Midnight Castle Production Materials?

[Crystal-Sushi]

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As an animator, I've always wondered about creating my own pony animations of course, but then that got me wondering, do any model sheets/settei exist that we know of for the G1 animated properties?

I've seen cels from Tales and the intro for MLP & Friends (as seen above) but no actual pre-production material for Midnight Castle, MLP The Movie, MLP & Friends or Tales?

It seems a bit strange to me as I've seen model sheets for other properties animated by Sunbow (who worked on all four) and Toei (who worked on Midnight Castle) but no MLP? Even if it was related to being a Hasbro property, model sheets for stuff like Transformers and Jem are readily available which just makes me all the more curious...?

Does Hasbro just keep them in a vault somewhere? 

[brightberry]

That actually looks like a scene from "Escape from Catrina" after the Rainbow of Light melts the snow.  It happens right after this scene:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ0CUQxuJVk

I don't know about model sheets for Midnight Castle.  It was animated by Marvel and I don't know if they kept anything or if Hasbro had much to do with it's production.  I remember from "The Toys that Made Us" that much of the staff was shocked it was so scary.

[Carrehz]

Yeah that's a Catrina cel, I remember it going up on eBay a while back.

I know Wildshadow has some production materials for the original cartoon and Tales. I remember seeing some storyboards for... it was one of the First Tooth baby eps, pretty sure it was "Prince and the Ponies" but it might've been the other one... blanking on where I saw 'em now, though. x_x Might have been a thread on here.

Have you seen the boards for "Call Upon the Sea Ponies"? The artist Wendell Washer put them up on his site and they're awesome: http://www.wendellwasher.com/samples/storyboards/mlpseaponies/sbdmlpsea-109.htm

I've seen G1 cels around as well too (mostly on Rubberslug, great site for cel collections) but mostly for the early adverts and Tales (Tales cels are kinda dime-a-dozen, I have no idea why), everything else seems to be impossible to find :/

To be honest I think a lot of it is that there just... hasn't been as much interest from our fandom, in curating that kind of stuff, compared to the Jem and TF crowds. Like, I know Christy Marx was active in the Jem fandom back in the day, and the TF fans seem to have a very good rapport with their "powers that be", but it's only really recently that MLP fans have started properly looking into this kind of stuff... from what I can tell.

[LadyMoondancer]

Way back in the day, like late 90s or early 2000s, I remember seeing a cel of Scorpan and one of the sea ponies on eBay.  Now I wish I'd bought them!  Also Chanth had a fully colored cel of Baby Glory that was a character model for Escape from Catrina.

MLP Tales cels are common, but with early MLP stuff the studios probably didn't see any value in preserving them.

I think a lot of the G1 Transformers show info you see online, like the animation models and character descriptions, come from the G1 Transformers show bible. Here's the history of that:

Transformers Production Bible

In the late 90s, a fan (Mardhen Bravo) was given a copy of the production bible for the original Transformers show. Whilst not making copies he figured that transcribing the text was okay, which was posted in chunks to Greg Gaub's CybCon mailing list then collected by Jim Walters. Site updates there were abandoned in 2002/2003, with the rest of the material just being posted to the mailing group. Full credit is entirely to them; this page is just an effort to get the text into a convenient, easily searchable format. (Also note that there intentionally isn't any correction of typing mistakes, and that uncorrected mistakes were far, far more common back in the era of typewriters.)

The set has been seen at various conventions, so this very definitely isn't a piece of fan writing -- photocopies and originals of other materials also crop up at conventions and on eBay from time to time, such as the movie storyboards shared by Sam Jones.

So basically this one guy, Mardhen Bravo, is the reason the Transformers info is readily available.

I agree that the MLP community traditionally hasn't paid too much attention to the nuts and bolts of the cartoons. Like I don't remember G1 voice actors getting invited to conventions until the last couple years.  (Five to ten years is "a couple", right?  lol.)  And even then it's rare to see someone from the production side of things instead of a VA.

Edit:  Just googled Wendell Washer and sadly discovered he passed away in July 2022. 

[StarryEmerald24]

I don't have anything from My Little Pony and Friends or the specials but I've seen and bought some things from the early advertisements so I know those are out there at least!

[Carrehz]

It wouldn't surprise me if a lot of production materials for the original series are just gone. Always a hazard with older shows, especially a toy-toon like MLP, it's definitely likely that those involved didn't see the 'point' of keeping them.

That's interesting about the TF bible. Here's a link to that if anyone else wanted to read it (I love seeing these things!).

I agree that the MLP community traditionally hasn't paid too much attention to the nuts and bolts of the cartoons. Like I don't remember G1 voice actors getting invited to conventions until the last couple years.  (Five to ten years is "a couple", right?  lol.)  And even then it's rare to see someone from the production side of things instead of a VA.

Ah, you worded it better than I did. Like, I've seen guest lists for TF cons and they've had writers, VAs, etc, you didn't really see that with MLP cons/fairs/etc until recently. I think part of it is that we're generally more focused on the toys than the cartoons? It's a shame since I bet some of the crew have interesting stories to tell.

Edit:  Just googled Wendell Washer and sadly discovered he passed away in July 2022. 

I'm sorry to hear that. I remember you posting about him before and he sounded like a cool dude.

[Gator]

I love the Midnight Castle and Catrina Art styles.  I wish I could have some of that art if it still existed.

[Crystal-Sushi]

Yeah that's a Catrina cel, I remember it going up on eBay a while back.

I know Wildshadow has some production materials for the original cartoon and Tales. I remember seeing some storyboards for... it was one of the First Tooth baby eps, pretty sure it was "Prince and the Ponies" but it might've been the other one... blanking on where I saw 'em now, though. x_x Might have been a thread on here.

Have you seen the boards for "Call Upon the Sea Ponies"? The artist Wendell Washer put them up on his site and they're awesome: http://www.wendellwasher.com/samples/storyboards/mlpseaponies/sbdmlpsea-109.htm

I've seen G1 cels around as well too (mostly on Rubberslug, great site for cel collections) but mostly for the early adverts and Tales (Tales cels are kinda dime-a-dozen, I have no idea why), everything else seems to be impossible to find :/

To be honest I think a lot of it is that there just... hasn't been as much interest from our fandom, in curating that kind of stuff, compared to the Jem and TF crowds. Like, I know Christy Marx was active in the Jem fandom back in the day, and the TF fans seem to have a very good rapport with their "powers that be", but it's only really recently that MLP fans have started properly looking into this kind of stuff... from what I can tell.

Aaah thankyou so much for linking those to me! It's awesome to see the storyboards for that sequence! That's also interesting to hear that the animation aspect wasn't focused on until recently but I guess it makes sense, I don't remember seeing it being discussed much back when I joined the community in 2004 

I'd love to find the model sheets for Midnight Castle as drawing reference, but as it's likely they may no longer exist (or at least no longer be accessible, I was under the impression that Toei doesn't tend to dispose of stuff like that) I guess I'll have to piece references together from the cels and screenshots haha

[DreamvalleyMLP]

There's this early model of Dream Castle:

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[greeby]

Yeah that's a Catrina cel, I remember it going up on eBay a while back.

I know Wildshadow has some production materials for the original cartoon and Tales. I remember seeing some storyboards for... it was one of the First Tooth baby eps, pretty sure it was "Prince and the Ponies" but it might've been the other one... blanking on where I saw 'em now, though. x_x Might have been a thread on here.

Have you seen the boards for "Call Upon the Sea Ponies"? The artist Wendell Washer put them up on his site and they're awesome: http://www.wendellwasher.com/samples/storyboards/mlpseaponies/sbdmlpsea-109.htm

I've seen G1 cels around as well too (mostly on Rubberslug, great site for cel collections) but mostly for the early adverts and Tales (Tales cels are kinda dime-a-dozen, I have no idea why), everything else seems to be impossible to find :/

To be honest I think a lot of it is that there just... hasn't been as much interest from our fandom, in curating that kind of stuff, compared to the Jem and TF crowds. Like, I know Christy Marx was active in the Jem fandom back in the day, and the TF fans seem to have a very good rapport with their "powers that be", but it's only really recently that MLP fans have started properly looking into this kind of stuff... from what I can tell.

Wendell passed away in July and his site has now been taken down.  Whilst I have had private copies of his Marvel storyboard samples from the site stowed away for a couple of years now and I do run an archive for such things.  I'm keeping them under wraps, at least for the time being, so as not to be disrespectful.

That said, if anyone has scripts, storyboards or other material from either N Friends or Tales, and is willing to help, please let me know

Sunbow Marvel Archive: https://sunbowmarvelarchive.blogspot.com/

[Carrehz]

I knew Wendell had died but I didn't realize his site had since been taken down, how sad

Looks like the Wayback Machine saved the MLP boards, at least. I've got them saved myself, not sure what the etiquette is for sharing something like that though...

http://web.archive.org/web/20160309051922/http://wendellwasher.com/samples/storyboards/mlpseaponies/sbdmlpsea-109.htm