate your everspring of optimism, FoME. And you couldn't make any Pinkie-Potion-based cards? Though I can only find Alabaster Potion and Sleeping Potion on Gatherer.
I tried to give it a fair shot, and I got through the first segment, but stopped watching the second fairly quickly. Not my cup of tea in the same way that a brick is not a cup of tea.
Here's hoping that G5 is an enormously pleasant surprise.
5290116
I mean I take her as a type who like buys in semi-bulk and then resells to her friends without much markup. Like, she might buy a 10 strip for 100 bits and then resell individual tabs at 15 bits each.
No I am not judging this from personal experience, what are you talking about?
Rarity does telekinetically move a flag at the beginning of the race in the second episode.
Looking it up, at least on the official YouTube channel, all the mane 6 get short intro videos too... Except Applejack for some reason?
5290272
Potions are surprisingly uncommon in MTG. There are cards which reference their use indirectly, like Revitalize, and other beverages like Elixir of Immortality though. More so than the potions themselves, it seems like the containers have all the power. Such as eternal staple Chalice of the Void, or the bowl that blew up a continent.
I, uh... I dunno. Not a fan. Maybe I'll watch them if someone puts up links but I'm not gonna go out of my way for this one.
I don't think it's a pony. Looks like a cat or something?
On paper, I like the idea of Applejack making fourth wall breaks instead of someone hyperactive and quirky; its like genre-savvyx2. I also like Pinkie making magic food and I wish G4 had done that. Havent actually seen it yet.
Are you sure the new magic isn't just cartoon logic?
5290389
Yeah I got a kick out of AJ being the fourth wall aware one. My first thought was that it's related to her being the only one of the mane 6 to exist in every generation (I think that's right) which has given her some weird multiuniversal abilities.
To be fair to Pony Life, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic was in much the same boat for most of the first season. It wasn't until season two, with the introduction of Discord and a semi-solid drama plot, that interest really began to spike.
Another thing G4 has going for it is a fairly solid world build, or at least a far more diverse one than is MLP's MO before this. Since Pony Life, as you say, seems to take place in Sugarcube Corner for the most part that may well negatively impact the show. That said, it does open a few doors that the writers could do some interesting things with.
Sooooo.... yeah, you pretty much said it. Not completely sold, but not storming out of the store yet either. It's got potential, so lets see if it lives up to that potential.
Having watched the first two episodes (and vaguely remembering what I saw in the character promos), I feel safe in assuming that this series is isn't at all interested in world-building. Or character growth. Friendship Is Magic assembled a core cast of six different personalities, and Pony Life is content to take those six personalities to produce gag-heavy 11-minute episodes.
Making a TV series where the sole focus is on gags is fine... if the gags are funny. But I didn't laugh once during either episode. The closest I came was during the second time a fainting couch materialized under Rarity (Okay, I thought to myself, I guess this is going to be a thing now), but at best, one side of my mouth barely twitched upward for a moment.
I promise that I didn't go into it with the attitude of "I'm going to sit here stony-faced for the entire time!" It didn't even occur to me to track my laughter until I was through the first episode, because that's when I understood what this series wanted to be. But here's where Pony Life fails:
If the audience is too busy being confused, then they won't laugh.
And everybody is going to be confused during these first two episodes. People who come into this already familiar with Friendship Is Magic are going to be confused by what's changed -- Why is Pinkie giving out potions? Why is everyone drinking them with no knowledge of what the potions might do? -- but at least they'll acclimate by the end of the first episode. And when they do, they'll be treated to jokes such as... Pinkie is narrating the beginning of her audition for no reason. Pinkie drops a bowl. Fire makes Pinkie throw a cake(?) into a different bowl, causing batter to splatter against a refrigerator. And so on. These are very light gags for a show that's supposed to be gag-heavy.
And if somehow, somebody goes into this without a knowledge of Friendship Is Magic... will anything about any part of this setting make sense? Who are any of these characters? The only thing that these first two episodes definitively establish is that Rainbow Dash is the best at everything. New viewers won't know why unexpected events are supposed to be funny because they won't know what the expected is supposed to be.
Friendship Is Magic was rarely laugh-out-loud funny. Instead, it took the time to make you care about the characters so you'd care about what happened to them. Pony Life either doesn't care to do that or is content to coast on what the previous series did on that front so it can focus all of its attention on being funny. But so far, it isn't succeeding at that.
Now, the question that's actually important to Hasbro: Will elementary-aged children watch it? If this were the '80s or early '90s, when kids only had a couple of dedicated channels, then maybe. It's lively and bright and inoffensive enough that if it were the only thing on, kids would sit through it.
But today, when kids have dozens of on-demand entertainment choices at their fingertips, Pony Life offers them no incentive to stay. The jokes aren't funny enough and the plots aren't compelling. The target demographic won't be coming back for more and the show won't unexpectedly appeal to any outside demographic, either. It just plain misses the mark.
5290272
Oh, the potions aren't the problem. It's that there's simply not much else to work with. There are prolonged stretches of not very much happening, like Pinkie struggling in the trial kitchen or Dishwater Slog existing. I set a minimum of twenty cards per blog to make them feel worthwhile, and I'm not sure if there's enough raw material in this episode to cover that. Especially not when a lot of it is mechanical concepts I've covered numerous times. (There's only so many ways to spin "Destroy target artifact.")
5290317
Ah, didn't recall that. Good to know, but Rarity and Twilight still make much heavier use of their hooves than I"m used to.
5290323
Yeah, not sure what's going on there. Though goodness knows people have made background pony jokes. Maybe her increased fourth-wall awareness meant she wanted to avoid as much association with this project as possible.
5290389
All part of the fey hypothesis.
5290422
Possible. I got into FiM between Seasons 1 and 2, so I was able to binge those early episodes. I do recall a friend telling me how people who started watching earlier saw the Crusaders as a plot tumor at first, given how they distracted from the main cast. As I said, this could still age into something better. We'll find out in time.
It does just fine at being what it's trying to be, IMO.
Some bronies aren't going to like it too much because it's not trying to be what G4 was, but I really think that would have been an unrealistic expectation to go in with.
On the other hoof, I also think that what it's trying to be lacks something critical to good TV and good storytelling, by trading a lot of depth for expediency.
My final verdict, and what to me is the critical difference, because it addresses who the shows are actually for and not just myself: if I had kids, I'd encourage them to watch G4, because I think it has some things of real value to say. I would not particularly care if they watched Pony Life, although at the same time, if they were, I would probably gently steer them toward something educational and/or morally instructive instead.
Grain of salt: this is all based on just what's been available so far, and future episodes could of course tilt things one way or the other for me, so... yeah.
I'm still going with my headcanon that this whole thing is some bizarre pocket universe Pinkie Pie created while hoped up on Chaos Magic.
5290099
Okay, but for the rest of the friends to just eagerly partake in it? They (minus Dash) are suppose to be the responsible ones!
Sir, with this you have elevated damning with faint praise to an art.
My own curiosity regarding PL centers around how badly FiM’s mortal remains are being treated; I appreciate knowing that it could be worse, even if we’re in Weekend at Bernie’s territory.
Eeeh, it's... odd. It's odd. The humor's funny enough -- I will admit it got me smiling at several points, although how much was the jokes and how much hearing these characters again I'm not quite certain -- and the narration bit felt Pinkie enough. Other than that, the backgrounds... aren't bad, exactly, but they're definitely weird and kinda confusing, although the floating islands and pink ocean are definitely memorable touches.
The first episode definitely opens with a lot of very odd and unexplained choices. Why is everyone glugging potions like it's nothing? If it's supposed to be an episodic gimmick, why is it only present for one scene? Why is Twilight an alicorn and why doesn't that seem to matter? Why is Princess Celestia the host of a baking show? I think that sums up the show overall -- it's not bad as such, but it's pretty dang weird.
The random fancolt is a bit of an odd choice. It's not so much the missed opportunity to work Scootaloo in that gets me, it's his being the size of a cat and that unblinking stare he's always giving the camera.
If it's just meant to be a gag-heavy cartoon with which to keep kids entertained between now and G5, which as far as I know is probably just what it is, then it's probably going to do its job fine. I don't know if I'll really keep up with it, personally -- it's not really my thing, and given that I've been meaning to watch the G1 cartoon anyway I'm probably just going to prioritize that.