I was extremely skeptical at first about taking the job. Shows based on girls’ toys always left a bad taste in my mouth, even when I was a child. They did not reflect the way I played with my toys. I assigned my ponies and my Strawberry Shortcake dolls distinctive personalities and sent them on epic adventures to save the world. On TV, though… female characters [in children’s shows] have been so homogenized with old-fashioned “niceness” that they have no flaws and are unrelatable. They are so pretty, polite and perfect; there is no legitimate conflict and nothing exciting ever happens…
This perception, more than anything, is what I am trying to change with My Little Pony.
— Lauren Faust, creative head and executive producer of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.
We already loved the My Little Pony mashup videos, but, okay, now I’m seriously considering paying an extra $2 in Netflix a month to get My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic DVDs. Faust’s whole post on My Little Pony and her attempts to create a show for girls that says “There are lots of different ways to be a girl,” can be found here, and it’s well worth a read.
