I’m still mystified my this whole MLP thing. Eventually I’ll get some time to take a peek, but I’m scared.
Meanwhile, I’d like to drop Adventure Time down as one of the best cartoons on the air right now. Maybe ever.
Sure thing. Take a look at the numbers in this scene: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1C0HuaZLM8#t=10m28s
It’s very low-key. Twilight, the alpha geek, is wearing the number 42 for the race. The Spinal Tap reference is more dodgy, but Rainbow Dash, the pegasus with a rock leitmotif and a tendency to excess…goes to 11. If the show didn’t also have nods to Star Wars, possible Potter puns hidden in Greek etymology, and an utterly shattered fourth wall, I would be more inclined to dismiss it.
It also opened The Cutie Pox with a Big Lebowski shout out.
I think one thing not mentioned in this thread that is a big plus is its music. It’s super catchy.
I like that there are well-developed female characters that are all different from each other, but also that they’re not perfect and all have flaws and work through them.
I do standup comedy and tape my big sets, but of course when you’re your own cameraman you sometimes don’t cut it as nicely as you want. For instance, I have an MP4 right now with about 7.5 minutes of footage I want, but an extra couple of minutes on the beginning and end I don’t want. I just want to trim that off.
What can I use?
About the fourth wall. Aside from Pinkie Pie, who obviously is bound by no law of nature or pony, what other 4th wall breaches have there been?
What are the possible Potter puns* hidden in Greek etymology?
*Always alliterate allocutions.
The wizard Starswirl the Bearded(hairy), inventor of the amnio(pot)morphic spell.
IOW, a hairy potter
I think it’s perception bias, you only know they are bronies when they are talking about MLP, so you wrongly perceive they are obsessed about it 24/7
Not Twilight, but google MLP “cupcakes” if you dare.
The show’s composer Daniel Ingram has been nominated for 2 Emmy Awards, for ‘Becoming Popular’ and ‘Find A Pet’ (the linked article has youtube embeds of the songs).
Also, the episode The Perfect Swarm is an obvious tribute to Star Trek’s The Trouble With Tribbles.
Yep… and that’s not even his best stuff… "The Day ‘Aria’ " in the season 2 finale is puts most of the Disney animated films’ music to shame.
Thirty-two-year-old male here. I myself don’t get it. I watched one episode with my girlfriend when it was on, and found it only mildly interesting. The animation is pretty good, I’ll admit, but otherwise, it looked to me just like another kid’s cartoon. If there was any subtle adult humor in it, I missed it.
This thread has fallen victim to other threads I’ve seen on the internet where people ask why MLP has such a large following of adult males. “It’s a really good show!” seems to be the only answer.
…Really?
I mean, really?
I don’t care if you don’t like the show. I severely dislike evangelists of all stripes and I think this show has more than the average which bothers me. If you don’t like it, more power to you. But don’t make things up and ignore facts in order to reinforce your own opinion.
It’s a reasonably well-written show with attractive animation and music. It’s funny and at times clever. And because it’s coming out of a known crappy girly merchandising property, its non-suckiness is all the more remarkable.
How that translates into people only being able to say “It’s a really good show” baffles me, unless you’re intent on making it out like people who like the show are idiots.
Overreact much?
Me not caring for the show and me wondering why it’s so popular are two completely different things.
“It’s a well-written show” tells me nothing. But if you were to say, “It has a lot of risqué adult humor I find funny in addition to childish humor and life lessons my 8-year-old daughter can enjoy,” then that’s a much more qualitative statement.
Hey, make easily disproven statements and they’ll be easily disproven.
Really, if you’ve seen it and you don’t like it, I don’t have much of an interest in trying to persuade you. This is true of anything. I’m not going to break down a critical analysis when bullshitting online; if you asked me why I liked the show Castle I’d tell you because it has witty writing and likeable characters, which isn’t any more substantial than what you get here. But those are still reasons why I think it’s a good show.
Which is why Bosstone went into more details and quoted Fair Rarity and Der Trihs who themselves went into more details than that.
You try to make it appear that Bosstone only said “It’s a well-written show” when anypony who’s actually bothered to read his post can see that he said more than that and quoted others saying more than that.
First, “It’s a really good show!” should be lots of points in its favor. Second, where did you find MLP:FIM fans who could keep their responses to a single sentence? The ones I know, and my home is infested with them, including one who met her sorta fiance through it, will talk for hours about why MLP has such a large following of adult males.
reels back, flinging cape over face protectively
HISSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS
The show does that relentlessly. If it’s not changing common phrases for horse terms (“on the other hoof”, etc) it’s making a terrible horse pun out of a location name (Manehattan, Cloudsdale). It’s hard to watch umpteen hours of it and not assimilate it. I can’t read Hornblower-style fiction without having Georgian phrasings leak into my speech for a week or two, either.
As for my two bits, the show has likable characters with life and dimension to them, fantastic art and animation, pretty good music, a huge amount of attention paid to world-crafting, and reasonably good, if fairly generic, episode plots.
That’s enough on its own, but I think that the mood of the show is what really sets the hook for its cross-demographic appeal. It’s got a hard-core optimism, that everyone’s life can be good if people are just decent to each other. That’s not special; every kid’s show is happy-joy idyllic bliss. The difference is that the ponies’ world is not sterilized. There are mortal dangers everywhere and even quiet, out-of-the-way Ponyville deals with existential threats on a regular basis. The ponies don’t have their cooperative worldview because they never encounter any problems, but because they -do-. When a natural disaster hits them, they don’t start looting, they start working together to make things better. Because of that, the optimism doesn’t feel naive, but like something that could actually work. Add in some tolerance and pro-science themes, and it’s pretty much tailor-made to grab geeks by the heartstrings.
I see what you did there.
Agree about Adventure Time, my sons and I love it, but we also find Regular Show to be just as funny and entertaining, albeit obviously more lowbrow. Amazing World of Gumball also gets regular rotation from us (The Silence Snake episode is awesome).