Editing My Little Pony (section)

==The Forgotten 80s MLP (1986-1987)==
One of the big reasons why "Friendship is Magic" took off was because it decided to mix girly, slice of life stories with surprisingly decent (well, sometimes) action-fantasy stories. In fact, the original draft of the show was literally more or less a [[Dungeons & Dragons]] show being told in a world of cute pastel-colored ponies, but that was too expensive, so the emphasis was shifted to the cute slice of life stuff. But what few remember is that this wasn't so much a novel idea as a legacy...

See, way back in the 80s is when the very first MLP animation showed up, in a direct-to-tv special called "My Little Pony: Rescue at Midnight Castle" (or "My Little Pony: Firefly's Adventure", depending on where you saw it). Kids watched this, often reluctantly, expecting cutesy stuff suitable for little girls. Instead, two minutes in, our cutesy pastel-colored ponies are attacked by an army of flying snake-dragon things called "Stratodons", whose presence is announced by a lightning storm out of nowhere. They kidnap two of them and drag them to a nightmarish castle that looks like a little chunk of hell straddling a rocky cliff high above a storm-lashed ocean, where the demonic leader of the Stratodons is made to kneel before the bastard lovechild of a [[centaur]] and Satan, who pets an ominous sack that pulsates with an audible heartbeat and has a voice straight out of any boys-oriented 80s fantasy cartoon. This is Tirek, our big bad for the special. His goal? To kidnap four of the ponies and ''painfully'' transform them into monstrous dragon-things to pull his flying chariot, so he can use the magical "Rainbow of Darkness" to snuff out all light in the world and create a Night That Never Ends. And the special plays all of this ''completely fucking straight'', no punches pulled, even going so far as to end with Tirek being ''blown to bits'' by a magical rainbow.

How did they follow this up? With a second special, "Escape from Catrina" (or "Katrina", again), where our pony heroines are captured by a mad [[catfolk]] [[witch]] who intends to work them to death to provide her with an endless supply of her power-augmenting drug of choice, Witchweed Potion.

And then came the movie, where the ponies are driven from their home, which is ''permanently'' destroyed, by a trio of witches who unleash the Smooze- an ocean-sized [[slime]] with a sadistic hunger to devour all life it can encounter, and whose touch sucks the positive emotions out of you.

Then came the TV series, explicitly set after all of this, so you'd think they'd ease up and make it more "girl friendly", right? Wrong. The series continued the tradition of trying to be a typical action/adventure fantasy show of the era despite its cast of pastel pony protagonists, with pretty much every episode involving some kind of monster or disaster. Even the "cutesy" episodes included things like a poorly chosen wish creating droughts and wildfires that nearly kill the ponies, or an uprising of [[Animated Object|now-sapient furniture]]. Other episodes included a [[bard]] forced to steal shadows to feed the hunger of a demonic master, a giant stone dog trying to petrify the world, an icy [[Nazi]] penguin [[Elementalist]] trying to freeze the world, a vain pig sorceress kidnapping ponies to turn them into glass statues so she could admire herself in them, living weeds trying to suck the life out of the forest (with a guest voice of [[Transformers|Optimus MOTHERFUCKING Prime]] as a giant crab cop!), a goat [[necromancer]] sealed away in a time-lost city, a lava demon that wanted to burn the world to ash...

Don't get us wrong, there were some cutesy slice of life stories in there, but for the most part, this was actually a pretty decent (by 80s standards) fantasy adventure show. So it developed something of a hidden cult following amongst boys who watched it alongside their sisters because it actually held up decently well alongside other toons of the era. It wasn't until the 3rd generation of toys (and their attendant tie-in cartoons) that the emphasis shifted to focus exclusively on "cute girly stuff" and the guys drifted away.