My Little Pony

This article or section is about something oldschool - and awesome. Make sure your rose-tinted glasses are on nice and tight, and prepare for a lovely walk down nostalgia lane.

The original 1980s series was widely regarded as shit....

My Little Pony (MLP for short) is a toy and cartoon series created by Hasbro with a long and tortured history. Originally noted for being a particularly shitty series back in the 1980s during the Dark Age of Cartoons, it was notable for having characters with no actually definable points, little in the way of conflict, and very little in the way of character development. The show was horrible, even by 1980s standards, and it died, as expected, long ago, and we were richer for having lost it.

....Or so we thought.

Then, nearly 2 decades hence, it saw something of a revival - and of a most.... Unusual sort. Done by a completely new team and with a completely new cast, a new show, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic emerged, and managed to leave everyone who watched it in a state of stunned silence - it was actually reasonably good.

...Whereas the re-release is heralded as mildly awesome.

How the series went from complete shit to not-complete-shit is something many familiar with the series have wondered. In truth, it owes most of its revival to a combination of factors: extremely clever writing (it has the same writers as the Powerpuff Girls), much better animation than most other shows, and remarkably-enjoyable characters. Which is hilarious when you consider that the show is directed at little girls. Whilst hardly the best show ever to grace television, the new series stands head and shoulders over 99.95% of the drek that's on network TV, which is kind of unique.

The charm and appeal of the various characters has caused huge portions of the general populace to develop an affection for the show, seemingly in the face of any and all logic. Even /tg/ has not been immune to this, with the show inspiring works of concentrated hilarity and win such as Don't Rest Your Hooves and joking setups with the cast of the new series playing D&D and Warhammer 40,000. It seems like almost no community can resist the combination of d'aaaaw and humor.

Wait Seriously

It's sort of incredible how a show that was ridely regarding as being some of the worst fail ever to fail could be revamped into something so widely-accepted and praised, but there you have it. The pony-show has inspired many, both on /tg/ and off of it, so in spite of the series being so aimed-at-little-girls, it has achieved humorously high acceptance, even among fa/tg/uys and ca/tg/irls. Posting MLP-related will invariably produce biblical-level firestorms on /tg/, as the few holdout haters of the series bitch and troll whilst the rest of /tg/ rushes to defend the original posting. It's rare anything on /tg/ brings about this kind of righteous indignation, but there you have it.

Characters and Such

blah blah blah original ponies: 1982, legs without feet like psuedopods, as many characters as the Chinese sweatshops could pump out. 24-minute Saturday-morning cartoons commercials. Second wave: 1997, poseable heads, Mary-Sue pegasusicorns, sales were good in Europe but tanked in USA, so fuck Europe. Third wave: the start of writing actual fluff instead of shitting on a typewriter, and making ponies for manchildren womanchildren adult collectors.

Wave three-point-five, or "core 7", 2008, is what /co/ would recognize as MLP. The water-caste Tau working for Hasbro figured the cartoons were getting more dollars in than the normal 30-second commercials, so they cut the pony models down to just seven: Pinkie Pie, Rainbow Dash, Star Song, Sweetie Belle, Toola Roola, Cheerilee, and Scootaloo. The toy molds were changed to make the toys more weeaboo: smaller bodies, larger heads, freakishly wide eyes.

Wave three-point-seven-five (the Pathfinder wave?) is 2010, with the "Friendship is Magic" cartoon on teevee channel The Hub. This is where the MLP starts to infect /b/, /tg/, even /v/ like a four-legged syphilis. All the reaction image shit you see comes from MLP:FiM. The new "core 7" are: Twilight Sparkle, Rainbow Dash, Fluttershy, Pinkie Pie, Applejack, Rarity and Princess Celestia. I think that last one is a horse, not a pony, but I'm going into diabetic shock doing this research. I need to lie down.

Gallery

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  Even /tg/ has not been immune.