This show has been on my radar for a while since I couldn’t avoid all the memes and the curious social phenomenon of adult males who appeared to legitimately enjoy it. Now that I’m finally giving it a go, I do see the appeal. It’s frequently cute and charming and funny all at the same time. The characters are lovable and the stories and world have surprising depth. I don’t mean it’s a complex or challenging show by any means, but it does maintain some kind of continuity and intelligence, which I did not expect going in. I usually have a big smile on my face watching it, almost like I’m a kid again. So I may be a convert.
That said, what exactly about this in particular has caught fire so fast and so far removed from its target demographic? At first I naturally assumed that the “brony” movement was a cynical ironic sort of thing that the internet does so frequently, but it turns out that plays a small role at most.These people really do love this show with the same kind of passion you see with other cult shows.
It started with this hilariously alarmist article: The End of the Creator Driven Era in TV Animation, essentially lamenting that the excellent Lauren Faust was directing a merchandise driven Hasbro show. It was posted on 4chan’s comics and cartoons subforum (/co/, and /co/ isn’t really much like what you think of when you hear “4chan”, that would be /b/). So most of the posters kind of said “okay, I guess that could be a little bad, I’ll watch the first episode.”
It was so far above the mark of the apocalyptic scenario the article writer made it out to be, and in fact was such a legitimately GOOD show that it kind of took off.
It probably never would have made a blip if not for that article, and honestly, it probably never would have taken off nearly as much as it did were it not for the lowered expectations. I personally, honestly think it’s one of the best animated shows in years, but I don’t think it would have gotten nearly as much of a following if the old My Little Pony hadn’t been such absolute dreck, and the article hadn’t been so alarmist (among other reasons, such as Hasbro being cool with it being posted on youtube since it was basically a half-hour long commercial to begin with).
I don’t see how it’s much better than a lot of the other animated series out there right now.
I dunno, maybe a lot of these guys don’t have kids. I do, and get to see a lot of cartoons, and My Little Pony just isn’t anything special. Is it good? Sure. Is it better than Phineas and Ferb? Nope. Is it better than Kick Buttowski? Probably, but not by a lot. Is it better than Fairly Oddparents? Well yes, but some cartoons have to suck. It’s not really any different from the latest Strawberry Shortcake series - some of the plots are pretty much the same, really.
The quality in animated series right now is off-the-charts good; there’s been a huge number of high quality cartoons put in the screen in the last ten years. Maybe people were just amazed MLP was good because they didn’t realize this kind of quality is now commonplace in TV animation.
The dreck is now in the live action shows made for kids, all of which are jaw-droppingly terrible.
Fairly Oddparents, Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, Spongebob…there’s a number of shows that hit the parental bonus pretty well and are reasonably well-loved.
I believe the current My Little Pony got hyped all out of proportion to the other childrens’ shows due to the cognitive dissonance of guys liking what was firmly established for the last 20 years as a little girls’ show. The actual show may not be of any greater quality than other decent cartoons out there, but it got kind of a slingshot effect due to how far back it sat in the public consciousness beforehand.
Personally I’m quite happy about the phenomenon. I’ve always been a little puzzled that girls can like boys’ things without sacrificing femininity (and sometimes gain a measure of attraction for it; see gamer girls) but it’s nigh impossible for boys to like girls’ things without sacrificing masculinity. It’s interesting to watch the first real push against that barrier.
This is a part of it, I’m sure, but it’s not just the original MLP. That period was a cartoon wasteland. For many of us, crappy, badly animated toy commercials were the only new animation we saw in our formative years–and we knew, even as children, that we were getting ripped off. The old theatrical shorts were still playing, and even though they were increasingly censored, they provided enough contrast that we could tell cartoon gold from dross. People wax sentimental over some of the old shows, but there’s an air of commiseration to it; they’re nostalgic not because the shows were good, but because they were what we had. There wasn’t a breath of fresh air until Animaniacs arrived on the scene, and nothing really new until Gargoyles actually attempted to tell serious stories in cartoon format…but by then, we were graduating high school, or already in college or working. Our prime cartoon years were lost in a cesspool.
MLP:FiM isn’t really an incredible show. It’s good, and any cartoon that can toss offhand references to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and This is Spinal Tap into the same scene earns some kudos, but as RickJay points out, there have been a lot of good cartoons in the past decade. It offers children of the 80s something beyond its intrinsic quality, though–a measure of redemption: it’s a broken promise to our childhood selves, finally made good.
I guess I wasn’t thinking when I said “one of the best.” I honestly can’t stand Phineas and Ferb myself, granted it’s probably the animation style. I find Regular Show… grating. There are some that are plain… weird, like Gumball, but they’re not atrocious. The more I think about it, I think is is a really good animation era, what with Legend of Korra, Adventure Time, MLP, Generator Rex etc it’s pretty good. Certainly there used to be good cartoons as well, but I think the proportion used to be worse, for every Samurai Jack there was a Cow and Chicken, or for every Batman: The Animated Series there was a 2 Stupid Dogs. I think the proportion of good to bad is definitely higher now.
Though Fairly Oddparents wasn’t bad for the first couple seasons, but like Spongebob it just kind of degraded over time as characters became caricatures of themselves and they went for the cheap jokes.
ETA: I say this as someone who, while I don’t watch much TV, watches mostly animated shows because I like what you can do with the medium more. Granted, I’ll still give Live Action shows a chance, I tend to find them a bit less creative except for a rare gem. Granted, I’m still not the target audience tuning in to a show every week (with exceptions like Legend of Korra). So I do have experience with the ever evolving state of animation, I just wasn’t thinking much about the current state when I wrote my initial post (for the record, I maintain that around 2010ish animation went off the wall crazy terribad for the most part for a couple seasons, at least on Cartoon Network).
Ditto… When Transformers, a brand originally based around a TV show for little boys spawn a hit film series, it is sad that it is surprising a high-quality show based on a brand for little girls became popular.
Besides the other reasons mentioned here, I’ve felt that it has the advantage of not being a grim, cynical, gritty, despairing “grimdark” show at a point in time where shows like that have become common to the point of many people being tired of them. The time’s right for the pendulum to start swinging away from grimdarkness I think, and MLP: FiM managed to cash into that. People can watch it without worrying that Princess Celestia is going to suddenly start enforcing her rule with death squads or that Twilight Sparkle is secretly murdering other ponies and hiding the body parts or something like that.
That’s certainly some of it. Though I think you overstate the grimdarkness. It was more like the worst of human nature played for laughs. Aside from the major gems, there were some damn good shows that the creative staff of clearly had unresolved childhood issues. Ed, Edd, ‘n’, Eddy was a good show, in my opinion, but CHRIST, those are the worst children ever. I know children can be cruel, but that show ups it to 11. Dexter’s Lab was decent, but everybody in that show seemed to alternate between completely incompetent or completely mad.
MLP is the first show in a while that has competent main characters, and a side cast not made up of mentally incompetent assholes. Sure, you had the odd show before that got up to the line (Kim Possible only really had truly incompetent villains), but for the most part the shows where it didn’t apply where at best at Film Noir levels of optimism about the state of society.
I’m not 100% convinced that “it was a show for girls” is the whole angle. I think some socially acceptable sexism may be a piece of it, but remember that this is My Little Pony. Have you every watched the old ones? I did a couple times. It was everything that was wrong with animation aimed towards girls embodied. It was the thing that made clear that television marketed towards girls were getting the leftovers in terms of talent and funding, the show that basically proved that girls weren’t as important a market. It had all the clear corner cuts that shows for REALLY little kids had, along with a plot and characters that seemed to, at best, be written by 35 year old men whose only knowledge of 8 year old girls came from vague memories of when they were giving themselves cootie shots against them and drunken research binges of the Barbie franchise. The show itself is a spin off the “hey, little girls like ponies, right?” stereotype.
If you told me there was a show for girls that was really good, I’d be inclined to believe you. I think the main disbelief comes from it being MLP in specific. I don’t think it’s some great marker of sexism that people say “Really?My Little Pony!? You’re pulling my leg, right?” It would be like plucking someone out of the '60s and explaining to them “No, really, there are some damn good Batman movies, like The Dark Knight! Yes, it’s the same Batman as in that Adam West show.”
It’s only when we get into “any man who likes MLP is a socially stunted manchild” stuff that I think we can really start calling sexism, and even then, I’d be inclined to see their reaction to an adult liking ANY cartoon first. Like I said, I’m sure sexism enters into it, but not as much as people make it out to.
I’ve seen a few episodes of the show, seems okay. But it has developed a really creepy cult following that I find a little disturbing. People don’t just ‘like’ this show, they are obsessed with it, in a way I don’t see people obsessed with similar shows.
For example, I really enjoyed Adventure Time. I think its a funny show and enjoy the art style. I think the extent of my sharing was casually asking my friends if they had seen/heard of it. They said no. I said “Its a funny show, check it out sometime” and ended there. As far as I can tell, the show has its fandom, but the only weird shit is people obsessed with characters from a gender-swapped episode.
Bronies, though, seem to go on and on and ON about it. Its like the show suddenly becomes 110% of their identity. I could care less if someone likes something. If a 35 year old guy wants to spend all his time watching, blogging, and fan-ficcing MLP more power to him. But folks like this get a creepy obsession and the need to divulge every detail about the show to people.
Again, I think most of it is a reaction. You know how when you tell people to not do something, they suddenly really want to? You know how that’s amplified with a self-supporting peer group?
After MLP became a sort of half-jokey memetic hit on 4-chan, it got banned there for clogging up the forum too much. This caused a… er… forum war between two sides that really wanted to win, eventually leading to a spinoff site specifically for ponies to be discussed. On Something Awful, the pony thread also got gassed (can’t recall for what reason), leading to further populating of fan forums. There were still a sizeable number of fans though. By kicking them out of their original venues, they were forced to make single-topic pony sites. And once you get that kind of breeding ground it kind of gets out of control.
I mean yeah, there are Power Rangers sites and stuff, but I can imagine Power Rangers being a lot more fanatically popular if two of the largest sites on the internet suddenly banned all Power Rangers discussion after a good season started. Once you force everybody into one plays and tell them they’re not wanted, well, first they all get together and you get a sounding room where you get a really warped view of the situation. Then suddenly you want to get back at the idiots who banned you from “innocently discussing your show.”
Hey hey HEY! C’mon, man, you gotta give C&C at least some credit for the numerous ways they came up with names for Beelzebub there to show he wasn’t wearing any pants.