Will the franchise ever be how it was, again?

[SpacePinto]

was even accused of faking interest in MLP to attract (these specific, messed up) guys

"Name all the friendship lessons!"

[ZeldaTheSwordsman]

was even accused of faking interest in MLP to attract (these specific, messed up) guys

"Name all the friendship lessons!"

Name the gimmick the writers obviously tired of by the second season, considering how they started horsing around with it. 
There's another awkward thing about FiM: Unlike past MLP, it had to present itself as edutainment early-on.

[Lilja]

But she did know what G1 was like.  She knew what the toys were like.  Which was the core of the MLP experience for little girls in the US.  This may seem odd to you since the UK had such a widespread, regular output of canon (the comics).  But most American little girls did not know or care about any of the canon, they just loved brushable horse toys. (Arguably the backcards were the most widespread type of canon but let's be real, most of them got thrown away and their stories forgotten.)

I was obsessed with MLP as a little girl, it was my absolute favorite toy.  I kept the brochures that came with the ponies and from those I could name all the ponies from Year 2 to Year 4.  But if someone asked me, "And which ponies are the main characters in MLP & Friends?  What are their personalities?", I would have been completely stumped.  To me Wind Whistler was not any more significant than Skippity Doo.

This is interesting and I suspected this was the case. The cartoon is probably the most widespread and well known canon for G1 MLP, but even then a lot of collectors are only vaguley aware of it and what ponies were featured in it, and it wasn't integral to their childhoods (if they saw it at all). Of course there were lots of story books as well, but I think generally animation will always make a stronger impression on small kids, since they can engage with it on their own without needing anyone to read for them.

In my opinion most G1 stories aren't very engaging either way, but when you're a kid who loves the ponies and their world you can use your own imagination to compensate for that. And to be fair to these stories, I feel like G1 MLP was so toy-focused as a brand that it didn't lend itself well to good storytelling. And using cartoons to sell toys was a very new thing in the '80s, there was no previous successful template to look at. The adults who had to put these cartoons/books together probably did the best they could with what they were given, but the best pony stories would most likely exist inside kids' heads.

So in a way I think Lauren Faust disregarding the G1 "canon" and just going by how she played with her ponies as a child, was the best and the most G1 way to go about it. 

[Taffeta]

Yeah, until it came to it being imposed on everyone else as "how G1 was".

I was a nerdy book type as a kid, and I read a lot, so they had a bigger influence on my opinion of ponies and their abilities etc. But even despite that I didn't play games based on the comic, ever. I made up my own. And my ponies had their own world they lived in which wasn't the comic world either.

I think G1 was fluid like that. You could enter into it or leave it and still get meaningful play.

The problem with interviewing Faust on G1 is that what she thought about G1 - which was entirely valid for her as a kid - got then imposed on MLP and has been used to interpret it as though that was how it was for everyone. Which is a problem, since G1 is not meant to be that proscribed.

[BubbleTea]

Applejack, who's been around for 37 years, is disposable, but 17 year Pinkie and Dash not so much. Oh the irony.

Well it's kinda different because Pinkie and Rainbow have been in the center of merchandise and media every year since 2003 whereas Applejack had a hiatus until 2010

Spoiler

yes there was a g3 applejack but she had a much different color scheme and besides she only had one toy release then vanished into oblivion

[Nightbow]

I'm surprised to hear that some of you guys see MLP and Friends as obscure. I was born in 1990 and grew up with the cartoon -- did the majority of us 80s/90s pony people not do that?

Not that it mattered much to me, because the pony toys I grew up with was not the ponies that were featured in the show.

I didn't watch the brony THING because just the clips I did see offended me, but watching her interview on TTMU told me everything I wanted to know about her concept of G1 and that it didn't really bear resemblance to G1.

Say what? Is this interview available somewhere, and what is TTMU?

[Taffeta]

I'm surprised to hear that some of you guys see MLP and Friends as obscure. I was born in 1990 and grew up with the cartoon -- did the majority of us 80s/90s pony people not do that?

Not that it mattered much to me, because the pony toys I grew up with was not the ponies that were featured in the show.

I didn't watch the brony THING because just the clips I did see offended me, but watching her interview on TTMU told me everything I wanted to know about her concept of G1 and that it didn't really bear resemblance to G1.

Say what? Is this interview available somewhere, and what is TTMU?

TTMU - The Toys that Made Us - it was on Netflix There's an ep for MLP and unfortunately she's included.

What's interested about what you just said is that you were born in 1990 but grew up with the show - so AFTER the time it was really made/released to promote the MLP toys released in those years (85-87ish?). I think this is in keeping with what happened here as it was aired in the UK AFTER MLP ended, in 1995. At the time the ponies were out on shelves, it was negligible here, and apparently, over in the US as well. Maybe it was the same in Sweden?

The difference for me as a kid (again, UK, not US) was that over here the comic was there as the toys came out. It introduced new ponies, had giveaways for new sets, contained adverts for them as they came out. I don't know what it was like pre-comic, MLP in the UK is a bit sketchy before 1984-5 anyway, and the comic began in 85. But after it got going, that was where new ponies were generally being introduced to kids. Rather than the TV show.

I've never thought the TV show was important, growing up as an eighties kid. But knowing it did air here in the 1990s makes me wonder if it's been more influential since MLP ended, with kids growing up with handmedown ponies or second hand ones or other generations - or collectors coming to G1 from the G4 background of a show and thus looking for it.

But that's probably a different discussion thread.

[Nightbow]

TTMU - The Toys that Made Us - it was on Netflix  There's an ep for MLP and unfortunately she's included.

Ah, of course. Thank you. That's the one I've meant to see but have missed because we don't have Netflix.

At the time the ponies were out on shelves, it was negligible here, and apparently, over in the US as well. Maybe it was the same in Sweden?

I was so young, but I remember seeing G1 ponies on the shelves when I was very little. I don't know hos long the gap between G1 and G2 was. It is kind of funny that UK grew up with the toy ponies from the show but not the show, and Sweden had it the other way around. I see how that must have led to UK kids going "I don't like what they did with *pony*'s personality in the show" and swedish kids going "I'm just going to prentend Kisscurl is Rosedust" (I had never seen a flutter pony toy). But yeah. OT?

[Shaz]

I think G1 was fluid like that. You could enter into it or leave it and still get meaningful play.

This is what I like best about G1, the freedom to make up your own stories. I think G4 is a lot more limited in that way because the cartoon is so in-your-face. But maybe there are still kids out there ignoring the cartoon and doing their own thing, I hope so! I'd love if future generations were a bit less media-orientated and more aimed at encouraging imaginative play and original storytelling, but I suppose that's not really what's fashionable these days.

Re what you grew up with: my girlfriend was born in 1993 and raised in the UK. She grew up with second-hand G1s, a video with three hours of MLP n Friends on it (Rescue from Midnight Castle, Escape from Catrina, The Magic Coins, Ice-Cream Wars, Bright Lights, Sweetstuff & the Treasure Hunt, Pony Puppy, The Return of Tambelon, Woe Is Me and Spike's Search), the annuals (but no comics) and the UK Factfile. Any pony she saw that she didn't have she just assumed that she hadn't found second-hand yet. The cartoon and to a lesser extent the annuals influenced the world her ponies lived in (it included Tambelon, the ponies lived in Dream Castle, and Midnight Castle was home to a whole race of evil centaurs against whom the ponies went to war) but she had no qualms about renaming ponies, assigning new characters to them, inventing a new world for them etc. She also wrote her own pony storybooks and even her own Factfile, which is now sort of like our own personal canon (for us there's three overlapping G1 canons, Comics, Cartoon and Kitti's Pony World. The latter is our favourite!). Thanks to the cartoon, I still can't persuade her to call Sweetstuff Sweetie, even though all our other ponies have UK names.
It's interesting to see which pony media different countries/different areas of different countries had and how it influenced different people's childhoods. I wonder how the current generation of children will remember G4. (End of somewhat off-topic ramble, sorry.)

[Taffeta]

TTMU - The Toys that Made Us - it was on Netflix  There's an ep for MLP and unfortunately she's included.

Ah, of course. Thank you. That's the one I've meant to see but have missed because we don't have Netflix.

At the time the ponies were out on shelves, it was negligible here, and apparently, over in the US as well. Maybe it was the same in Sweden?

I was so young, but I remember seeing G1 ponies on the shelves when I was very little. I don't know hos long the gap between G1 and G2 was. It is kind of funny that UK grew up with the toy ponies from the show but not the show, and Sweden had it the other way around. I see how that must have led to UK kids going "I don't like what they did with *pony*'s personality in the show" and swedish kids going "I'm just going to prentend Kisscurl is Rosedust" (I had never seen a flutter pony toy). But yeah. OT?

We didn't really grow up with ponies from the show, tbh. I thought Cupcake and Truly were made up characters as a kid because they weren't in the factfile. The SS ponies I didn't know were SS, so just thought of them as the regular ones. But we also didn't get any of the y2/3 pegasus or unicorn ponies so in those cases didn't even have the regular Heart Throb or Surprise to be going on with. No Ribbon or Lofty either. But some of those were also in our comic stories, just not in our shops.

I never saw later ones with Mimic or Twilight SS etc till 1995 but even then wasn't sure they were real ponies. Twilight was on the packaging for something we had here that had US cards, but that's all.

Milkweed and Tumbleweed and Scoops were others I remember from my childhood vhs who I didn't think were real ponies. Or Satin Slipper.  I never once thought that was a real playset.

So really we didn't. The show was here on VHS - all but one episode - but they didn't really relate to the ponies we had here, their personalities in the comic etc or their proper release names here. So yeah. It didn't really mean much to me. TBH the only pony the show did better than the comic was Wind Whistler. xD.

We did get the Flutter ponies, though. Did you not have Rosedust over there?

G1 in Europe ended in 1994, but I'm not sure exactly when in Scandinavia. G2 started in Europe I think in 1998. Certainly here it was 1998, the US it was 1997. But of course old lines can stay on shelves for longer. We found ponies into 1995 and I had a bed and crib set I bought from TRU when I was at university in 2000ish...

[Zapper]

was even accused of faking interest in MLP to attract (these specific, messed up) guys

"Name all the friendship lessons!"

Haha! I used to counter such stuff with G1-G3 gatekeeping:
"Oh you like Pony, heh? List the names of the Core Seven and the Tales/TV Star ponies. I'm waiting, you fake!"
Thankfully that has died down.

But people thinking a woman buys kids toys for herself to appeal to men is crazy no matter what fandom. Like, wouldn't the first assumption be she is buying them for a child?

Post Merge: July 26, 2020, 05:16:24 AM

Whenever I mention I'm a fan of My Little Pony I feel like I have to add a disclaimer that I'm only into g1/the 80s and 90s ponies, just so I won't be associated with br*nies 

I feel this especially true for male fans given how we're so likely to get regarded as brownies simply for being male. I grew up with G1, and have been a fan since the mid 80s. In fact I used to watch the original cartoon series in the morning before going to preschool.

Yeah, this too. I hate bringing gender into discussion, but it's true that bronies especially ruined it for oldschool male pony fans. When you're an adult woman into MLP people will usually just assume that you liked it as a kid and it's childhood nostalgia, but when you're an adult male into MLP then people these days will just automatically associate you with the brony fandom. That's probably one of the main reasons behind my personal grudge against them.

Why not bring this up? I have noticed this since "brony" became a term that a lot of Bronies themselves pretended that every male fan that came before them must have been either gay (and a Mr. Smithers type with a room full of Malibu Stacies) or nonexistent. That all straight male fans are Bronies by default, even little boys growing up with FiM.
No wonder this backfired on all male G1-G3.5 fans. Some adopted the term out of peer pressure and said "I was a brony before it was cool" but that is another can of worms.
There is nothing wrong about liking MLP. MLPs are cute. I think the fandom was way less divided by gender in the past. Guys were fewer but I don't recall us girls trying to put a label on them or keep away from them. Anyone remember MLP fandom being anti-men? I personally don't.
Maybe side-eyeing them and questioning them because most girl things are deemed "uncool" but calling them a separating term and telling tgem to make their own fandom, nope.

[DreamvalleyMLP]

TTMU - The Toys that Made Us - it was on Netflix There's an ep for MLP and unfortunately she's included.

Lol, I just rewatched that ep because of this thread, and here it is being discussed

I wasn't quite bothered by Faust's presence, but her idea of Seashell and Bubbles being "differently abled" was so odd to say the least. Maybe it was her delivery of that line? I dunno. I never saw my Seashell as such. She was always the babysitter in my herd, sitting tight and keeping her eye on the little ones playing Faust had a few overall views on G1 that were a little off in tone, but whatever.

What I did find interesting is how Hasbro felt like they hit a wall after the first six... They saw the potential for collectibility in the expansion of the line with different poses, species, colors and symbols, and so we ended up with 10 years of different ponies. Nowadays, all they want to do is pump out the same six One could argue that the diversity and collectibility has moved from the main brushable line to the blind bags, but that has always been a secondary line to me.

EDIT: on the TTMU episode; "Feed the beast" ... new ponies... "Feed the beast" ...new ponies...  "Feed the beast" ...new ponies... Always makes me laugh.

[Leave a Whisper]

How does she get the idea that Seashell and Bubbles are disabled? I'm gonna say it now and I don't care who this ticks off. This woman says a lot of dumb crap. Horses can sit.
They seldom do it, and its not comfortable for them, but they can.

[DreamvalleyMLP]

How does she get the idea that Seashell and Bubbles are disabled?

Because they were sitting down, that's all there was to her theory. The TTMU ep is not the only time she brought this up; I can't recall the exact interviews (or online posts or chats?), but she did mention it before, when asked about G1.

[Leave a Whisper]

How does she get the idea that Seashell and Bubbles are disabled?

Because they were sitting down, that's all there was to her theory. The TTMU ep is not the only time she brought this up; I can't recall the exact interviews (or online posts or chats?), but she did mention it before, when asked about G1.

  pfft