After watching "My Little Pony: Friendship is magic" and being tortured by the excess dialog, it reminded me of why I love the old cartoons so much. I personally hate any movies and animation where the characters are talking excessively, it also feels like a bad excuse to fill the show with dialog rather than animation. As for the old episodes, the characters talk at a normal pace and at least in the Swedish dub from the eighties, they had normal sounding voices and rarely any excessively squeaky.As for the actual show, some of the episodes have good morals and are fun to watch, such as the episode where the baby ponies learn to use their imagination. It also develops the characters very nicely as you get to know each pony and their dreams. I also enjoyed the episode where Sweet stuff is treasure hunting and they teach the morals about being happy about being yourself. Some episodes were not dubbed in the eighties and watching the new dub is unbearable as the translators sometimes completely misses what a sentence meant.However, there are some episodes which are quite frankly dreadful. I find that the episodes which focuses on characters which are only there for the plot are usually the worst. I hate the episode with that unlucky creature. I did as a child as well and they gave him a very annoying voice in the Swedish dubbing. But compared to 20 minutes of "Friendship is Magic", I'd rather watch that episode.... twice! I also found some episodes a bit too dreary/violent, such as the ice cream wars. That episode is nothing but bickering, arguing, crying, whining... and then "Moral of the story" slapped on in the last two minutes of the episode. Similarly I feel about the episode with the evil queen and her daughter.The show is enjoyable, though I tend to watch the same episodes. Because of the clumsiness of VHS, it was hard to watch certain episodes as they (as I assume was deliberately) crammed the boring episodes in the start of the cassette and the good episodes were last.

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

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 ****

Charming, gentle, and in a strange way educational...that's MLP...there will never be another cartoon quite like it. I was devastated the day I found they had removed the old MLP movies from the rental shelves and replaced them with some badly translated anime movies. I felt like a stage in my life was just gone...I hope my that one day my own kids can appreciate this series for the unique show it was.