Making Season 5: The Screenwriting Process

Every once in a blue moon, we are provided with a new episode of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.  They just appear on our television sets, seemingly out of nowhere, only on The Hub Discovery Family.

But do you ever stop to wonder just where exactly these new episodes come from?  Today, we here at Horse News will take an in-depth look at the process of writing an episode script to eventually be turned into a full-length animated miniature horse show episode.

Wannabe script writers, take note!

Step 1: Brainstorming

Directors for season five along with Meghan McCarthy and Hasbro execs gather in a secret room in the basement of Hasbro HQ.  After a feast of human flesh with choice of side (baked potato, house salad, or steamed broccoli), they proceed to participate in the traditional blood orgy.  Following this, they begin the ancient ritual of summoning the true Creative Director of My Little Pony, the only being in existence to truly understand the art of bright and happy scenes from nature.

Taken by our undercover source at Hasbro

The Creative Director provides input on how to make the ponies look like happy little ponies.  Hasbro execs figure out ways to market their products through the upcoming episodes.  Meghan McCarthy thinks of more ways to ruin the lives of Twifags.  After swearing their eternal souls to their pagan gods, attendants of this brainstorming session are dismissed.

Step 2: Writers are "Hired"

Here we see the writer in his natural habitat, working on his third magnum opus that will surely break him from the bounds of mediocrity and launch him into stardom as an author.

"This is definitely the one!"

The writer is a very fickle creature.  They tend to travel alone, as the writer is not very sociable.  Avoiding human contact at all costs, writers are usually found in cheap flats in L.A. and emerge only when they must forage for food or get shitfaced at the local bars in order to "get through their writer's block."

The key in successfully trapping a writer lies in selecting the proper bait.  While each writer is unique in terms of his or her palate, the thirsty writer has been observed to take the bait of beer on almost every occasion.

After being successfully trapped, the elusive writer is taken to Hasbro HQ, where they will be given a list of brief episode synopses and told to turn them into scripts.

Hasbro execs successfully capturing a writer, luring him in with promises of booze and a stable paycheck

Step 3: Writing the Scripts

Captured writers are now tasked with turning ideas given by Bob Ross (or Satan, if he turns up; those pentagrams can be tricky...) into full-length episodes.

A writer hard at work on a season 5 episode script

The writers are chained to their desks so they don't escape and aren't allowed to leave until they have finished writing all their episodes.  Writers have many different ways of organizing their ideas and putting together those ideas into full-length episodes.  One such writer, M.A. Larson, was kind enough to give us a glimpse into his creative process.

Mr. Larson likes to take all of his ideas and tape them up to his wall.  If we take a closer look, we can make out a few things that will eventually make it into season 5:

Wow! A mysterious and powerful book from another world? Sounds like Equestria Girls III: Revenge of the Sith a fantastic episode waiting to happen!

Step 4: The Revision Process

Nothing is perfect the first time around; even our Horse News articles go through an "intensive" revising process!  These scripts are no exception; after all, it would be a shame if one of the writers were to do something silly like put a distress message into one of their scripts...

0 Days since the last workplace accident

The scripts are torn apart by Hasbro's crack team of editors and then thrown back together, usually with tape and glue.  After finally being pieced back together, the finalized scripts are sent to Animation.

Warning: Please do not touch or feed the editor.

Step 5: The Completed Episode

Animation performs their strange voodoo magic on the completed scripts in order to turn them from words on paper into fully-animated episode.  Since getting into animation for interviews and insider info requires you take a blood oath promising your firstborn child to Hasbro's toy factory (and because our inside source is too much of a pussy to do this), we were not able to obtain any sneak preview clips of season 5.  We were, however, given a screenshot of a piece of one of the episode scripts:

Completed episodes are then arbitrarily locked away by Hasbro for months on end, because they enjoy watching our suffering as we wait for the next season to air.