Western Animation / My Little Pony: Make Your Mark

Times may change, but the magic never changes.

Make a mark that you can share
Hoof to heart, you know we care
Oh, ponies, come on!
Let's all unite!

— Opening Theme

My Little Pony: Make Your Mark is an all-CGI TV series based on the fifth generation of the My Little Pony franchise, which is streaming on Netflix. The first chapter is a 45-minute special which premiered on May 26, 2022, while the second chapter, consisting of eight 22-minute episodes, premiered on September 26, 2022. The third chapter, Winter Wishday is a 45 minute Christmas special and premiered on November 21, 2022. The fourth chapter, which begins with the 45-minute special Bridlewoodstock, premiered on June 6, 2023. The fifth chapter premiered on September 18, 2023. The sixth and final chapter, which ends with the 45-minute special Secrets of Starlight, premiered on November 23, 2023. Make Your Mark serves as a sequel to the 2021 movie My Little Pony: A New Generation, which in turn is a Distant Sequel to the fourth generation of the My Little Pony franchise.

Only a couple of months have passed since magic returned to Equestria, and everypony has still yet to adjust to having their magic restored. And while the three pony races are at peace now, lingering racial tensions between earth ponies, pegasi, and unicorns make this peace tenuous at best. It now falls to Sunny Starscout and her friends, who helped restore magic in Equestria, to maintain the unity between ponykind through The Power of Friendship while uncovering the mystery behind their long-lost magic.

See the official trailer here (contains spoilers!). The first three minutes can be seen here.

---

Tropes in the series and its specials include:

• Added Alliterative Appeal: In "The Cutie Mark Mix-Up", the three types of pony magic are referred to as "Float" (unicorns), "Flight" (Pegasi) and "Flora" (Earth ponies).
• Are You Pondering What I'm Pondering?: Invoked when the Mane Five brainstorm ways to end the tensions between the three tribes.
  Izzy: Wow! Are you ponies thinking what I'm thinking?
  Sunny: I think I might be.
  Izzy: All right, everypony. On the count of three. One... two... three... Floating parade! Right?
  Sunny: Not exactly, but close.
• Art Shift:
  • In "The Traditional Unicorn Sleepover", Sunny and Misty tell each other different versions of how the pony races were divided, which are presented in a paper-like art style instead of the show's CGI.
  • In "The Isle of Scaly," Spike's account of Twilight's efforts to defend Equestria against Opaline is presented in a style similar to cave paintings.
• Ascended Extra: Sugar Moonlight (who made a brief appearance in the movie modelling one of CanterLogic's anti-mind-reading helmets) plays a significant role in "Ali-Conned" as the leader of the "Filly Four", a group of social media influencers.
• Bizarre Taste in Food: During Maretime Bay Day, one Unicorn offers moss-flavored ice cream, which few others enjoy.
• Bland-Name Product:
  • "Portrait of a Princess" includes several references to real-world smartphone apps: Dewdrop (AirDrop), Clip Trot (TikTok), Ponygram (Instagram), and Feedbag (Facebook, presumably, but Pipp made that one up).
  • In "Hoof Done It?", the Pippsqueaks confess to having been up all night watching Pipp videos on "YouHoof".
  • Zipp's cell phone is a FlyPad, a take-off on the Apple iPad.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: In "Nightmare in Mane Street", Hitch announces that the Nightmare Night activities include trick-or-treating, costume contests, and trick-or-treating while participating in a costume contest, but then realizes that the last one is a typo. He also announces the scavenger hunt for the Golden Pumpkin, and Jazz and Rocky wonder if the grand prize would be a treasure trove of treats, a gourd dipped in gold, or a treasure trove of treats dipped in gold.
• Breaking Old Trends:
  • The series' intro sequence lacks the use of the "My Little Pony, My Little Pony..." lyrics all past series have utilized, though it does include the first five notes of the melody.
  • This is also the first time a villain has appeared in an MLP opening sequence.
• Brief Accent Imitation:
  • Sunny briefly imitates Izzy's voice while reminding Zipp of how much she loves to fly, and that it makes her "sparkle" shine brighter.
  • Sunny attempts to mimic Zipp's voice when Zipp asks her to cover for her in "Portrait of a Princess".
  • In "A Little Horse," Izzy brews a batch of tea that briefly makes Pipp sound somewhat like her.
• Call-Back:
  • Zipp invokes Izzy's "maximum sneaky" comment while sneaking into the Zephyr Heights castle.
  • Izzy fixes up the lantern Argyle made for Sunny.
  • The intro for the series features Izzy using the bottle-based musical device seen during the visit to her cottage in A New Generation.
  • The glasses Izzy wore during the song "Fit Right In" return in "Izzy Does it", being referred to as her "crafting glasses".
  • In "Portrait of a Princess", the portrait of filly Pipp and Zipp with Queen Haven that briefly appeared in the special makes a return.
  • Sunny and Hitch use their Secret Handshake in "The Cutie Mark Mix-Up."
  • In "The Traditional Unicorn Sleep-Over", Izzy mentions "the jinxies".
  • In "Hoof Done it?", Izzy uses Señor Butterscotch (the Companion Cube she made in the Tell Your Tale short "It's T.U.E.S.day") as a Sleeping Dummy while she searches the garden for tea leaves.
• Cassandra Truth: In "Bridlewoodstock", Pipp organizes the first music festival in Bridlewood during Lumi-Bloom season. However, she ignores Izzy and the unicorns' warnings about the Troggles, which only come out during Lumi-Bloom and curse anypony who makes noise near them, and dismisses them as a superstitious belief. It turns out they were right all along when the music festival, indeed, attracts the Troggles, which steal everypony's voices.
• Concert Episode: "Bridlewoodstock" focuses on Pipp organizing the first music festival in Bridlewood during Lumi-Bloom season, despite Izzy and the unicorns' warnings about attracting the attention of the Troggles, which curse anypony who makes noise near them. Pipp's friends help her out, anyway, by recruiting Electric Blue, Ruby Jubilee, and the Dreamlands to play for the festival, while Zipp and Hitch investigate the legend behind the Troggles.
• Continuity Snarl: Make Your Mark and Tell Your Tale share world-building and reference each others' stories and plot developments, but also have some incompatibilities:
  • Make Your Mark shows Cloudpuff still living with Queen Haven. In Tell Your Tale, the sisters bring him with them to live in Maretime Bay.
  • In Make Your Mark's "Izzy Does It", we learn how Izzy acquired her Unicycling Cart seen in the Tell Your Tale episode "Dumpster Diving", but "Dumpster Diving" is an Interquel to Make Your Mark Chapter 1, which is when Izzy is trying to fix Sunny's lantern and then present it to her as a gift, which precedes "Izzy Does It". Thus it's impossible to reconcile whether Sunny's lamp or Izzy's cart came first.
  • Both series show the main cast arriving in Maretime Bay just in time to witness the Wishing Star pass overhead in Winter Wishday, ostensibly showing the same event from two different perspectives, but some details (beyond just the different art style) don't match up.
  • By the same token, the creation of the Marestream in Tell Your Tale happened before the events of the special, and was a project Izzy and Zipp completed without the help of their friends. In Winter Wishday, they have only finished the crappy prototype and the Hope Lantern transforms it into the Cool Plane in front of everyone.
  • The two dragons Opaline enchants to be her minions in Make Your Mark Chapter 6 are Jade and Lava. In the Tell You Tale episode "Nightmare Nightmarket" she calls her off-screen minions Jade and Charcoal. Lava properly appears in Tell Your Tale's "A Dragon Quest" matching his Make Your Mark look. It's unclear if Charcoal is meant to be a different dragon that Opaline captured instead of, or in addition to, Lava, if it's a Series Continuity Error, or if Opaline is so self-absorbed that she just doesn't care enough to remember her minions' names.
  • "Roots of All Evil" has Opaline steal Onyx's cutie mark along with the rest of Bridlewood's, contradicting Tell You Tale showing she stole Onyx's mark prior.
• Cool House: The Crystal Brighthouse, which replaces Sunny's lighthouse and becomes home for her, Izzy, Pipp, and Zipp (and later Misty). Fully stocked kitchen; arts-and-crafts corner; lounge area with fireplace and flat-screen TV; play area for animals; a huge shared bedroom; elevator (with security system) leading to the Unity Crystals at the top.
• Cool Plane: The Marestream, which is a magic-powered flying RV. The original prototype was a broken-down tram car that Izzy and Zipp haphazardly slapped wings onto, until the Hope Lantern transformed it.
• Diegetic Soundtrack Usage: In "Roots of All Evil", Izzy's vehicle's horn plays the Title Theme Tune.
• Distinction Without a Difference: When Sunny gets angry at Hitch for calling her "huffy", Hitch retorts that he was just saying she was being huffy.
• Double Agent: In Chapter 5, Misty occasionally sneaks into Opaline's castle after the former's Heel–Face Turn to gather intel about the alicorn's Evil Plan for her new friends.
• The Dragons Come Back: The egg Hitch found hatches into a dragon, which hasn't been seen in Equestria for centuries.
• Easy Evangelism: Subverted, in that the movie's events were not enough to completely heal the inter-breed rift that has existed for centuries. It takes being saved by an alicorn for Posey to give up her bigotry, and it's unclear whether all of her cronies followed suit.
• Fake Static: In the opening special, Queen Haven calls Zipp, asking her to come back to Zephyr Heights for her royal training. Zipp makes an excuse to hang up by making fake static noises before ending the call.
• Fantastic Legal Weirdness: The sudden reappearance of magic means Hitch has to grapple with a lot of questions; whether it's legal to fly in a sandcastle contest, whether clumsy pegasi are responsible for the injuries of ponies they crash into, and how to protect the town from falling experiments. Some of the plaintiffs are motivated by jealousy, however, and calm down once they get magic of their own.
• Fisher Kingdom: In "Secrets of Starlight", the Mane Cast gains sparkly hooves/mane/tails/jewelry upon entering Starlight Ridge, like the native Auroricorns.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Zipp sneaking into her family's castle to fetch Pipp's lucky microphone rather than simply walking through the front door hints at how she is actively trying to avoid Queen Haven.
  • Zipp passes by a portrait of herself and Pipp wearing unusual flowers in their manes. The series episode "Portrait of a Princess" goes in-depth about those flowers (called "ocean lilies").
  • The green vine-like patterns briefly created by the crystals foreshadow the earth ponies gaining Green Thumb abilities.
  • When Posey reports strange happenings to Hitch, one of her claims is that a unicorn is attempting to prank her, since her hooves were stuck to the ground, and she couldn't move for a long time. It is later revealed that the disharmony of ponykind caused the earth ponies to be stuck to the ground, since their abilities were not yet granted.
  • Misty often draws a crude symbol of a butterfly on her flank whenever she interacts with other ponies. In "Missing the Mark", she gains a butterfly cutie mark after freeing Sunny and her friends.
• Gene Hunting: In "Family Trees", Misty searches for her birth parents after getting nightmares of her fillyhood, where she gets stranded from them after wandering into the forest. When she gets her memories back, she remembers that Alphabittle is her father after seeing him in one of Zipp and Pipp's photos, and she tearfully reunites with him after her visit to the Breezie Night Market.
• Given Name Reveal: After Hitch gains the ability to understand animals, he learns that one of the seagulls that follows him and wears a can on his head is named Kenneth. Much later on, he identifies the other, bareheaded gull as Steven.
• Green-Eyed Monster: The earth ponies are jealous that they don't have any special abilities compared to the unicorns' magic and the pegasi's ability to fly.
• Green Thumb: When the magic of the crystals is revitalized, the earth ponies gain the ability to make plants grow with their hooves.
• Halloween Episode: "Nightmare on Mane Street" has the main cast organizing Maretime Bay's Nightmare Night celebration, while Opaline tries invading the town to steal ponies' Cutie Marks. Even if she's not hiding her villainy, the ponies mistake her theatrics as part of her costume and acting, to her frustration.
• Hold Your Hippogriffs:
  • Ponies (especially Pipp) often say, "Oh my ^hoofness goodness!"
  • In "Portrait of a Princess", Zipp says that she doesn't "give a saltlick" about Pipp's "PonyGram" account.
• Hostile Weather: A thunderstorm forms in response to the ponies arguing, and becomes worse as the situation devolves.
• How Do I Shot Web?: Even though months have passed, both unicorns and pegasi are still struggling to control their magic. Even Sunny has difficulties using her alicorn magic.
• Humble Goal: In "Ali-Conned", Opaline is dismayed that Sunny's "wildest dream" is to make a community garden.
• Hypocritical Humor: In "Bridlewoodstock", Pipp, who's always on her phone, reminds some guests that there's no cell service at the music festival because it's "more about forest streams than streaming".
• I Choose to Stay: At the end of "Roots of All Evil, Pt. 2", Sparky decides to stay with Hitch, who had been worrying about the day he will have to let Sparky go with his own kind, the dragons. Spike, who was raised by Twilight when he was a hatchling himself, gladly accepts Sparky's decision.
• Incredibly Lame Fun: When Hitch thinks Zipp is bored, he suggests that they order fries from three different places and decide which ones are the best.
• It Was Here, I Swear!: While alone in the crystal room, Zipp sees them glow and create green vine-like patterns on the glass. When she leaves the room to get the others, the vines vanish, and they think she was seeing things.
• Lame Pun Reaction: In "The Isle of Scaly", Hitch tells his friends and the dragons to get going, because "there's no reason for [their meetup] to drag-on!" Cue the Rimshot as everyone then turns around and leaves, unamused, while Sparky gurgles at Hitch, disappointed.
• Lampshade Hanging: Zipp points out that singing a song about being happy doesn't make everything better.
• Laughing at Your Own Jokes: Sunny does this twice in "Growing Pains", first after joking that Hitch made "quite an impact" in an incident involving a giant berry, and again when she says she and her friends are a "friendship smoothie" after getting hit by an even bigger berry.
• Line-of-Sight Name: When Izzy invites Misty to her "traditional unicorn sleepover", she asks for her last name. She hastily says "Brighthouse" because she's standing right in front of it, to the other ponies' confusion, so she settles on "Brightdawn" instead after looking at the stained-glass images on it.
• Literal-Minded:
  • In "Izzy Does It", Pipp says that she listens to her fans whenever she suffers a creative block. Izzy takes this as meaning she should listen to her paper fans.
  • In "Growing Pains", Pipp tells Hitch that there's a berry rolling in from 6 o'clock (behind him). Hitch replies "But it's only 2:15."
• Living MacGuffin: Opaline wants Sparky to repower herself by absorbing his dragon fire.
• Long List:
  • In "Growing Pains", Hitch gives Izzy a list of instructions for dragonsitting Sparky, which unfurls down to the floor.
  • "The Traditional Unicorn Sleep-Over" includes a similarly long list of requirements for a Bridlewood-style sleep-over.
• Lost Common Knowledge: Due to being without magic for many generations, the ponies are unaware of aspects of their magic that were once well-known.
  • The Pegasi do not seem to be aware that they once controlled the weather in Equestria, or that their magic allowed them to walk on clouds.
  • The knowledge of how to cast spells has been lost to the unicorns, who only use their magic for lifting things. In the Winter Wishday special, they unknowingly invoke an ancient spell that brings snow through their Wishiehoof tradition of saying "frosty shivers" to each other. The effects are reversed when Izzy comes up with a new saying, "Warm Wishiehoof".
• Lost in Transmission: Twilight's message left in the Unity Crystals conveniently glitches out whenever it might mention the villain's identity, keeping the Mane Five guessing about the threat lurking in the shadows.
• MacGuffin: Sunny's lantern becomes this after the special, containing a fragment of the Prisbeam power of the Brighthouse.
• Magic A Is Magic A: Magic is shown to require a degree of unity between ponies (and the crystals that embody that unity). Sunny's alicorn magic activates when she's doing something she loves, like running her smoothie business, or is completely confident about, like saving ponies — essentially, when she feels most herself.
• Magic Mirror: Mane Melody, Pipp's salon, has one. Clients can sit in front of it and pull up a photo of a certain style on their cell phone, and it shows how the finished product would look on them.
• Mythology Gag:
  • A picture at the Maretime Bay Day festivities resembles the original G1 pony designs.
  • Hitch being able to speak with critters is the same ability Fluttershy had in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.
  • In "Ali-Conned", Sugar Moonlight accidentally calls Misty "Minty", after the G3 pony. An actual pony named Minty then shows up in "Bridlewoodstock", where she's one of the members of the Dreamlands.
  • Also in "Ali-Conned", Izzy mentions her "Auntie Buttons" (the name of a pony from G1).
  • In "The Cutie Mark Mix-Up", Seashell mentions that her book has information about a tree that grows Elements, references G4's Tree of Harmony.
  • In "Bridlewoodstock", the album cover of the Dreamlands has its band members drawn in the style of G1 ponies.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: In "Portrait of a Princess", Pipp is so upset about Zipp lying to her that she doesn't even take a picture of the ocean lily they were searching for for her social media account.
• Overly Narrow Superlative: In "Have You Seen This Dragon?", Hitch despairs that losing Sparky makes him "the worst pony dragon dad ever". Both Izzy and Pipp are quick to point out that he's the only pony dragon dad ever.
• Personality Swap: In "The Cutie Mark Mix-Up", Sparky's hiccups accidentally switch Sunny's and Hitch's cutie marks, which also switches their personalities. Sunny, who's now serious and rule-abiding, decides to try rounding up Hitch's animals while Hitch, who's now friendly and easygoing, decides to try running Sunny's smoothie stall in her stead.
• Pillar of Light: The Crystal Brighthouse features a perpetual pillar of rainbow light called the Prisbeam.
• Power Incontinence:
  • Sunny has trouble calling upon the alicorn form she attained at the end of the movie, often only being able to transform when she's being passionate about something she believes in.
  • "Growing Pains" is about the Earth Ponies having trouble controlling their new Green Thumb magic and causing disruptive plant growth, leading Hitch to prohibit any further use until they can get a handle on it. Unfortunately, suppressing their magic only makes it more out of control.
• The Power of Friendship: It is revealed that the crystals rely on the three pony tribes being friends with each other to maintain their magic. When division starts to form it causes the crystals' magic to glitch, causing such dire consequences, the cast speculates it might have been why the crystals were separated.
• Promotion to Opening Titles: After her Heel–Face Turn in "Missing the Mark", Misty Brightdawn appears at the end of the intro starting in Chapter 5.
• Pun:
  • When the others compliment Izzy on her decorations of the glimmerberry tarts they made, she jokes that they're a "true work of tart".
  • After agreeing not to tell anypony about the egg Hitch found, Zipp jokes that she'll "Zipp it".
• Reading Tea Leaves: This is one of the activies shown during "The Traditional Unicorn Sleep-Over". Misty accidentally drinks her leaves along with the tea.
• The Resenter: Posey and several other earth ponies resent the fact that the unicorns and pegasi now have magic, while they have none.
• Riding into the Sunset: "The Isle of Scaly" ends with the Mane Cast riding with their new dragon friends into the sunset, ready to take down Opaline and save the other dragons.
• Running Gag: Izzy keeps dropping food whenever she's surprised.
• Scatterbrained Senior: Elder Flower is the elderly storyteller of Bridlewood, but most of her stories don't make sense, to Zipp and Sunny's frustration when they ask her for clues about Opaline's Evil Plan.
• Series Continuity Error:
  • The Friendship Is Magic Distant Finale showed Twilight Sparkle was shown to have significantly grown and chanced appearance, But despite being set after that, in Twilight's recorded hologram massage and stylized story/flashback depictions she's her previous size and appearance which goes unexplained.
  • "Family Trees" has Hitch explain that the Breezies' language is pony language, just spoken so quickly that it's unintelligible to anypony but Hitch. Zipp is able to make it understandable by recording it and playing it back slowly. In "Mane Smelody", it requires a "new translator app" that uses clearly synthesized speech, which only makes sense it if was translating foreign language as opposed to slowing it down.
  • Twilight's message in the Unity crystals explains that an invisibility bubble cast around Equestria protected the ponies from Opaline, but the return of magic exposed them, thus why she was now actively threatening them again. In "Mane Smelody", Opaline states the bubble is still up, which is why she relies on Misty for most of her schemes despite regaining her powers, which doesn't explain how Misty and other ponies can travel to and from Opaline's castle without issue.
  • Sparky has wings when he hatches, despite Friendship is Magic showing that dragons in this continuity are born without wings, and gain them later in life.
• Shadowland: Opaline's castle is situated in a perpetually cloudy region with little visible vegetation, a contrast to the bright colors of Maretime Bay and Zephyr Heights.
• Shout-Out:
  • In "The Traditional Unicorn Sleep-over", a unicorn version of Notting Hill is briefly shown.
  • In "Top Remodel", Hitch says that he's "not afraid of no ghosts" as he explores the abandoned CanterLogic factory, only for a winged rat to scurry behind him and startle him.
• Smelly Feet Gag: In "Mane Smelody", Pipp discovers that Inkthistle polishes her hooves to be extra shiny, but despite its horrible smell, she uses it as part of her new hoof polish brand. Jazz Hooves is disgusted by the idea but goes along with it so as not to hurt her feelings, while Mane Melody's customers poke fun at it and make a viral challenge on who gets to survive the stink the longest.
• Speaking Simlish: Like in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, the Breezies speak in high-pitched gibberish, but they're actually speaking too fast for ponies to understand, so Zipp uses her phone's translator on them.
• Speaks Fluent Animal: Hitch gains this ability when magic is revitalized. Curiously, he's the only one to do so.
• Stalker Shot: Just before Pipp sings her new Bay Day song near the end, the camera zooms out to reveal Opaline and Misty watching the town on a screen.
• The Tape Knew You Would Say That: In "Growing Pains", Hitch leaves it to Izzy to dragonsit Sparky while he goes around Maretime Bay to ban earth ponies from using their out-of-control Green Thumb powers so he can reduce the damage. He then sends Izzy a prerecorded video detailing how to take care of Sparky:
  Hitch [on recording]: Be careful not to cross out any items on the Sparky schedule. It's important he does everything in order. Don't let him eat before sleeping, don't let him sleep before eating! Don't let him do all this unsupervised.
  Izzy: Huh? Even if he asks me to?
  Hitch [on recording]: Especially if he asks you to!
• Technologically Blind Elders: Queen Haven struggles with using the features on her smartphone, such as video calls and text messages.
• Trailers Always Spoil: The trailer for the TV special reveals most of what the special is about while the officially released synopsis explains the whole plot.
• Ungrateful Townsfolk: The residents of Maretime Bay are now at peace with the unicorns and pegasi thanks to Sunny Starscout, so you'd think they'd listen to her more now, right? Nope! They dismiss her and only pay attention when she's in alicorn mode, much to her sorrow.
• Vile Villain, Laughable Lackey: Both Opaline and her lackey Misty have comical moments, given Opaline's tendencies to start Chewing the Scenery and Misty's Bumbling Sidekick moments. But considering Opaline is an out-and-out alicorn implied to have lived long enough to have met Twilight, and Misty's a unicorn without so much as a cutie mark, it's no surprise Opaline is a far more serious threat!
• Wham Shot:
  • The Unity Crystals begin to crack as a result of multiple lightning strikes.
  • A mysterious alicorn watching the events from afar proclaims she will take back what belongs to her.
• Worthless Treasure Twist: In "Nightmare in Mane Street", Jazz Hooves and Rocky Riff compete against each other in the scavenger hunt, only to wonder where the Golden Pumpkin is after a while, unaware that it mysteriously teleported to Opaline's castle. They then realize that the real treasure might be the quality time they're spending together, only to laugh it off and continue searching.

---