My Little Pony G3

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My Little Pony G3 is a series of Direct-to-DVD movies, specials, and shorts released between 2003 and 2009. Somewhat akin to My Little Pony Tales, these stories tended to be about friendship and baking cakes. In general, My Little Pony G3 is the third most popular of all the incarnations of My Little Pony on its target demographic of girls, at least in terms of the cartoons adapted from them. G3.5 suffered a bit of a backlash due to the designs, but both series have their fans.

Tropes used in My Little Pony G3 include:
  • Adaptation Distillation: Most, if not all of the G3 stories have been released as either picture books, graphic novels, or both. These generally follow the storyline of the video releases, but simplify or leave out certain elements.
  • Alternate Continuity
  • Anthropomorphic Shift: The first special wasn't really all that different from other gens. They occasionally used their hooves to do things, and moved their forelegs around, but it wasn't that different from, say, Friendship is Magic. Later on they became far more anthropomorphic and starting wearing clothings often.
  • Art Evolution: Originally the specials were hand-drawn.
  • Art Shift: Some of the toy commercials use a different art style from the actual cartoons.
  • Be Yourself: The Princess Promenade, "Come Back, Lily Lightly"
  • Big Damn Heroes: Pinkie Pie and Star Catcher's rescue of Minty and Thistle Whistle from a hot air balloon in A Very Minty Christmas
    • Also, the Breezies save the ponies from going down a waterfall.
  • Breaking the Fourth Wall: At the end of the "We're Glad That Everyone's a Princess" song in The Princess Promenade, the characters turn to the audience and sing "And, yes, it's true! That you are a princess too!"
  • British Stuffiness: Spike fits this stereotype in this version, mainly in The Princess Promenade. While he isn't exactly reserved, he's certainly quite stuffy and concerned with rules and proper behavior.
  • Canon Discontinuity: Once the "Core 7" came along, Hasbro threw out several older characterizations out the window and everything became even more feminine. This Dork Age-type change is where the infamous "Fashionista" Dash comes from.
  • Christmas Special:
  • Everything's Better with Princesses: Played with in The Princess Promenade. At first, everyone is excited to have Wysteria be the princess of Ponyville, but as Spike's rules pile on and restrict Wysteria from doing the things she normally does, including interacting with her friends as equals, the idea of having a princess doesn't seem so great anymore. However, instead of quitting being a princess in name, Wysteria essentially quits the job by making EVERYONE in Ponyville into royalty, including Spike, which means that neither she nor anyone else has to follow the princess rules anymore. So it's played straight in the sense that everything is better with LOTS of princesses instead of just one, but in making the title meaningless it's not a typical example of the trope. It almost seems to have a lesson of "It's fun to be a princess but only when you don't have to follow any behavioral rules or do any actual leading."
  • Filler: The World's Biggest Tea Party stage show is nice enough, but it also contains a lot of songs that seem to have been placed merely as a way to get the audience up and excited and don't actually drive the plot of the film. The story presented in the stage show probably could have easily fit into a 22 minute television episode.
  • Fun Size: The Breezies in Princess Promenade and the new redesign in Twinkle Wish Adventure.
  • The Klutz: Minty, more so in A Very Minty Christmas than in any other movie.
  • Licensed Games: A few games for the Game Boy Advance and PC/Macs came out during this series' run.
  • Lighter and Softer: Within the same generation at that. The first few specials weren't the sugary, Tastes Like Diabetes fueled stuff that G3 is known for (although it wasn't anywhere as dark as pre-Tales G1).
  • Mad Libs Dialogue: The "Cheerilee & Scootaloo's Storybook" section of the online G3.5 Family Scrapbook.
  • The Musical: The World's Biggest Tea Party stage show, to the degree that there is actually more singing than there is dialogue. It is not unusual for a song to be almost immediately followed by an entire song, as there a total of 25, running a total of close to 40 minutes. Many of the songs are extended versions of songs from other G3 releases heavily edited to fit the show, including "Positively Pink", "I Just Wanna Have Fun, "Breezies Know" and "Here in Unicornia". In fact, they may have just about recycled close to half of the tunes within the G3 releases, including the My Little Pony theme. Others, however, were created exclusively for the stage show. And one song, "I'm a Little Teapot", isn't original material at all, just a traditional tune that they repurposed for the program.
  • Mythology Gag: Well, there's two of them
    • In Dancing In The Clouds, Sky Wishes prefaces every wish she makes with "I wish, I wish, I wish...." just like Twilight in G1's Escape From Castle Midnight.
    • In Friends are Never Far Away, Skywishes is searching for the manual to a hot air balloon so she can find out how to lower the landing gear. Of a hot air balloon. This related to the My Little Pony Tales episode Up, Up, and Away which has Patch steal a balloon and immediately find the instruction manual in the basket.
  • No Antagonist
  • Off-Model: Inverted in that the series was very on-model, to a fault. In many specials, especially post Core-7, everypony essentially looked alike at all times. They all followed the same movement patterns and weren't very expressive. During the Core 7 and G3.5 only Toola-Roola had her own tic, which was occasionally blowing her mane out of her eyes.
  • Only Sane Pony: kimono shows signs of being this in A Charming Birthday.

Kimono: "That's why I live outta town."

  1. ↑ from the G3 toy "Sing & Dance Pinkie Pie" and the "Sing-A-Long with Star Song" section of the online G3.5 Family Scrapbook
  2. ↑ from the G3 cartoons The Princess Promenade and Meet the Ponies: Starsong "Dance & Sing Party" [dead link]
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