Saturday 3 November 2018

Sounds of 2011, nos. 92 and 91: Applejack fights, MandoPony celebrates

I shall be doing a number of multiple-track posts during this series, since otherwise it's going to take years to complete. A double bill for you today...


Remember Fighting is Magic? If you've been in the fandom a few years, then of course you do. You may even have played it. One of the most infamous C&Ds in the fandom's history came when Hasbro ordered the end of the Pony-themed fighting game at a point when it was already in playable alpha. Lauren Faust herself took an interest and offered to design some lawyer-compliant original characters. The eventual result was Them's Fightin' Herds, released on Steam Early Access in February. (Mind you, it's still Early Access...)

Although the original game didn't get finished, we did get to hear a lot of its music. One such track was this AJ-themed instrumental by erstwhile chiptune specialist RainbowCrash88, now known simply as RC88. It's unsurprisingly a country-style piece, full of activity and attitude and twangy banjo licks, and it works just as well as background music to type to as it does in the game. Should you wish to hear it in high quality, you can purchase the track for $1 from RC88's Bandcamp. Oh, and I mentioned Them's Fightin' Herds? He provided music for that, too!


The last track remains pretty well played to this day. This one? Unless you were around Equestria Daily way back in December 2011, maybe not so much. MandoPony wrote this to celebrate EqD reaching 80 million hits. I'm not sure how many it has now (the banner seems to have been quietly removed) but it's hundreds and hundreds of millions. For some years, EqD was the place to hang out in a way it isn't quite so much today – though, in line with my policy of being as odd as possible, I spend far more time there now than I did when I was a newbie in 2012.

The song was a victim of MandoPony's slimming-down of his Pony back catalogue on YouTube a while back, and the above video is the only one I know of now. Bizarrely, you can buy a karaoke version for 50 cents from MandoPony's Bandcamp, but as far as I can tell he doesn't offer the original at all. Maybe he doesn't like the way he sings, but I think it's fine for a song like this: a catchy, light-hearted, poppy celebration of the then-still-novel idea of a My Little Pony fan blog getting tens of millions of hits. It's worth a listen, especially if you remember the fandom of 2011 yourself.

Next time on Sounds of 2011: another double feature, with two more songs that are now pretty darn obscure but which were obviously fairly well known seven years back.

7 comments:

  1. It always surprises me how certain people that really distanced themselves from the fandom still keep the pony-based channel names — like Mando or Digibro.

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    1. The whole Digibro(ny) thing rather passed me by, so I can't say much about that. But I suppose MandoPony hasn't gone quite as far. He hasn't deleted all his pony-themed songs, after all, though he noticeably doesn't have a playlist for them, unlike for his FNAF or Undertale tracks.

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    2. He always had a ready-made non-pony handle in MandoAndy, and I've often wondered why he never went back to it. <.<'

      What he did delete was all his furry music, which makes me sad. :( It was good. And you can't find Paws for Effect stuff anymore. D:

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    3. I never really got into furry music, beyond a few brief online conversations with Chama C. Fox, so "Paws for Effect" doesn't mean anything to me and hence I can't think of anything to suggest. It doesn't help that it's a rather generic name that's shared by a bunch of dog-grooming companies and the like.

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    4. Oh man, Chama was the O.G., the real deal. Nowadays, everything's Fox Amoore, but Chama C. Fox, he was the man. :D

      I'm really out of touch with the furry music scene these days, though. Like, uh, Technomancer's good if you like more industrial stuff. There's Renard, of course. And maybe some, uh, Runtt? He worked with Matthew Ebel for a while, but he's not doing anything anymore. :/ Checqerz or whatever is good. There's a guy I'm thinking of that I can't remember the name of, and no one's really prolific anyway. D: Bluh.

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    5. He wrote a song about my (rabbit) character once, but for one reason and another it never saw the light of day. I used to have a copy of the draft version, but it's long since disappeared.

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    6. Once upon a time, I got him to record an instrumental of American Idiot so I could record a pony parody.

      That was seven years ago. <.< My career as a brony musician never materialized. I sometimes think about it and then wonder if it wouldn't look like riding coattails to post it now, when he's long since been internet famous.

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