“The book doesn’t say anything about having a giant tree branch at your slumber party! Or, at least, I haven’t found that entry yet.”

Episode written by Charlotte Fullerton
Entirely unofficial reflections by sixcardroulette

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This is a full-length Ponywatching essay. For a condensed review
of this episode, check out The Shorter Ponywatching!

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So, thanks to those wacky British DVD compilers, this was the fourth episode of My Little Pony we ever watched – from memory, we watched it the morning after we saw the first three – and again, like Griffon the Brush Off, even though it’s actually out of sequence (something we didn’t realise at the time), it works just fine in its misplaced role.

But unlike Griffon the Brush Off, hindsight has made a difference here. When we later found out the correct running order, and that both Applebuck Season (17th on the DVDs) and Boast Busters (22nd!) were meant to have come before this one, it raised all sorts of questions about the portrayals of Applejack and Twilight Sparkle here – how was our understanding of these characters, characters we’d come to know so well by the time we saw those episodes, affected by seeing this one first?

For sure, seeing this fourth up, straight after Griffon the Brush Off, gave the four of us a pretty radically different idea of what the show was going to be like week-to-week, thematically if not structurally. Following the chaos of the opening two-parter, it really seemed like each episode for the foreseeable future was going to be a slice-of-life sitcom/dramedy affair building on the foundations of a friendship first laid in the pilot.

*A* friendship, not “Friendship” in general. Both of these early “regular” episodes focus on a particular pair of ponies, diametrically opposed, who’ve ended up in the same gang: the ponies least likely to be believable as plausible friends just because the scripts tell us so. Just as, in reality, friendships need to be built, nurtured, earned, so it goes with our faith in friendships onscreen. Show, don’t tell, as the maxim goes. Time and again, My Little Pony shows.

This, then, is the story of how Applejack and Rarity became friends. Continue reading “Reflections on S1 E8: “Look Before You Sleep”” →

  …[sigh]… “Junior Speedsters are our lives, skybound soars and daring dives…”

Episode written by Cindy Morrow
Entirely unofficial reflections by sixcardroulette

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This is a full-length Ponywatching essay. For a condensed review
of this episode, check out The Shorter Ponywatching!

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Hold on, Episode 5? What gives? Shouldn’t The Ticket Master, episode 3, be next up?

Well, yes. Yes it should. But actually, this is the third episode I ever saw. You see, I’m British, and I first watched My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic this Christmas just gone, when my daughter got the newly-released Season 1 DVD for Christmas and we all sat down to watch it together.

(Newly-released? Yup. The show premiered in the US in October 2010. The British DVD of Season 1 came out in November 2014, over 4 years later. For once, that’s not a typo. We still can’t legitimately watch Seasons 2-4 on DVD, or buy episodes for download.)

Anyway, we were visiting my parents for the holidays and had limited Internet access, and the strange order does still make sense, sort of, so it took us a while – probably a good twelve episodes or so in – to realise that we were watching the episodes in completely the wrong order, because the running order of the UK Season 1 DVD set has deliberately been jumbled up. So, yeah, the third episode I ever saw is actually this one. Hence: Episode 5. It gets even more confusing soon. Stay with me, guys.

Continue reading “Reflections on S1 E5: “Griffon The Brush Off”” →

“Gee, Twilight! I thought you were just spoutin’ a lot o’ hooey, but I reckon we really do represent the elements of friendship!”

Episode written by Lauren Faust
Entirely unofficial reflections by sixcardroulette

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This is a full-length Ponywatching essay. For a condensed review
of this episode, check out The Shorter Ponywatching!

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Here’s a thing. Unlike most sports, which tend to have evolved gradually over many years from various informal games until an agreed set of rules finally came together, basketball was actually invented by one person: Dr James Naismith, a YMCA instructor, who sat down in his office one day in the 1890s and sketched out the entire game. What he came up with doesn’t look much like basketball as we know it today, but it’s recognisably the same game, the basic structure is there. And yet when Dr Naismith’s creation took off across America, and he accepted a job offer from the University of Kansas to become head coach of their new basketball team – a team playing a sport he himself invented – he actually ended up with a losing record, to this day the only Kansas coach to do so. The guy who actually invented basketball is, statistically, the least successful basketball coach in school history.

Why am I talking about this on a My Little Pony blog? (Other than reminding people I’m a sports geek, rather than a comics one?) Friendship is Magic Part 2 – or Elements of Harmony, to give it its more descriptive and less confusing alternate title – is the last time we’ll ever see a sole writing credit here on Ponywatching for the great Lauren Faust, the creator of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. She has one more co-writer credit coming up (for episode 3), and then that’s our lot, as she withdraws into the clouds as Executive Producer for the rest of the first season, to keep a watchful eye on what other writers are doing with her characters, her stories, her world.

While “success” is kind of a fluid concept when we’re talking about TV – I mean, what constitutes a success? Ratings? Widespread critical approval? A 40% surge in toy sales? Whether me and my family liked it? – generally, in terms of its reception by the brony community (in my own limited experience of it anyway), Elements of Harmony seems to get a pretty rough ride.

This is the second half of a two-part episode, which I suppose makes going back to revisit it in isolation a faintly artificial process. But I think it’s the right thing to do. Even the people who have nice things to say about the opening two-parter as a whole (and that’s by no means a whopping majority in itself), or those who are less hesitant to recommend it as a starting point for new would-be bronies, do broadly seem to confine most of their praise to the first part.

Now, I really enjoyed Mare in the Moon, and not just sentimentally because it’s what ultimately hooked me into becoming a brony – I’ve thoroughly enjoyed rewatching it with the kids, and I had a blast watching it back again to write that essay. This second part, which has a very different tone and style, is (for me) a bumpier, less satisfying ride for a number of reasons, all of which were developed before I ever went online and discovered there were such things as bronies, or indeed that there was any dissatisfaction at all. That’s kind of the way this blog works, really – a mix of my initial reactions on first and subsequent viewings, and my reactions now having seen what’s popular and what isn’t. And, apparently, this one isn’t.

Of course, this being My Little Pony, there are still some brilliant bits. Let’s get to them.
Continue reading “Reflections on S1 E2: “Friendship Is Magic, Part 2” / “Elements of Harmony”” →

“All the ponies in this town are CRAZY!”

Episode written by Lauren Faust
Entirely unofficial reflections by sixcardroulette

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This is a full-length Ponywatching essay. For a condensed review
of this episode, check out The Shorter Ponywatching!

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So, here we are then. At the start. Or a start, anyway.

A question which seems to tie the fans in knots: what’s the best way to introduce your skeptical friends to the show? Which episode should they watch first? Should you begin here, or what?

It’s interesting to me that this, the actual beginning, doesn’t seem to feature too often in that conversation; it’s not common consensus among bronies, apparently, to start at the start. I find that fascinating, and I’d like to know the reasons behind it in the comments, if you hold that view. I have my own thoughts on the matter, which we’ll get into here before too much longer.

I didn’t have a choice: my daughter, who’s 2, got the first season on DVD for Christmas, and so we sat down to watch it. Here, then, is my introduction to the show. Disc 1, episode 1. With that in mind, here seems a good place to introduce myself.

Your Faithful Student

Let’s get this out of the way first, then. I don’t really like doing “about me” type stuff – after all, why should you care? I really like writing for the fun of it, and I publish that writing because I also really like reading other people’s opinions, especially when they’re different from my own. But usually, who I am is a pretty unimportant part of that bigger picture.

So, biographical details I’ll keep to a minimum: I’m British, male, a lawyer and part-time radio presenter, I’ve got two children (1 boy, 1 girl) both under 5 as at the time of writing. They both love the show. So do I.

Oh, I’m a brony now, it would seem. Mm-hm.

But here’s some stuff you do probably need to know about me for the purpose of reading these little essays. I’m a complete geek, but not in the way you might be used to. I’m a walking compendium of sports statistics and obscure music trivia. I’ve never read comics, at least not since my age got into double figures. I don’t really know anything about superheroes. I don’t watch a lot of cartoons, or indeed a lot of TV generally these days, unless I’m sitting down with the kids. Sci-fi and fantasy have largely left me cold. I can’t draw, I can’t sing, I’d never in a million years dress up or go to a convention (or dress up to go to a convention). I don’t pay much attention to online fan culture. The Internet for me has always been for talking about sports and music, areas where I can hold my own. Can you name both bass players on Stevie Wonder’s “Fingertips”, or the winner of the 1958 Moroccan Grand Prix? Yeah, I’m that guy.

And then this happened, and I find myself in strange and unfamiliar waters. I’m a new brony. These are my thoughts. Continue reading “Reflections on S1 E1: “Friendship Is Magic, Part 1” / “Mare in the Moon”” →