My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic
File:My Little Pony Friendship is Magic logo.svg
Genre	Adventure Comedy Fantasy
Developed by	Lauren Faust
Written by	Lauren Faust Amy Keating Rogers Cindy Morrow Chris Savino Meghan McCarthy Charlotte Fullerton M. A. Larson Dave Polsky Merriwether Williams
Directed by	Jayson Thiessen James Wootton
Voices of	Tara Strong Ashleigh Ball Andrea Libman Tabitha St. Germain Cathy Weseluck Nicole Oliver Michelle Creber Madeleine Peters Claire Corlett
Theme music composer	Daniel Ingram
Opening theme	"Friendship Is Magic" by Rebecca Shoichet
Composers	William Kevin Anderson Daniel Ingram
Country of origin	United States Canada
Original language	English
No. of seasons	2 (As of September 2011, season 3 is in production)
No. of episodes	52 (40 aired) (list of episodes)
Production
Executive producers	Lauren Faust (first season, and second season pilots) Chris Bartleman Blair Peters Kirsten Newlands Beth Stevenson Stephen Davis
Producer	Sarah Wall
Running time	21-22 minutes
Production companies	DHX Media Vancouver Hasbro Studios Top Draw Animation
Original release
Network	The Hub
Release	October 10, 2010 (2010-10-10) – present

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic is an animated television series that premiered on October 10, 2010, on the United States cable network The Hub. It is based on Hasbro's My Little Pony line of toys and animated works. The series is produced by Hasbro Studios and DHX Media Vancouver (formerly Studio B Productions). As of September 2011, the show is in its second season in the United States, and is broadcasting internationally in dozens of countries in over ten languages.

Lauren Faust, an animator for several other successful children's shows, was selected by Hasbro as the creative director and executive producer for the show. Faust sought to challenge the established "girly" nature of the existing My Little Pony line, creating more in-depth characters and settings. She focused more on adventurous themes than the previous My Little Pony animated works had, and centered many stories on resolving difficulties between friends. Faust and her team incorporated suggestions from Hasbro to improve both the E/I ("educational and informational") rating of the show and the marketing of the toy line, but were otherwise given a free rein. Faust stepped down as executive producer near the end of the first season, but remained as consulting producer through the second season before finally leaving the show. Jayson Thiessen, the show's supervising director, became the showrunner starting with season two.

The show follows a studious unicorn pony named Twilight Sparkle as her mentor Princess Celestia guides her to learn about friendship in the town of Ponyville. Twilight becomes close friends with five other ponies: Applejack, Rarity, Fluttershy, Rainbow Dash, and Pinkie Pie. Each represents a different facet of friendship, and discovers herself to be a key part of the "Elements of Harmony". The ponies share adventures and help out other residents of Ponyville, while working out the troublesome moments in their own friendships.

The show has been critically praised for its humor and moral outlook. Despite the target demographic of young girls and their parents, Friendship Is Magic has gained a large following of older viewers, predominately male teenagers and adults, who call themselves "bronies". Reasons for this unintended appreciation include Faust's creative contribution to the writing and characterization, the expressive Flash-based animation style, themes that older audiences can appreciate, and a reciprocal relationship between Hasbro, the creators, and the fans. Elements of the show have become part of the remix culture and have formed the basis for a variety of Internet memes. The show has prompted a fan convention known as BroNYCon.

Origin

Hasbro, Inc. has produced several generations of toys and entertainment related to the My Little Pony franchise, often labeled by collectors as Generations 1 through 3. The animated cartoon series My Little Pony Tales, produced in 1992, was the toy line's most recent television series before Friendship Is Magic, and it featured the pony designs of the first generation. It was followed by various direct-to-video releases, which featured later designs up to the third generation. Just as Michael Bay's film had helped to boost the new Transformers toy line, Hasbro wanted to retool the My Little Pony franchise and update it to better suit the current generation of young girls. According to Margaret Loesch, CEO of The Hub, revisiting properties that had worked in the past was an important programming decision, influenced to an extent by the opinions of the network's programming executives, a number of whom were once fans of such shows. Senior Vice President Linda Steiner also stated that they "intended to have the show appeal to a larger [demographic]", with the concept of "co-viewing" of parents with their children a central theme of the Hub's programming.

Lauren Faust, developer and initial showrunner of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic

Animator and writer Lauren Faust approached Hasbro, seeking to develop her girls' toys property "Galaxy Girls" into an animated series. Faust, who had previously worked on The Powerpuff Girls and Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends, had been pitching original animation aimed at girls for years, but was always rejected by studios and networks because cartoons for girls were considered unsuccessful. When she pitched to Lisa Licht of Hasbro Studios, Licht showed Faust one of their recent My Little Pony animated works, Princess Promenade, "completely on the fly". Licht considered that Faust's style was well suited to that line, and asked her to consider "some ideas where to take a new version of the franchise".

Faust was initially hired by Hasbro to create a pitch bible for the show, allowing her to get additional help with conceptualization. Faust said she was "extremely skeptical" about taking the job at first because she had always found shows based on girls' toys to be boring and unrelatable. My Little Pony was one of her favorite childhood toys, but she was disappointed that her imagination at the time was nothing like the animated shows, in which the characters had "endless tea parties, giggled over nothing and defeated villains by either sharing with them or crying". With the chance to work on My Little Pony, she hoped to prove that "cartoons for girls don't have to be a puddle of smooshy, cutesy-wootsy, goody-two-shoeness". To do this, she incorporated into the design of the characters and the show many elements that contradicted idealized stereotypes of girls, such as diverse personalities, the message that friends can be different and can get into arguments but still be friends, and the idea that girls should not be limited by what others say they can or can not do. Elements of the characters' personalities and the show's settings were based on her own childhood imagination of the ponies' adventures. Faust stated that as she provided Hasbro with more of her ideas for the show, she was inspired by their positive response to the non-traditional elements. Faust had initially pitched the show to include "adventure stories" in a similar proportion to "relationship stories", but recognizing the younger target audience, as well as the difficulty of writing complex plots around the adventure elements, she trimmed back this content, focusing more on exchanges between the characters. The show still incorporates episodic creatures intended to be scary to children, such as dragons and hydras, but it places more emphasis on the friendships among the characters, displayed with a comedic tone. By the time the show was approved, Faust had developed three full scripts for the series.

Faust began to work out concept sketches, several of which appeared on her deviantArt page, including ponies from the first generation (Twilight, Applejack, Firefly, Surprise, Posey and Sparkler), which would later build on the core for the main cast of the show. Hasbro approved the show with Faust as Executive Producer and asked her to complete the pitch bible. In order to do so, Faust brought in Martin Ansolobehere and Paul Rudish, who had worked on other animated shows with her. Faust credits Rudish for the inspiration of the pegasus ponies controlling the weather in Equestria, as well as the character of Nightmare Moon during this period. Faust also consulted her husband, Craig McCracken, a fellow animator and creator of The Powerpuff Girls and Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. After seeing the initial version of the pitch bible, Hasbro requested more character designs from Faust's team; subsequently, Faust brought aboard Dave Dunnet and Lynne Naylor to further refine the background and character styles.

On completion of the pitch bible, Hasbro and Faust began looking at studios for the animation. Studio B Productions (now DHX Media Vancouver) had previously worked on Adobe Flash-based animations and on shows that featured a large number of animals, and Faust felt they would be a good selection. Studio B requested that Jayson Thiessen be the director, a choice Faust agreed with. She, Thiessen, and James Wootton led the completion of a two-minute short to pitch the final product to Hasbro, resulting in the company's sanctioning the full production. Faust estimates that from being initially asked to develop the show until this point took roughly one year.

Production

The show is developed at Hasbro Studios in Los Angeles, where most of the writing staff is located, and at DHX Media Vancouver (formerly Studio B) in Vancouver, British Columbia, for the animation work.

A sample storyboard from the episode "Call of the Cutie", containing pencil sketches of the main characters, rendered backgrounds to establish settings, and instructions for the Adobe Flash animators, such as the panning shot shown in the second panel

Faust's initial writing staff at Hasbro Studios included several writers who had worked with her on her previous shows and were approved by Hasbro. These included Amy Keating Rogers, Cindy Morrow, Meghan McCarthy, Chris Savino, Charlotte Fullerton, M. A. Larson, and Dave Polsky. The writing process began with Faust and Renzetti coming up with broad plots for each show. The two would then hold a brainstorming session with each episode's writer, allowing the writer to script out scenes and dialog. Faust and Renzetti then worked with the writer to finalize the scripts and assign some basic storyboard instructions. Hasbro was involved throughout this process and laid down some of the concepts to be incorporated into the show. Examples of Hasbro's influence include having Celestia be a princess rather than a queen, making one of the ponies focused on fashion, and portraying toy sets in relevant places within the story, such as Rarity's boutique. In some cases, Hasbro requested that the show include a setting, but allowed Faust and her team to create its visual style, and Hasbro then based the toy set on it; an example is the Ponyville schoolhouse. Faust also had to write to the E/I ("educational and informational") standards that Hasbro required of the show, making the crafting of some of the situations she would have normally done on other animated shows more difficult; for example, Faust cited having one character call another an "egghead" as "treading a very delicate line", and having one character cheat in a competition as "worrisome to some". Each show also generally includes a moral or life lesson, but these were chosen to "cross a broad spectrum of personal experiences", and not just to suit children. Because intellectual property issues had caused Hasbro to lose some of the rights on the original pony names, the show includes a mix of original characters from the toy line and new characters developed for the show.

Jayson Thiessen, supervising director (left), and Shaun Scotellaro ("Sethisto"), the founder of the fansite Equestria Daily, at BroNYCon 2011

Completed scripts were sent to Studio B for pre-production and animation using Adobe Flash. Thiessen's production team was also allowed to select key personnel subject to Hasbro's approval; one of those so selected was art director Ridd Sorenson. The Studio B team would storyboard the provided scripts, incorporating any direction and sometimes managing to create scenes that the writers had believed impossible to show in animation. The animators would then prepare the key character poses, layout, background art, and other main elements, and send these versions back to the production team in Los Angeles for review by Hasbro and suggestions from the writers. Thiessen credited much of the technical expertise in the show to Wooton, who created Flash programs to optimize the placement and posing of the pony characters and other elements, simplifying and economizing on the amount of work needed from the other animators. For example, the ponies' hair and tails are generally fixed shapes, animated by bending and stretching them in curves in three dimensions and giving them a sense of movement without the high cost of individual animated hairs. Once the pre-production work was approved and completed, the episode would then be animated. Though Studio B performed this animation work initially, the final steps of creating the animation were passed to Top Draw Animation in the Philippines, an animation studio that Studio B had worked well with in the past, in the later part of Season 1 and beyond.

The voice casting and production is handled by Voicebox Productions, with Terry Klassen as the series' voice director. Faust, Thiessen, and others participated in selecting voice actors, and Hasbro gave final approval.

The series' background music is composed by William Kevin Anderson, and Daniel Ingram composes the songs. Songs from Ingram would only be included if they would make sense in the episode's script. The production team would identify specific parts of the episode where they wanted music cues, allowing Anderson to create appropriate music for each.

Before the show was approved, Hasbro and Faust had planned for episodes to be 11 minutes long, to which Faust conformed in her first full-length script, "The Ticket Master", which was part of the pitch bible. However, Faust preferred more traditional 22-minute episodes, and Hasbro eventually agreed to this. The initial production stages were very tight, requiring a schedule twice as fast as Faust had previously experienced, and frequent remote communication between the Los Angeles writing offices and the animation studio in Vancouver. At times, the two teams would hold "writer's summits" to propose new ideas for characters and situations, at which the animation team would provide suggestions on visuals, body language, and characterization. Faust estimates that the time to complete one episode was one year; at one point, the team was simultaneously working on various stages of all 26 episodes of the first season, and when the second season was approved, that number rose temporarily to 32. Episodes then aired about a month after completion. Thiessen explained that they had pushed to start working on the second season as soon as the first one was completed, to prevent staff turnover.

Near the end of the first season, Faust announced that she had left the show, and for season two she stepped down as Executive Producer, to become Consulting Producer. Her involvement in the second season consists mainly of story conception and scripts. Despite her decreased participation, she still has high hopes for the staff members, stating that "the gaps I have left are being filled by the same amazing artists, writers, and directors who brought you Season 1. I’m certain the show will be as entertaining as ever".

Premise

My Little Pony animation series chronology
My Little Pony My Little Pony Tales My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic

Friendship Is Magic takes place in the land of Equestria, populated by varieties of ponies (including variants of Pegasus and unicorn), along with numbers of other sentient and non-sentient creatures. The central character is Twilight Sparkle, a unicorn pony sent by her mentor Princess Celestia, ruler of Equestria, to the town of Ponyville to study the magic of friendship. In the show's opening episodes, Twilight resents this assignment, as she is more concerned about the foretold appearance of Nightmare Moon. When Nightmare Moon does appear, vowing everlasting night and causing Celestia to disappear, Twilight sets off with five other ponies—Applejack, Fluttershy, Pinkie Pie, Rainbow Dash, and Rarity—to obtain the Elements of Harmony and defeat Nightmare Moon. Before Twilight can activate the Elements, Nightmare Moon appears and shatters them. In a flash of inspiration, Twilight realizes that each of her new friends represents one of the Elements of Harmony, and that she herself is the final piece, Magic. The magical power of the ponies' friendship reverts Nightmare Moon to a repentant Princess Luna. Celestia reappears, reunites with her sister, and allows Twilight to stay in Ponyville to continue studying the magic of friendship.

Later episodes follow Twilight and her friends dealing with various problems around Ponyville. At the end of each episode, Twilight sends a report back to Celestia explaining what she learned about friendship from these adventures. This part of the formula was abandoned in "Lesson Zero", the second season episode in which Twilight was convinced to be less rigid in her perceived duties; after this, all the principals contribute reports, although the formality is disregarded when appropriate. There is a loose continuity in these episodes; a theme throughout the first season, for example, is the ponies' preparation for the Grand Galloping Gala that occurs in the final episode of that season.

A central theme of the show is "cutie marks", iconic symbols that magically appear on a pony's flank once she has discovered her special talent in life. While physically young adults, the six main characters are envisioned as similar in maturity to human teenagers in the 12- to 18-year-old range. One episode, "Cutie Mark Chronicles", highlights how each received her cutie mark as a younger filly. Several episodes focus on the exploits of a much younger trio of pony characters that call themselves the "Cutie Mark Crusaders", who have yet to receive their cutie marks and are teased by other young ponies as "blank flanks". In response, they desperately hurry to try to discover their talents and receive their own cutie marks, often doing so in comical fashions.

Characters

Main articles: List of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic characters and List of My Little Pony characters

The cast of Friendship Is Magic, presented as a poster at the 2011 San Diego Comic-Con. Major characters include (mid-front row, starting sixth from left) Rainbow Dash, Pinkie Pie, Applejack, Twilight Sparkle, Fluttershy, Spike and Rarity. The poster also includes minor characters and those named by the "brony" community, including "Derpy Hooves" and "Doctor Whooves".

The show revolves around the adventures and daily life of the unicorn pony Twilight Sparkle (voiced by Tara Strong, singing voice by Rebecca Shoichet), her baby dragon assistant Spike (voiced by Cathy Weseluck), and her friends in Ponyville:

• Rainbow Dash, a tomboyish pegasus pony who helps control the weather (voiced by Ashleigh Ball);
• Rarity, a glamorous unicorn with a flair for fashion design (voiced by Tabitha St. Germain, singing voice by Kazumi Evans);
• Fluttershy, a shy pegasus pony who is fond of animals (voiced by Andrea Libman);
• Pinkie Pie, a hyperactive pony who loves throwing parties (voiced by Andrea Libman, singing voice by Shannon Chan-Kent);
• Applejack, a hard-working pony on her apple farm at the outskirts of Ponyville (voiced by Ashleigh Ball).

The younger Cutie Mark Crusaders include: Apple Bloom, Applejack's younger sister (voiced by Michelle Creber); Sweetie Belle, Rarity's younger sister (voiced by Claire Corlett, singing voice by Michelle Creber); and Scootaloo, a pegasus that idolizes Rainbow Dash (Madeleine Peters).

The show takes place in the fictional land of Equestria, which is ruled by Twilight's teacher Princess Celestia (voiced by Nicole Oliver) and her sister Princess Luna (voiced by Tabitha St. Germain).

Episodes

Main article: List of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episodes

In total, 52 episodes have been produced and 40 episodes have been broadcast. As of September 2011, the series is in production for a third season.

Season	Start Date	End Date	Number of Episodes
1	October 10, 2010	May 6, 2011	26
2	September 17, 2011	TBA	26

Distribution

United States broadcast

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic is one of several animated shows used to premiere The Hub, a retooling of the Discovery Kids channel of Discovery Communications in United States markets. The block of programming is a joint development of Hasbro and Discovery, designed to compete with similar family-friendly programming blocks on other networks such as the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon. The first episode of Friendship Is Magic premiered on the first Hub broadcast, on October 10, 2010. In March 2011, the show was renewed for a second season to air in 2011-2012. The season two premiere on September 17, 2011, had 339,000 viewers. Shannon Chan-Kent, the singing voice performer for the character Pinkie Pie, has begun recording for an upcoming third season.

The series is rated TV-Y (designed for a very young audience). The first season was broadcast with the "E/I" ("educational and informational") logo, but this no longer appears in the second season.

International broadcast

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic has been distributed to international markets, including Treehouse TV for the English-speaking audience in Canada, Boomerang in the United Kingdom, Okto in Singapore, and Cartoon Network and later Boomerang in Australia. Some of these international broadcasts, including language translations, were arranged with Turner Broadcasting System, which had broadcast Friendship Is Magic and other Hasbro shows on many of their European and Middle Eastern channels.

The series is or will be available in the following languages, sorted in chronological order of debut. The series is or will be automatically available in countries wherever the following television channels are broadcast.

Language	Dubbed title (literal meaning)	Channel broadcast	Date of debut
European French	My Little Pony: Les amies c'est Magique ("Friends are Magic")	TiJi (and later Gulli)	August 26, 2011
Italian	My Little Pony: L'amicizia è magica ("Friendship is Magic")	Italia 1	August 29, 2011
Dutch	My Little Pony: Vriendschap is betoverend ("Friendship is Enchanting")	Kindernet block on Nickelodeon	Early September 2011
European Spanish	My Little Pony, La Magia de la Amistad ("The Magic of Friendship")	Boing (official) Cartoonito Spain (unofficial)	September 12, 2011 (official) September 1, 2011 (unofficial)
German	My Little Pony: Freundschaft ist Magie ("Friendship is Magic")	Nickelodeon	September 19, 2011
Danish	My Little Pony: Venskab er ren magi ("Friendship is Pure Magic")	Boomerang	September 26, 2011
Norwegian	My Little Pony: Vennskap er ren magi ("Friendship is Pure Magic")
Swedish	My Little Pony: Vänskap är magisk ("Friendship is Magical")
Turkish	My Little Pony: Arkadaşlık Sihirlidir ("Magical Friendship")	Minika	October 1, 2011
Arabic	ماي ليتل بوني ("My Little Pony")	Cartoon Network Arabic	October 6, 2011
Polish	My Little Pony: Przyjaźń to magia ("Friendship is Magic")	MiniMini	October 15, 2011
Mexican Spanish	My Little Pony: La Magia de la Amistad ("The Magic of Friendship")	Discovery Kids	November 21, 2011
Brazilian Portuguese	My Little Pony: A Amizade é Mágica ("Friendship is Magic")
Hungarian	Én Kicsi Pónim: Varázslatos Barátság ("My Little Pony: Magical Friendship")	Minimax	December 16, 2011
Czech	Můj malý Pony: Přátelství je magickéc ("My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic")
Romanian	Micul meu ponei: Prietenia este magică ("My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic")
Serbian	Moj Mali Poni: Prijateljstvo je magija ("My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic")
Russian	My Little Pony: Дружба – это чудо ("Friendship is a Miracle")	Karusel	January 2, 2012

Home media

Episodes of Friendship Is Magic are available for digital download through the iTunes Music Store. Shout! Factory will release a 5-episode Region 1 DVD of Friendship Is Magic on February 28, 2012, entitled My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic - The Friendship Express. This DVD will contain five non-sequential episodes: the two-part premiere episodes "Mare in the Moon" and "The Elements of Harmony" (Season 1), "Over a Barrel" (Season 1 Episode 21), "Hearth's Warming Eve" (Season 2 Episode 11), and "The Last Roundup" (Season 2 Episode 14). Hasbro has also signed a deal with Leapfrog Enterprises to release episodes of the show for the Leapfrog Explorer tablet system.

Toys and merchandise

As with the other generations of My Little Pony television shows, Friendship Is Magic has figurines and playsets based on it.

Other media

A section of the Hasbro website gives information about Friendship Is Magic for children and their parents, including character backgrounds, videos, and interactive games and media. In conjunction with Ruckus Media, Hasbro released an iOS application Twilight Sparkle: Teacher for a Day in October 2011. It gives children practice in reading and incorporates mini-games.

Reception

Critical reception

The series has received positive reviews from critics. Todd VanDerWerff of the A.V. Club favorably notes its "sheer and utter joyfulness" and lack of cynicism, unlike many other shows that garnered a cult following of parents and adults. He compliments the characters' stylized appearance, the stories' relative complexity for children's television, and the solid jokes which make the show enjoyable for parents as well as children. He gives the series a B+. Genevieve Koski of the A.V. Club later commented that Friendship Is Magic is an example of a show that, while considered "girly", has been able to tap into the nerd culture to allow it to gain wider acceptance than other comparable forms. Emily Ashby of Common Sense Media, an organization focusing on the parenting aspect of children's media, gave the show a rating of four out of five stars, emphasizing its messages of friendship, tolerance and respect, but advised parents to be wary of the "influence the characters might have on their kids' desires, since it's rooted in a well-known product line of books, toys, and just about everything in between." Matt Morgan, writing for Wired's "GeekDad" column, praised the show for having "rebooted the long-time Hasbro property while managing to lace it with geeky undertones" and being one of the few "girl-focused shows that a geeky dad can appreciate with his daughter".

Kathleen Richter of Ms. believed that Friendship Is Magic did little to change the nature of older animations for girls, which she considered "so sexist and racist and heteronormative." For example, she suggested that, through the character of Rainbow Dash, the show was promoting the stereotype that "all feminists are angry, tomboyish lesbians." She also considered that the only darker-colored ponies shown to date were in positions of servitude towards the "white pony overlord." Lauren Faust responded to these claims by stating that while Rainbow Dash was a tomboy, "nowhere in the show is her sexual orientation ever referenced" and "assuming [tomboys] are lesbians is extremely unfair to both straight and lesbian tomboys", and further stating that "Color has never, ever been depicted as a race indicator for the ponies." Amid Amidi, writing for the animation website Cartoon Brew, was more critical of the concept of the show, calling it a sign of "the end of the creator-driven era in TV animation". Amidi's essay expressed concern that assigning a talent like Faust to a toy-centric show was part of a trend towards a focus on profitable genres of animation, such as toy tie-ins, to deal with a fragmented viewing audience, and overall "an admission of defeat for the entire movement, a white flag-waving moment for the TV animation industry."

Internet following

Despite the target demographic of young girls and their mothers, My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic has become an Internet phenomenon, with many male fans between 14 and 35. The response from the Internet has been traced to cartoon and animation fans on the Internet board 4chan, responding to Amidi's negative essay on the show and on current trends in animation. Before they had seen the show, members of the cartoon board of 4chan noticed the alarmist nature of the essay, began watching the show, and quickly warmed to the series for its plot, characters, and animation style. This reaction soon spread to the other boards of 4chan, where elements of the show quickly caught on as recurring jokes and memes on the site. The number of Friendship Is Magic posts, so unlike the usual attitudes and image of 4chan, caused a large stir on the site. Fans of the show were unrelenting in their defense against various trolling attacks from other 4chan boards. This led to a temporary ban on anything related to ponies, although it was soon overturned. Christopher Poole, the founder of 4chan, briefly acknowledged the popularity of the show on the site at the 2011 South by Southwest festival.

An attendee at the 2011 Anime Expo, cosplaying as the character Rainbow Dash

Though the discussion of the show would continue at 4chan, many fans created other venues to discuss it, leading to its spread onto other forums and the rest of the Internet. Sites such as "Equestria Daily" and "Ponychan" were created to share artwork, stories, and news about the show. They receive more than 500,000 visits a day, and many artists use sites like deviantArt to display fan art based on existing and fan-created characters. Fans have also started series of local meet-ups and small conventions, such as BroNYCon held in New York City, which featured the show's supervising director Thiessen as a guest at its first gathering. BronNYCon's numbers have since grown; the first convention posted an attendance of 100 people, but the third, held in January 2012, was attended by 800, and the fourth, where Lauren Faust will be a special guest, has expanded to a two-day event at a higher-capacity location. Most of these fans are themselves surprised by their fondness for the show. Shaun Scotellaro, operator of Equestria Daily, one of the main fan websites for the show, said, "Honestly, if someone were to have told me I’d be writing a pony blog seven months ago, I would have called them insane." He speculates that the spread among adult fans was accelerated by its presence in online gaming, which sparked further interest. Another avenue for popularity for the show came from the furry community, whose ranks include a large number of animation fans.

The adult interest in the show is comparable to similar shows such as The Powerpuff Girls, Animaniacs, Yo Gabba Gabba!, Rocko's Modern Life, Phineas and Ferb, and SpongeBob SquarePants: a combination of jokes aimed at adult viewers and a sense of nostalgia for older cartoons. Many of the aforementioned shows had attracted college-aged fans who, when Friendship Is Magic was airing, would be raising children of their own. The show has made references to works that older viewers would recognize, such as I Love Lucy, The Benny Hill Show, X-Men, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Diamond Dogs, and The Big Lebowski. Two episodes, "Suited for Success" and "The Best Night Ever", feature lengthy musical numbers inspired by Stephen Sondheim, including the song "Putting it Together" from the musical Sunday in the Park with George. With the interest of the older demographic, the show's viewership increased from 1.4 million per month on its premiere to 4 million per month by the end of the first season, making it the highest-rated of any Hasbro offering at the time. Advertising Age reports that the viewership doubled between the first and the second season.

Older fans of the show have adopted the title "brony," a portmanteau of the words "bro" and "pony." Though generally taken to refer to male fans, the term is often applied to any fan outside the target demographic, regardless of gender. Another term, "Pegasister", has been used to refer to older female fans of the show. Two informal surveys, one of about 2,300 self-identified bronies conducted by Dr. Patrick Edwards, and another performed by a brony fan with about 9,000 respondents, revealed that the average age was around 21, that approximiately 86% were male, and that 63% were currently pursuing a college degree or higher. In a promotional advertisement entitled "Equestria Girls", prepared by the Hub using a parody of Katy Perry's "California Gurls", the lyrics acknowledge the word "brony" as part of its lexicon. The brony community has gained media attention through outlets such as Wired, Fox News Channel, and The Wall Street Journal. During a telephone interview on NPR's comedy radio show Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! in June 2011, former US President Bill Clinton successfully answered three multiple choice questions about Friendship Is Magic, leading at least one journalist to refer to him jokingly as a brony. Lexicographer Grant Barrett listed "brony" as a memorial new word of 2011. The brony fandom has been perceived negatively by others due to the strangeness of the older fans' dedication to the show, which has in turn overshadowed its critical success. The brony community has encountered ridicule through trolling, even after moving away from 4chan. The Fox News Channel comedy talk program Red Eye w/Greg Gutfeld poked fun at the brony community for consisting largely of young adult males.

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic was heavily promoted by Hasbro at their booth at the 2011 San Diego Comic-Con.

The brony community has been described as representing one aspect of New Sincerity, where these older viewers not only watch the show but create new material around it. As such, a number of Internet memes have grown from the brony fandom. The community has adapted catchphrases from the show, such as "anypony" and "everypony" as replacements for "anybody" and "everybody", and has created its own Internet meme-like statements, such as the phrase "confound these ponies", inspired by the Merrie Melodies short The Dover Boys. Numerous videos that incorporate footage from the show are posted every day on YouTube, including music videos, parodies and remakes of movie and video game trailers, and other mashups. In one case, a video made by a high school student named Stephen, using science to dissect some of the physical impossibilities on My Little Pony as part of a class presentation, was highlighted by several news outlets and featured on the Tosh.0 website. Remixed media of professional works using Friendship Is Magic footage have been noticed by their respective creators, such as by Edgar Wright for the My Little Pony versions of the trailers for Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and Hot Fuzz, and the cast of Top Gear for a video setting clips of their show to the pony characters. Numerous fan projects have created video games based on Friendship Is Magic, such as the brawler game My Little Pony: Fighting Is Magic, or modifications of existing games like Team Fortress 2 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Flash-based applications have been made to allow fans to create their own pony characters in the same style as the art from the show. An organized group of fans, calling themselves the "Humble Brony Bundle", has polled donations from its members towards the Humble Indie Bundle, a charitable indie video game sales drive for Child's Play and the American Red Cross, topping the contribution list for one sale while contributing the largest single donation (over $16,000) for a later sale after getting into a friendly competition with Minecraft developer Markus Persson (known as "Notch").

Time named the brony fandom as the ninth-best meme of 2011, the Internet meme research site Know Your Meme listed it among its top ten memes of 2011, and PC Magazine named it as one of the top memes of 2011.

Reaction from crew members

From the messages I’ve received, these episodes have lifted spirits, brought parents and kids together, changed perspectives and inspired the most unlikely of people in the most unlikely of places. Who would have thought it from a show about candy colored ponies?

Lauren Faust

Lauren Faust, the creator and executive producer of Friendship in Magic, has expressed appreciation for the older fans of the show on her deviantArt page. Early in the first season, in response to Richter's criticism, Faust stated that she had expected people "to instantly label it girly, stupid, cheap, for babies, or an evil corporate commercial", and that she encouraged people instead to watch the show with "an open mind". She had not expected older people without children to watch it, but said, "The fact that they did and that they were open-minded and cool enough and secure in their masculinity enough to embrace it and love it and go online and talk about how much they love it — I’m kind of proud."

Faust and the creators have acknowledged some of the fan-created elements of the show and reflected them back into the animation. In the first episode, a background pegasus pony is shown in one scene with a cross-eyed stare, the result of an overlooked animator's joke. The 4chan boards quickly dubbed the character "Derpy Hooves" and created a more detailed personality for her, despite having minimal on-screen time. Faust responded to the fans and has since kept the Derpy character with the cross-eyed look and incorporated her into a slapstick sight gag during "Feeling Pinkie Keen". According to supervising director Jayson Thiessen, the teams consider Derpy "like a little Easter Egg for people to catch". As part of a relief effort for the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, Faust auctioned several original drawings from the show along with a new sketch of Derpy Hooves, which alone sold for more than $2,000 on eBay, contributing to a total of more than $15,000 in charitable earnings. At the conclusion of the first season, one of the show's animators confirmed that Derpy would be a scripted background character in the second season, which culminated in a scene within one episode, "The Last Roundup", that referenced the character by name and her klutzy antics. Another pony character, sporting neon colors, wearing sunglasses, and manning a DJ mixer who briefly appeared in "Suited for Success", was given the stage name of "DJ P0N-3" by the fans. This name was reused in the "Equestria Girls" advertisement. Similarly, fans of the show have named a male character with an hourglass cutie mark as "Doctor Whooves", referring to The Doctor from the long-running BBC television series Doctor Who.

Hasbro and the Hub have also sought to market to bronies. Linda Steiner, senior vice president of Hasbro Studios, noted that while she hoped that the show would attract a "broader audience", she had "been in the business for 25 years and never seen anything like this". The company recognizes the brony community as "a small group of My Little Pony fans who don't necessarily fit what one might expect to be the brand's target audience", while its core viewership in the older market is predominantly females. Despite being a small audience, Hasbro and the Hub network chose to "salute and embrace all the viewers who have embraced our brand", according to Margaret Loesch, CEO of the Hub and former executive producer of the original My Little Pony animated series. Though Hasbro's priority is to deliver a child-friendly show, they will try to "do the 'bronie' [sic] check to see if [an episode] could pass with them", according to Steiner.

Hasbro introduced new My Little Pony toys at the 2011 Comic-Con International, including a collectible one available only at the convention. Clothing vendors that sell officially licensed My Little Pony merchandise, such as Hot Topic, have expanded their lines to include themed shirts for both genders. The Hub promoted the show through a billboard near the Valhalla Motion Pictures Building in Los Angeles, using an image of the pony characters spoofing the film Bridesmaids. On October 3, 2011, the billboard was replaced with another, spoofing Poltergeist. In addition to the "Equestria Girls" advertisement, the Hub made a parody of Apple's technorati-oriented App Store, including a play on the motto: "There's a pony for that." Hasbro has generally not taken a stance against full episodes being available on sites like YouTube, taking down episodes in high-quality that conflict with their iTunes offerings, and this policy has enabled the growth of the fandom. Though many fan-created mash-ups combine copyright footage of Friendship is Magic with adult elements, such as those from R-rated films like Inglourious Basterds or foul language from artists such as Wu-Tang Clan, Hasbro has not taken a stance against these videos and has allowed them to be hosted at various outlets, recognizing that the parodies and remixes form a "participatory culture" that has helped to draw larger attention to the show. Daniel Nye Griffiths of Forbes, in light of the Stop Online Piracy Act, considered the brony phenomena to re-use copyrighted works and create new works from these as an example of the inevitable result of any media that gains a fandom, and praised Hasbro for embracing the means to extend the brand through this instead of trying to endlessly stop such infringements.

Other arenas

The existence of the brony fanbase (in contrast to the target audience for the show) has led My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic to appear in other arenas.

The Pirate Party of Germany, sitting in the Abgeordnetenhaus of Berlin (the Berlin state parliament), has insisted on the inclusion of "pony time" during sessions, in which an episode from the series is shown, an action that has displeased many of the other members in the Berlin parliament. The internet activist group Anonymous has used the character Rainbow Dash to deface the website of the Social Democratic Party of Austria.

An article appearing in the New York Times on December 26, 2011, "Navigating Love and Autism" by Amy Harmon, described how one young woman sought to overcome her autism using My Little Pony characters, but misidentified Twilight Sparkle as Fluttershy on initial publication. The paper issued a correction, which some journalists have jokingly considered as "the best New York Times correction ever", though others saw it as a sign of the journalistic integrity of the Times. Harmon herself noted that she was contacted by fans about the mistake, and said, "I hate to get anything wrong, but I confess to some enjoyment in finding the right way to phrase this one."

External links

• Official website
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic at IMDb
• Template:Bcdb
• My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic Wiki on Wikia
• Equestria Daily - Friendship Is Magic online community news and fanfiction