Gauging interest: A G1 cartoon Roundup

Who here would be interested in watching and discussing the G1 cartoons, My Little Pony N’Friends and My Little Pony Tales, as well as the specials and movie?
 
I’m not planning any kind of synchtube events, although I wouldn’t object if someone else wants to set that up, just discussing the episodes in order with the watching done as your schedule permits.
 
Mods, would using this part of the forum for a roundup be permitted? I don’t see why it wouldn’t, but just to make sure, I’d rather have confirmation now.

Considering the many animated clips and screencaps I’ve been posting from the original ‘adventure fantasy’ canon, I would love to have something like this on the forum.
 
Also, watching the two specials and the movie first might be better before diving into the ’My Little Pony ‘n Friends’ show, just to watch things in chronological order. They also make a better first impression in terms of animation quality, at least the consistency of it. It would be better to get ahold of the original ’84 and ‘85 specials instead of the edited versions at the end of the show’s seasons, although it is difficult to find them in decent quality.

I’m down.

After seeing the discussion in >>451048 I’m interested.

@Amethyst_Crystal  
Chronological order is the idea, so specials, movie, and so on. What little continuity the show has places them first. After them, I’ll be going by wikipedia’s episode listing.
 
Advance warning: The G1 cartoon, at least through N’Friends, is a mess. It’s got all the faults that you’d expect of an American cartoon from the nineteen eighties, and script quality is all over the place. But, and this is the important part, it’s a fun mess. There’s a lot to enjoy, and a lot to talk about. Still, if someone wants to avoid watching a particular serial, I can’t blame them.
 
I haven’t seen My Little Pony Tales myself, so I can’t offer any warnings there, but I’ve heard good things about it.
 
It looks like I won’t be talking to myself, so if no one objects, I’ll start the Roundup thread proper next Friday, the twenty-fifth. The first special is Escape from Midnight Castle. I’ll be posting youtube links, but if someone else has other ideas, I’m happy to listen to them.
 
Oh, and just to get this out of the way now, Wind Whistler is Best Pony. Always. Even in a series that she doesn’t appear in.

@Sjogre
 
I can agree that the animation quality isn’t consistent. Especially the few times someone speaks another character’s lines. Foreign language versions of the show are clever to fix that, usually with well picked still screens or just changing the dialogue to fit the speaker.
 
The script and dialogue however is usually pretty solid. There’s a lot of poetic and emotional bits throughout, not to mention more complex conversations and language than you’d expect from a kid’s show.
 
Some of the fun comes from something Adventure Time does well too: throw out a whole mess load of new people, places and things every story, making the fantasy world building get more fascinating and detailed every time.

@Amethyst_Crystal  
The dodgy writing deals more with format issues than the scripts themselves. I’m thinking of a few specific issues that I’ll mention in the thread proper. Basically, more characters than they can deal with.
 
That last thing is both a strength and weakness: The show is constantly introducing new, cool, interesting ideas with lots of plot hooks, and then never, ever, mentioning them again. That’s something that the franchise as whole does. Friendship is Magic has introduced more than a few things that have never really been used or explored. It’s somewhat better than ’N Friends about exploring the stuff that it introduces, but that’s not a high bar to clear.
 
The show feels like a tabletop campaign where the GM had nothing planned and is improvising desperately, and I mean that in a good way, but I would have really liked to see some of those characters and ideas again. Really, the plots fly by the seat of their rumps, and rarely slow down to even gasp in the good serials. I like that sort of thing, but it can result in issues when you stop and think.
 
The series mostly manages to avoid contradicting itself by never explaining anything, which is not really the best way to go about that.
 
That’s stuff to talk about in the Roundup, though.

@Sjogre
 
It really does feel like a D&D campaign sometimes, but I admit that I really enjoy that sort of feeling, not to mention the serialized adventuring format. Some of the main writers may be fans of the RPG game too, there seem to be a few nods to it, or at least fantasy fiction in general.
 
Considering the sheer volume of places and people and creatures and artifacts introduced, it was probably a better idea not to go back to most of it throughout the series. Very few animated series can pull this off well. Gargoyles, another dramatic fantasy adventure cartoon, comes to mind.

@Amethyst_Crystal  
I’ll be telling what the writers did. Some just have the one serial or episode to their name. Others… Others will be more impressive, let me put it that way.
 
But mentioning D&D and Gargoyles is appropriate.

Yeah, Gargoyles certainly shares in the serialized multi-part ‘epic fantasy adventure’ style. Though with more sci-fi elements. MLP ‘n Friends does have a few ‘sci fi’ elements in a few stories, or at least shares FiM’s ‘mostly medieval fantasy but with some steampunk and modern day elements thrown in at random’ style.

@Amethyst_Crystal  
I was thinking of D&D and Gargoyles for another reason. I’ll explain when we get there, but that won’t be for a while.
 
FiM has a rough technological baseline that mostly takes from Renaissance Europe and the Old West. ’N Friends has not even that, with contemporary trucks visiting medieval towns. Fun stuff.

@Sjogre  
Then best name goes to Whizzer.

@Sjogre
 
MLP has had modern day construction sites, industrial hair driers, laser defense grids, and scientific monitoring equipment.

I’d like to get into the older gens, yeah.

@Amethyst_Crystal  
All of which are visibly out of place compared to the rest of the setting. With ’N Friends, you’ve no idea what’s supposed to out of place.

@Sjogre  
That’s true, FiM never really made any of those modern day machines into a major plot point.
 
There aren’t too many story arcs of MLPnF that have modern tech, but The Great Rainbow Caper and Bright Lights come to mind easily.

I’d dig it, as it would be good to compare the current generation with the previous ones, and see what strengths and weaknesses each share.

I might as well do. I watched it all during free time, there was some good ideas in it.
 
@Amethyst_Crystal  
The penguin king also have a modern machine that made cold, I have a theory that the G1 world was living a shock of civilization behind the scene between the futurist/steampunk and the middle aged.

@boz  
I’ll talk about it more in the thread, but the pony world of G1 did have access to the human world. The main characters weren’t above bringing technology across, and they might not have been the only visitors.

@Sjogre
 
That is true, Megan and her siblings would bring their own regular average real modern world stuff across the trans-dimensional rainbow sometimes, and some of it proved useful in quests.
 
I don’t know about the G1 comics, but there were never any visitors from Earth besides Megan, Danny, and Molly. At least, it was never made clear if other human(oids) in the world of Dream Valley were from Earth, or using rainbow travel.
 
On the flip side, the only non-pony creature shown to visit Earth was Sting the badass bee. Wings seem to be necessary to travel it.

This sounds really interesting, i will live to see what you have to say about classic MLP.

I’ve watched some G1 and I liked it. I wouldn’t mind buying the DVDs later on and checking it out/discussing it. It’s got some problems but nothing that didn’t plague the animation of it’s time in general.

I’d definitely be interested in checking out the slice-of-life comedy My Little Pony Tales that followed, if only because I know almost nothing about that one (but we should check this stuff out in order!).
 
Also, are we going to have one huge mega thread to discuss story arcs, or separate threads as we go through them, one by one? There’s 28 stories of the Dream Valley ponies in all, with total running times varying between 11 - 44 minutes (except for the movie and its tv multi-part sequel,which are the third and fourth stories).
 
I also wonder if we should watch these stories chronologically or choose them by, say, popular vote? There’s not that much in the way of continuity, but I’m sure feelings or reactions to changes in the characters may be less effective.
 
Spike in particular seems to have a real growing process across the stories.
 
Or watching a story with a more relaxed Shady, then watching one where she’s depressed, instead of the other way around.
 
Or Wind Whistler having her rant so early its less effective.
 
… maybe we should go in airdate order after all?

@Amethyst_Crystal  
One thread, at least for ’N Friends. I’m going to be referring back to earlier serials on occasion. Twenty-eight threads is also kind of a lot of threads for one activity. I’m not so sure about Pony Tales, but I’d rather one G1 megathread. I’m pretty sure that I’ll be comparing the two shows, so I’d rather not separate them.
 
As tempting as it is to move Lavan’s serial to the end for a big finish, I think stick to chronological order. Even if there isn’t much in the way of callbacks or character development, that’ll make it easier to tell what we’ve watched, and what’s coming up.
 
Each serial is discussed as a whole rather than being divided into discussions per episode, in case that wasn’t clear.

@Sjogre  
That’s true, it’s not like there’s a colossal amount of demand for popular vote for this or anything. So this way, it’ll be more organized and the stories will be in order.