Early Installment Weirdness / My Little Pony

The original 1984 special

• The first special from 1984 was very dark; in fact significantly more so than other children's cartoons at the time (this Cracked article notes that it was basically about a bunch of cartoon horses fighting the devil himself). The series based on the special was Lighter and Softer, and with later generations becoming moreso until My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic reversed the process (due to initial showrunner Lauren Faust actively taking cues from the original special and series).
• The special also introduced Ember, the generation's first baby pony. However, unlike most other baby ponies from the generation, her name does not have the word "Baby" in it.

G 1 in general

• The ponies in the original 1980's cartoons resembled actual horses (especially in the original two specials) and often acted like them. To fans of the newer series', seeing them lick each other and lie down near each other seems homoerotic.
• The original cartoons had humans. Every installment since My Little Pony Tales has been strictly horse-centric, to the point of redesigning Mix-and-Match Critters to replace strictly human body parts such as faces and feet (e.g. Generation 4's Tirek is a centaur, but because there are no humans in Equestria, the human parts are replaced with those of a bull).
  • G3 occasionally implied humans exist in their world (Spike has knowledge of Fairy Tales from Real Life, Santa Claus is mentioned, and his house at the North Pole is shown and in Rainbow Dash's Special Day, Cheerilee tells Rainbow Dash her package is from Paris) but none appeared onscreen.
  • The Equestria Girls franchise that spun-off of Generation 4 establishes that the human realm is indeed a separate dimension from the pony realm.
• In the G1 Toyline, Ponies weren't the only creatures with "Cutie Marks" (or symbols as they were known at the time). The Pony Friends were a group of other animals who were brightly colored and had Cutie Marks like the Ponies.

Friendship is Magic

• In the opening of the premiere, the narrator refers to Celestia and Luna as "unicorns". The season 2 script and a 2013 comic later call Chrysalis a "pegacorn". Season 3 canonizes the fanon term "alicorn" for ponies with both wings and horns.
• The second episode suggests that Celestia and Luna aren't flesh and blood mortals. It's implied that Celestia literally turned into a ball of light and it's repeatedly mentioned that Luna was housed in (not "on") the moon. This fits Lauren Faust's original plans for the sisters to be godlike; however, later seasons establish the two sisters as much less distinct from other ponies and as not generally being especially powerful or otherworldly. The only remnant is Luna being housed in the moon as it's too concrete a part of her backstory to alter. At the end of the series premiere, Princess Luna is also shown to have a short, matte-colored, periwinkle mane, in sharp contrast to her long, dark blue, starry mane shown in later episodes.
• Spike is less competent in the pilot and some early episodes, not even knowing how to spell words like "brink". Twilight also treats him rather harshly, and is more an acerbic Jerk with a Heart of Gold in this and certain early episodes, compared to the All-Loving Hero she usually is season 2 onwards (though that can be chalked up to character development).
• While Spike was always the Butt-Monkey, earlier seasons had him treated rather abusively and in ways that suggested other characters thought very little of him (such as leaving him on an ice flow and laughing about him falling in the water and getting sick, or smashing his present for another character and not caring even when he complained) while in later episodes it is made clear he's considered a member of Twilight's family and, when he is on the receiving end of slapstick, it's always either completely accidental or brought on by himself.
• The third episode of the series, "The Ticket Master", was the first episode to be written, and it shows — Spike lacks his crush on Rarity, non-unicorn ponies can somehow levitate the tickets above their heads, the episode opens with Twilight helping Applejack with the harvest (which clashes with the latter's convictions in "Applebuck Season"), etc. It's also the lightest episode plot-wise, as it was originally intended for a Two Shorts format.
• The Ticket Master also introduces Prince Blueblood, who Rarity talks about marrying so that she can become a Princess. This contradicts Rarity's ambitions in later seasons, where she has no interest in being royalty and little in romance, instead wanting to focus on growing her fashion business.
  • Prince Blueblood himself is also really odd: he's supposedly Celestia's nephew (which would make him Luna's son! Either that or the Royal Sisters have a third sibling who no one ever mentions.) It's never made clear how he fits into the royal hierarchy, and after season 1 he vanishes from the show completely (aside from a few silent background appearances) never being mentioned by name again and rarely appearing in scenes where Equestria's royalty gathers. Later seasons establish that there are only four royal ponies (Celestia, Luna, Cadance and Twilight) seemingly ignoring Blueblood entirely. A lot of this can be chalked up to Executive Meddling where Blueblood was originally meant to be a Duke, a title of nobility which can be either hereditary or granted by a member of royalty, but the higher-ups felt that kids wouldn't understand what a "Duke" was.
• "Swarm of the Century" is one of very few episodes◊ to have a scene with completely legible English-language writing, when townsponies make a banner that reads "Welcome Princess Celest" (the townsponies state that they couldn't fit "Celestia" on their welcome banner). Most other visually depicted instances of the printed or written word are made with chicken-scratch, made-up written lettering, or mashed-together letters with filled-in areas that look somewhat like Latin letters and real-life words.
  • Later seasons establish that the characters speak Ponish, a fictional language (which is implicitly being "translated" for the viewer's benefit) making the season one English signage seem even more out of place.
• "Applebuck Season" opens with Big Macintosh having his first speaking lines and manages to say two complete sentences! Which is a rarity in the series as most future episodes will only have him saying "Eeyup" and/or "Nope" whenever he appeared and maybe a two or three word sentence if you're lucky, barring the occasional episode that gives him A Day in the Limelight where he is a little more talkative.
• In general, the first season is a lot more Slice of Life than any of the later ones, which tend to have more adventure-type episodes that include premieres/finales that bookend an overarching theme or plot. The season one finale, "The Best Night Ever", is just a standard slice-of-life episode; all other seasons' finales are instead much more plot-heavy, dramatized stories. It's also the only season to not feature Discord.
• Despite Word of God to the contrary, some Season 1 episodes depict unicorns and pegasi as having physical strength on par with earth ponies. For example, the three types of ponies seem evenly matched in the Running of the Leaves, and they all are able to dig through earth at the same pace.
• It took a while for the visual effects of unicorn magic to be standardized, and even then, the Color-Coded Wizardry didn't really show up until "Lesson Zero" in season two. Generally speaking, Season 1 episodes tend to depict the visual effects unicorn telekinesis as only a cluster of white sparkles around the levitated object, sometimes with a colorless glow around the unicorn's horn as well. From Season 2 onward, each unicorn and alicorn has a specific, individual color their magic always manifests as, and magic is always accompanied by a brightly colored aura surrounding their horn and — where applicable — the object the magic being cast on.
• The show's treatment of musical numbers also changes over the first season. In the first few episodes, any singing is done by Pinkie Pie, with other characters being confused or annoyed by it. Starting with "Winter Wrap Up" midway through the first season, everyone else starts singing their own numbers too. It can seem odd to see the other ponies rolling their eyes at Pinkie's singing in the two-part premiere, especially when they all get their own songs as the show goes on. It is even shown in "The Cutie Mark Chronicles" that the characters (in particular, Fluttershy) have broken into song before the events of the show.
• The first season is the only one to have a recap of the lesson in just about every episode, through Twilight writing Princess Celestia a letter. Once the E/I requirement was lifted in season 2, these were gradually phased out, with "Lesson Zero" having Celestia tell Twilight not to worry about sending her a letter every week.
• The end credits in the first couple of episodes are written in a fancy script font called Woodrow (which was also used for Lauren Faust's credit in the title sequence and for every episode title card) rather than the plain Helvetica Black in later episodes.
• The season one episode "Suited for Success" has a surprising number of references to humans and the real world. For example, during the reprise of the song "Art of the Dress", Twilight mentions Orion, who is a human from Greek mythology. Later in the song, Fluttershy requests "French haute couture" for her dress. And during the second fashion show, after seeing Applejack's dress, among the foods Hoity Toity mentions having a craving for is Dutch apple pie. It is quite odd hearing ponies making references to the real world, especially in one of the pre-Equestria Girls episodes. Later episodes, as well as the Equestria Girls franchise, demonstrate that the human realm is indeed separate from the pony realm.
• The first two Multi-Part Episodes (the pilot and season 2's "The Return of Harmony") had their second halves aired at least a week apart, while every subsequent one premiered as hour-long specials.
• In the very early episodes, ponies treat other fully sapient creatures like animals — cows are kept in barns and a stampeding herd of them has to be rounded up, and, when the mane six go up against a dragon, they value Fluttershy for being good with animals. It isn't until "Over a Barrel" that other non-equine sapient creatures are depicted like other races, nations or cultures, which remains the case in the rest of the show. This creates Furry Confusion as cows and dragons can both speak, and in particular creates considerable awkwardness around Spike's origins — his egg was kept in Canterlot and used as a subject for an entrance exam to a magical school, which worked well enough when dragons were essentially just monstrous creatures that happened to talk, but this became a much more confusing issue when dragons were recast as a civilized species like the ponies.
• The first season episode "Over a Barrel" features the Mane Six and Spike riding to Appleloosa in a relatively low-key (horse-drawn!) locomotive, the only appearance of a train that season. The Friendship Express already existed in the toyline, but it wouldn't appear in-show until Season 2.
• Chrysalis speaks with a minor Voice of the Legion filter in her first appearance, which she lacks when she appears later on starting with "The Cutie Remark".

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