My Little Pony (1986)
First episode title: The End of Flutter Valley: Part 1
How familiar with the show am I?: I was aware of it, but I had never watched any of it, or of any My Little Pony show.
Is this the first episode?: There had previously been a couple of TV specials and a movie based on the toyline, but this is the first episode of the actual series. That does mean I'm missing some context, because it evidently continues from the movie.
It's been a few months since I last looked at a show created to advertise a Hasbro toyline, and now we're on another! This time, it's the sweet little multicoloured horses known as My Little Pony - the original incarnation, not the mega-popular Friendship is Magic version from over 20 years later, which I gather is quite different.
The very first thing I notice as the episode starts is that it has the same writer as the first episode of Transformers, George Arthur Bloom - evidently he's done quite a few things for Hasbro-related productions.
The next thing we see is a white-furred, green-maned pony with wings, jumping around in some flowers and giggling. I'll be honest, I've used internet guides to keep track of all the characters - I would have had to do the same for Transformers if I wasn't already so familiar with it, these toyline-based shows always had huge casts - but here we're about to learn that this particular pony is Surprise. I'll also note, in case there are any that I end up never referring to by pronouns, that all of the ponies featured in this episode are girls.
We cut to a group of five ponies, and one tiny dragon, all walking along. One of them says "Where's Surprise? We don't want to lose her." I'm saying "one of them" because there's a recurring problem in this episode where one character is animated as speaking a line that's in the voice of a different character. It's not an extremely noticeable problem - I only actually spotted it once on first viewing - but it does make it occasionally awkward to say "this character said this line".
At that moment, Surprise sneaks up behind the group and shouts "Boo!" A very small blue pony at the back of the group, named Baby Cuddles, goes literally flying into the air in shock - and she's not one of the ones with wings! The little dragon, Spike, tries to catch her, but he's no bigger than she is and he topples over. Baby Cuddles, who is literally a baby after all, whines that Surprise frightened her.
A minor argument breaks out - Gusty, a white unicorn with green hair, complains that Surprise is wasting time when they should be getting to Flutter Valley (oh hey it's the place from the title of the episode), and Fizzy, a teal pony with all sorts of colours in her mane, is panicking that they might already be late for the celebration, which Gusty blames on how long the white-and-teal Cupcake took to bake the cake she's carrying on her back.
Now for the most obvious thing about Gusty to a modern viewer - she's played by Nancy Cartwright, before The Simpsons started, and the voice she uses here is very similar to what would become her Bart Simpson voice. Apparently this was a voice she used for all sorts of roles, and she hadn't yet settled on it being a specifically "boy" voice, but from a post-80s point of view it strongly gives the impression that Bart is playing this girl.
Cupcake retorts that "perfection is not something to be rushed", and after the surprise of Bart it's a lot less of a revelation to notice that Cupcake is Russi Taylor doing something similar to her Sherri and Terri voice. Baby Cuddles randomly changes the subject (well, she's a baby), saying that she's never been to Flutter Valley, and our remaining party member, Buttons, who is pink with blue and red hair, tells her how beautiful it is.
But it turns out we're not the only ones watching the ponies! The next thing we see is three human witches looking into a kind of big cauldron full of red liquid, displaying an image of what the ponies are doing. The lead witch exclaims how much she hates Flutter Valley, while angrily hitting the pot with a ladle and unintentionally knocking two rats in - they zoom back out again pretty fast!
We soon learn that the lead witch, who is short and dresses sort of like a fortune teller, is named Hydia. She's delightfully wicked and voiced by Tress MacNeille, sounding much like she later would as Mom in Futurama. The other two witches are her daughters - Draggle, who's tall and wears dungarees, and Reeka, who wears an apron and has a pot of some kind on her head. Whenever they call her "Mom", they correct themselves to "Hydia", so evidently she doesn't like being referred to as their mother.
The other two witches sycophantically agree that they hate Flutter Valley, and the Flutter Ponies too. Yes, we'll get to see those later! Hydia wants to ruin their celebration in revenge for them stopping the "Smooze", which is evidently a reference back to the movie. Reeka, who's eating some kind of cone full of snakes - see, she's disgusting, so she reeks, hence "Reeka" - also wants revenge on the "Little Ponies" for what they did to help, so that term is evidently how the main characters are distinguished from other groups like the Flutter Ponies.
There's some business with Hydia whacking her ladle on the ground and causing objects to fly around - a flying stool almost kills the rats and causes Draggle to fall over. Draggle says they should ruin the Flutter Ponies' celebration, which makes Hydia even angrier because she already said that! She decides that the first thing they should do is stop the Little Ponies from reaching it, and when her daughters ask how they should do that:
Hydia: How? You ask me how?! YOU'RE WITCHES, THAT'S HOW!
She chases them out, swinging the ladle around, and they run right out and straight off the volcanic pillar of rock that the house is on, getting caught on the way down - as Hydia complains about them and their stupidity, continuing to swing the ladle, she manages to fall off too! I do love my silly, over-the-top pantomime villains, so I can tell I would like her if I got to see much more of her.
Back on the road to Flutter Valley, the ponies are walking along - or flying, in Surprise's case. But Draggle and Reeka have found them, and are watching from behind a nearby bush on a hill. Draggle wants to just grab them, but Reeka whacks her with a branch and tells her how stupid she is for thinking just the two of them can grab all of them at once. Draggle definitely does seem to be the least intelligent of the witches, although none of them are that bright.
Reeka: We gotta be clever! We gotta outsmart 'em!
Draggle: You mean we have to get help?
Reeka tells Draggle to follow her down the other side of the hill, but Draggle sticks out her leg to trip her up, causing her to fall into a big puddle of mud. Reeka doesn't seem fazed - she picks up an old boot out of the mud and eats what looks like tadpoles out of it! Then she grabs a spell book that also seems to randomly be in the mud - was she meant to have been carrying it? - and finds the spell for "lasso" in the evidently alphabetically-ordered book (I can't make out everything she says when flicking through it but "large intestine" comes up).
Following the instructions in the spell book, the two of them pick up flowers and Reeka recites some magic words, causing the flowers to form themselves into lassos. The ponies, still talking to each other about whether they're going to be late, have no idea what's about to happen, when the witches jump out and start throwing the lassos over everyone!
Buttons: Help! It's the witches from the Volcano of Gloom!
Ah, so that's what that volcanic-looking place was. Very quickly, Baby Cuddles, Buttons, Gusty, and Cupcake are captured - Cupcake looks very sad as she's forced face-first into her own cake. I find it kind of funny that the witches needed a spell to make the lassos but are able to capture the ponies using them with no difficulty - I would have thought learning to throw them accurately would be harder than learning to make them, but I'm no expert!
Reeka was doing all the work till this point, but Draggle manages to catch Surprise in the air - Surprise tells Spike to run and get help, but Reeka uses the last remaining lasso to catch both Spike and Fizzy. The amount of ponies involved here makes each individual pony less memorable than any of the villains, which is a shame, because the ponies were the ones the show was supposed to be advertising!
Hydia, back at the house, is watching these events as before, and declares how proud she is of her daughters, squeezing her rats as she does so:
Next, we see some of the Flutter Ponies! A group of winged ponies are flying through a field, wondering why the Little Ponies haven't arrived yet - I'm not going to keep track of all their names here because most of them do nothing individually in the episode, and aren't named within it.
They catch sight of the witches and the Little Ponies and see what has happened, so they switch to "utter flutter" and fly towards the witches, sprinkling some sort of dust over them that makes them start sneezing. The witches flee in the face of this overwhelming onslaught, and the ponies escape.
The witches, once again in a bush, argue about whether they've failed, Draggle pointing out that Hydia could be watching what they're doing in the "viewing pool", so that's apparently what it was called. The two of them get in a fight, and end up rolling down a slope, tangled together in a ball of vines!
Now, it's finally time for the celebration, with the Little Ponies safely present! Rosedust, the Queen of the Flutter Ponies, gives a speech about how important the Sun and its light and heat is. So this show is even a little bit educational if you squint. She's giving the speech in front of a big jewel held up by a pillar, whose relevance isn't yet clear. The witch sisters are once again watching from a height at a distance, this time behind a rock for some variety.
This was the point in the episode where I actually noticed the voice mismatch error I mentioned earlier, as Draggle says a full line in Reeka's voice before following it with one in her own. Anyway, both of them hate to see the ponies having a good time, and start looking through the spellbook to see what they can try, Draggle insisting on being the one to look this time - and almost toppling off the hill due to the weight of the book!
Queen Rosedust declares today to be "Sun Tuesday", and that kicks off a song sung by all the ponies. Of course, I don't know whether a song is a feature in every episode or just this one, but I would guess this is just here specifically because it's a celebration. The song is about how great the Sun is, and is accompanied by a montage of natural scenes and of the ponies playing. It's all very sweet!
Back to the witches, and Draggle hasn't managed to find any good spells for ruining the celebration this whole time. Reeka is fed up and just suggests something herself - a landslide - and so Draggle turns to the page in the book that also contains "land", "land grant", "land lord", and "land mine". Well, now I want to see what the landlord spell does!
Reeka grabs a lizard from a nearby rock, presumably to eat it given what we've seen already, but the cute little animal gives her a kiss on the nose, and she drops it in disgust!
Next, the Bushwoolies are presenting gifts to the Queen. The Bushwoolies are the colourful balls of fluff that Cupcake was juggling at one point during the song montage - they're in one of the gifs above. They have made some "woolie pies" - I hope we're not to take that too literally - and they've also brought "bushmelons". Cupcake also presents the ruined remains of her cake:
Cupcake: And here's a chocolate cake, Rosedust. Well, it was a chocolate cake...
There's no time to hear how Rosedust feels about this, though, because the witches have cast their spell, and the place starts to shake. I love this little bit where one of the ponies guesses that the noise they can hear is "heavy dancing", and then it cuts to the witches dancing around with glee. Then the rocks start falling around the ponies:
Rosedust: Run, my little ponies! Fly away, my little Flutter Ponies! Hide, Bushwoolies, hide!
Then, Buttons and Spike realise that the Sunstone - the big jewel from the celebration - is about to fall! I wish the episode had told me what it does, because the fact that someone needs to stop it from falling is the episode's big cliffhanger. Yes, it's over already! It was only ten minutes long, but it was Part 1 of a ten-part serial. It's too bad I already have so many other things to watch!