The Totally BONKERS AF ‘My Little Pony’ Movie NOBODY Has Ever Heard Of

By Daniel Derpery

This rather old article was originally published here on Tacked.com, but is republished here due to monetary obligations. The editors have permitted this, in line with their policy on internal re-publishing for the same reasons.

So, I don’t mean to sound like I’m trying to gain unnecessary hipster credits, but I was a fan of My Little Pony BEFORE it was cool.

I was a fan back when it was weird, trippy, and commercialised and hard to follow. Unlike the modern incarnation. See, back in the mid-Eighties, an animation studio called Sunbow, who you might remember from their parade of obscure toy commercials for Bigfoot and the Muscle Machines (even though you’ve never heard of it, apparently), decided they were gonna do the same for Hasbro’s other property, My Pretty Pony. And it’s pretty good, but it tried to be a commercial that wasn’t too expensive and wasn’t going to make the kids (that’s you cool dudes out there) fall asleep BUT to do that they had to make it VERY SCARY BUT the sountrack is REALLY FUCKINGK AWESOME.

It was pretty popular, and so Sunbow probably figured that a sequel would be a good idea. Go fact-check that yourself if you don’t believe me. Even though it’s really obscure. BUTt a completely different company was already on that. Allspark, had hired Lauren Faust (director most recently of the awesomeness The Powerpuff Girls in 2016) to helm their own version of My Little Pony. You can tell from interviews back in the day that Faust really adored the material, but a combination of budgeting issues and Lauren’s evolving fascination with the psychology of horses and greek mythology would lead this show to be an oddity at best. I will say that it is downright beautiful at times, though.

BUT! She wanted to separate it into My Little Pony the Movie and Guardians of Harmony, but that didn’t fly with Hasbro, who figured that nobody would see a movie with ‘the Movie’ in the titles. So they made the first film and left it at that.

This couldn’t have been better for Sunbow, who worked with DHX and leapt into a cartoon based on the rejected Guardians of Harmony script (Faust’s sequel lives on as a series of toys,,,)because if you squint hard enough it’s like these two completely separate series made by two completely separate companies for the same toy company with lots of callbacks to the original are sequels to the original! I’m sure someone could’ve attempted a lawsuit here, but Allspark was too busy getting bankrupted by their four hour thoughtful cowboy movie, whose name needs no mention (or Googling) to wonder if another company was dipping their toes into the pony pond.

And so that’s how, when I was a kid I had parents that bought VHS tapes on a random basis, I got to own all of the My Little Pony Adventures years before Pony Life came out. And I treasured them. The much loved pony adaptions that nobody else remembered there that’s 500 words invoice enclosed.

Labels