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MoeDantes cuter, cuddlier Edmond from the Land of Classics Since: Nov, 2010
cuter, cuddlier Edmond
#151: Jun 26th 2011 at 4:28:54 AM

[up][up] Dude, I can't imagine why anyone would prefer the new Pound Puppies over the old one.

I mean, it totally replaces the main cast with completely different dogs! I mean, MLP did that too, but the thing is G1 Ponies didn't really have a "mane cast" to begin with. Pound Puppies did.

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BagofMagicFood Since: Jan, 2001
#152: Jun 26th 2011 at 8:09:19 AM

Yeah, but just a few years ago they had the "Core Seven"...

lalalei2001 Since: Oct, 2009
#153: Jun 28th 2011 at 11:41:58 PM

[up][up] The most common ponies in the show were Fizzy, Gusty, and Wind Whistler, I believe.

I like how sometimes other pony sets got their own Day in the Limelight episodes, like the Princess Ponies.

edited 28th Jun '11 11:42:05 PM by lalalei2001

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lalalei2001 Since: Oct, 2009
#154: Jun 29th 2011 at 8:40:48 PM

Installed the G2 CD-ROM game, My Little Pony Friendship Gardens. ^^

edited 29th Jun '11 8:40:56 PM by lalalei2001

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BagofMagicFood Since: Jan, 2001
#155: Jun 29th 2011 at 9:22:36 PM

The most common ponies in the show were Fizzy, Gusty, and Wind Whistler, I believe.
There was one episode, "Mish Mash Melee", that featured only Fizzy, Gusty, Wind Whistler, and Shady, so you might be right, those could be the writers' favorites. I also recall Paradise appearing a lot, and maybe Galaxy or Buttons too?

...Actually, according to Wikipedia, Heart Throb was the pony who appeared in the most whole episodes. Huh. I'm now surprised she didn't leave more of an impression on me.

I like how sometimes other pony sets got their own Day in the Limelight episodes, like the Princess Ponies.
I think that was mainly Season 2 scrambling to dedicate an episode to each of the new toy sets before it ended, including the Big Brother Ponies, the First Tooth Ponies, and the Newborn Twins. I do find it interesting that the series started with a long arc revolving around the Flutter Ponies as a follow-up to what happened in the movie, but then they had just one more appearance after that that came as a total surprise.

And what happened with the Rainbow of Light exactly? I seem to remember they had a whole episode about almost losing the Rainbow to some bad guys, then it was completely forgotten about until it suddenly appeared again in one random episode way later.

lalalei2001 Since: Oct, 2009
#156: Jun 29th 2011 at 11:45:40 PM

[up] I remember at the end of the movie the Ponies were given the Rainbow of Light to protect themselves. Maybe they switched off between ponies and the ones who had it weren't in episodes where it could've been used. XD

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MoeDantes cuter, cuddlier Edmond from the Land of Classics Since: Nov, 2010
cuter, cuddlier Edmond
#157: Jun 30th 2011 at 6:16:48 AM

With a name like "Heart Throb" I shudder to think what her personality was like.*

edited 30th Jun '11 6:17:09 AM by MoeDantes

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BagofMagicFood Since: Jan, 2001
#158: Jun 30th 2011 at 10:16:09 PM

Heh, sounds about right.

I think this mash-up actually makes a pretty cool preview for "Rescue at Midnight Castle".

lalalei2001 Since: Oct, 2009
#159: Jul 1st 2011 at 5:39:34 AM

[up][up] I seem to remember Paradise being pretty Southerny. Could be wrong though.

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Rainbow Pomeranian Lover from Central Illinois (Experienced, Not Yet Jaded)
Pomeranian Lover
#160: Jul 1st 2011 at 10:20:08 AM

No, that was Truly who had a Southern accent. North Star had an RP English accent and liked exploring, and Heart Throb had a similar accent but not as much. I think Baby Heart Throb had a Southern accent according to one description, but I didn't notice it that much.

Heart Throb's personality was that she was a hopeless romantic who liked talking about things like Valentines (she had a collection of them) and costume parties but the only time she ever found someone she actually fell in love with was Prince Charming in "Through the Door" and he flirted with ALL the ponies. She was also very protective of her daughter. Baby Heart Throb I think didn't get as much screen time as her mom but she loved Knight Shade and liked to jump around and scream at his concert and wanted to sing backup for him (and she and two other baby ponies got to do that at the end of his story, at least for one concert).

lalalei2001 Since: Oct, 2009
#161: Jul 1st 2011 at 12:10:12 PM

I like how the unicorns had different powers. :D When I was little I compared them to the X-Men.

Buttons had telekinesis, Gusty could call up wind, Fizzy could make bubbles, Galaxy was an empath, and Ribbon could teleport better than the others. I forget what the others could do.

edited 1st Jul '11 12:10:37 PM by lalalei2001

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BagofMagicFood Since: Jan, 2001
#162: Jul 1st 2011 at 3:46:41 PM

Haha, so I'm not the only one who's tried to compare Generation 1 to X-Men! That might make for a fun trailer mash-up too.

So Generation 1 is like X-Men, Generation 4 is like Watchmen, and the rest are... I dunno... the Silver Age?

SatanicHamster Moldova, never change. Since: Jan, 2001
Moldova, never change.
#163: Jul 1st 2011 at 3:47:29 PM

The Dork Age?

BagofMagicFood Since: Jan, 2001
#165: Jul 5th 2011 at 6:08:30 PM

Hey, so I just discovered the magic of You Tube's automatic captioning system by accident, and now My Little Pony Tales may be entertaining enough for me to watch whole episodes of it. I have to think the humor in the nonsense sentences is the only reason they leave the automatic transcription feature in, considering its low success rate...

A prediction of their dental health?

lalalei2001 Since: Oct, 2009
#166: Jul 5th 2011 at 8:56:16 PM

[up] Well they ARE sugary.

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BagofMagicFood Since: Jan, 2001
#167: Jul 6th 2011 at 8:17:30 AM

So I got bored, and now I feel like posting a bunch more thoughts about the Generation 3 cartoons today. First off, it's annoying how due to being a scattering of direct-to-video releases of varying lengths rather than a straight TV series, it's difficult to know for sure just how many animations are out there, and the confusion is made worse when the short cartoons are re-packaged into different DV Ds or even given alternate titles in some places. The list posted here comes pretty close to getting them all, but there are some errors like what Lancer pointed out. It's also missing "Greetings from Unicornia", which I found out about by luck just the other day. I think it's missing from a lot of lists because I've read that it was left off the DVD it was supposed to be included on in many regions. At least it's nice to know that the live stage show is available as an official DVD recording, and that they made only two of those stupid babies cartoons.

I'm not sure about the repeated movie titles on that list either. I've got a strong feeling the extra "Positively Pink" was a mistake, but other sources seem to indicate there being a "Meet the Ponies" for both G3 and G3.5. And does "Meet the Ponies" consist of those seven free "webisodes" where each of the "Core Seven" friends throws a party for the rest? That must have been the earlier one if there were two, because while it was in the Core 7 continuity, it was still in the old G3 art style. I suspect that "Pinkie Pie's Special Day", "Rainbow Dash's Special Day", and "Star Song and the Magic Dance Shoes" are the same way, since they came out around the same time, but I can't find very much about them online—I actually get more search results for the book of "Pinkie Pie's Special Day". I also wonder if the Pinkie Pie video games are adaptations of any of these movies, like The Runaway Rainbow's game.

Now I think that that Winter Wishes Festival "prequel" was just a short bonus feature on the Twinkle Wish Adventure DVD, but I do wonder what "A Party in Ponyville" is supposed to be. The one description of it I found was identical to A Charming Birthday's, however, so that one might have been just a retitle.

Another reason I like having a comprehensive list of videos is that I can trace the evolution of the franchise better from seeing the exact chronology. For example, with the art style: I noticed that in the very first one, A Charming Birthday, the ponies are drawn with all thin black outlines and have plainer colors, whereas by A Very Minty Christmas the new standard was in place where ponies have shading and thicker colored outlines around their bodies, giving them a softer look.

G3 movies: I find the characters' personalities a little harder to tell apart, they seem to be more defined by their hobbies rather than their personalities in this one, some of them are a little repetitive with saying their catchphrases
YES RAINBOW DASH, EVERYTHING IS DARLING. And Rarity's "That was fun, let's do it again," and there was that one viewpoint character from A Charming Birthday who kept saying "Yes yes yes", but I could get over that by thinking of that meme about what Sean Connery said before "You're the man now, dog." It took me a lot longer to realize that Star Catcher's catchphrase was "Consider it done", but Star Catcher's just cool like that. (Sunny Daze is more cool in a Fonzie kind of way, I think. Also, "Consider it done" would be an excellent response to Captain Picard's "Make it so.") Then there's the character quirks that aren't actual words, like Thistle-Whistle's whistling, and Minty's nervous giggling, which I think works really well with her being sort of half-cocked in general.

Since I spoke of Star Catcher, I also want to mention I found it a little funny how she spoke with a reverb effect and was all "IT'S A SECRET TO EVERYBODY" in her initial appearance in Dancing In The Clouds, like she was some kind of magical ghost or something, but then in Friends Are Never Far Away she's like "Aw what the hey, let's have a big ol' meet 'n' greet." And from then on, RBI stood for Really Big Icecream

I actually liked the Runaway Rainbow story in itself, it's my favorite of the three main G3 movies I've seen. But that may be simply because I love rainbows (which should be obvious given my username).
I liked it for putting in the "My Little Terraformer" aspects that Friendship is Magic capitalized on: Not only are the royal unicorns responsible for making rainbows appear, but their meteor magic is also required to maintain separation of large portions of the visible spectrum! Plus, with my "Spike as the Evil Chancellor (to Celestia?)" theory, I can say that each of the G3 movies is about stopping an impending disaster: In Runaway Rainbow, the threat is that Equestria will be rendered a ghostly white wasteland; in Princess Promenade, it's that Spike will rule with an iron fist; and in Very Minty Christmas, it's that Minty's OCD will flare up and destroy everything the ponies hold dear. Hey, these shows could stand to be a little more dramatic.

Didn't have time to finish A Very Pony Place, guess I'll have to watch the rest tomorrow... if I can stomach it. To be honest, those short little cartoons were okay but the same thing stretched to over thirty minutes is a recipe for driving me to murder.
In my opinion, the shorter G3 cartoons tend to be the more boring ones. I think with the longer movies, the writers realize they need to have a strong enough plot to actually hold the viewer's attention for that long, while the 3-minute shorts let them go "Hey let's be completely aimless and pointless, it'll be over soon!"

I liked "Two for the Sky", though, perhaps only because it was the rare G3 cartoon that wasn't about yet another big town celebration; it was just the cute adventures of the Wright Brothers ponies. I'm a little disappointed they didn't pay a visit to Butterfly Island to study how ponies their own size flew, since there should have been time to show that as the cartoon was full of padding anyway. I suppose in-universe the story must have happened before first contact with the pegasus ponies, or they needed to fly to get to Butterfly Island in the first place; I'm not at all clear on the geography with those places.

It also lends support to my theory that unicorn magic is Functional Magic, pegasus magic is Required Secondary Powers (plus some sky-based Elemental Powers in the new series), and earth pony magic is Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane. So maybe it wasn't a dream, and Star Flight and Heart Bright really did cast a wing-growing spell in their sleep, but when they got scared they unwished the big tall wish and turned back time. Earth pony magic is always sure to frustrate the likes of Twilight Sparkle!

To be kind though, I did think the interaction between Pinky (is this an early version of Pinkie Pie?) and Minty was amusing though, especially the conversation about the sock drawer.
Heh, Minty and Pinkie Pie were a pretty good comedic duo back in the day. I consider that one of the strong points of "A Very Minty Christmas". I'm not sure that Minty would work as a foil to Pinkie Pie anymore though...

I found the phrase "shine on!" kinda narmy since it sounds hippie-ish, and thought it was funny that Lily was embarrassed about "lighting up" (both because that phrase can be a euphemism for smoking and because I kept imagining that her glowing horn was some sort of unicorn erection).
Lily Lightly just made me feel sorrier for Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, considering how upset she got over her glowing horn when she was never really even teased about it. It also adds to the impression that unicorn magic was a lot weaker in G3, when just glowing was considered impressive, and even princesses like Rarity needed magic wands to do the really special stuff. And that strengthens the idea that "princess" doesn't mean to the ponies what we think it does, when one of the unicorns went "Oh and what the heck, you can be a princess too now Lily, the princess of glowiness and stuff, whatever."

And since I might as well mention "Positively Pink" too: I've seen another reviewer come to the same conclusion I did, that it shows how "Party of One" could have gone a lot more smoothly if Pinkie Pie's friends had simply designated one of them to keep her busy for the day. (It also helped that the old Pinkie Pie knew when her own birthday was...)

Oh hey, I found a post about G1 we forgot to discuss:

On the topic of G1, the story "Crunch, the Rockdog" has some gender confusion in the beginning, when Paradise is telling her story. In the beginning, it talks about "Valentine's friend" running off into the sunset, where Valentine is referred to as a girl, even though she has hooves like a male pony. Then when the ponies are discussing the story, one of them mentions that Valentine lost HIS true love! So are these lesbian ponies, girls who are just friends (the pony who left was referred to as a friend initially), or a heterosexual couple? I'm a little surprised Windwhistler was questioning the journey being at sunset (which one could think of logical reasons for, such as stealth) and didn't notice the gender confusion there! Since the gender was changed after the story ended, perhaps this was a writing error where what was initially a parting of friends was rewritten as a parting of lovers but the writers forgot to change the genders in the actual telling of the story?
If Valentine was drawn as a boy pony, I think it would make more sense if it was originally written as a parting of lovers, then the bosses said they didn't want lovers in the show, so to try to hide it there was a hasty change to Valentine's gender in the writing that didn't go far enough because there wasn't time to find and fix everything.

lalalei2001 Since: Oct, 2009
#168: Jul 9th 2011 at 11:09:28 AM

You think Friendship is Magic would've benfitted from using the G1 Ponies as planned?

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SatanicHamster Moldova, never change. Since: Jan, 2001
Moldova, never change.
#169: Jul 9th 2011 at 11:25:28 AM

Does that mean Tirec would've been part of this?

DeathCloud Since: Apr, 2009
#170: Jul 9th 2011 at 11:45:59 AM

What episode have nazi pingwings ? And other interesting vilains (like lava demon). ?

SatanicHamster Moldova, never change. Since: Jan, 2001
Moldova, never change.
#171: Jul 9th 2011 at 11:46:36 AM

You're talking about Lavan?

BagofMagicFood Since: Jan, 2001
#172: Jul 9th 2011 at 11:57:23 AM

Nah, I like that Generation 4 feels like a whole new generation, and not just a kooky update of Generation 1; that would make it look like a cheat compared to Generations 2 and 3. Applejack and Spike are good enough as "legacy" character names, Applejack as the "old reliable" one who sticks with her family's traditional work and probably got some great-grandmother's name, and Spike as the name for every little dragon sidekick because his real name's too long to use. Plus you gotta have a Twilight in there somewhere, only once the name turned out to be very common, they had to use their surnames like "Twinkle" and "Sparkle" more often.

I also like that they pulled a little switcheroo by giving Fluttershy wings and leaving Pinkie Pie wingless, breaking a few stereotypes by showing us an Earth pony who's flightier than a pegasus. Pinkie Pie could still make sense as an extreme exaggeration of the previous Pinkie Pie, even if you know nothing about Surprise. (And honestly, Surprise's voice scares me a little, especially when she laughs. It would be as if Pinkie did her "Welcome to my cave, Rarity!" routine, and then never stopped talking like that.)

I guess it would have been nice to revisit the ponies who only appeared in the one TV special and thus didn't get much development, but I don't think putting them in a whole new world with a whole new art style really accomplishes that.

By the way, do you think I should keep at this Tales caption hunting stuff?

I forget what species we're supposed to be

ENOUGH WITH THE RAINBOW PONY STEREOTYPES

edited 9th Jul '11 11:57:37 AM by BagofMagicFood

DeathCloud Since: Apr, 2009
#173: Jul 9th 2011 at 12:09:36 PM

[up][up]Maybe, how many lava demons are in G1?

So what episodes have pingwins Kaleds and Lavan?

Rottweiler Dog and Pony Show from Portland, Oregon Since: Dec, 2009
Dog and Pony Show
#174: Jul 9th 2011 at 1:00:07 PM

Applejack and Spike are good enough as "legacy" character names, Applejack as the "old reliable" one who sticks with her family's traditional work and probably got some great-grandmother's name, and Spike as the name for every little dragon sidekick because his real name's too long to use. Plus you gotta have a Twilight in there somewhere, only once the name turned out to be very common, they had to use their surnames like "Twinkle" and "Sparkle" more often.

Would be interesting if the setting turned out to be Dream Valley three generations later.

G1 was fun because the pretty girly parts of Dream Valley were explicitly noted (in the Movie) as a recent development caused by the ponies' hard work. They always had to fight to retain order against witches or a devil or Nazi penguins wanting to turn it into Mordor or an Ice Age or something.

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BagofMagicFood Since: Jan, 2001
#175: Jul 9th 2011 at 1:03:34 PM

Lavan, king of the lava demons, was from "The Quest of the Princess Ponies". Charlatan, king of the penguins, was from "Baby, It's Cold Outside," and I believe that also had Surprise's biggest role if you want to hear more of her scary voice. I don't remember any Kaleds.

edited 9th Jul '11 1:04:12 PM by BagofMagicFood


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