April Fools Day Review: So Many Ways to Play

Happy April Fools Day, everybody! I hope you're having fun with...whatever your favorite sites are doing this year, because there will be no hope and joy in this post. Today, we're going to use this holiday as an excuse to look back on the very last thing produced in G3.5 and see just how badly Faust and her team needed to swoop in and save this franchise.

Yes, we're looking at the infamous Newborn Cuties and one of the two animated straight-to-DVD cartoons bundled with the toys. This is So Many Ways to Play.

To truly grasp the dire horror of this situation, we need to think back to the franchise's state back when this...abomination was first inflicted upon the world. You could watch CR's retrospective of the early generations (in fact, his reaction is an abridged version of my own), but for the criminally lazy, here's my summary.

At the time, MLP's animated offerings were going straight to video as animated specials, often bundled with toys that related to them. This was back during G3, and...honestly, G3 itself isn't all that horrific. There are some awful specials, sure, but it was more dull and simplistic than anything else. There were no villains, and even the interpersonal and internal conflicts are kept on a very small level. But alas, Hasbro decided to redesign the ponies this generation into big-headed monstrosities while also focusing on a Core 7 set of characters, many of which survived the jump to G4 and FiM, albeit with extensive redesigns. Unfortunately, all semblance of quality went screaming into the night, with the ponies being reduced even further to the most bare-bones of personalities and their situations relating shamelessly to specific toys and situations.

The only exception for me, however, was Scootaloo. Introduced as part of the Core 7, she was pretty much the only one who had any sort of character to her, even if it's piddly compared to what came after. At the very least, she gets a funny line or two, which is more than I can say for anything else this sub-generation gave us. And she shows us games to play, so we can't fault her on that.

But one redesign wasn't enough for Hasbro. So they turned the ponies into...

Sorry, I had to do it.

Which brings us to this duology of specials, Once Upon a My Little Pony Time. Yes, they made more than one of these...charming specials, but we're going to focus our attention on the more infamous of the two, “So Many Ways to Play.” Because frankly, I don't think I can handle both and retain what little sanity I have.

The special begins with probably the most utterly stock intro I've seen in a long while. And it's at this point that we start to see this special's crippling issues. The music is very standard and low-key, kind of like one of those low-cost nursery rhyme recordings you buy to shut your babies up. But that has nothing on the animation and artistic design. To put it simply, this thing is horribly animated and terribly conceived on every level. Like FiM, it's done in Flash, but where that show makes good use of the software and has plenty of good animators and artists who care about their craft, this thing looks like someone slapped this together in about half an hour before going off to lunch.

And it gets worse from this point.

The actual special begins with Pinkie Pie looking over an old scrapbook, which is how both of these features begin. Before we continue, though, we have to address G3.5 Pinkie Pie. If you were expecting the party animal, hyperactive, joy-spreading mass of goodness we know from FiM, you aren't getting it here. G3.5 Pinkie was actually quite levelheaded and sort of the leader of the group. She still loved parties, but she wasn't the mass of sugary goodness that we associate with the name.

So with that out of the way, let's take a look at how Pinkie meets Scootaloo...

WARNING! DO NOT GO BEYOND THIS POINT WITHOUT A PUKE BUCKET!

So we first start with a tea party, and not the kind Fox News loves. This tea party is being held with your usual cadre of stuffed animals and...

...WHAT IS THIS FOUL CREATURE?! FROM WHAT PIT OF HELL HATH IT SPAWNED?! KILL IT! KILL IT BEFORE IT CAN BREED!

Okay, now that we have that out of the way, let's look at this special's truly spectacular levels of fail. If you though the animation was lazy in the opening, you have no idea what you're in for from this point on. The baby designs in this generation are ugly as sin. They try to proportion them out to be akin to stages of human development, and while G4 did much of the same, it also remembered that these are miniature horses and gave them, you know, features like horses. But the babies here are pudgy, slack-jawed monstrosities.

But that isn't even the worst part. Take a look at how they move...

Dear God, someone broke that poor baby's hind legs! Quick, get a doctor before... Oh wait, they actually made them crawl like human babies. Again, trying to impose human qualities on a creature that is not human is not always the smarted move, especially when it looks astoundingly horrendous like it does here. This isn't cute or adorable; it's disturbing.

Okay, so what's the plot here? Well, Pinkie is having a tea party with her stuffed animals, which she's given the usual names and is doing the usual tea party things. Then her mom (yes, her mom) shows up and boldly fights her debilitating case of lockjaw to tell her that her friend, Cheerilee (yes, that one), has come over. Oh, and she's brought her sister, Scootaloo.

...Yes, they're sisters in this continuity. Look, let's put the differences between the two generations behind us; it really doesn't accomplish anything to compare this to what followed at this nitpicky level. Besides, it fails hard enough on its own merits.

It's kind of hard to even talk much about the rest of the special, since there isn't anything remotely resembling a plot going on. Basically, Scootaloo and Cheerilee are both babies, despite Scoots seemingly being more than a few months to a year younger than her sister in the regular G3.5 specials, and she proceeds to wreck everything Pinkie had set up and behave like a total brat. And all throughout, the animation, sound effects, music and writing just continue to get worse and worse. One of Scootaloo's first actions, for example, is to jump around at the mere sound of the word party. The problem is that we start with her looking straight at the viewer like something out of a Bethesda game, while an incredibly annoying stock sound effect (that I seriously think comes from Microsoft PowerPoint) plays for a brief moment in a music-free scene. And then she proceeds to jump up and down, which is really her cycling between a two-frame animation of her landing and bouncing off the couch and her doing a somersault. When she has to do some serious action (i.e. crashing into the tea party), it all happens off-screen.

Also, have I mentioned the voice acting? Because there is simply no excuse for how bad it is. I don't know if they hired actual kids or the actresses just reallydumbed down their delivery, but everything is said in that utterly patronizing tone you see on a really bad PBS show. The annoying thing, though, is that the voice acting in the rest of the G3/G3.5 stuff wasn't that bad; it was the scripts that were the real culprits, not the performances. Also, when the ponies talk, only their mouths move, and in this really off-putting animation that just feels...wrong.

In fact, that's really the best way to describe this special. It's simply wrong.

Anyway, how do things go from here? Well, Scootaloo (now with a teapot on her head) just continues to raise ruckus while Pinkie and Cheerilee try to do things together. And all this culminates in the single most infamous scene of the entire special: Scootaloo riding a horse while holding a bottle like a lance.

This sequence lasts twenty seconds, and yet encapsulates everything that is horrible about this special. The music is something out of one of those lullaby synthesizers you stick on your baby's crib to shut them up. The actual animation is literally Scootaloo holding this same expression while the background is whipped around in the background really fast and her leg occasionally flashed in the background. And even when it changes locations, it keeps the exact same frames, only dragging them along like it was moving around clipart. The only thing that doesn't feel tacked on and lazy is a brief POV shot just before Scoots crashes and lands in a sink (which is full of water for absolutely no reason), and even that just feels cheap.

So, now that Scootaloo has ruined everypony else's fun, it's time for things to come to an end. Pinkie and Cheerilee invite her to join their activities, but she just acts like a brat until she sees some butterflies outside. And so the babies wander outside, with absolutely no parental supervision, so that Scootaloo can ride that stupid horse toy again, all in an effort to kill some insects. And here's the best part: there's a moral to all this. Apparently, doing things on your own is fine, but doing them together is even better! Only the reason all this happened was because Scootaloo was being a jerk about the whole playdate thing, so really, it was the two giving into what Scootaloo wanted to do that resolved the problem Scootaloo created. But either way, we fade back to adult!Pinkie reading the book, backtracking into the very distance as this special comes to a merciful end.

CONCLUSION:

As you have probably gathered by this point, I am not a fan of the Newborn Cuties cartoons. They are absolutely horrid pieces of work on every conceivable level, from the terrible animation to the phoned-in voice acting to the slapped-together writing. So on its own merits, this short is a waste of time and a blemish on MLP's already spotty record when it comes to animated entertainment. And yet, there's something about this entire affair that bugs me even more, and that's the complete absence of any sort of effort on the part of the production team.

I can respect that you might not have all the resources and talent necessary to make something truly spectacular. Perhaps you weren't given enough time to hammer out all the little details. That's all understandable, and it has happened to good series in the past. But this short, and the one that directly followed it, represent the absolute nadir of shows aimed at girls. I'm not talking about things like dresses and making everything pink, but rather that they can throw any slop together, slap a brand name on it, and expect little girls to instantly fall in love with it just because. This is an absolutely insulting, degrading attitude to have not just towards girls, but children in general. Contrary to popular belief, kids are not stupid. While we've all watched things as tykes that we later regard as being not that good, kids can usually pick out a complete waste of time pretty fast, and this wouldn't have made it past the first minute.

FiM, even at its worst moments, has obvious love and attention poured into it. Even if you didn't like MMC, the fact is that everyone on board tried to put something good together. MMDW is panned by a great number of fans, but there was still some semblance of love and care that went into its production. So Many Ways to Play is the exact opposite. Nobody cared at all about this project, nor did they want to waste any more money or time on it than they had to. I'm actually convinced that the followup, Over Two Rainbows, was released unfinished, since it's missing lip flaps and any real expressions from the ponies.

In closing, there is nothing redeemable about these specials. It would take another generation to finally put baby ponies right, making them actually kind of cute and not these mutant abominations that give kids nightmares right after boring them to sleep. The end.

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Sorry if you expected a joke, because there is nothing to laugh at here. These specials offended me on a very personal level. Now if you'll excuse me, I shall be spending the rest of my foolish April 1st eating leftover Easter candies. I need the chocolate after all this.