According to Word of God, executives have been mostly hands-off for My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, and the writers have been allowed a lot more freedom than expected, with some exceptions. The length of this section is due to how open the people who work on the show have been about talking about it, rather than an unusually high amount of interference.
- Princess Celestia was originally to be a queen, but was made a princess because apparently, Disney has supposedly made it so that little girls affiliate queens with evil and princesses with good. After all, this was several years before Queen Elsa became Disney's pop-culture icon.
- Executives forced all of Princess Celestia's toys released for the first couple of years of the show's run to be pink, even though she has a white coat in the series. Even after her body color was corrected to white, she often still had hints of pink included somewhere in her toy designs, such as on the tips of her wings.
- Prince Blueblood was supposed to be a duke, but again, kids can't grasp the subtleties of royal hierarchy.
- Apple Bloom was originally going to find her cutie mark on her own without any help. Lauren Faust was asked to add Sweetie Belle and Scootaloo to be her friends, and the Cutie Mark Crusaders were born. Oddly enough, Faust always thought they should have their own spin-off show, but Hasbro suggested that the Crusaders should be used in the main series first.
- One of the most common forms of executive meddling was the demand for specific, popular characters from previous gens to appear in the show in a prominent enough fashion to sell the toy version of them. Thankfully, no specifics about how those characters would have to appear, so the writers could deal with this fairly easily (for instance, Cheerilee becoming the teacher of Ponyville).
- The episode "Suited For Success" can be viewed as a satire of executive meddling, as Rarity's artistic vision of Pimped Out Dresses for all her friends is compromised by their nitpicking, despite the fact that most of them don't have any clue what they're talking about, and with Rainbow Dash offering absolutely no advice other than "Make it 20% cooler." The second take on the song in the episode
(to begin with based on another song about executive meddling) even contains lines that make some sense in the context of the story but really work in such a satire: "Make sure that it stays within our budget." is an example of one of those lines. It makes sense in the story, because the ponies naturally don't have unlimited money to spend on the dress, and even more ironic, as they impose many lavish changes to their respective dresses, but still demand that "even if [Rarity] simply has to fudge it, make sure it stays within [the ponies'] budget". It also works in respect to the satire as well.
Executives were mostly hands-off for the show, but one thing mentioned by Lauren Faust as a "requirement" was "to incorporate fashion play," which was handled by making it a matter of Rarity being an artist. The episode can be seen as incredibly meta if you think about it like this. Ironically the episode itself fell slightly to a bit of Executive Meddling, the episode title was originally to be "Dress For Failure" but was altered because it was considered too downbeat. - According to this, Big Macintosh was planned to get his own episode, but it was rejected. This later came to fruition in Season 5, where he's given an episode that mainly focuses on him.
- In season 1, he could only be called Big Macintosh in-show instead of Big Mac, due to the latter being an obvious usage of a trademark from another large company. This seems to no longer be in effect, however, as he has been called "Big Mac" several times in season 2 and a couple times in online printables.
- The character Derpy Hooves, a Memetic Bystander grey cross-eyed pegasus who's largely looked at as the bronies' avatar was subjected to meddling. When she was first given a slightly larger role in the show, Moral Guardians complained that the character portrayal resembled an offensive caricature of a mentally challenged person note , something completely inappropriate to include on a children's television show—and they complained to Hasbro to fix it. Apple removed the episode of her appearance from iTunes, only for it to come back with a completely edited version of the infamous scene, which wound up replacing the original version of the episode nearly everywhere (apart from the early DVD "The Friendship Express"). Derpy has a more normal voice (since Tabitha St. Germain got the gender mixed up at first), her eyes are less crossed, and Rainbow Dash doesn't call her by name. Needless to say, bronies were not happy about the edit. Derpy then went on to have very few appearances, causing fans to be worried she was being phased out, up until she returned properly in the season 4 episode "Rainbow Falls". Later word confirmed the character "wasn't going anywhere", and that the "cameo drought" during previous episodes was intentional, to build up her return.
- Hasbro crediting◊ Derpy as "Muffins" in "Slice of Life" was confirmed to be due to "legal reasons", and not executive meddling, by director Jim Miller.
- Hasbro crediting
- Lauren Faust originally intended for Princess Cadance to be a unicorn and was surprised to see her changed into an alicorn. However, this allowed Hasbro to continue selling a pink alicorn toy while allowing them to produce show-accurate WHITE Princess Celestia toys, because ToysRUs thinks Pink Means Feminine (and apparently, only pink).
- Twilight becoming an alicorn has been speculated to be the result of executive meddling, considering that a very large number of Princess Twilight Sparkle toys were launched with the episode.
- "Baby Cakes" likely exists because Hasbro demanded there be baby ponies at some point in Season 2. The show's crew weren't specified how to use them, though.
- Same could be said for a lot of other Merchandise-Driven stories like "A Canterlot Wedding" or "The Crystal Empire", each with more or less of a confirmation.
- For the finale of season 4, "Twilight's Kingdom", they did get one note that they couldn't do in that episode: show Twilight punching Tirek in the face. A bit weird when one considers that the second episode of the series was allowed to show Rarity kicking a manticore in the face on-screen and later in season 5 where Rainbow Dash is shown hitting several Changelings in the face in a dream.
- Before season 4 aired, Meghan McCarthy promised that Flash Sentry wouldn't be a character on it. Despite this promise, he appeared twice and after the backlash following the second time, Big Jim (Series' co-director) confirmed that Flash was added "by request" and admitted the fans shouldn't trust any staff's promises anymore. Ouch.
- According to M. A. Larson Hasbro was the one behind the idea of having the 100th episode be a Lower-Deck Episode that focused on background characters and included many fandom in-jokes.
- The suits at Hasbro were the ones who came up with the premise of "Fame And Misfortune", and handed it to M.A. Larson. He immediately didn't like the idea of the fan's favorite background ponies grabbing the Jerkass Ball and showing the less savory sides of the Brony fandom, because he knew that the episode was going to feel like it was attacking them. However, Larson was forced to go through with the episode, and he later admitted that he hated it because it was very needlessly mean-spirited for an otherwise light-hearted show.
- According to Jim Miller the higher-ups mandated that they did the School of Friendship which the writers "tried to make fit as organically as possible".
- Jim Miller also said Hasbro didn't feel comfortable with the brief Ship Tease Big Macintosh had with Marble Pie in "Hearthbreakers" due to the vague implication that they may or may not be distant cousins.
