Pony Life overall thoughts · 12:00am Jun 6th, 2021
It's time for overall thoughts on Pony Life.
The short of it is: it was good, could have been better.
The long of it is a semi-organized ramble.
First of all, there's the characters. Many would say Pony Life is a series where Pinkie Pie is the lead character, and I'm sure that's what they were thinking at the start of development, but those who watched a lot of it would know that that the actual lead character is Rarity. This is a series where the voice actors took control with tons of improv, and no one did this more than Tabitha St. Germain.
Compared to FiM, Rarity in this series goes for more of a theater diva persona. Not exactly much room for nuance, but Tabitha is having a blast! For the sort of sitcom set up of Pony Life, shifting Rarity's focus from dressmaking to theater was great. It makes for good set up for stories, and allows her to make references to the projects she's working on. Her new tendency to reference shows like Game of Thrones but with pony puns seems like something execs threw in, but then you look at Tabitha's live reading scripts at conventions, and you realize, no, that's 100% Tabitha.
https://twitter.com/SigmasonicX/status/1300690806093750272
Next for Pinkie Pie, she is the driving force behind the first arc of the series, with her participating in a cooking competition, but she falls back into being another part of the ensemble after that. A very interesting shift for Pony Life is that she actually comes off as more responsible and focused, and even more of the straight man, here. She often has to act as the voice of reason and calm, and shows more ambition than she generally did in FiM.
She's still fun and goofy, but even after the competition arc ends, she's interested in innovating with her desserts and episodes often start with her presenting a new food experiment. She's often concerned with keeping Sugarcube Corner as a successful business. We hear mentions of Pinkie having participated in further competitions after the first one in season 2, and I would have liked to have seen that.
Something I hadn't mentioned is that every character gets some new magical gimmick, most of them oddly just signs of their distress/excitement and nothing more than visual gags. Not so with Fluttershy. Her new magical gimmick of changing size works so naturally with her character, I would like to see it in future generations that use Fluttershy. It's great for visual gags and is a perfect visual representation of her mood.
As a character, Fluttershy does feel rather unfocused, though. The later FiM seasons have certainly expanded Fluttershy into getting openly excited and stubborn, but there are points where she doesn't feel shy at all. When animal movie stars are involved, she can even turn into a jerk, though she does realize her mistake by the end. As a story arc, I would say the Trail Trotters is the best presentation of Pony Life's potential, though Fluttershy herself got exaggerated a bit too much. On the other hand, her sudden interest in being a clown in that season 2 episode worked pretty well, especially when she showed concern about Applejack's fear of clowns.
In Pony Life, Applejack got a new gimmick: being able to break the fourth wall. I thought it was a pretty genius way to give her something more to do in a pure comedy series, though it ended up pretty underused as the series went on. She ultimately falls back into the stubborn straight man role, and there isn't really much to say about her. Pinkie even starts breaking the fourth wall!
Twilight as a character is fairly middling in Pony Life. She gets stories where she worries about something, just like you'd expect from FiM. We see flashes in season 1 of her acting like a mad scientist, which could have been fun if expanded more, but this gets dropped by season 2. That said, Tara Strong is still having a lot of fun playing Twilight, and there are a lot of cute little noises and Twilight-isms.
Rainbow Dash is Rainbow Dash. She's just kind of there, and I couldn't point out any differences from FiM that wouldn't just be saying Pony Life is more of a sitcom than FiM. It's really weird that she got a time freezing power, yet she almost never uses it.
Spike is voiced by Tabitha now, which felt odd at first, but I got used to it after a bit. He doesn't show up too much, but he's fun when he does.
One big failing of Pony Life is its use of other characters. Existing FiM characters barely appear, with notably Luna and Starlight being completely absent despite Celestia, Cadance, and Trixie appearing. The new to Pony Life characters don't fare well either. Potion Nova is presented as a very intriguing character, and is the only new character with her own toy. However, after her introduction arc, she's gone until the season one finale song, and then is gone for good. This is especially strange given how they established that Twilight is apprenticing under her.
Then there's the Wild Siders from season 2. Chill Lightning has a nice voice, and her archetype is surprisingly something we haven't really gotten in FiM. But... what were they doing here? They didn't even get toys, so it's baffling.
There were a couple fun one-off characters in season 1, but they didn't really show up again either. There weren't any interesting background ponies either.
The thing is, all of the problems with characters I brought up are things that could have been addressed if there was just more of the show. The strengths could have been emphasized more, the weaker characters shored up, and we could have seen more use of the other characters. Seeing a FiM character show up was always a joy, even as a one off.
Second, I want to talk about the art. The characters themselves look decent. The simplified designs don't look bad, but it doesn't take full advantage of them with squash and stretch. The really interesting part, however, is the backgrounds. Inspired by UPA, there's a lot of neat abstract details in the background, and even some beautiful shots like this one of the moon below. This made each new setting a joy, including the new designs for each pony's house.
https://twitter.com/SigmasonicX/status/1384019742789304321
Third, there's the story structure. I think Pony Life is at its strongest when it plays into its ability to have story arcs focused around one concept that can last longer than two 30-minute blocks. However, I think its standard story length of 7 minutes was to its detriment. During early season 1, they generally had two 7 minute stories together as a two-parter, making it seem like a standard 15-minute story. However, as the series went on, they dropped that structure and just had 7 minute stories.
Some stories worked at 7 minutes, but especially season 2's time travel arc really would have worked better with 15 minute stories. Season 2 still had story arcs, but in total, they were shorter than a 30-minute block, so not much of an arc. As I mentioned before, the strongest instance of a story arc in the show is the Trail Trotters arc. Despite not having any two-parters, the arc concept was good, there was a specific central character and something to look forward to at the end, and it led to the ponies going on connected adventures, with each story getting appropriate focus. I think if they had the opportunity to continue the series, we could have seen more arcs along those lines.
Last, I want to talk about the metatextual circumstances of the show. Fans being suspicious is something I don't think I have to explain more, but there were a few big factors that prevented fans from checking it out. First, there's the fact that Hasbro was much more aggressive with taking down clips from YouTube. I myself have tried to upload clips, only to be completely stymied; hence opting for Twitter instead. Besides clips, this also means fans can't make PMVs.
Second, there's the way it aired in other countries well before the US. We've seen before with FiM that this does split the fan experience, but more importantly here is that once it came out in the US, there wasn't an official way to watch the episode again for the longest time. FiM went up on iTunes, but they didn't do that for Pony Life. There were some early indications that Pony Life episodes would be put directly on YouTube, but that didn't pan out.
And third, COVID preventing the voice actors from going to in-person conventions. If you've listened to their virtual panels over the last two years, you'd know that Tara, Tabitha, and the others all plug Pony Life frequently and talk about how great it was to work with. I have no doubt that if they could have, they would have pushed the hell out of it to con goers.
If these issues weren't present, then I'm not sure the fandom would have accepted the show, but it would have had a much better opportunity.
Overall, Pony Life had the opportunity to play into the strengths I mentioned and forge a strong identity for itself, but unfortunately, season two went in another direction, and then it ended. A FiM spinoff that played into the idea of the voice actors improvising, with a stronger emphasis on longer storylines, could have been fantastic, but in the end, it just goes halfway there. I enjoy Pony Life for what it was, but I do wish we got more of what it could have been.
I honestly had no idea about the improvisation. This does explain a fair amount...
But yeah, between not giving the stories time to develop, not using the granted cast anywhere near to their fullest, and limiting efforts to promote the series, this could have been a lot more.
So it is a time freeze! I was never sure. :O
Really interesting observations at the end there. Granted, I was so generally disabused by the first season I didn't even bother with the second. :B