The Ponyville Confidential book?

[Sunset]

Just ran across this on Amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/Ponyville-Confidential-History-Culture-1981-2016/dp/1476662096/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1502241010&sr=8-1&keywords=ponyville+confidential


Has anybody read this?  Is it any good?  Does it give some respect to older gens or does it only discuss them in relation to FIM.

[Safflower]

Wow, this looks interesting! Haven't read it though. The reviews say it's pretty good. It looks like it doesn't talk about everything in relation to FiM. The only confusing part is this, "Critics dismissed the cartoons as toy advertisements, and derided their embrace of femininity." This was in the description. Don't know if this is true? That would be the only reason for me to question the book.

[sd_dreamcrystal]

I'm going to see if I can get it from the library... my system doesn't have it but we can go outside the system. If the book is new enough we may get it for our system.. but it would be a while either way

[Leave a Whisper]

It already sounds snide. Embracing femininity is now a bad thing and a ton of shows then and now are toy advertisements.

[Sunset]

So Amazon does let you read a good portion of the first part of the book, though it randomly skips pages presumably to get you to buy it.

Looks like the first 67 pages are devoted to G1-3 and the entire rest of the book, pg. 76-196, are devoted to FIM.  There were some very interesting parts from what I read.  However, the tag line "The History and Culture of My Little Pony, 1981-2016" is misleading in my opinion.  It should be called "My Little Pony in the Media and why MLP has a bad rap."  It is not at all about the actual toy line outside of how that affected the treatment of the various medias because "OMG, they're ruining little children's minds by marketing toys to them!."   But just to be clear, this is not the author's opinion. 

It seems clear she is really all about FIM cause she takes particular note of the first appearances of any of the mane 6 and at one point references a g1 episode with a similar theme to an FIM episode and basically said FIM did it better.  She also persists in using FIM language like "somepony" which doesn't really match with the more scholarly tone of the parts I read. 
 
But outside of those cringy (to me) bits, she recognizes that while MLP (the various cartoons)  wasn't that great, it also wasn't as terrible as it was made out to be.  Mostly she is making the point about the misogyny apparent in various reviews, books, and discussions that happened in the 80's and 90's that led to  "My Little Pony" still being a punchline to the general public's consciousness.   I did find it kind of fascinating, all of the various discussions she found of people worrying about what shows "like MLP" would do to little girls since I am one of those little girls.  Though, really not, since I only got to watch mlp when we checked it out at the video store and not on a weekly bases.  And yet, I still managed to have my mind melted by little plastic horse

I especially liked the one part when she calls out some reviewer who basically said that little girls would like the Power Puff Girls because they are "heroic and not too girly."  As if those two things must be mutually exclusive and as if being "girly" is a bad thing.

She did also make the interesting point that in the 80's was the first time that there were children's shows like MLP that were aimed just at girls so that they didn't have to try to identify with a group of males.  Thus implying that this may have been the underlying cause for MLP getting unfair treatment among the various male reviewers and such.  (I'm a male and you made something that doesn't directly speak to me!?  How dare you!)

I did notice that she claimed Faust based Rarity on Glory when Sparkler is usually the one noted. ( I personally believe it was a combo of both.)  And she did perpetuate the whole "Hasbro lost the rights to the g1 names" thing.    Other than that, she has clearly done her research.  In fact, after a while my eyes started to cross from too much info and too long reading on my ipad.

[LadyMoondancer]

I don't have the book, but I've read excerpts of it on Google.   IIRC it's pretty respectful of older generations, but obviously written by someone who is mostly all about FIM, and is studying the other generations to figure out how they relate to FIM.  It also is more "TV focused" than "toy focused", so when she talks about G1, she's mostly talking about the TV shows.

THAT SAID!!!  There is an ENORMOUS amount of information in the book on how G1 was received back in the day--quotes from articles and books from the 80s. I believe she touched on the "occult hysteria" (evangelicals who decided that He-Man, She-Ra, MLP, and other 'fantasy' properties were really a way to brainwash kids into being Satanists, because Magic Is Bad.)

I've been wanting to get Ponyville Confidential for a while now, for this reason alone.  It's an aspect of G1 that's hard to get ahold of without doing a ton of research, and I'm very pleased that someone else has done said research, lol.

Rarity is basically a combo of Glory and Sparkler--Sparkler's symbol, Glory's general color combo.  I'm pretty sure I remember that being confirmed on Lauren Faust's Twitter or something.

Wow, this looks interesting! Haven't read it though. The reviews say it's pretty good. It looks like it doesn't talk about everything in relation to FiM. The only confusing part is this, "Critics dismissed the cartoons as toy advertisements, and derided their embrace of femininity." This was in the description. Don't know if this is true? That would be the only reason for me to question the book.

Yes, critics back in the day definitely scorned MLP and other "girls franchises", and all the toy-based cartoons (for boys as well) were seen as artistically bankrupt.  I hope that makes sense.  I'm not quite sure what you're asking.  The "critics" in question would be people who were adults in the 80s.

[poniesthatsparkle]

I bought the book not long after it came out, and it's actually a very interesting read. It covers all generations,  often comparing the older gens to G4. I was disappointed in how the author didn't  delve into the toys as much as the show, but that was my only complaint. (Aside from bronies being mentioned on every page.) I did learn a lot from it, especially information about G1.

I would definitely recommend buying the book and reading all of it. I had done plenty of research before reading the book and learned way much more than I thought  was possible.

[Taffeta]

It makes me wonder whether this book originally was someone's PhD thesis into media interpretations of MLP over a series of decades? THe title and the approach suggests it might have begun life that way.

I would be driven mad by the FIM language, but it is a study that probably needed to happen and maybe needs to happen again from a less FIM informed perspective. Largely because we don't know if FIM is the end or the next step in the process, and from what has been said above, it seems to be tailored towards how we got to the 'finale' of FIM and the perceptions relating to that. And, I admit, I resent interpretations of older generations through the FIM filter. They came first, and it should be the other way around.

I remember as a child "My Little Pony, Skinny and Boney", and I also remember ponies being banned at school because the boys threw them onto the roof. Girls punished for boys misbehaving. We ended up taking our own revenge on the boys, but that's another matter.

I still resent any suggestion that G1 MLP was overtly girly, because in context with toys in the eighties, it really wasn't that girly. The packages weren't all pink, the ponies weren't all pink, and there were some adventures and opportunities for imaginative play. Yeah, some of them were pink and flowery but I tend to think G1 was the least guilty of that stereotype in a time when the girls toy aisle was nauseatingly and oppressively pink in a way just not seen since. I was actively scared of the girl toy aisle and I hated pink until I became an adult. But I loved MLP.

 I really think it was a girl-aimed toy that allowed girls to not be pushed into those stereotyped roles of "taking care of baby" and so on. Lots of baby dolls, drink and wet dolls, cribs, prams, and very pink barbie doing exceptionally girly things. Yeah, there were drink and wet babies, and there were pony families, too. But there was never that narrow interpretation of what those families or babies could do.For example, in the comics the DnW babies had magic associated with water and there was never anything in their stories or in the comic that discussed the drink and wet function in the sense of "you are the mummy and you have to clean up after baby". It was more about, "look, baby pony's panties change with water! Woot!"

My petite ponies used to ride on my electric railway, my other ponies learned to swim in puddles and fly across the school field, they went on walks and got abducted by zombie overlords. MLP was open enough to allow for that level of non-girly play...and I think the associated media also allowed for that, wih the comics and the animation.

G1 for me was the girl's toy that wasn't girly for me as a kid who really wasn't girly and didn't care about playing families or taking baby doll for a walk or any of that stuff. :/

In terms of masculine hostility to MLP in the eighties, that's usually a symbol of something that's considered threatening to the social norm. There are lots of incidents across history where men criticise something women are doing or interested in because of that. Good example is women's football in the UK, which the FA banned as unfeminine because it was helping to support popular movements and it was more popular than men's football at that time. A 50 year ban later and women's football is struggling to get parity back in this country. Those kinds of examples are always around. Obviously MLP didn't get banned, but as a child I was aware of a lot of hostility from boys at school and from my male headteacher about the toy.

And also, in any review of top toys of the past that come out on tv around CHristmas, if MLP is mentioned it is usually flippant and brief, and overall most of the "proper" toys referenced are actually boys toys. Even now the media gives more legitimacy to adult men into boys toys than adult women into girls toys...even to the point of not really giving respect to the toys themselves. There's still a big issue regarding this - women are still expected to grow up and take care of the family etc while there isn't the same social censure on men to do the same.