Cynical Cinema

As a child, I found My Little Pony to be very perplexing. I could not understand why girls in my class had these little plastic horses, and combed their hair at recess, and played at tea parties with Sparklestar and Twinkletush and all the other bizarrely named creatures. Dolls I got. Sort of. They’re like little people, and you can pretend like they are actually talking, and you can live out your fantasies through the world of dolls. Like we boys did with army men and transformers. I suppose I knew, deep down, that My Little Pony fed into every little girl’s desire to own a horse (or, a pony, as most would say), much the same way transformers fed into a little boy’s desires to own a robot. And that the little dinosaur figures I played with were a manifestation of my own latent desire to own a Dimetredon. God, how I wanted a Dimetredon! He could have fetched my slippers, and store solar energy in his fin to keep me warm after those long hockey games where my feet froze, and he could have bitten my sister and eaten some neighbourhood cats…anyway.

Paramount Home Entertainment is releasing a special holiday treat for those girls out there who have not outgrown My Little Pony. And I’m sure they exist. After all, My Little Pony couldn’t still be around if there weren’t still some freaky members of the sparkly-pink-pony brigade still kicking. Much like the comeback of Transformers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, there are 30-year-old nerds of both genders who won’t let some of this old school crap die. And so we get A Very Minty Christmas. It is a Christmas story, starring Minty the Pony. Yes, the pony’s name is Minty. The characters of My Little Pony, you see, are either named as though they were the long-lost children of Frank Zappa, or like strippers. I am certain, although I didn’t see her in this episode, that there is a My Little Pony horse named Vanilla, and one named Candi, and one named Diamond, and several more named Sun Station and Moon Unit and Paisley Horseradish. Unfortunately, those characters do not appear in A Very Minty Christmas. Instead we have to deal with characters with even more irritating names, like Thistle Whistle, Pinkie Pie, Rainbow Dash, and Sparkleworks.

I am a firm believer that no child playing with toys named things like “Sparkleworks” can grow up to lead a normal, adult life. Being exposed to this kind of stuff in childhood will lead to an adult lifetime of dotting your i’s with hearts and happy faces, an obsession with cutesy emoticons, the purchase of Anne Geddes paraphernalia, and a collection of CDs by the Olsen twins. And that’s a best-case scenario. At worst, a career as a stripper, dancing enthusiastically to songs by Aqua, ABBA, Air Supply and the Starland Vocal Band, saving one dollar bill from each customer to be pasted into your scrapbook with shiny star stickers and glitter, next to your magazine cutouts of a shirtless Ryan Seacrest. And that path can only lead, inevitably, to your being murdered in a back alley somewhere in a glitter-for-oral-sex deal gone awry.

Anyway, A Very Minty Christmas is a far-too-early Christmas release that opens with the most irritating theme song this side of the new Dr. Phil theme. I rewound the theme song about nine times, because I was convinced that I had heard the word “darkies” used in the song. I am still not convinced that I didn’t hear that word, but then I was drinking a little at the time. I could swear they sang “there’s a twinkle in the darkies”. I don’t want to add racism to my litany of complaints against the My Little Pony cartoon, but it certainly didn’t start things off on a good note for me. The show stars Minty the pony, who accidentally shatters the candy cane that will summon Santa Claus, and must go on a quest in an inexplicable hot air balloon to replace it. The rest of the ponies, who are all apparently sorority girls at a slumber party, must set off after her to rescue her from the perils of single-person hot air balloon piloting. Before they go, however, they make a few important decisions. Like, pink glitter? Blue glitter? Silver glitter? They settle on pink and mint. And then they set off on their rescue mission.

The most fascinating character in the show is Rainbow Dash, who is either British or Southern, with a completely undecipherable accent. If she is British, then she must be the matronly mother of this bizarre sorority house. If she is Southern, she seems to be the matron of this bizarre brothel. There is also a pony reminiscent of Starchild Ace Frehley in Kiss And The Phantoms Of The Amusement Park, called I believe Starcatcher. Throughout the episode, the ponies are continuously giving each other medals. My girlfriend (a reformed My Little Pony enthusiast), watching this with me, explained this to me - “they’re show horses - whaddya expect?” I thought this was a prescient statement, a window into the culture that is My Little Pony, one from which I will be forever excluded.  I should have let my girlfriend review this one too.

There is another episode on this DVD too, a bonus episode called “Dancing In The Clouds”. It’s just as irritating. Oh - the box set comes with a little plastic horse, Minty, wearing a Santa hat. So you may want to pick it up after all. Good luck with the rest of your life.