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My Little Pony‘s Lauren Faust on Her New DC Comics Shorts, Super Best Friends Forever

by Susana Polo | 2:48 pm, February 24th, 2012


It seems like every time Lauren Faust opens answers a question about how to make girl’s entertainment, something awesome comes out, so forgive us if we’re still a blinking at our good fortune to have DC Comics get her to make a series of animated shorts featuring three of the most famous female sidekicks in the DC universe. And blinking at how cute the designs look. And now gushing over her descriptions of how she’ll be characterizing them.

I mean, just look at some of the stuff she said to io9:

“I’ve been a comics fan my whole life. So I took what I knew of the history of Batgirl and Supergirl and Wondergirl. I just wanted to put together a superteam with the attitude of, ‘It’s fun to be a superhero.’ And taking a real approach, a fun and funny approach to what it’s like to be a teenage girl, and mixing that up with a superhero [story.]”

…For example, she imagined Supergirl as out to prove herself. Everybody in the world knows who Superman is, but not everybody knows about Supergirl. And even though both Kryptonians have the same powers and com e from the same place, everybody treats Supergirl like “chopped liver” compared to the celebrated Kal-El. “She doesn’t get the same amount of attention” as her cousin, notes Faust. “If you were going to apply that to a real teenage girl, she’d probably be pretty mad. She’s really got something to prove.”

Meanwhile, Batgirl is sort of the ultimate fangirl — Barbara Gordon grew up watching her dad work with Batman, since she was a little girl, and she’s looked up to him as a hero. “She’s a geek,” says Faust. “She’s dreamed about being a superhero throughout her whole childhood, and now that she’s a teenager and she’s got this mantle, she’s finally getting her chance.”

Though with the length of the five shorts set at about a minute each, not all of this backstory might shine through, but even a short series benefits from depth to draw from. Faust is also excited about depicting something that she didn’t get to do in My Little Pony:

“You get to have fighting in a superhero show,” she notes. “There’s absolutely no fighting in My Little Pony.” She wasn’t really upset or disappointed that the action-adventure aspects were downplayed in MLP— it’s more like, the project evolved as she collaborated on it — she’s glad to be doing more of that here. SBFF will feature “a little more adventure, a little more action, higher stakes [and] higher emotions… but still the same humor and the same heart.”

Above all, the series will be about how fun it is to be a superhero, and will be primarily about the friendship between the characters, not competition between them. Much like My Little Pony itself. While the DC Nation shorts are not intended to feed into a larger series, Faust says she wouldn’t mind if it did, and nether would we. ”If people should like it, and if people should respond well to the shorts, never say never. I could certainly see it in my head as something to carry longer stories and definitely a cool series. But that depends on a lot of other factors.”

Well, we’re pretty sure how we’re going to respond. To see the whole interview, including Faust’s thoughts on why the presence of action heroines in television has dropped off after its heyday in the ’90s, see the whole article at i09.

(via DC Women Kicking Ass.)

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  • Anonymous

    I’m curious as to how much of a say Lauren Faust has in the art direction of these shows. I can see a stylistic similarity to MLP in the promo art on this article but I’m curious as to whether or not that’s because it’s Faust’s work or if it was a conscious design choice to play up the relation to an already popular series.

    I certainly don’t mean to downplay her contribution to to either project it’s just that I’ve recently added her to my personal list of favorite television animators next to Tartakofsky, McCracken and Hartman and I just wonder how correct my own terminology is in regards to any of these names.

    Oh well, technical jargon aside I’m interested to see how this new project works out.

  • http://twitter.com/acidragdoll Bel

    Pretty sure she did the designs herself, as she did for MLP.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Amanda-LaPergola/81300432 Amanda LaPergola

    Batgirl is totally the Pinkie Pie.

  • Frodo Baggins

    Nice designs, though I wonder why Wonder Woman decided to affiliate with communist China.

  • Adam Whitley

    Snappier dressers

  • http://acksed.myopenid.com/ Colin

    Please have the Batfamily in it. PLEASE. :-)

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