My Little Repeats 3: "The Ticket Master"

Enough G4.5 speculation for the moment. Let's get back to the show that's the reason most of us are in the MLP fandom in the first place.

The sort of expression we got so much less of from later-series Twi

S1E03: "The Ticket Master"
Written by Amy Keating Rogers and Lauren Faust
29 Oct 2010

My original rating: N/A
IMDB score: 7.2

The one with oatmeal.

Thoughts: This episode started out as an 11-minute script in the Show Bible, then was expanded with AKR's help to 22 for broadcast. (Thanks to Mike Cartoon Pony for that.) Anyway, it's a pretty stupid setup, really: why would Celestia send Twilight just two tickets in the first place? For the Grand Galloping Gala, no less, which first appears here. Early Instalment Weirdness applies: Spike doesn't want any of that "girly, frilly, frou-frou nonsense" and there's some odd levitation right at the end. Still, Fluttershy singing the theme tune (the start of the then-unreleased extended version, at that!) is adorable. Two rather forgettable little Pinkie ditties, too. We get our first sight of Prince Blueblood in Rarity's vision, though (perhaps thankfully!) we learn nothing of his character just yet. This episode does contain a favourite early scene of mine, though: when Twi is picking the petals off the flower, her stomach rumbles... and she eats the petals. A nice reminder that in S1, these were very much horses; see also the restaurant having piles of hay instead of chairs. The Benny Hill-esque chase scene is actually quite funny, and it ends with Twilight first teleportation – awkwardly, and apparently not even knowing it would happen! Overall, though? It does feel a little stretched at 22 minutes, and the plot is all a bit obvious. I think a high two-star rating is about right.

Choice quote: Rarity: "Twilight! It's raining." Twi: "No. Really?"

New rating: ★★

Next up is "Applebuck Season", which many fans cite as their first hunch that things were really going to come together on this show.

My Little Repeats 2: "Friendship is Magic, part 2"

Shall we? Oh, go on, let's do it, for old time's sake... "You know. For kids!"

Something I noticed in the comments last time was the number of people – even those who liked part 1 – who felt it was rather formulaic. It felt fresher to me, which I suspect has a lot to do with my general non-watching of modern animation. Anyway, time to end the cliff-hanger! Just be thankful you've only had to wait two days for it – back in 2010, the notion of running a Pony two-parter in a single slot lay well in the future: viewers had to wait for twelve days before they saw episode two. Yes, that's right: ep 1 went out on a Sunday, but ep 2 appeared on a Friday. Indeed, Friday would remain FiM day for the rest of S1.

S1E02: "Friendship is Magic, part 2"
Written by Lauren Faust
22 Oct 2010

My original rating: N/A
IMDB score: 7.7

The one with Twilight forgetting how libraries work.

Thoughts: I like the foreshadowing of each of the ReMane Five's Elements, even though with hindsight it's pretty obvious. The Everfree Forest is a much spookier place than it becomes even later in S1, and I miss that – until this episode, none of the ponies had ever been inside before. The manticore shows the dangers pretty well, even if Rarity does kick him in the face! (But Twi wasn't allowed to hit Tirek years later? Hmm.) We get our first song – not a great one, but it's cute in its place. Steven Magnet appears, though he'd have to wait 98 episodes for his pirate-upload name to become canon. The Shadowbolts sequence is nice, showing just how susceptible to flattery early-series Rainbow can be. And of course there's the dramatic final confrontation and the return of (S1-style) Luna. Interesting that Twilight refers to her friends as "the spirits of the Elements of Harmony", not dependent on the physical artefacts. I suppose that also applies after the Tree's destruction so many years later! Also our first sight of Celestia and the first utterance (albeit with significance unexplained) of "cutie mark". And, right at the end, Pinkie's first fourth-wall moment. A fine episode. Not hugely representative of most of the season, but even so.

Choice quote: Twilight (sarkily) to Dash: "Yes, Rainbow. I was there."

New rating: ★★★★

Next up is "The Ticket Master", which my admittedly rusty memory doesn't recall being all that great. We shall see!

My Little Repeats 1: "Friendship is Magic, part 1"

I wonder how many of FiM's first viewers spotted this clever foreshadowing shot?

Welcome to My Little Repeats, everypony! Today, of course, we start off with the episode that started it all more than nine years ago. This episode is sometimes referred to as "Mare in the Moon", but I'm going to stick with the more common name here. As you'll see, I'm not joining double episodes together – so there'll be a thrilling cliff-hanger wait before you find out what I think of part two. Off we go!

S1E01: "Friendship is Magic, part 1"
Written by Lauren Faust
10 Oct 2010

My original rating: N/A
IMDB score: 7.6

The one with the Rain-blow-dry.

Thoughts: The very first thing we see is the book opening – it would finally close over 220 epsodes later. The very first voice is Nicole Oliver's, and quickly we're into the storybook-style opening and the dramatic story of Nightmare Moon's banishment. Then it's back to Flash animation in its S1 form, which these days looks a bit sparse but still quite nice. Meeting the Mane Six is pretty fun throughout, and long-running concepts like Sparity and the Wonderbolts are efficiently introduced. "Ten seconds flat" also shows nice attention to detail. Mind you, Ashleigh Ball's voices for Applejack (especially) and Rainbow aren't quite there yet. Twilight's snarky personality is a joy to revisit, but her sometimes thoughtless treatment of Spike is less so, as is the dragon's partial illiteracy – thankfully swiftly forgotten. Nightmare Moon makes a fine villain in the short time she has on screen, and (despite an anachronistic CMC shot) the final scene works very well. All in all, a very promising beginning!

Choice quote: Twilight to Spike: "Focus, Casanova."

New rating: ★★★★

Next up is "Friendship is Magic, part 2" [You don't say? —Ed.], which I'm looking forward to very much as the series' first big adventure!

The Lauren Faust and M. A. Larson Show at EQLA

I find it somehow amusing that the way this blog handles tags means that Mitch is listed as "ma larson". Anyway, I can't find a video of this big Equestria LA event – though with luck one will surface – so here's the Equestria Daily report. Quite a lot of information from Lauren Faust that I didn't know, though I don't know how much of that is genuinely "first time in public" stuff and how much is just things everyone in the fandom except me has known since 2012. Still, it's not absurdly long and is worth a read. Don't expect a big "All the reasons I left the show" reveal, but there are a couple more pieces added to the jigsaw.

In other news, my liveblog of AestheticB's The Immortal Game has an entry for the first two chapters. Naturally, it's packed with spoilers.

Lauren Faust will be attending Equestria LA!

I don't normally post about specific guests at non-UK pony conventions, since there are far too many of them to keep up with. Besides, it just depresses me. You guys over in Leftpondia get more and bigger cons, with more guests, at lower prices all the time. But this is a bit of a special case, because EQLA have announced a last-minute addition to their already stellar line-up of guests: a certain Lauren Faust.

Since it's only just over a week until the convention starts, this is a really late announcement. Faust hasn't attended a pony con since, I think, 2012, and it'll be very interesting to see what her programme is for this one. EQLA already had an amazing guest line-up (Amy Keating Rogers, M. A. Larson, Bonnie Zacherle, Tabitha St. Germain, John de Lancie... the list goes on) and this just makes it even more impressive.

Oh, and just to upset my compatriots even further: a three-day ticket to EQLA costs $60. That's £38. £38! For comparison, a weekend ticket to BUCK is £100, which converts to about $154. As I said at the start, if you're an MLP fan in the US – at least, if you're within any sort of reach of any of the large conventions – you really don't know you're born. :P

Why "really pretty good, considering" won't be enough for Season 4

Despite the practically rock-solid certainty of large swathes of 4chan that the show is in terminal decline, the only sensible answer to that question is: "No idea yet." I think most fans would agree that season 3 of Friendship is Magic was the least impressive yet, but how much of that has to do with Lauren Faust's departure and how much is due to other factors remains to be seen. It's interesting that Hasbro seem to have given the creative team more freedom once Faust had gone, perhaps realising that they'd made a mistake, though I doubt they'd admit it.

Season 4 this winter will be the big test. The team have had a long time to prepare for it, it's a full 26 episodes long and the sense of people finding their feet without Faust will no longer be an excuse. In short, it must be more consistently good than S3 if faith is to be maintained/restored (delete according to preference). Yes, S3 had some wonderful moments, not least "Sleepless in Ponyville" — one of the all-time classic episodes — but it also had some pretty shaky moments. It simply wasn't up to the overall standard of either S1 or S2.

I've only seen a few snippets of Equestria Girls, but it looks as though that may be a potentially terrible movie saved and lifted into the realm of the genuinely good by a tremendously talented creative team. That's not a million miles from what happened with "Magical Mystery Cure", where MA Larson and Daniel Ingram in particular came up with the goods, to the extent that the only really major complaint was the one they couldn't help: that it was very clearly a two-ep story forcibly crushed into 22 minutes.

But that's not going to be good enough when S4 finally arrives. What I want, and need, to see is a season whose episodes are excellent in their own right. Not "really pretty good, considering", but just plain excellent. FiM is a special cartoon, as all of us in this remarkable and (let's be honest) bizarre fandom know. The standards it set in S1 were amazing, and it mustn't aim simply at being a good, solid kids' cartoon. It has to be more than that, and I'm sure Meghan McCarthy knows it. Let's hope she can pull this off.

Lauren Faust on Ponychan

Here's the Equestria Daily archive of the questions that Lauren Faust answered, stripped of the random babblings that chans have everywhere. Some interesting stuff in here, as you'd expect: a tantalising hint about the origins of Nightmare Moon, an even more tantalising hint that one day — presumably after the show itself has ended — we may get to hear Ms Faust's original plans in detail, and the revelation that she wanted the show to feature Viking caribou, no less!

Equestria Girls dolls break cover... or possibly not

I can't decide which is scarier, the arms or the necks

The eagle-eyed Hazzat over on UK of Equestria has spotted that the Russian toy website lillu.ru is advertising dolls as shown above. They're listed as out of stock (Нет на складе) at the moment, which I'd guess means that they haven't yet been released. Their designs are... interesting, though. Note that the dreaded cutie mark face tattoos are back, for one thing. And what has happened to AJ's hat? As for our beloved Fluttershy, she looks like she's contracted jaundice. All right, the FiM brushables don't look much like the show ponies either, but really, Hasbro...

Edit: Ah... Equestria Daily says they're early prototypes, presumably from the same time as the similarly-tattooed cartoon characters. So probably the finished dolls will look a bit less terrifying. Even so, it's amazing that anything looking like this was allowed to see the light of day

Edit 2: Unsurprisingly perhaps, Lauren Faust was not at all happy with the way the EqG girls were portrayed in those dolls.

Classic episode review: "The Ticket Master" (S1E03)

Gratuitous Fluttercuteness ahoy!

Apologies for the month-long break since my last classic episode review; unfortunately life got in the way. It does that. Anyway, today we're taking a look at what might be considered something of a transitional episode. This is the first episode that is part of the regular series, rather than being a pilot... but it's also the last episode to have Lauren Faust getting a writer's credit. In this case, she shares that honour with Amy Keating Rogers, who would go on to write many more. After the jump we'll consider how well it turned out.

Lauren Faust answers S1 questions

She did so via Twitter, but thankfully the fine people at Equestria Daily have collected them all together, and made this post of all her answers. She was confining herself to S1 questions — unsurprisingly, given her history! — so anything else was ignored, as (quite rightly) were those questioners who did us all a disservice by asking yet again why Faust left the show. Yes, we'd all like to know... but she's said as much as she's going to, at least for now, and we should respect that.

Anyway, back to the S1 questions. Some are more predictable than others, and some (such as the "pony that thinks it's a deer" episode) were already known through other means, but there are still some very interesting revelations in Faust's replies. Here are some of my favourites:

• Trixie was created as a stallion... but Hasbro wanted her to be a mare
• Trixie (again!) went to Princess Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns, just like Twilight
• Faust's working name for Berry Punch was Pinot Noir(!)
• Celestia and Luna still lived with their parents (in the castle from the premiere) when Nightmare Moon appeared
• Before appearing in Ponyville, Nightmare Moon went to Canterlot to magically banish Celestia to the Sun in revenge
• Twilight's power surge in E23 attracted Celestia's attention: Tia knew then Twi could reignite the elements... and do "other stuff" Faust had planned that never came to be
• In maturity terms, Spike starts out as around eight years old in human chonological equivalents

Lauren Faust asking for bronies' help in wildlife fundraising push

Ours is a fandom that prides itself on its willingness to give to good causes, so here's another one — with a strong MLP angle to it, too! Lauren Faust is asking us to help the Wildlife Learning Center in California to raise thousands of dollars for its work in caring for rescued animals. So far, the campaign has raised just over $20,000 — but they'd really like to raise more than double that, which is where Faust (and therefore the fandom too) come in!

It's also where the pony angle comes in: when the total reached $10,000, they agreed to name a bunny Angel. Now that $20,000 has been achieved, a tortoise will be named Tank. If we can somehow get to $30K or even $40K, then there'll be an owl called Owlowiscious and even a gator named Gummy to add to the collection! Even if you can't spare money, you can still help by spreading the word — but if you can donate, here's the WLC's Indiegogo page.

Classic episode review: "Friendship is Magic, part 2" (S1E02)

Bright eyes, burning like fire

Gosh, I bet this choice of episode was a surprise to you after last time. We left our heroes at the mercy of Nightmare Moon, and the series itself at the mercy of Lauren Faust. (Actually, at this point it was probably mostly at the mercy of Hasbro, so I suppose we're back where we started, but still...) I can't claim to have found that first episode to be a classic, even knowing what we do now, but if you'll be kind enough to come with me past the jump, we can assess episode 2 — and the story as a whole.

Classic episode review: "Friendship is Magic, part 1" (S1E01)

"What do you mean, not until season two?"

I've been thinking for a while now that it might be fun to go back and take another look at some of the older episodes of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. I've actually been doing it in one or two places on a small scale, but as I don't have to keep to a regular schedule here, I can fit things in with my other commitments rather better. It seems only fair to begin with the story that started it all: the Season One pilot, written by the great Lauren Faust herself. There's plenty to interest us, so join me after the jump for more!

A belated comment on Fighting is Magic

There's a simple reason why I haven't said anything before about Mane6 and their ceased-and-desisted Fighting is Magic game, and that's that I'm one of the (minority of?) fans who was never all that interested it in the first place. Don't get me wrong: what I saw of it in videos and so on was very impressive, and it's a great shame that Hasbro's actions came so very close to the end of the development process. But I didn't bother playing the leaked alpha. I just don't find fighting games very interesting, and never have. Driving games, yes. Fighting games, no.

Lauren Faust is, of course, a fantastic person for offering to work with the Mane6 team to turn the game into an original-IP product with some of her own characters. I hope that whatever's eventually released will be a success, assuming it plays as well as Fighting is Magic looked. But will I play it? Frankly, no I won't. If I were a fighting-game fan, I probably would, especially given Faust's involvement. But I'm not, and the MLP angle was the only reason I'd have been interested in playing Fighting is Magic.

All right, so what about Hasbro? Well, they had the right to do this; nobody with a brain can question that. It's their IP. Whether they had to do it is another matter. I'm not sufficiently familiar with these things to say, but if common sense had anything to do with the law (I know, ha ha) they'd have left it alone. This was bad PR for Hasbro, no question. There's actually a case for saying that their worst offence was not doing something about it earlier, since I simply don't believe nobody at the company knew about Fighting is Magic until just recently.

We all know, Hasbro included, that the brony fandom would not exist in anything like its current form and size had Hasbro cracked right down on YouTube, in particular, from the start. They have the legal right to do so; MLP:FiM is their intellectual property. They also calculate, I think correctly, that only a small minority of bronies will do the dreaded "leaving the fandom" thing over this. So it's probably a business decision as much as anything else... and Hasbro is, undoubtedly, a business.

Review: Bronies: The Extremely Unexpected Adult Fans of My Little Pony

No, you haven't bought Peppa Pig by mistake

It's been a long wait — extended at the last minute by a week due to delays in obtaining clearance to use some of the music and artwork — but Bronies finally went public at the weekend. The "Core Edition" of Laurent Malaquais' film (without the Blu-Ray discs and other goodies that certain backers receive) is sold from the official website at US$12.99, which works out at £8.30 or so. For that, you get a DRM-free file in 400p, 720p or 1080p quality; you're allowed four downloads of each, which should cover any potential power-cut disasters.

If you have a reasonably fast connection and are watching on a screen big enough to take it, then you'll probably want to get hold of the 1080p version. Be warned: this takes up 3.5 GB! That does at least mean that it can be burned to a single DVD easily enough without any messing around. It's a standard H.264 file which I had no problems playing using any of the players I tried. For the sake of completeness, I mostly watched the film with the excellent, cross-platform VLC media player. You need have no fear here.

Enough technical geekiness; we have pony geekiness to consider! I shall, of course, be rambling on at some length in a minute, so out of the kindness (of course!) of my heart, I'll put the rest of this review after a jump. Follow me there for lots more waffling!

Official trailer for the Bronies documentary is out

Lauren Faust: "We need to ... not call [men] weak for caring."

And here it is! This comes courtesy of Scrnland, the company responsible for the digital distribution of the documentary. (Whose full title, as I'm sure you all know already, is Bronies: The Extremely Unexpected Adult Fans of My Little Pony. Not perhaps the snappiest name in existence, but I guess it does the job.) Brian Gyss of Scrnland posted the link to the video here on UK of Equestria a little earlier on, so this trailer is all official and above board. This video has been eagerly awaited by many in the fandom, so is it going to live up to expectation?

Well, there's only so much of a 90-minute film that you can fit into a four-minute trailer, but on the evidence of that trailer it's looking pretty promising. We get several show personalities interviewed, naturally including Tara Strong, and both Lauren Faust and John de Lancie appear as their OCs as well as in human form. (That's right, folks: there's original animation too!) The fans interviewed are a little on the overwhelmingly enthusiastic side, though they're balanced by one poor guy from the mountains of Appalachia who was confronted by rednecks with baseball bats...

We're told that the full documentary will also feature a certain amount of original music — though we don't know who will write it — but the trailer simply uses two fan-made songs, both by very well-known artists. One is "A Long Way From Equestria", a collaboration between Acoustic Brony and MandoPony. The other is the pony song with the highest number of views on YouTube — 4.6 million and counting — The Living Tombstone's legendary remix of Eurobeat Brony's "Discord". Come on, do I really need to give you a link for that one? Oh all right, if you insist.

Bronies: The Extremely Unexpected Adult Fans of My Little Pony will be released on 12 January, and a download in DRM-free (yay) MP4 format will cost US$12.99. That equates to £8 or so at current exchange rates. You get your choice of resolutions: since they all cost the same, I expect most people will go for the 1080p video, but there's also a 720p version and a 400p "phone resolution" option as well. (Actually it's 405p, but apparently 400p sounded better!) You can sign up for a pre-order at bronyfilm.com. Oh, and before I go: nice to see that we British fans aren't forgotten: BUCK 2012 features briefly in the trailer!