Rescue at Midnight Castle Observations

[Shatyr]

I would have been over the moon for a Moochik doll, as well as Tirek and Scorpan. I can just imagine Tirek coming with his chariot, and ponywear showing the ponies as the chariot beasties. Or Scorpan with the dragons he rode, large enough to pick up ponies.

Oh man, those would have been AMAZING. Then I wouldn't have had to borrow my rothers' Ninja Turtles enemies to be the ponies' foes!

[LunaMoonCustoms1212]

I would have been over the moon for a Moochik doll, as well as Tirek and Scorpan. I can just imagine Tirek coming with his chariot, and ponywear showing the ponies as the chariot beasties. Or Scorpan with the dragons he rode, large enough to pick up ponies.

Oh man, those would have been AMAZING. Then I wouldn't have had to borrow my rothers' Ninja Turtles enemies to be the ponies' foes!

even tho hopefully they wouldn't have toned tirek down for the toy, he's such a good villain!

[Leave a Whisper]

I would have been over the moon for a Moochik doll, as well as Tirek and Scorpan. I can just imagine Tirek coming with his chariot, and ponywear showing the ponies as the chariot beasties. Or Scorpan with the dragons he rode, large enough to pick up ponies.

Oh man, those would have been AMAZING. Then I wouldn't have had to borrow my rothers' Ninja Turtles enemies to be the ponies' foes!

Sounds like playtime at your house was fun. Are the turtles and ponies still foes? Or did they bury the hatchet? :p

[Shatyr]

Sounds like playtime at your house was fun. Are the turtles and ponies still foes? Or did they bury the hatchet? :p

The turtles went back to their own dimension (ie: were sold at a garage sale) and now the ponies rule unchallenged. But theirs is a golden reign, full of equality and compassion and mostly confined to plastic storage bins because a one bedroom apartment just doesn't have enough display space that isn't sunlight-prone. Historians have no idea how long their dynasty will last, but it's not slowing down any time soon!

[Taffeta]

Love the turtles vs ponies concept. It sounds like the kind of zombie apocalypse games my sister and I played and that I played at school with friends and ponies. Plus I had ghostbuster toys. So you can imagine how that played out.

Ok, on topic.

Love that animation of Windy. Can't remember if I saw it before. Feel like I did remember a conversation ages ago (I mean ages ago) about that animation but don't remember what came of it.

Peachy and the rainbow pony. Okay well, this may have nothing to do with it at all, but I actually wonder if Peachy was an afterthought pony overall. Rationale for this:
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This is from the Argos catalogue in the UK in the autumn of 1983. It's the earliest My Little Pony item in an Argos that I've found, as UK catalogue stuff is hard to come by. Argos didn't have the full line, there's a TV commercial for the flatfoot ponies that's a cut up version of the US commercial so I know we had those as well BUT this interests me more.

I've never seen a parlour like that in reality, nor a box for it. It could be a prototype image, but the reason it intrigues me is that Argos didn't usually use stock photos. They usually deboxed an item and photographed it. The text, however, says nothing about a pony included. The one pictured is Butterscotch.

So the idea that Peachy was still a concept in design at this point is really highly possible for me. And I think that the suggestion they recoloured Snuzzle for it also makes a lot of sense. Doesn't rule out the idea that the rainbow pony was the original idea for the grooming parlour but got pulled. We've seen other things pulled for whatever reason, so maybe she did exist, as a prototype, but then instead they decided to do a whole Rainbow pony set, and make a simpler pony for the parlour.

Snuzzle did come with the Grooming Parlour as well here, but only in 1987, which was much later.

Re "girly girl". I think the fact we're discussing an episode in which ponies are enslaved, turned into monsters, and a creepy, beating heart of darkness is trying to take over the world really proves G1 MLP was not a girly girl toy with girly girl stories. But I think that there were a number of "girl" aimed toys and storylines in the 1980s that weren't as "girly girl" as they would be in the modern "safety first" climate of kids TV shows. I remember someone saying once that if Jem was aired on TV today it would have to be aired after 10pm (this was someone in the US, dunno about here) because of the gratuitous violence from the Misfits and Rio's random potplant kicking temper tantrums. There are some amazing videos on Youtube of "violent" or "dangerous" Jem scenes!

Let's not forget, too that the villains of SheRa are actually MOTU figures/characters that got used in that series instead. And some serious stuff happens in SheRa too. This is the climate G1 was competing with, and so it matched up to the demand in my opinion for less "girly" and more "actiony". But I'd guess the reason that, unlike SheRa or Jem, MLP villains were not sold is that, unlike Hordak and company, they did not make regular appearances. It's a lot of money for a one shot wonder character and the TV series did not endure very long. So investing in making them seems risky. Maybe the movie witches. Otherwise, I don't see it working in a business sense. I doubt it had anything to do with girly girlness, since G1 is not as pink and sparkly as G3 and G4 in that regard.

The Weather Witch would have been a much more interesting doll than Megan, but sadly not to be...I would also have liked Question Mark and a few of the other comic regulars, like Junk-It, but Hasbro UK already scrimped on releasing full sets of ponies here.

[Al-1701]

I still find hilarious people gush over Twilight's Kingdom and Tirek.  I just sit there and can tell they were trying way to hard to be cool and "hardcore" leading to a fight that felt gratuitous and a design for Tirek straight out of a Powerthirst commercial.  They wanted to one-up the original Tirac but ended up making such a joke "pale imitation" is too kind a phrase.

Tirac of Midnight Castle will always be the true Tirac.  Accept no imitations.

[Ponyfan]

To me Rescue at Midnight castle is one of the darkest G1  MLP stories so I don't think Hasbro was afraid to release villain characters due to MLP being a brand marketed to girls. I agree that they probably didn't want to do the villain characters because most of them were only seen once. I have a VHS copy of the original special uncut and this is what the back of the box says.
 
My Little Pony, the wonderful series of toys that children love is now an enchanting animated program full of fun adventure and fantasy. Featuring the voices of Tony Randall and Sandy Duncan plus an original musical score My Little Pony is a delightful animated adventure for children to enjoy over and over again.

They're all here-the winged Firefly, beautiful Bowtie the baby Ember , Applejack Moondancer and more- all the fabulous Little Ponies that live in Dream Valley. When the evil half horse Tirac begins to kidnap them one by one to pull his dark chariot the Little Ponies ask their young friend Megan for help.  With her beside them they set out from Dream Castle to battle Tirac's forces of darkness.


Ponyfan

[Shatyr]

The issue I have with the "we only see them once" thing is we only saw the ponies in the specials once as well, but we have toys of them. Some of them even have multiple releases (Firefly, I'm looking at you)! I grant, they wouldn't have been very good dolls. Making a centaur like Tirac/Tirek back in the 80's would have been a very different proposition than making it now. But we still would have had them!

[Taffeta]

The issue I have with the "we only see them once" thing is we only saw the ponies in the specials once as well, but we have toys of them. Some of them even have multiple releases (Firefly, I'm looking at you)! I grant, they wouldn't have been very good dolls. Making a centaur like Tirac/Tirek back in the 80's would have been a very different proposition than making it now. But we still would have had them!

Wrong emphasis. Toys existed, show made to showcase toys. It's not the other way around. I dunno how it works with the G4 line, as I don't follow it, but with G1, it was a case that ponies were made and animated specials were created to sell them. Therefore there are more ponies than animated scenes.

Same happened with Jem. The animation is the thing that has lasted, but it was created to sell dolls. The dolls didn't come from the animation.

By contrast, the one-ep-villain was literally that - a one episode character designed to showcase the heroics of the pony toys the kids were hopefully going to buy. Just like the comic characters mentioned above, they serve no other purpose really and thus aren't financially worth the investment. Not saying fans wouldn't have liked to have them, but from Hasbro's point of view, it didn't make sense.

Besides, I'm not sure how influential the G1 series was compared to FIM now. I suspect, considering its short run, Hasbro realised it didn't need cartoons to sell ponies. They were selling fine on their own. If the cartoon wasn't that influential, then there's even less reason to make villains who appear in one episode in a time period pre-online streaming and youtube and where VHS is basically the only option available.

[Shatyr]

Wrong emphasis. Toys existed, show made to showcase toys. It's not the other way around. I dunno how it works with the G4 line, as I don't follow it, but with G1, it was a case that ponies were made and animated specials were created to sell them. Therefore there are more ponies than animated scenes.

Same happened with Jem. The animation is the thing that has lasted, but it was created to sell dolls. The dolls didn't come from the animation.

By contrast, the one-ep-villain was literally that - a one episode character designed to showcase the heroics of the pony toys the kids were hopefully going to buy. Just like the comic characters mentioned above, they serve no other purpose really and thus aren't financially worth the investment. Not saying fans wouldn't have liked to have them, but from Hasbro's point of view, it didn't make sense.

Besides, I'm not sure how influential the G1 series was compared to FIM now. I suspect, considering its short run, Hasbro realised it didn't need cartoons to sell ponies. They were selling fine on their own. If the cartoon wasn't that influential, then there's even less reason to make villains who appear in one episode in a time period pre-online streaming and youtube and where VHS is basically the only option available.

Oh, you're absolutely right that the cartoon was made to sell toys, not the other way around. I just wish they had made villains along with pretty ponies in the toyline. It's mostly a waste of flailing at this point, but a collector can dream, right?

 

[Al-1701]

Yeah.  Firefly and company were released in the fall of 1983.  Rescue at Midnight Castle was made because they were a smash hit success.

And the series was more taking MLP's popularity and trying to use it to the elevate other brands.  That ended up being a failure (all the "Friends" quickly went into the ash bin of history) and the Transformers and G.I. Joe cratering convinced Hasbro to give up on animation all together (for a whole year).

[Foxtale]

Love the turtles vs ponies concept. It sounds like the kind of zombie apocalypse games my sister and I played and that I played at school with friends and ponies. Plus I had ghostbuster toys. So you can imagine how that played out.

Ok, on topic.

Love that animation of Windy. Can't remember if I saw it before. Feel like I did remember a conversation ages ago (I mean ages ago) about that animation but don't remember what came of it.

Peachy and the rainbow pony. Okay well, this may have nothing to do with it at all, but I actually wonder if Peachy was an afterthought pony overall. Rationale for this:
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This is from the Argos catalogue in the UK in the autumn of 1983. It's the earliest My Little Pony item in an Argos that I've found, as UK catalogue stuff is hard to come by. Argos didn't have the full line, there's a TV commercial for the flatfoot ponies that's a cut up version of the US commercial so I know we had those as well BUT this interests me more.

I've never seen a parlour like that in reality, nor a box for it. It could be a prototype image, but the reason it intrigues me is that Argos didn't usually use stock photos. They usually deboxed an item and photographed it. The text, however, says nothing about a pony included. The one pictured is Butterscotch.

So the idea that Peachy was still a concept in design at this point is really highly possible for me. And I think that the suggestion they recoloured Snuzzle for it also makes a lot of sense. Doesn't rule out the idea that the rainbow pony was the original idea for the grooming parlour but got pulled. We've seen other things pulled for whatever reason, so maybe she did exist, as a prototype, but then instead they decided to do a whole Rainbow pony set, and make a simpler pony for the parlour.

Snuzzle did come with the Grooming Parlour as well here, but only in 1987, which was much later.

That cat in the picture is so different! Is it plush? I like the blue cards with the white text.

We have a new mission. To find out if there was ever a prototype of the white pony with the rainbow hair. I bet there is a poloroid somewhere of her with the cat on her back that was sent to Sunbow back in the early 80s . Now to question the correct special pony guest.

[LadyMoondancer]

Looking at First Born, her hair colors actually don't resemble Mystery Pony's much.  First Born has only three colors in her hair:  blue, pink, yellow, and blue again.   RaMC Mystery Pony's hair is pink, orange, yellow, green, purple, and sometimes you can see blue in her mane, depending on the angle.  Blue is the least prominent color in Mystery Pony's mane, but the most prominent on First Born.

I'd love to see pictures of the First Born prototype that was mentioned, though.

[Al-1701]

On the villains thing, Hasbro wasn't going to make Cobra until Marvel literally wrote them in.  When Marvel was brought in to make a comic adaptation of the reboot, they asked "Who is G.I Joe's enemy" and the Hasbro people just sat there with blank expressions.  So, Hasbro had no input with the MLP villains and allies and therefore, and their exposure was too limited to bring out a toy of.  It took years just for them to figure out what to do with bushwoolies.  Their only attempt was the Fur-Bobs and for that got tabled probably because they were so annoying in animated form.

[Ponyfan]

Any thought about Scorpan? I know he was forced to serve Tirek but unlike the guards and Stradons that blindly followed his every order Scorpan seemed to keep some of his free will. He saved Megan from falling and freed Spike and Ember.   

I wonder if Tirek was planning on leaving Ember in the dungeon until the castle collapsed on top of her? 


Ponyfan