I remember seeing My Little Pony n Friends as a kid, and I loved it then. Re-visiting it a decade or so later, I do still like it now, if not as much as I did when I was younger. The animation is of inconsistent quality, the characters are well-drawn, and mostly the colours are vibrant and backgrounds fluid, but the continuity from things disappearing out of frames, things appearing out of nowhere, colour changes in the same scene, voice actors speaking different characters' lines and sometimes a lack of consistency between story-lines has never been a strong suit. Some of the characters served a good purpose in some episodes but were pointless in others. This was especially true of the sea-ponies. However, while not always memorable, the songs are sweet and tuneful and the characters are likable and engaging, with Megan a sympathetic character, the ponies and Spike adorable and the villains interesting, some comical(Hydia in a sense), some threatening(Tirak) and some very dimensional(Catrina). The writing always maintains it gentle nature, while showing humour, poignancy and suspense also, and the story lines are charming often in their simplicity with some having a dark tone like Rescue at Midnight Castle and perhaps Return of Tambelon. The voice acting is great, Nancy Cartwright I am most familiar with, but Susan Blu and Ellen Gerstell also stand out. Overall, I quite like this show. 8/10 Bethany Cox

When I was little, I had about three 'My Little Pony' videos and I watched them constantly. Even though this cartoon is mostly for girls, my brother liked it as well because he liked the brightly-coloured ponies.My favourite Series 1 episodes are 'The Return of Tambelon,' 'Fugitive Flowers,' 'Pony Puppy,' 'Crunch the Rock Dog,' 'Mish Mash Melee,' 'The Revolt of Paradise Estate' and 'Sweet Stuff and the Treasure Hunt' while my favourite series 2 episodes are 'Flight to Cloud Castle' and 'Ice Cream Wars' because they're the ones I always watched on video when I was younger. I didn't see 'Crunch the Rockdog' and 'Mish Mash Melee' until I was about 11 because those two episodes were on a video tape that was exclusive to Asda stores in the UK at the time. I thought those two episodes were originally broadcast in 1990, the year on the tape case, but I soon found out that they were broadcast in 1986 like most of the episodes.The things I like the best about the show are the songs, the memorable story lines and dialogue and the diverse range of characters. I have recently found episodes of this show on YouTube and there were a few on there that I hadn't seen before. I also liked looking out for continuity errors in this show because there were so many of them that let the show down a bit, but overall, the show is an entertaining nostalgia trip. 8/10.

OK, so i am now 21, but My Little Pony has just been released on DVD in New Zealand, and as it was my favourite cartoon from when i was a kid, i had to get it on DVD to relive the adventures of the ponies and their friends. But my adult mind sees several things wrong with this animated series.So, the good and bad parts about this animated series: The ponies themselves are too cool. North Star, Whizzer, Paradise, Magic Star, Gingerbread, Masquerade and Ribbon were my favourite, but nearly all of them were good. They all had varying degrees of characteristics, some of the ponies were well developed, for example, Wind Whistler was always incredibly wise and remained calm at all times, a sort of leader for the group. Gusty was brash, brave and impatient. Fizzy was fun, excitable and a friend to everyone, while Hearthtrob was a true romantic. However, some ponies, while cool, were not that well developed in terms of depth. North Star mainly stood around looking posh. Whizzer unfortunately never got any main stories, except for being faster than everyone else - in flight and speech. Cupcake, well, Cupcake just got to bake.One thing that was a let down was the amount of guest-characters that were "needed" to drive the story, which in my opinion just got in the way. Like the Grundles and Moochick who were just annoying, and one-off characters that the ponies meet on their adventures, like Puck. The human characters Meggan, Danny and Molly were pretty cool though, as was Spike the Dragon and the Bushwoolies. Various other ponies took up time too - like the decent Flutter ponies, the boring baby-ponies, the pointless Sea-ponies, the Big Brother ponies and the one-off Princess Ponies. I think more time should have been spent on the development of the ponies and less on the various guest stars. The villains though were fairly decent, like Grogar and Somnambula.The animation was fairly poor. Plenty of mistakes occurred in terms of characters speaking but no open mouths, or the words coming from the wrong character. Also, the wrong ponies being shown at various moments plagued the series, for example if four ponies went on a mission, at one point a different pony would have been drawn in place of one of the correct ones. But there were plenty of bright colours and illustrative settings.Continuity was terrible, in "Return of Tambelon" especially, the group of ponies who were not captured changed from episode to episode, a tragedy for what i believe the best episodes from this series.The voices were great, particularly famous voice-actor Susan Blu as Paradise, Catherine Cavadini as North Star, Sarah Partrdige as Wind Whistler and Ellen Gerstell as Magic Star, Whizzer and Masquarade... at least i think she did all three, no where can i find a complete list of which ponies were voiced by who. Of course it is a well known fact that the famous Nancy Cartwright (Bart from "The Simpsons") played Gusty.Some of the best episodes were those that allowed for more story, like the 10 part "End of Flutter Valley", 4 part "Return of Tambelon", 4 part "Magic Coins" and 4 part "Ghost of Paradise Estate". These longer stories allowed more screen time for various ponies, and were more fun to watch as opposed to singular or 2 part episodes. It would have been heaps better to have longer stories, but the show was shared with another 10 minute cartoon ("Glo Friends", "Moondreamers" or "Potato Head Kids").Overall, this animated series is a fun watch, it has a great cast, fun characters, exciting settings and plenty of good stories with fun songs and has good morals, but is plagued with inconsistencies, errors, and goofs. A new series would be cool, but with the same actors and ponies, only having longer stories with more development in the characters. But then again, this series was aimed at kids, so maybe now i expect too much! 7.5 out of 10

I was vaguely aware of this show back when it was airing during the mid to late eighties, and I remember watching some episodes and being charmed by them, even though I was too young to remember those episodes in any detail. So I decided recently to rent an episode of MLP because I thought it would be a delightful trip back to memory lane.All right, perhaps I'm not being fair. Perhaps this episode, "The Glass Princess" was not really a representative episode of what is supposed to be a popular and thoughtful children show. But then again, if this is what they consider an episode worthy of distributing in commercial VHS, then we might have ourselves a problem.I can honestly say the opening and closing sequences were the best parts of this 35 minute treac-a-thon. The music was upbeat and wistful at the same time, which would beckon kids from whatever activity they may be engaged in at the time and embrace them for the fanciful adventures that will be sure to follow. The closing sequence stripped down to the many flutes provided the proper denouement of a mythical adventure that recalls the dance of the satyrs.But instead of a carefully considered bit of storytelling, we are subjected to a continuous traffic accident of plot holes barely small enough to cover with an infield tarp, disconnected plotlines that were haphazardly stitched together, carbon-copy characters I could care less about and (worse of all) VERY superfluous songs which were lazily written.For specific examples, the ponies were preparing for a Pony Olympics at the beginning of the episodes, yet less than five minutes in you wouldn't even know there was a huge event being planned. The main-character pony, Shady, gets into a song about how useless she is, only to be sung back into comfort by one of her human friends - an exercise that could have been easily resolved by a few well crafted dialogue. In this episode, Gusty the magic unicorn and Heartthrob the pegasus were kidnapped along with Lickety-Split the "earth pony" and kept in bondage - even though magic unicorns can *magically* teleport wherever they want and pegasuses can fly away under their own volition as welland were give several opportunities to do so as well. And the show just generally suffers from the fact that it has too much characters and too little time to distinguish between them and make them compelling and interesting enough.What is really inexcusable, however, is the slipshod animation it serves us. This has got to be the one of the cheapest, most weakest production of a cartoon series this side of juvenile anime. Missing cells translate into jerky and stuttered movement of every character. Continuity of form is thrown out the window. And lip sync? They might as well be dubbing over an Estonian film for the type of attention they've paid to it. Oh well, at least the cartoon has a lot of color that will stimulate the mind of the youngest audience.All this seems to indicate that the producers of this cartoon only intended to make this a vehicle to which to sell their many toys and pony dolls, which were virtually ubiquitous during that era. Any new and useless character introduced will usher in a new doll and the cycle will repeat itself at the bidding of the toy companies. This is not the 12-year-old boy repelled by anything that would appeal to girls, I showed this tape to two of my younger sisters, and they were appropriately repulsed by it. It's a shame I have to do this, but this saccharine piece of popular watered-down pablum deserves only one star. I was expecting a LOT more.* out of ****