The Pony Problem (Pt.1)

Part One: Background (ponies.)

     In the 1980’s, a toy company called Hasbro found that they could increase their profits massively if they were to increase the running time of their commercials from 30 seconds to 30 minutes.  Because of the undeniable fact that boys and girls cannot like the same thing (as they are scientifically documented to be two separate species) they had at least one series of their newly patented 30-minute commercials made special for each gender. 

     They quickly realized that in order too keep the children from changing the channel during these Extra-Lengthy Hasbro Half Hour Extravaganzas®, they needed to study carefully what would catch all groups’ attentions for the entirety of the Extravaganza.  Their research found that boys liked guns and robots and bad guys and fighting and weird voices, but they couldn’t get many answers from the demure, quiet gender as to what they liked.  It was decided to show test Extravaganzas to the girls, and just cut out everything that made the girls cry uncontrollably, leaving the My Little Pony show for girls tailored specifically to never touch upon their crippling fears of conflict, plot, characters, non-primary colors, and content.

     Flash forward to the 2000’s, the ever-creative Hasbro team decided to focus upon an experiment similar to the one they conceived in the eighties.  They found that the children who watched their “Television Shows®” had grown up now had unhealthy nostalgia for everything from their childhood, due to dissatisfaction with their current life and fear of impermanence and death.  Most importantly however, they found that these freaks had disposable income now.  They hired Michael “D’Hoffrynn” Bay, their demon child birthed from black magics and the stem cells from failed attempts to clone a

(Michael Bay being evil)

cyborg-Ayn Rand-Ronald Reagan-hybrid, to produce a series of four and a half hour long Film-Like Product® that people would pay them to see.  By the date of this essay, there have been 14 Film-Like Products® made from the Transformers intellectual property.

     

Hasbro attempted to do the same with My Little Pony, but they found that the girls who grew up watching the "show" didn’t remember any of it, somehow being placed in a catatonic trance the entirety of their experiences.  This left their nostalgia nearly impossible to take monetary advantage of.

     Michael Bay made a test My Little Pony Film-Like Product, but couldn’t refrain from having sex with and putting M80's in the specially bred Technicolor ponies on set.  Hasbro was now forced to think outside of the box and hire out of house to produce SOMETHING from the intellectual property just gathering dust instead of Frankalynns.

(Lauren Faust being good)

     The desperate toy-company approached Lauren Faust, an animator known for her work as a storyboard artist from the Powerpuff Girls and head writer of Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends.  Faust was a radical idealist in Hasbro’s eyes, and brought to Hasbro’s attention to the new concept of Non Corrupt Artistic Expression®, an idea Faust herself was one of the initial drafters of. 

      The tough-as-nails animator nearly walked several times from the new television production with Hasbro that she was creating, until the ever-make it up as they go along gamblers of the toy industry threw her the most creative control a cartoonist ever had in this period of animation history following John Kricfalusi being killed and eaten by Nickelodeon executives.

    

     Personally disgusted and uninterested with the My Little Pony show while she was growing up, Faust took charge to create a show with REAL, identifiable female characters that broke clichés, character relationships that created conflict and directed the internalization of the show, and themes of finding your identity and growing as a person/pony.  Being given the opportunity, she wished to make a show that would have not only kept her attention while a young girl, but caught her imagination and made her think and feel.  She didn’t care about all of the people who would undoubtedly dismiss her show as commercial trash or vapid, colorful crap for girls ...all she wanted was to make a good show for young girls.  If that ideal was compromised by her corporate overlords, she was more than willing to jump ship into the sea of jobless animators with both middle fingers extended and her tongue hanging out.  The best-case scenario would be that she could attain and maintain enough creative control to have the show (Later titled: My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (Seriously.)) perhaps become known as an itty-bitty oasis in the tiny desert of empty, condescending (and at times straight up evil), media for girls.

*(Exhibits A, B, and C)

Not to mention all of the children’s media that present incredibly backwards, anti-feminist values!

*(Little Mermaid:  Girl characters don’t need arcs!  Their daddies do though… And they can be rewarded for their naiveté and learn nothing at the end so long as they end up with their 1-dimensional, blandly conventionally attractive Prince GenEric they just met!  Now go get married and have a kid for the direct-to-video sequel, you scamps.  Oh, my.  Kids turn sixteen so fast.

Mulan: Starts out quite novel and pretty fighty for equal righties, until the title character is offered the biggest position of power for a woman in the history of her culture, and perhaps the world when you eliminate power inherited from bloodline, but turns it down for the laughable excuse given that she's: “been away from her family long enough”.  Because those two things are mutually exclusive.  Hows about you visit your family and then come back and serve as adviser to the EMPEROR OF GODDAMN CHINA?  Maybe change all of those sexist cultural policies that oppressed you throughout the entire movie?  Maybe serve as an example to all the girls who feel forced into where society has put them that they can attain something higher if they fight for it?  Oh?  You got a boy now?  All the men serving in Government can totes have wives and shit but she can’t have a boyfriend?  What? 
Shut up.  

And yes, Lion King.  I know, you like Lion King, but it’s one of the few Disney movies that presents arranged marriage between children in goddamn passing like it's no big deal.  And all of the Lionesses who are left behind when Simba leaves can't do anything about Scar?  Why?  Scar was overpowered by fucking hyenas.  Why did they have to wait for one guy to show up, who was assumed dead?  Because they're girls?  All of them could take him out while he was fucking sleeping, they are the hunters of the pride.  Did providing balance to the Kingdom require Simba to show up?  Just Nala was presented to be able to keep up with Simba, why couldn't all the women gang up against Scar?  One dude vs. many very strong and capable females and until they get one dude on their side they can't challenge Scar's role as leader? But back to fucking arranged marriage in a kids movie; even fucking 15-year-old Snow White who had her happy ending with some guy she met for less than a minute at the beginning of the movie and didn’t show up till the end wasn’t arranged for her.  That aside, am I the only one who thought they were kind of totally setting up it ending up with her and Grumpy?  Like, if you’re just paying attention to the narrative and not how he’s a troll and shit?  She was making a pie for him and everything.  Fuck.  Wait.  Am I still in a fucking caption?  Shit!  Back to ponies!)

     -Faust also hoped that perhaps My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic could be something mothers would look forward to watching together with their daughters.  What happened however, was an unprecedented something no one has yet claimed to have predicted, and a source of both great, fiery hatred and heavily devoted love.

TO BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK!!!

*For the record, I love all of these movies.  The Disney ones for many reasons, mainly the music, and the non-Disney one for giving me one of the most unintentionally and unexpectedly unique movie-going experiences I've ever had.  But Alan Menken, Howard Ashman, hilariously jarring tone-shifts and CGI babies don't make up for under-characterizing female characters as a rule, and using them as a vessel to promote sexist, damaging philosophies that should be gone-gone by now.  I mean, Birth of a Nation made some of the biggest leaps forward in film history, but it's still kind of the most racist movie ever in the history of ever, dig?