Part 2 of...wait, are they still just in season 3?!

When I left my last post about My Little Pony, reclusive nerd Twilight Sparkle was forced to endure every socially anxious person's worst fear (insane parties with no chance for escape and forced interaction), Princess Celestia was missing, and Nightmare Moon had managed to keep the sun from rising, dooming all in Equestria to death since crops won't grow and fireplaces are nice, but you still need solar heat to keep from freezing to death.

Pretty grim stuff.

I have to admit, though, that if I suddenly found myself the center of attention of a group of people I just met, I might make like Twilight Sparkle there and pour myself a large glass of something.  Just saying.

First of all, an amendment:  that whole "lightning bolts to the face" deal?  That's how this episode starts, not how the last one ended.  My bad, I own that.

The episode begins with- you know what?  Wait.  I have to do one more prelude.

My Little Pony had a lot of ground to cover to become what it is before it even started.  The previous iteration was...well, it was terrible.  It was awful.  It was shameless shilling to stereotypical "girly" stuff featuring the "Newborn Cuties" with an animation budget somewhere between "jack" and "squat," voices by undoubtedly talented people given nothing to say, and the cheapest (read: early flash animation on computers) designs I've seen.  There were no lessons, no real character development, and I'm pretty sure even the cast knew it was going to suck before they did it, and it shows.

I tried watching some for this article.  This next sentence is not an exaggeration, it is not embellished, and it is not at all a lie:

I felt real, physical pain watching it.  It hurt more than the time I had the wind knocked out of me from a wayward dodge ball back in high school.

Now, to be fair, I caught a clip of the first generation MLP specials....and it wasn't bad.  It had some pretty awesome villains and had some powerful conflicts.  More villains died than I ever saw on Care Bears or Jem and the Holograms.  Everything after that, from the looks of it, just went steadily further downhill.  I even remember watching some of the early specials when I was young because, well, it was something to watch.

Enter Lauren Faust.  Her highlights, in my eyes, were working as an animator for The Iron Giant, Her two Emmy nominations for her work on Powerpuff Girls, and her two Emmy nominations (and one win!) for Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends.

Convinced by Hasbro (seriously, she was pitching her own series at the time), she assembled a team and an animation studio that had everything going for it.  A history of beloved and imaginative animation worlds?  Check.  Some of the most endearing female characters to grace TV screens in ages?  Check.  An animation studio that could take a method that had once produced this:

...and use better tools to make this:

(I kid you not, this gif is better than -any- of the animation in that other series.  Look it up on Youtube and cry.)

Check.

And yet, people were still blown away when this show appeared on the air.  Go figure.

So back to the story.  Nightmare Moon makes a grand exit, and Twilight Sparkle makes a mad dash back to the library she's living out of to try to find more on the "Elements of Harmony" (but she first puts Spike to bed, so we don't have to worry about him for the rest of the episode).  However, she's confronted by her new friends since it appears she's the only pony who knows what's going on.

One small quibble:  In the first episode, even Spike has heard of the Mare in the Moon legend, and states it's an "old pony's tale."  How is it this group of ponies has never heard of it?  Granted, Spike does live with the biggest bookworm who ever lived, but still.

After consulting a reference guide detailing the history of the Elements, the ponies head out to find them, looking for the original castle the two ruling sister ponies lived in over a thousand years ago.  This involves heading out to the Everfree Forest, and I'll freely admit it, I love the Everfree Woods.  These woods are the polar opposite of the rest of Equestria.  Plants grow wild, monsters lurk in caves and bushes, and clouds move without ponies to guide them!  It's madness, I tell you, madness!

And this is also where the insanity gets cranked up as the ponies are assaulted multiple times by Nightmare Moon, in the guise of an evil cloud that sets up challenges for the ponies to overcome.  The first challenge?  She rips the ground out from under them so they'll fall into a ravine and die.  As I said before, ponies don't shiv.

This plan fails (mostly because two of the ponies can fly, and Applejack is able to hold on to Twilight long enough for the other non-fliers to be saved), but one thing that I loved is how three of the ponies had to be saved by fliers, but Applejack?  She jumps down the side of the cliff like it's nothing.  Applejack is awesome.

So, having failed to kill them once, Nightmare Moon tries her next plan...sic a manticore on them, which will not only kill them, but probably eat the remains.  

Despite the best efforts of the other ponies (including a respectable rodeo act by Applejack trying to ride the beast into submission and Rainbow Dash creating a tornado around the beast), Fluttershy manages to tame the beast because, seriously, who could harm this?

D'awww.  ...I mean, um, right.  To adventure!

...to be honest, I think Nightmare Moon ran out of ideas at this point, because her next plan to make some scary trees glow in the dark to try to scare the ponies away (defeated by Pinkie Pie laughing in the face of fear with a musical number, but I'll discuss the music in this show another time), and after that is...well...after that is this guy.  

And I'm not going to lie, they make no attempt to not make this the most flamboyant character you'll ever see.  See, he's making it impossible to cross the river because a dark cloud ripped out half of his mustache, thus ruining his entire ensemble.  This isn't an exaggeration either, as the dragon and Rarity spend time discussing how he set up an entire look, but this one missing ingredient is a "crime against fabulosity."  Rarity's term, not mine.

So, Rarity chops off her own tail to make the dragon a new mustache, and the ponies move on to the final challenge...Rainbow Dash gets offered her heart's desire, and all she has to do is give up and leave her new friends behind.  But because you can't get multiple episodes out of the team failing to save the world in the second episode, the ponies get to the castle and find the Elements of Harmony!

...well, five out of the six.  And the silly things don't even work.  So, here's where the meaning of the title comes into play.  Turns out each pony, as demonstrated in how they got the team past each challenge, embodies one of the elements themselves, and that friendship allows the last element (here's a hint: My Little Pony: Friendship is _______) to appear.  And then the ponies unleash a huge rainbow that simply makes a Care Bare Stare look like shooting a BB gun next to a rocket launcher.  I'm not kidding either.  Check this out:

The only way this could get any more epic would be if this was the last element of "harmony":

...but I digress.

When everybody gets up after the magical Pony Bomb goes off (P-Bomb?), Princess Celestia shows up and reveals that Nightmare Moon is actually...her SISTER!  ...yeah, Ms. Celestia's also 1000 years old.  The two sisters make up after a tear-felt apology from the pony who almost doomed all of ponykind twice, a-

...y'know, if the elements of harmony could blast all of the evil out of Nightmare Moon and return her to her former self, why didn't Celestia do that in the first place?  Maybe she didn't have as much control over the elements as six ponies who don't, on their own, have control over the sun?  I mean, surely you don't imprison your little sister in the moon for a thousand years on purpose, right?

...what's that?  Celestia knew Nightmare Moon was going to break free, and the real reason she sent Twilight Sparkle out to make friends was because she knew the "magic" necessary was in the little pony the whole time, it just had to be unlocked?  ...man.  There's a dark turn.  Someone suggest something to get this back to being happy.  Pinkie Pie, what do you suggest?

Right!  So, everybody in Ponyville celebrates not dying a horrible death, and Celestia tells Twilight Sparkle that it's time to head on home.  ...and I'd be lying if I said this last bit wasn't done really well, when Twilight points out how sad it is that she's finally, for the first time in her life, learned to appreciate having friends, but now has to leave them...so Celestia gives her prize student a new assignment:  Live in Ponyville with her friends, and report back every week with a lesson learned about being a friend.  And yeah, I know, "oh look, a reason for a moral at the end of every episode.  Yup, this sure is a show for girls."

Hush, you.  I'll tell you now, the morals stem naturally out of the episodes in such a way that I haven't seen since...well, ever, really, and sometimes a story will twist around enough times that you almost forget what the moral "set-up" was until everything wraps up at the end.  It's extremely well crafted and laid out, but really, what do you expect from Lauren Faust?

So, I guess I gotta sum this up.

The Good:
  
The story holds up, even under the weight of setting up something that the title spells out before the series even begins. The character interactions are very well done, managing to show a respect for the characters, laying out some simple things for the children watching, but it never talks down to its audience.  Also, Pinkie Pie's song was really catchy, but that's not going to be unusual, as I'll point out later.

The Bad:

Princess Celestia's design when she first shows up.  This is, for all intents and purposes, one of the mightiest beings in the world, a thousand year-old princess (seriously, you rule the ponies, you're a queen.  Queen it up) who controls how celestial objects work.  It's common for the noses of the ponies to be extremely downplayed when they're facing towards the camera, but since the first time we really see Princess Celestia is this:

It's...not flattering.  

Another thing was the hinting towards the elements of harmony being in the ponies themselves.  The slow draw across each one of the girls as Twilight lists the elements is necessary, I suppose, but could have been done more smoothly.  

Also, while Nightmare Moon's plots to stop the ponies starts strong, it descends into silliness towards the end, especially with the sea serpent and Rarity.  Then again, I'm not a young girl, so, what do I know.

Overall:

The first episode intrigued me, but this episode locked my interest in this series.  In the space of 22 minutes I was presented a monumental quest, two types of "monsters" to be overcome, an affirmation of who the characters are, and a satisfying ending.  There are very few hour long dramas that manage that so well, and I look forward to doing more of these.

Next episode we'll see one of the two (that I've seen so far) Benny Hill references in the show!  Because that's what girls like, right?  Benny Hill's chase scenes?

Reviewing is Magic: Episode 1

Blogs have transformed journalism.  What used to require travel, editing, and a lengthy printing process now reaches the masses in the blink of an eye.  Updates from major news moments occur in real time, and having a blog becomes a privilege for those willing to put themselves out there, but also a responsibility to make sure it is used in a manner that serves not just the writer, but also the reader.

So, on that note: My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.  

This series first crossed my radar when I listened to an episode of Talkin' Toons, a podcast done by voice actor (and overall great human being) Rob Paulsen.  His guest that week was the incredibly talented (and ridiculously good looking) Tara Strong.  From that interview I learned of the Bronys, a term I had previously heard as something akin to a derogatory word.  Time passed, and the idea of men watching the show passed as nothing more than a cultural curiosity, albeit it one I could never judge too harshly on, having grown up sitting through episodes of Jem and the Holograms and She-Ra: Princess of Power in order to get to other programs.  The less said about my brief stint watching Totally Spies while unemployed is a topic for another day (It's Clueless meets James Bond, and one is voiced by Commander Shepard!  What's not to like?)

The series crossed my radar again with several articles written by blogger, humorist, and Batmanologist Chris Sims of the Comics Alliance.  His description of some of the themes and challenges intrigued me, and phrases such as "a bear made out of outer space" only whet an appetite I was, up to now, unaware I had.  Flashbacks to when I first attempted to eat a fried banana at an Indonesian restaurant or when a friend showed me a television show devoted entirely to myths and debunking them with high explosives flooded back to me.

And so, in the spirit of "I <insert verb here> so you don't have to (but in some cases you totally should)," I present my new series reviewing episodes of a television show that first came out in 2010.  Because everybody deserves to know about a show this absolutely insane interesting.

So, because the first two episodes are a two-parter, I'm breaking this post into two parts.  Normally I'd just summarize a bit more, but this encourages me to post more show deserves an insightful look.  I'll do my best to stick to initial opinions, but some hints/spoilers from future episodes will surface.

So, episode one, "Mare In The Moon" begins with a history of the kingdom of Equestria.  And I'm going to say this right now, I love when a show plays with a theme, and MLP milks the "pony" theme for all it's worth.  "Anybody" becomes "anypony."  "Everybody" is "everypony."  Their kingdom is named Equestria because of course it is.  What else would they call it?

So the nation used to be ruled by two sisters, one who used her magical control over the sun (!) to force it to rise every morning, and the other wou'd control the night and make the moon rise.  The younger sister feels jealous because nights aren't as appreciated as days, she goes bitter, and her attempts to plunge the world into darkness causes her to be banished inside the moon.  For a thousand years.  Ponys don't shank.

This also means that the other royal pony has to be on charge of the sun and the moon from that day forward.  This is important, but doesn't really affect the plot in any significant way except to point out that damn, there are some potent magical abilities going on in this show.

I'll be honest, though, it took me until later to realize that the evil sister's new name, "Nightmare Moon" has the word "mare" built right in.  Well played, ponys.

The first real character we meet is Twilight Sparkle.  That's a real name, and not the description of what vampires are now famous for. She's a student to the ruler of Equestria, a total bookworm, and has a pet baby dragon named Spike because I don't know how pets really work in this world.

I'll be honest, in this episode the only thing, animation-wise, that really bothers me is Spike.  I always just get the feeling his eyes are floating an inch in front of his face, and his movements aren't as clean.  But that's nitpicking, because I'll be absolutely honest here...the animation on this show is superb.  The characters are expressive, the mouths move with the voices, the backgrounds have ridiculous detail to them, and there are little throwaway moments during scenes that are clean and easy to pick out.

Twilight's the only pony who seems to realize that a prophecy claiming the "Mare of the Moon" will be freed is about to come true during a major celebration, and the only thing that can stop her from banishing the sun forever are the "elements of harmony."  But her attempts to warn others are thwarted by a royal edict declaring "get your nose out of those books, go check in on the preparations for the ceremony, and make some friends you recluse."  That's not the exact wording, but the spirit's there.

Twilight Sparkle is sent to Ponyville (because of course) where she meets the five other major members of the cast.  First is Applejack, and if I'm being completely honest, I'll admit that she is one of my favorite characters on this show, and in the short running for "favorite new character of 2012."  I'll do more extensive character reviews later, but it's just awesome that, in this world, the most effective way to harvest apples is to kick the crap out of trees until they give up their bounty.
And if that doesn't work, she'll just lasso them straight off the branch. And she wears an awesome hat.  Hats always get bonus points.

 The next pony met is Rainbow Dash, a winged pony whose job is to control the weather by kicking and punching clouds so hard they explode.  I promise you, I'm not making any of this up.  Such precise weather control allows for pushing clouds across the sky, causing miniature rainstorms, and even generating lightning with a swift hoof to the cumulus solar plexus.  She's also extremely proud of the fact that she's one of the most accomplished fliers in the land, reaching rather ridiculous speeds for a winged equine.

No, I don't know how weather works in Equestria, either.  But a later episodes shows us the factories where weather's "built."  Go figure.

We next meet Rarity (no last name), another unicorn like Twilight Sparkle, and thus also able to use magic.  I'll admit, I've always hated characters like Rarity.  Prissy, afraid of getting "dirty" and completely into fashion and little else, it took me a loooooong time to warm up to this character.  She was squarely in the same camp I put Baby Piggy in Muppet Babies, Daphne in Scooby-Doo, and Michelle in the comic strip "Curtis." 

The next pony is another pegasus, Fluttershy, and this is where I get stripped of my "Man Card."  I am totally Fluttershy.  I'm not just saying that because of the "What Pony Are You?" quiz I took during a recent bout of insomnia, but because I see so much of myself in that character when I was growing up.  Fluttershy is kind and caring, but has a small problem with being social with strangers.  Her attempts to say her name to Twilight Sparkle come out as a mumble and only get worse with repeated attempts.  She freezes up and gets uncomfortable in large social groups,   Granted, I'm not quite to this extreme (I don't squeak when trying to talk, for instance), but man.  If Applejack is my character find of 2012, this is my "they must be reading my diary thoughts when they write for this character" moment.

The last new pony we meet is Pinkie Pie, and I'll admit, I've never been fond of the zany, crazy, talkssofastyouhavetolistenthreetimestounderstandwhattheysay characters, but again...in this show, it works.  It takes a few episodes for me to accept it works, but since the character holds to the same "type" of crazy with only a few moments of going more extreme, it at least shows a consistant character, and one whose craziness never overrides the basic ideas of the show, namely "friends come first."  Plus, the other ponies do enough talking about how insane Pinkie is to let me feel confident that it's not just me.  Again, we'll get deeper in the character later, but for now trust me that Pinkie Pie is to MLP what Deadpool is to comic books.

Anyway, after meeting all the ponies and having each of them, in their own way, claim her as their newest best friend (and Twilight Sparkle essentially sigh with disgust at the idea of meeting new people), we come to the big celebration where Princess Celestia (again, what else do you call a pony who forces the sun and moon to do what she wants out of sheer willpower?) is supposed to show up and make the sun rise...but instead, she disappears, and the Mare of the Moon appears, lording it over all the ponies with her magical power and bragging how the sun will never rise again.  But first she has to take out the pony "royal guard" with lightning bolts to the face.  Nice to know that being stuck in the moon for a thousand years hasn't softened her up any.

At this point, it jumps to a "To Be Continued!"  So let's break it down:

The Good:

I've said it before, but the animation for the most part is top-notch.  The story does a superb job of introducing the characters and giving us everything we need to know about their personalities, and nothing really feels like filler.  The plot itself would fit in pretty much any setting trying to tell an epic story, and if you can get over the fact that these are talking ponys, it becomes pretty fun.

Again, another shout out for Applejack, who I did not expect to find in a series like this.  She reminds me a lot of Rogue from the 90s X-Men cartoon, except I don't hate her so intensely that it puts me off southern accents for several years.  Also, another nod to Fluttershy for being the pony who makes me sigh and go "man, I've so been there" when I watch her try to interact with her peers.

The voice work is superb, and the voice staff have enough experience to be able to fully flesh out the previously mentioned personalities without going completely over the top.

The Bad:

Well, nothing's perfect.  Spike's animations bug me somewhat, but just because it isn't as clean or as deep as the rest of the animation (even background characters do a better job of looking complete).  Rarity is given the least personality outside of "I decorate, like to do makeovers, and totally want to get out of this dump and both hob and nob with the elites." Plus, the scene where Twilight Sparkle was delivered to Ponyville in a chariot drawn by two winged horses just felt somewhat uncomfortable, since the only response they give her thanks is a mix between a grunt and a whinny.

Overall:

As I said before, this show really didn't have to be this good.  Al I really remember of the original cartoon was it was essentally "Care Bears, but with horses, and nobody shoots rainbows out of their stomach to make bad guys explode."  Overall you can look past any gender issues in the show (Rarity excluded, of course) and simply enjoy a well-built story that happens to have an almost entirely female cast.  It's easy to understand how the "Brony" culture came around, and in today's world it really nice to have a show to bring up that goes "Hey, wouldn't it be great if people could just be nice to each other to solve their problems?"

For its purpose, I give the episode a solid B+, docked from A status only for a few minor quibbles.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to watch the Expendables to see if I can get my "Man Card" back.