Was MLP G3 really that bad?

(Originally drafted October 2023, finished in April 2024 )
It's recommended to read the prequel first, if you haven't already.

Table of contents:
A new era begins - G3's cartoons - Core 7 - G3...5 - So was G3 really that bad?

A new era begins

In 2003, G2 was on it's last leg - literally! The ponies scurried off to the corners of Europe to thrive, and its last year was pretty uneventful. Then something strange happened. The frail, soyed out males died off because their diet of pizza and candy malnourished them, and the remaining females had to bulk up. They became much bulkier compared to G2s, but still slimmer than the fat G1s. We're witnessing an evolution here. No more boys. No more soft vinyl. (Same colors, though.) Not much species diversity, but down the line pegasi and unicorns appeared. Babies were later introduced, but where did they come from? Parthenogenesis?

You know damn well where this is going...

Welcome to My Little Pony Generation 3! Depending on who you are, your reaction to this picture is either joy, indifference, or running away screaming.

As we know, I was a pretty big 80sboo that was indifferent towards My Little Pony until Friendship is Magic came along. In hindsight, I think G3 was a big reason why. I was indifferent to G1; My mom bought them often in the early 2000s to resell on eBay and I wanted to like them, but I thought they were ugly and was more interested reading collectors fansites. G2 was Hasbro's dirty little secret that was hidden from me. G3, on the other hand, I saw in stores constantly and was very much not a fan of what I saw!

I used to fucking hate G3. It was sacchirine and idiotic. It wasn't cute, it was insulting to the viewers! It SUCKS! My brain is melting as I watch this shit! I hate these ugly bitches and wouldn't hesitate to send them to the glue factory!

Ouch... That's a bit harsh, isn't it? Let's back things up a bit.

There was always this knee-jerk negative reaction to the previous cartoons from people (usually adults, and adult men) who started with Friendship is Magic and expected previous generations to have the same self-awareness and quality. Well that's on you, because these were glorified toy commercials for little girls! But then again, "being for little girls" doesn't exempt it from criticism. You shouldn't hold it in adult standards, but I do find a lot of media for small children a bit worrying. Children aren't stupid, and media that acts as if they are isn't going to help their development. Especially when parents love to use the TV and internet as a substitute to actually raising their brats. Meanwhile, when I was in elementary school there was nothing I wanted more than to kill Barney with my own two hands. ...Sorry, did I get off track?

I thought I was going to be similar to most bronies in 2010-2013 where Friendship is Magic was the only generation I liked. But I warmed up to G1 a lot (mostly for the specials...My Little Pony n' Friends was not very good!) and liked G2's aesthetic, but G3 would just not click with me. Then I saw Star Catcher, and was very charmed by her design. I tried to watch the cartoon with her, but wrote it off as vapid and idiotic. This is a girl's cartoon, so of course they're talking about friendship and tea parties, the exact shit Lauren Faust wanted to avoid in season one. I just figured I would collect G3 toys and stay far away from any official media.

Before Friendship is Magic became the cash cow that changed the franchise, searching for various Mane 6 characters would lead to their G3 counterparts instead. The first time I saw G3 Rarity I had a knee-jerk reaction on who the fuck this terrible impostor was. Then I noticed her cartoon had Brights Brightly, who resembled the old design of my OC. Well that's a funny coincidence, what else is going on here? Why is G3 Rarity an idiotic child that plays in mud? Why do people like Minty so much? How different is G3 Pinkie Pie? You can't show me this and not expect me to investigate.

Liking G3 was just a bit ironic you know. It was the early 2010's ironic, like Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff. But I warmed up to it quickly after watching the cartoons more. I ended up growing to like it a lot unironically and even bought The Princess Promenade on DVD and watched it on my 20th birthday! I found some other media shared on Tumblr, and while I'm not interested in the story books or comics, there are some good moments of humor I liked.

Unlike G2, whose failure was linked to not having a cartoon, G3 had plenty of direct-to-video movies. So how bad is it? Or is it actually bad at all?

G3's cartoons

If you want to be pedantic, I noticed some mini-phases within G3's animated releases. The art style of the first three cartoons uses thinner lines and no shading. I found all three of these cartoons pretty decent, and they made me laugh several times (intentionally and unintentionally). If some insane sadist locked you in a basement and forced you to watch shitty direct-to-video cartoons from the 2000s, these would be the better ones. I thought it was interesting how all the characters look identical minus their colors and cutie mark, but there's still an effort to make the ponies distinctive by giving them personalities. Said "personalities" is just giving them a catchphrase, verbal tic, or a specific thing they're obsessed with, but it gets an E for effort. (To be fair, My Little Pony n' Friends did this too.)

My main nitpick is that there's so many characters, it's hard to care about any of them. And if there's a character you do like, you'll probably never see her again. For example, Razzaroo is the protagonist of A Charming Birthday and is differentiated by her "yes yes yes" tic, but she's never seen again after that. My favorite character in that cartoon was Kimono for being the only sane pony, but that was her first and last appearance. And every cartoon introduces several new, unmemorable faces that we'll quickly forget about. What a bloated cast... The characters that stuck out the most to me were Rainbow Dash, Minty, Pinkie, and Star Catcher. Hasbro seems to agree with me here.

(A Charming Birthday, Dancing in the Clouds, Friends Are Never Far Away)

Near the end of Year 3 (2005) is when G3's "iconic" art style with the thick lines and shading comes in. A Very Minty Christmas was the first cartoon to use this, but it has the overall same quality of early G3. New characters we'll quickly forget about are introduced, while others are shoved in a background role. I actually watched this on Christmas day a few years ago, and it's a pretty average holiday special with some funny moments. Year 4 (2006) on the other hand, was the peak of animated G3. Four whopping cartoons were released on VHS and DVD - two movies and two shorts - and my personal favorites are in this bunch. This is when G3 actually tries to do more with this vague setting; In the earlier cartoons, we only know about Ponyville and Butterfly Island where the pegasi come from, but now the Breezies and unicorns are introduced. (G3 did "species segregation" before G5.) Of course, the pegasi were shafted, but they were kinda boring...

I mentioned The Princess Promenade was the first G3 cartoon I liked unironically, and I still find it pretty entertaining even on rewatch. The same issues like certain characters not appearing again are still there (Daffidazey was a one-scene wonder), but at least Wysteria was previously a background character given a major role. This is speculation on my end, but I think this is when whoever was in charge took the hint about how there's too many characters. The popular characters like Pinkie Pie, Rainbow Dash, and Minty appear more often, and the new characters from The Princess Promenade like the Breezies and Spike return in The Runaway Rainbow. The shorts released this year also focus on major characters; Pinkie Pie and Ladybug Jamboree is exactly what it says on the tin, and Greetings from Unicornia is about Rainbow Dash visiting Rarity in (you guessed it) Unicornia.

(A Very Minty Christmas, The Princess Promenade, The Runaway Rainbow)

So far so good, huh? After these were released, G3 was at it's 5th year in 2007. I think by now Hasbro knows which characters are liked the most, and has decent amount of locations to choose from for future stories. Three short cartoons are released this year, all in one DVD. These shorts reinforce my suspicions about the bloated cast being cut down more, because while there are new characters introduced in two of them (Lily Lightly, Star Flight, and Heart Bright - Storybelle was never made into a toy), they're just token animated appearances to promo "special" toys released the year before. Otherwise, most of the characters are the same recurring ones that appeared in the last major cartoons (minus Puzzlemint, but she featured in a Plug-n-Play TV game). They're also painfully average and not very interesting, although Two for the Sky gets a shout out for having lesbian ponies that sleep in the same bed together. ("They were almost like twins"... If you say so.)

(Come Back Lily Lightly, Two for the Sky, and Positively Pink)

This page is mostly about the G3 cartoons, but I'm going to shift gears and talk about the toys now. (You'll know why soon.) Year 5 wasn't really anything special on the toy front, it just released more gimmick ponies, the fan favorites, and the 25th anniversary of My Little Pony was approaching soon. That is... until you look closer at what else was released besides that. Uh... What is this style of toy, exactly?

These miniature figures - referred to as Ponyville style, were technically first released in 2006, but it was just one four-pack. In 2007, various G3 characters were re-relased in this style. They're not too bad, if you ask me. G1 and G2 also released miscellaneous merchandise like figurines and keychains, so this isn't out of the ordinary. But if you look at a catalog of all the toys in this style, you'll notice that it gets more repetitive after 2008. Almost as if the same few characters are being released over and over. Wait a minute... Could this be...?

Year 5 also released another strange premotion for how the next few years of G3 will be.

*SCREAMS*

Things start getting kind of weird from here.

Core 7

So maybe G3 isn't so bad if you don't take it seriously! But it turns out that I may not have been the only one who thought the cast way too big. Even though I complained about this when watching the animated releases, this isn't even a problem unique to G3. G1 ran for a decade and had even more characters, and that's not even counting the Europe-exclusive ponies. G2's catalog is nothing to sneeze at either. But maybe Hasbro took the hint and realized that children and casual collectors will stick to certain characters, and the new gimmick ponies released each year we'll never see again aren't worth it. Or maybe some children got mad that their favorite pony barely got a speaking role in some cartoons. I don't know.

Either way, 2008 was when Hasbro decided to stop making new characters and focus on seven characters. Core 7 consists of Pinkie Pie, Rainbow Dash, Sweetie Belle, Scootaloo, Starsong, Cheerilee, and Toola-Roola. This doesn't seem like a big deal at first, since every generation had ponies that were popular enough to be re-released often. Except the issue here is I don't even know who most of them are. Okay, I know Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash, but the others are a bunch of literally whos! In fact, that Cheerliee isn't even the same Cheerliee that appeared in The Runaway Rainbow; Cheerliee was a unicorn, and this is an earth pony! It turns out the Core 7 Cheerliee was previously known as Cherry Blossom... Again, who? Cherry Blossom was only released four times, and has zero animated appearances. (Was someone at Hasbro playing favorites?) The other characters were made up on the spot and have never appeared before 2008, although Toola-Roola has the same color scheme as Rarity.

If you couldn't tell, I'm not a fan of this. Core 7 is the tipping point to when G3 goes to complete hell, but you'll have to wait a little bit for that part. I understand wanting to reduce the cast size, but this is pretty drastic. The Core 7 cartoons are a soft reset, and the already-existing characters like Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash get new voices and personalities. So I can't even stick around and watch it for them. Gee, thanks... If I could go back in time and do this my way, I'd keep the idea of focusing on several main characters, but I would make them fan favorites that people are already familiar with. Like, hello? Where the fuck is Minty? (Outside of one holiday release in 2008.) Or even Rarity, who was already in three cartoons and is friends with Rainbow Dash? If you want more species diversity, there's Starcatcher and Zipzee. What about ponies who appeared more often in printed media, like Sunny Daze and Kimono?

I decided to take the plunge and watch the first Core 7 cartoons, since they're not very long. Pinkie Pie's Special Day is literally... Just a recap of Pinkie Pie's appearances in the previous G3 cartoons, despite this being a new continuity. Starsong and the Magic Dance Shoes properly introduces the Core 7 with a new theme song (and is the origin of the Rainbow Dash always dresses in style meme), but it's very short and painfully average. Rainbow Dash's Special Day is another 9-10 minute cartoon full of reused footage with Rainbow Dash's new voice dubbed over. What the hell... I mean, 2008 was a pretty bad year in general. There was a recession, you know. There's more short introduction cartoons titled Meet the Ponies, but I really don't care to watch them.

(Pinkie Pie's Special Day, Starsong and the Magic Dance Shoes, Rainbow Dash's Special Day)

You're probably thinking while reading this; "Geez, you're being a bit too harsh on shitty direct-to-video children's toy commercial! You don't have a right to be talking smack when you were flunking high school when Core 7 happened!" First, get over yourself. Second, even when I was a little brat glued to the TV, I was nitpicking these things. I can assure you if I was a decade younger and my mother put these cartoons on to shut me up, I'd be raving over why does Rainbow Dash have a different voice? Why are the old G3 cartoons referenced but Ponyville now is completely fucking empty except for these seven characters? And probably turn off the TV to make up my own stories.

That's another thing that gets me about Core 7. There are literally no other characters present, not even in the background. I'm mostly focusing on the cartoons here, but it's like this in the other Core 7 media too. I once played the Nintendo DS game out of curiosity, and it creeped me out how Ponyville was like some abandoned village. This is making me wonder now, what's worse? Having a cast that's too big, or a cast that's too small? Even if it was hard to care about the vast majority of the characters early on, the setting felt more lively with a large cast. Now Ponyville is a ghost town, the ponies we were already familiar with have different personalities, and I don't even care about the new faces introduced. Did Hasbro just... Brutally murder all of the other ponies, reprogrammed the two legacy survivors, and pretended it didn't happen? Is that why the previous cartoons are shown as flashbacks? Just kidding, I'm just having a Game Theory moment.

Well, at least Core 7 kept G3's art style. I'm sure the fans who weren't literal toddlers just collected the normal-looking toys and ignored everything else. Except it didn't stay the same at all. Here's when it goes from just "weird" to really fucking bad.

G3...5

AKA, the dark age. Dork age. It's both, okay.

Remember when I noted those strange, smaller plastic "Ponyville style" toys with molded hair that appeared for awhile in 2007? I think that was one of the tipping points that led to this new redesign. I already mentioned this in the prequel to this page, but there's a trend that the end of every My Little Pony generation has a weird "in-between" era for a year or two before the next. Hasbro decided that mass-murdering all the old characters in cold blood wasn't enough: It's time to transmutate the survivors into horrifying horse-duck hybrids.

Once again, the hypothetical smartass in the audience chimes in to keep this going: "Isn't that a bit too harsh? That official art you posted isn't that bad. It's kind of cute, actually." Here's the thing: It's not that bad on paper. The background in this image is colorful and stylized, and now the Core 7 aren't using the same cookie-cutter designs in G3. These redesigns do a better job of showing off their personalities by visuals alone, as opposed to how A Charming Birthday in 2003 differentiated characters by their voice and actions. So what's the issue? They don't translate well in toy form. Like, at all.

*duck quacking noises*

"Oh, come on. Just because they're not to your tastes doesn't mean it's bad. I'm sure plenty of little girls - you know, the REAL target audience - enjoyed this." Oh really, hypothetical smartass? If that's true, why did I see these exclusively discarded in thrift stores or sold in bargain bin retail stores from 2010-2011? These SUCK! I'm sure some children with questionable tastes liked these, but what the fuck is this? More important, what is THAT?

Yes, that's a baby of herself in the first photo. Since there are only seven characters now.

Jesus fucking Christ. Now I realize why I hated G3 for so long; This was one of my first few exposures to it. Duckface horses, and strange demonic humanoid infant dolls. Yes, Newborn Cuties technically first appeared in Year 5, although they were referred to as So-Soft ponies. There was also only a few of them, and no cartoons to my knowledge. Baby ponies have existed since G1, but they looked like actual ponies. What's with the humanoid design? At this point, I think Hasbro took the memo that it's weird to make baby versions of its new, tiny cast, with no parents in sight. The only new characters added in G3.5 were the mothers of four characters, but they have no name besides "Mom". Also, there's no mom for the other three Core 7 ponies anyway. Okay then...

Mom Dash, Mom Cheerilee-Scootaloo, and Mom Pie. I actually think they have cute designs, but they're wasted on G3.5's ugly style...

Remember when I said in regard to the proto-Newborn Cuties, they didn't appear in any cartoons? Yeah, I've been spending my time talking about the toys, but yes, G3.5 had cartoons in the redesigned style. Including shorts about ugly demon baby ponies. I've actually seen them once over a decade ago out of morbid curiosity, and it's similar to the brain-rotting crap you see parents make their iPad babies watch. You'd have to put a gun to my head to make me watch them again. Or any of the short webisodes in the G3.5 style. I'm getting tired looking at these freaks... Instead, I'm going to touch on the direct-to-video animation that was released during G3.5, Twinkle Wish Adventure.

Twinkle Wish Adventure... Is actually pretty good! It's even a better Generic Winter Holiday™ special than A Very Minty Christmas. It also improves on both of my complaints about G3 and Core 7. Notably how the cast in early G3 was too big, but then too small in Core 7 to the point it felt like an abandoned ghost town. Twinkle Wish Adventure focuses on the Core 7, but there's plenty of other background characters seen in Ponyville, and even new ones introduced like Mayor Flitterflutter and Whimsey Weatherbe. It also made me finally like the Core 7 ponies, even the literally whos. It turns out what this new continuity needed was a length more than 5 minutes, and an actual plot to show off the characters and their social dynamics. I don't even mind the art style, it's closer to the decent concept art than the duckfaced mutant toys. The colors are nice, and the backgrounds are pleasant.

Unfortunately, this was the the last Core 7 cartoon, give or take the short prequel on the same DVD, and the Newborn Cuties shorts also released in 2009. This is kind of mind-boggling, because Twinkle Wish Adventure is equally good, if not better than the "peak" of G3. To be fair, that's kind of a low bar. These are direct-to-video/DVD cartoons after all. G3.5 was rescued from the scrappy heap, only to be sent back into the glue factory. Geez... Core 7 lasted until 2010, and then Friendship is Magic started airing that October. The rest is history.

So was G3 really that bad?

At the beginning? No! 2000s media may be nostalgic if you were shitting your diapers back then, but as a teenager I mostly saw a hotbed of subpar direct-to-video cartoons and shovelware video games. Early G3 was some of the better VHS/DVD-exclusive animation I've seen. It knew it's audience without treating them like idiots, and even as an adult I got plenty of laughs from it. It did suffer from being a glorified toy commercial with it's loads of characters, but attempting to fix that backfired hard. And by the time Hasbro finally figured out how to balance it in Twinkle Wish Adventure, it was over.

In fact, I think Core 7's abrupt introduction may have cut G3's life short. I speculated last time that G2's failure led to G3's success, but every generation has its pros and cons. G2's fatal flaw was introducing a new art style too soon and a lack of cartoon, and G3's was flipping through the extreme of either having too many characters or too little. G1 lasted a whopping decade, while G2 spanned only seven years. But G3 was around for six years before the G3.5 redesigns. Remember, reviewing Year 5 (2007) was when I started noticing something might be up, and Core 7 was released the next year. Then the duckface redesigns emerged in 2009, and after that I started seeing them constantly discarded in thrift stores and bargain bins. But like I said, I was flunking high school when this happened, I don't know what was going through the Hasbro executive's heads.

G3's shortcomings also led to G4 and Friendship is Magic's even bigger success. I'm assuming you're already familiar with G4 (either from experience or osmosis), but I'm going to remind you again that G4 went on for an entire decade, just like G1. And it had the balance that was G3 was missing all along; It had it's "core" characters with the Mane 6 for the plot to focus on, but plenty of side and background characters to make the setting more lively. It also took inspiration from the amount of action and villains G1's Rescue from Midnight Castle and Escape from Katrina TV specials, which G3 was missing.

Unfortunately, Friendship is Magic did a bit too well. Instead of G5 repeating the cycle and having a quiet flop era akin to G2, Hasbro is repeating similar mistakes all over again. Now G5 is riding on G4's coat tails with a distant sequel, and with art on par with G3.5's duckface toys.

I know, I know... The few things I've said about G5 weren't very nice. But maybe that's a topic for another day. ...If I want to.