The original show bible (pitch notes) discussion

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The original show bible (pitch notes) discussion

Postby drunkill (?) » Sat Oct 07, 2017 6:01 pm

It is not a good month for leaks related to My Little Pony. First the movie was leaked, then the last few episodes of Season 7 and now a bunch of episode scripts and the show bible has been leaked. While we don't condone leaking, I'm making this thread to discuss the original pitch of Friendship Is Magic for Hasbro which is now out and available on the internet.

Do not post links to leaked material on The Round Stable forums. The show bible is still copyright to Hasbro and has a confidentially warning at the start of it.

This thread is a place to discuss the leaked show pitch information given it is from 2009.


Anyway, some interesting tidbits I got from glancing over it quickly before bed; a few of these we knew beforehand such as Applebonking becoming Applebucking.

  • The ponies were going to wear clothes much more often.
  • The Wonderbolts were originally Blue Thunder (a reference to the Blue Angles no doubt)
  • Twilight Sparkle was Twilight Twinkle with a cresent moon & star cutiemark (and more blue than purplehorse)
  • Sweet Apple Acres was Big Apple Orchard
  • Big Macintosh was Big Apple
  • Applebloom was Apple Seed
  • It was confirmed that Scootaloo cannot fly (pretty obvious)
  • Princess Celestia was Queen Celestia (we knew this)
  • Zecora was Shaman
  • It was originally called 'A Dawg and Pony Show' and the Diamond Dogs spoke like "gansta rappers"
  • Seaponies were going to be in a Season 1 episode
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Postby The Doctor (?) » Sat Oct 07, 2017 6:07 pm

This can probably be in general ponies instead of the spoiler forum. Not like this has any relevance on the future of the show, just a window into it's origins.


"Big, strong and, well, studly, it’s not unusual for a girl pony to develop a crush on Big Apple, and giggly fillies are often found visiting the farm to admire him under the guise that they want to buy some pie. Some of our girls may not admit it, but they may just be crushing a bit on him, too."


:eeyup: All the ladies love the Mac.
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Postby PonyHag714 (?) » Sat Oct 07, 2017 6:11 pm

I found it interesting that the bible makes no mention of Princess Luna, Nightmare Moon or the banishing. I guess they came up with that later. :unenthused:

They describe Celestia as an elusive character. I'm glad that's changed. :gotcha:
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Postby The Doctor (?) » Sat Oct 07, 2017 6:13 pm

PonyHag714 wrote:I found it interesting that the bible makes no mention of Princess Luna, Nightmare Moon or the banishing. I guess they came up with that later. :unenthused:


Yeah, considering that ended up being the pilot, I'm surprised nothing is mentioned about it.
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Postby Fizzbuzz (?) » Sat Oct 07, 2017 6:20 pm

I found it interesting how, though the other "relationship episode" story pitches got used pretty much as written, Bring On the Thunder eventually got split across several episodes. Consider:
Little Appleseed has a new plan for obtaining her cutie mark and Rainbow Dash has agreed to help. However, Rainbow had a bit of a brain fart in her planning,youseethatverydayisthedaythat
the Blue Thunders will be in town for a show! Now,RainbowDashwantsnothingmorethan to become a Blue Thunder, and this opportunity toimpressthemistoohardtopassup.Rainbow, being the slightly irresponsible pony that she is, puts her priority on showing off. But every time Rainbow pulls off an impressive maneuver, the Thunders just happen to be looking the other way. InthemeantimeAppleseedtriestoac- complishhergoalsonherown---whichisreally, really, really bad because Appleseed is attempting toearnacutiemarkforDAREDEVILSTUNTS!! Andofcourse,justwhenRainbowDashisabout to pull of her most spectacular move with the BlueThunders’undividedattention,littleApple- seedshootsherselfoutofapoorlyconstructed canon and ies past Rainbow, yelping for help! Inmid-airRainbowDashhasdecidewhetherto ruin her one chance with the Thunders or save herlittlefriend,whowouldn’tneedsavingif Rainbow had just been responsible. Obviously she saves Appleseed, but she severely botches her landing and blows it with the Thunders. Still, Rainbow is happier she saved her friend, and is leftwithanimportantlesson. Let’sjusthopeshe remembers it.
Sonic Rainboom is perhaps the most obvious comparison to this, except there that ended with Rainbow Dash winning the attention of the Wonderbolts. That whole thing about daredevil stuff, we did see Apple Bloom and Rainbow Dash doing that briefly in Call of the Cutie.

But what's really interesting is that this test of loyalty vs. ambition is something that came up again much later in Newbie Dash, where she had to save Scootaloo in the middle of a Wonderbolts show even though it'd perhaps mean her embarrassing "Rainbow Crash" nickname would stick for good. Newbie Dash was written by a then-new writer, Dave Rapp, so I wonder if he had seen this concept when he was first reading the bible and decided to finally put it to use.
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Postby Fizzbuzz (?) » Sat Oct 07, 2017 6:33 pm

The way the three races of ponies are treated in the bible has changed a lot since then. Aside from making earth ponies and pegasi out to be little more than laborers of land and sky, the bible had this to say on unicorns:
Where earth ponies inhabit the earth and pe- gasus ponies populate the sky, unicorn ponies hail from the mountains. Each and every unicorn has magical powers that emanate from their horn, a Unicorn’s crowning glory. These individual powers usually coincide with each unicorns individual personality, talent and cutie mark.
Most unicorns tend to gravitate to the more metropolitan of the pony dwellings, like Equestria’s awe inspiring capital and home of the queen, Canterlot. Canterlot is a hub for unicorns to practice their unique skill, which is reading and sometimes controlling the stars.
The knowledge they gain from the stars helps them to guide the pegasus and earth ponies in their work and make Equestriaís seasons run ef ciently. Very talented unicorns can make certain stars shine brighter, or even move so that they may communicate with po- nies far, far away. They are the scholars, artists and mages (who needs science when you have magic?) of pony society.

Here they're practically made out as holier-than-thou types and that, were it not for their wisdom and grace, the other ponies (dimwitted fools they be) would be utterly lost and helpless in their lives. Twilight was kind of worried about that perception in her very earliest episodes, and Applebonk Applebuck Season did actually depict Applejack as a fool and Twilight as an intellectual who got everything done in a snap after 22 minutes of tomfoolery, but the races really seemed to get quite a bit more equal-feeling later in the show.

I'm thinking now about Not Asking For Trouble and how the resolution was "well, let's get the unicorns from Equestria to help, Rarity and Twilight will solve everything." That was written by May Chan, another new-at-the-time writer, so maybe this was where she got that concept.
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Postby adiwan (?) » Sat Oct 07, 2017 7:45 pm

Here comes the obvious thing to quote from all of the bible:
Secondary Audience: Boys (believe it or not)
They won't admit it, but they'll watch. When their sister's watching it, they'll balk and act like it's dumb, then they'll sit down and watch it. [...]

It was all planned from the beginning and we went happily into the Faustian trap!
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Postby Niels Olof (?) » Sat Oct 07, 2017 8:16 pm

This is a fascinating read to be sure. Pity, the friendship between Cheerilee and Twilight was never much developed.

I was relieved to see that Spike came from an orphaned egg.

Aaaand I'm disappointed that we have still not seen ponies graze the fresh green grass.
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Postby Kronos (?) » Sun Oct 08, 2017 2:47 am

I'm just posting here so I'll know when Headless Horse gets in here.
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Postby Soft Snow (?) » Thu Oct 12, 2017 11:14 pm

Kronos wrote:I'm just posting here so I'll know when Headless Horse gets in here.

Were you expecting some insightful poster? Too bad, it was just glasses Soft Snow!
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Postby Just Scuds (?) » Fri Oct 13, 2017 4:40 am

Image

Image There's six thousand fonts on this Cee-Dee Rom and, by gum, We Are Gonna Use 'Em!


Huh. Spike presented as just another supporting character. Cheerilee is billed more prominently.

Oh this thing definitely took awhile to put together.

I still like how Lauren draws ponies. :allears:
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Postby Fizzbuzz (?) » Fri Oct 13, 2017 12:12 pm

Hey, remember the fandom's early idea that there were something like 8-10 mares for every stallion? Unless I missed something, the bible said nothing about that among all the other details of the world, so I suppose that really was a consequence of all the (pony) main characters being female, thus making female background ponies easier to animate too.
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Postby Soft Snow (?) » Sat Oct 14, 2017 12:33 am

I think that was more of a visual quip then how they thought the show was intended. It was just that every large crowd was like 90% females so fans just made that conclusion.
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Postby Fizzbuzz (?) » Sat Oct 14, 2017 12:49 am

I've seen enough bad fanfics down in PPPP to know that at least a few people are or were earnest in believing that. :nngh:
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Postby SlateSlabrock (?) » Sat Oct 14, 2017 4:32 am

Just Scuds wrote:Image

Image There's six thousand fonts on this Cee-Dee Rom and, by gum, We Are Gonna Use 'Em!

Oh man, I've been looking for a copy of Courier New for aaaages!
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Postby Headless Horse (?) » Sat Oct 14, 2017 12:23 pm

I'm still working my way through this, but here's one thing that jumped out at me right away:

We as the audience are fascinated to see our own experiences told from a perspective that we’ve never seen before. The love of these brands stems from this juxtaposition of the familiar and the fantastic, and the undeniable love of these stories and characters, sometimes spanning across generations, cannot happen without a vast, complete and believable world.

This approach has been utilized for countless intellectual properties, including Transformers and G.I. Joe, with much success, but has fallen short when attempted with girl properties. Perhaps this is because the softer gentler nature of girl properties felt limiting to those who would try. And all too often the worlds created for girl properties are left vague, ambiguous and generic. But I do not think this has to be so. A girl world can be set up the in the same manner, it is the intentions that must be different.

Rather than set the stage for epic, dramatic adventure stories like the examples above, a girl world should set the stage for friendship, heart and laughter as well as adventure--- adventure that is more fun and exciting than dramatic and epic, but adventure nonetheless. With only that alternate intention, the same strong history, mythology, back story and even the alternate logic and physics of an alternate world will serve the same purpose to endear you to the characters and make the stories memorable.


© 2009

I mean this would have seemed like a pretty forward-thinking pitch a decade ago, but now it feels like there's this whole :biotruths: thing going on with it, doesn't it? Like it's a relic from another era, where the idea hadn't even been normalized yet (not that it has universally today either, but certainly among people like us) that there's nothing fundamentally "boy" or "girl" about an adventure story or a story with heart and emotion. Listen to Lauren Fucking Faust sell the idea that in order to make a believable girl-centric world you have to make it about nurturing and getting along, a girl world can't be solely about adventure. It has to have a "softer gentler nature". I mean it's obvious, duh.

The revolutionary part of the pitch is that a (naturally relationship-oriented) girl's property can be good, not that a girls' show doesn't have to be relationship-oriented. That part seems to have emerged later or as a consequence of the other.

And this is her speaking to a receptive audience, one that's already produced twenty years' worth of My Little Pony stuff and made themselves the world authority on What Little Girls Want. I mean to some degree she's speaking the language they expect, since hell, who is she to come tell Hasbro how to market toys? But at the same time she's playing it so super-safe by appealing to their expectations, that if you make a world of pink ponies fighting dragons you're going to attract no audience at all because girls won't come near it if it doesn't have a let's-play-dollhouse aspect to it and boys will stay further away because wtf, ponies.

If this show were being pitched new today (and let's say for the sake of argument that whatever social shifts have gone on since 2009 as a result of MLP had occurred anyway for some other reason), I feel like this pitch wouldn't have to be nearly so gender-conscious. It probably could have gotten away with saying "Hey! You know what? Kids of all types will appreciate any show that's visually appealing and treats them with respect. Let's make a well-rounded, well-developed world in which to tell a whole variety of stories, both slice-of-life and adventurey, and both girls and boys will flock to it even if the characters are ponies and half the stories are about tea parties and playing nice with others."



E: I mean I was thinking about this thing over the movie weekend a bit and realizing that I didn't even have the vocabulary at the time (in 2013!) to describe that what I was talking about was cultural appropriation and male privilege, but in today's language the damn thing could have been 66% shorter because we all fucking know this shit now.

E2: haha, that was pre-gamergate too. "It’s just setting us up for another upheaval down the line, a backlash against some kind of rigidly orthodox equality of screentime for the genders" We were so innocent then :negative:
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Postby Headless Horse (?) » Sat Oct 14, 2017 9:39 pm

One notable thing about the pitch bible: no Elements of Harmony.

Each of the Mane 6 is carefully characterized in a neat little box—"the smart one", "the adventurer", "the free spirit"—but at the time of writing the Elements had not even been conceived of, nor had the ponies been matched up to particular friendship-related virtues.

So clearly the personalities were derived first—and so were the stories that revolved around them that are included in the pitch bible—and the Elements came later, so that would explain why the Elements seem kind of ill-fitting a lot of the time, wouldn't it? They were jimmied on after the fact.
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Postby Headless Horse (?) » Sun Oct 15, 2017 1:43 am

You know what else is missing from the pitch bible? Friendship lessons.

That's right, the whole structural conceit of S1—that every episode is centered around a friendship lesson delivered in the form of a GI Joe style summarizing moral, and that the whole show can be taken as a social-skills primer delivered episode by episode, example by example—is totally MIA.

The pitch only describes a fairly traditional sitcom-style show that might happen to convey illustrative lessons and morals, but they're not essential to every episode and certainly not dictated to be delivered every time as a letter to Celestia.

This all makes me wonder whose idea this and the Elements of Harmony were: Lauren's or Hasbro's? Or someone else on the team or in the chain of command?

The more I see of this pitch bible, the more I think it was not Lauren.

I mean ... boy. This thing is really damned eye-opening. Not because of the actual content it describes—there's not much in it that we didn't already know to some level of detail or other—but more because of the picture it paints of Lauren. It's only a minor piece of the puzzle that is MLP:FiM the show, but it's a huge chunk of the meta-story of how the show was born and has evolved.

What I see here is an amazingly imaginative piece of creative work, but one that's delivered in a shockingly sloppy way, and weirdly tone-deaf too.

Sloppy: by that I mean that the text is barely proofread, full of typos and misspellings and inconsistencies ("Pinkie" and "Pinky" show up in about equal numbers), and written seemingly really hastily right in the middle of a brainstorming session—the word "everypony" seems to come up all of a sudden about halfway through Rainbow Dash's bio, like it only just occurred to Lauren in the process of writing the thing down.

And tone-deaf... this is more alarming, and this is hindsight and all, but it really seems like the seeds of conflict in the creative process were inevitably present right from the start. While it would have been really fun if the ponies' world could have been as vividly horse-themed as Lauren wanted, with houses reminiscent of barns with corrals instead of yards, some elements of it were just a bridge too far. Clothes that look like "tack", disregarding what that looks like to a kids' entertainment executive whose greatest fear is having her company show up in headlines for having a cartoon full of magical horses in what look like bondage outfits, are a pretty huge faux pas. And that's only the beginning. Remember that "deer" episode we heard about and wished we'd been able to see?

Fancy Meeting You Deer

There has been a strange gure appearing in the woods that appears from afar to be a mysterious pony with... antlers? Curious and eager for adventure, Rainbow Dash wrangles up some of the girls to investigate, and what they find is a herd of talking, cutie-mark donning forest deer who speak and adorn themselves like the native Americans of the NorthEast. They find that the pony is their adoptive son, and a pony who does not know he is not a deer even though his antlers are obviously sticks (his deer family dance around the subject like it’s a bad toupee.) Can the ponies convince the deer pony of who he really is and convince him to come back to Fillydelphia with them--- or should they??


:icky: Boy, and we thought "Over a Barrel" was problematic. But even worse is the pitch for "A Dog and Pony Show":

Suddenly, she is captured by a posse of Diamond Dawgs: burrowing, half prairie dog, half troll creatures are dripping with gold chains, rings and earrings. They talk like gangsta rappers (or at least try to, and they’re really bad at it) and also like gangsta rappers, have a notable obsession with acquiring bling!


I mean ... wow. Right? All of a sudden I can't help remembering that this is the same Lauren Faust who made that one PPG episode. She may have these bursts of righteous creative energy, and they promise these big idealistic premises that could shake the trees and change the world for the better, but for some reason they also seem to have these bizarre regressive elements they bring along with them. Like the creator simply couldn't help it. Like the progressive stuff is there only by accident, or as the result of a really narrowly focused goal that elbows fellow progressive elements aside in its own quest for prominence.

So all in all it's really starting to feel to me like the core of the show as presented in the pitch bible was an amazing piece of creative work, but it really badly needed to be taken out of Lauren's hands and workshopped around in the hands of other people until it was really properly presentable—which is seemingly exactly what happened. And we'll probably never know this for sure, but seeing that happen in and of itself might have been what made Lauren shut down and decide it was no longer "hers" anymore—before S1 even finished airing. Like it might not have even been any major disagreements that happened during production, it could simply have been the heartbreak of seeing her vision changed, even if it was ultimately for the good of the show (which I honestly think it was). I am not a very creative person, but I can certainly imagine being in Lauren's shoes having written this and seen what it turned into, and I can certainly imagine reacting the way she seems to have done.

It's dangerous doing "fanfiction" of real people and speculating about their state of mind and their personal reasons for doing this or that, and I feel icky having done this, but darn it, this story has fascinated me since day one. Now that I've read the pitch bible it feels like I understand a lot more clearly what must have happened. It's not that it makes me happier with how things went down—certainly it's not ideal—but if the choice was between the show succeeding and Lauren remaining in charge of it, boy

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Postby Headless Horse (?) » Sun Oct 15, 2017 3:20 am

Before I forget, I also wanted to note that the pitch bible repeatedly specified that the Mane 6's ages (emotional and otherwise) should be thought of as in the 10-15 range, generally like around 12.

And I think we can safely say that before the show went to air this was ratcheted up pretty significantly, right? There wasn't ever a time in the actual completed show where I could conceive of any of them as being less than 18, maybe even more like 20. There were moments when they acted immature or indulged in some uncharacteristically immature folderol—the slumber party comes to mind—but even in those moments there was always the fairly obvious undertone that they were doing this consciously, that these are adults choosing to act younger, not teenagers who act this way all the time.

(The show has pretty firmly moved away even from those fleeting moments of immaturity in later seasons, too, which is something I've been meaning to post about; I don't think they've really done anything that paints them as even part-time kids or teenagers since, well, S2 started. Except maybe Rainbow Dash's Daring Do obsession and her inability to sit still on a stool learning Wonderbolt history.)

This isn't just a trivial detail of the pitch either—the ponies in it are presented as having junior-level jobs if they have jobs at all. Rarity isn't the owner of Carousel Couture, she just works there (and is sort of a prodigy who irresponsibly gives away the designs she comes up with). Applejack works the farm like a farm kid would. Pinkie doesn't work at Sugarcube Sweet Shoppe, she just eats there all the time. True, Twilight and Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash do seem to have roughly the same jobs/livelihoods as they ended up with, but they're pretty loosely defined. Those first three in particular, though, definitely got "aged up" at some point during development, and all of them ended up with dialogue and character development details that pretty clearly place them in the 20-25 range, easily enough to bring the CMCs up to that 12-year-old level and out of the "baby ponies" category that the pitch bible has them in.

I can't decide whether this feels like something Lauren would have pushed for or if it was something the other writers imposed on the show. Did Lauren want them to be younger? Was that part of why Hasbro balked at the "tack"-style clothing—it was that much creepier if they were teenagers too? Was that one aspect of a composite roadblock that she softened for the execs' consumption by making the ponies older?
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Postby The Doctor (?) » Sun Oct 15, 2017 3:27 am

Well yeah, it's obvious that a lot was reworked before the show went to full production. Probably some from a corporate level (like the decision to make Celestia a Princess and not a Queen), and some from the writing team sitting around and hammering out the finer details. Imagine the ages thing was ramped up because of the various activities the ponies engaged in. Rarity going from working at a shop, to being the owner. And if Rainbow Dash is already trying out for the Wonderbolts, it makes sense for her to be older.
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Postby SlateSlabrock (?) » Sun Oct 15, 2017 6:12 am

Headless Horse wrote:And I think we can safely say that before the show went to air this was ratcheted up pretty significantly, right? There wasn't ever a time in the actual completed show where I could conceive of any of them as being less than 18, maybe even more like 20. There were moments when they acted immature or indulged in some uncharacteristically immature folderol—the slumber party comes to mind—but even in those moments there was always the fairly obvious undertone that they were doing this consciously, that these are adults choosing to act younger, not teenagers who act this way all the time.


I dunno, the main characters were always working professionals, but I've felt that the introduction of the CMC was when their perceived ages shifted. Before that, you have the whole Mane 6 dancing around giggling at the ghosties, having slumber parties, and agonizing over fitting in. Then "Call of the Cutie" happens halfway through the season, followed by "Suited for Success," and the main characters start feeling more like adults, while the insecure pubescent kid topics are shifted to the CMC.
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Postby drunkill (?) » Sun Oct 15, 2017 12:14 pm

Headless Horse wrote:You know what else is missing from the pitch bible? Friendship lessons.

That's right, the whole structural conceit of S1—that every episode is centered around a friendship lesson delivered in the form of a GI Joe style summarizing moral, and that the whole show can be taken as a social-skills primer delivered episode by episode, example by example—is totally MIA.

The pitch only describes a fairly traditional sitcom-style show that might happen to convey illustrative lessons and morals, but they're not essential to every episode and certainly not dictated to be delivered every time as a letter to Celestia.

I think the friendship lessons would have come about after the show was green-lit or at least further along in discussions after the original pitch, once they figured out it would be an IE rating and the show needed a clear moral at the end of every episode. Once the show was YT-7 it moved away from the letters.
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Postby adiwan (?) » Sun Oct 15, 2017 1:23 pm

drunkill wrote:Once the show was YT-7 it moved away from the letters.


A part of me wishes that the letter writing returns, for at least sporadically. They were such a good bookend to an episode, structurally speaking.
The other part of me thinks that these can be extremely cheesy and forced, especially the one in Cutie Mark Chronicles.

I'd cool if Twilight encourages Ponyville to write their own friendship letters to Twilight in one episode.
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Postby Headless Horse (?) » Sun Oct 15, 2017 6:19 pm

"Big, strong and, well, studly, it’s not unusual for a girl pony to develop a crush on Big Apple, and giggly fillies are often found visiting the farm to admire him under the guise that they want to buy some pie. Some of our girls may not admit it, but they may just be crushing a bit on him, too."

The Doctor wrote:
:eeyup: All the ladies love the Mac.


Lauren ships it :plonk:
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Postby Just Scuds (?) » Sun Oct 15, 2017 8:38 pm

I was watching Secrets and Pies and the central conflict of the episode was about to be resolved at the beginning of the third act. In this episode they allotted plenty of time to teach the moral of the story with (despite Rainbow dipped in garbage) hugs and jokes in the end. If this was a season two or three episode Rainbow's letter to Princess Celestia would appear at the end. It’s a nice ending but the show has to walk a fine line between the letter scene being a memorable teachable moment and being a chore.


So all in all it's really starting to feel to me like the core of the show as presented in the pitch bible was an amazing piece of creative work, but it really badly needed to be taken out of Lauren's hands and workshopped around in the hands of other people until it was really properly presentable—which is seemingly exactly what happened.


The term 'Bible' implies an of immutable truth from On High instead of what it really is - primordial ooze. :toxx:
You know how pilot episodes are rough, and elements appear in them that eventually fade out in later episodes as the writing staff finds out what's workable and introduces their own ideas. So, in the end, the pitch doc is a basis for a basis.


Sure, there are going to be big spots that someone writing up a pitch document will have to be happy with just leaving blank. Making it too complete just to get a No from Hasbro means wasted effort. Turning in an incomplete pitch document and getting a Yes would mean a mad dash back to the drawing board to address the fundamentals. In the end this is not a completed work, and things like slightly-better-than-spitballed story premises might not be something to hang on the show creator at this early time.
(Edit: Hoo boy, I didn’t notice the typos and missing letters here and there. This thing was put together in Less Time Than You’d Think)


Lauren’s forteCutie Mark seems to be in character design and animation. So, in reading this pitch document, we’re just going to have to be comfortable with all the spots intentionally left blank. The one paragraph under ‘Relationship Stories’ on how the characters relate to each other, is handwavey**, so it’s expected that the writers will define how the characters will relate to each other and take ‘Rarity is jealous of Fluttershy’s natural beauty’ * and turn that into Green Isn’t Your Color. Other things come out as a need in the writer's room; When we first need meet Rarity, we need to show that she's beautiful. And so, Spike has an instant little boy crush.
Even all important things like a character’s tone and phrasing and mannerisms aren’t going to come out until the VAs sit next to each other in the recording booth.

*
:fluttersmirk: A little more jealousy wouldn't hurt. Shy or no, we all have egos could use some assuaging, and frankly, Rarity, you’re long overdue.
:wat: I beg your pardon?
:modesty: Ha-ha! Nothing! Nothing! New lashes today? They really bring out the shape of your ... … ears.
:rariwhat:


**
Woah. Even the pitch document is a distillation of ideas that are only then being set to paper. Saying anything definitive about what the show would be like if she was the single auteur driving the whole works is difficult.


Goddammit this post took too long for me to write - I hem and haw and rewrite and lose the track and lose motivation and time just keeps passing on a Sunday afternoon and I have to be places and pull requests to review :flail:
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Postby Headless Horse (?) » Sun Oct 15, 2017 8:57 pm

Note that a lot of the missing letters are where ligatures would go (e.g. “fi” as a single glyph) so those are PDF rendering glitches. That only accounts for some of them though.
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Postby Soft Snow (?) » Sun Oct 15, 2017 11:19 pm

Headless Horse wrote:"Pinkie" and "Pinky" show up in about equal numbers

That is a bit of a strange one given how Pinkie was a holdover from G3 and not a G4 original character. In G3, Pinkie was more of a Twilight. (Given how much you could gleam from their lack of character development and minimal screen time.) It would be like making a new movie for Harry Potter and in the script it kept spelling his name as "Harrie Potter."
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Postby Just Scuds (?) » Mon Oct 16, 2017 5:16 am

The whole timeline of this thing is interesting to deconstruct from off hand-remarks and early sketches. There's no Firefly, RD is very much the blue character we know and not pale pink. There's no Posey, though there's a number of of wingless Fluttershys.
And there's no Surprise, either, and there aren't any sketches of Pinkie included in this document, and the colored full page Pinkie towards the end is a recolored Surprise.

Click for Fullsize

Somebody really wanted to bring back Pinkie Pie from Generation 3, so Posey got wings to even the types out.

Click for Fullsize

:nnngh: Just think - at any given moment with no warning at all, you could be in the middle of an aerial bombardment of confetti. I'd never go outside...
:cheese: I don't need to fly to drop a party on you!


But, we still have Twilight Twinkle. IIRC Rarity is a later edition to the ensemble because the people at Hasbro wanted a fashionista type of character because accessories and brushy-brushy (whether or not that actually panned out is a different story.)

Since this is listed as a Show Bible, I'm guessing that this is what was accepted as the first version of the Show Bible and that there are prior revisions of this document that have Posey and Surprise and maybe less cleaned up vector-ready 'Show Art' and slightly altered text for character bios.
E: Ah! Hey! Lauren is making note of a 2008 pitch bible with this Posey.
https://fyre-flye.deviantart.com/art/Shy-255839611




:3: Well, I'm glad you're here with me Fluttershy. We turned out alright in the end.
:yay: You can't spell Pegasus without US!
Image Don't look now, but I think she did ...
Image 'There are three types of ponies that inhabit Equestria’ … Earth Ponies, Pegasis Ponies, and Unicorn Ponies.
Image And there’s a background picture but no pony!
Image And here I thought you were her favorite.
Image I’m not her favorite, I’m just a mashup of two other characters ... for copyright reasons, I guess.
:ohrarity: Well, if it’s any condolence, it has me listed as an Earth Pony and a Unicorn on the same page.
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Postby adiwan (?) » Mon Oct 16, 2017 8:15 am

Just Scuds wrote::ohrarity: Well, if it’s any condolence, it has me listed as an Earth Pony and a Unicorn on the same page.

Image
But she likes being covered in mud! :heehaw:

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Fancy mud for sure. :vogue:
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Postby Headless Horse (?) » Mon Oct 16, 2017 9:58 am

I also thought it was interesting that while we had heard about how there were both "adventure stories" and "relationship stories" in the creative landscape way back in the early days, I hadn't realized that there was such a formal distinction with its roots right in the pitch.

During S1 when we were all discussing all the minutiae so obsessively, I don't think it was ever really totally obvious to us which ones were "adventure" and which ones were "relationship”. I mean some of them obviously, like Dragonshy and LBYS, but in all our Best Pony and Best Pinkie Pie Imaginary Friend polls we never really broke out the episodes into the two types for separate consideration. It just wasn't that obvious in the final product. The adventure stories all involved plenty of character and relationship development, and eps like Owl's Well (which are very relationship-driven) have adventure components to them. It ended up that the distinction was nowhere near that cut-and-dried.

It's funny since right in the pitch Lauren admits outright that in the adventure stories we're not going to learn much about the ponies or friendship, but at least they'll be fun :v:
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Postby Headless Horse (?) » Mon Oct 16, 2017 12:59 pm

Something else I'm going to take from this is that in retrospect it's pretty silly to have ascribed some kind of originalist purity to the mythos of Celestia and Luna as a ditheon, if that's a word, or to have been scandalized by the addition of Cadance and then Twilight as new alicorn princesses.

Luna wasn't even in the pitch. No Nightmare Moon, no thousand-year single-goddess rule, no Elements. The pitch does describe Celestia as being over a thousand years old and that raising the sun is in the ponies' domain, but the entire mythology that underpins the pilot episodes—and got the whole fandom so energetically invested in extrapolating on what the implications of such a world would be—was never even a part of the show's original premise.

Which isn't to say that the two-goddesses-as-avatars-of-the-two-celestial-bodies thing isn't a cool concept or one that justifies all the work fans put into all that extrapolation. But the show would have been basically the same without it, as far as Lauren's original pitch was concerned.
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Postby Fizzbuzz (?) » Mon Oct 16, 2017 1:12 pm

It makes me wonder just how late into the game Luna was introduced. It'd certainly explain her lack of appearance or even mention in the rest of S1 (though I think I once heard something suggestion that Hasbro thought she'd be too scary for kids to see her again).
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Postby Soft Snow (?) » Mon Oct 16, 2017 11:25 pm

You might not want to judge Lauren's intentions because you don't know her that well, but fortunately for you, I am under no such moral obligation.
:haw:

I feel like Lauren had the George Lucas effect, where she had solid ideas but need input from another perspective to make them really shine. The first Star Wars were really great because George had a lot of other people helping him with ideas and concepts. When he became super popular people stopped giving him advice and leaving him to his own creative devices. Which is why his prequel movies kinda sucked. Lauren is a great story teller but she still needs someone there to mentor her.
:-P

Rainbow Dash was also a hold over from G3. Rainbow was the Rarity of G3 and said the word "darling" more times then Big Mac said "eeyup."
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Postby Just Scuds (?) » Thu Oct 19, 2017 5:08 am

Ah jeez. I never realized leak was more than the pitch bible. It contained original flash assets and lots of design sketches (production and preliminary)used in the production of Season 1.

I'm wondering if the team over-designed everything because they didn't know if they were going to have a season 2 so they had to get all their good ideas in when they could.

Fizzbuzz wrote:It makes me wonder just how late into the game Luna was introduced.

Probably around the time the pilot was being written and when they'd made the decision to go with a two parter BIG BANG opening instead of Twilight just being booted out of her observatory and being sent to Ponyville. And then the storybook opening followed from that, I guess. The whole concept of the Elements of Harmony have always felt clumsily tacked in; like they realized they got to the part of the story with Twilight and Nightmare Moon and they needed a way for Twilight to defeat her.

It'd certainly explain her lack of appearance or even mention in the rest of S1 (though I think I once heard something suggestion that Hasbro thought she'd be too scary for kids to see her again).

IIRC her she'd kinda fallen by the wayside and if you only have One season, she doesn't make the cut. They saved her, and included a redesign for the Halloween episode.


Headless Horse wrote:It's funny since right in the pitch Lauren admits outright that in the adventure stories we're not going to learn much about the ponies or friendship, but at least they'll be fun :v:

Which is not to say there isn't plenty of opportunity show what the characters are about and how they respond to each other in tough situations. http://mlp.wikia.com/wiki/Dragonshy/Gallery

Now I'm wondering how much of these initial story pitches would have had to be scrapped because of the change in characters. Stare Master would always have occurred with Posey or Fluttershy.

But Griffon the Brush Off might have featured two pranking pegasus pals, Firefly and Surprise meeting up with Firefly's old friend, Grizelda. But Surprise is now Pinkie, the flightless(?) earth pony, and...


Click for Fullsize

Image Hiiiii~~
*boing*
Image Hello
*boing*
Image look at me
*boing*
Image Why're you so damn insistent on being in this scene anyway?!
*boing*
Image It's a surprise!
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Postby Headless Horse (?) » Thu Oct 19, 2017 12:15 pm

Just Scuds wrote:Which is not to say there isn't plenty of opportunity show what the characters are about and how they respond to each other in tough situations. http://mlp.wikia.com/wiki/Dragonshy/Gallery


Yeah, I mean that was kind of an ironic comment—plenty often it's the adventure episodes that give us the best character moments of all. Since after all Dragonshy is a "Fluttershy is timid but can come through when pushed in just the right way" story just as much as it is a dragon story; really the dragon is just a macguffin and the whole episode is a Fluttershy character study. And for that matter is Feeling Pinkie Keen an adventure story or a Pinkie character study in the same way?

Frankly the only real "adventure" stories seem to be the Twilight-centric two-parters, and even in those everyone else gets to do ensemble stuff.
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Postby Headless Horse (?) » Fri Oct 20, 2017 12:39 pm

I have to say I rather like Twilight's original cutie mark/character concept.

Image

That is to say, she was basically the same character personality-wise, and she was seemingly the main POV character/protagonist for the show, but she didn't have that whole messanic aspect that show Twilight ended up with. Never mind becoming a princess/alicorn, she wasn't supposed to even be anything particularly game-changing in the long run in any kind of "friendship is magic" sense.

Her bio mentions that Celestia sees huge raw power in her and she might be the most magical unicorn of all someday, but then again Rainbow Dash's hints even harder at some great high destiny, such that you get the feeling the show never intended either of them to get there. Twilight's unicorn magic seems to be about casting light in dark places; whether literal flashlight-style or metaphorical, that's it. No teleportation, no shields, no rainbow lasers, nothing. She seems to be conceived of as pretty ordinary, and meant to stay that way.

And no "center of the universe, with five friends backing her up" cutie mark either. Just a symbol of nighttime, because she pulls all-nighters studying.

Which makes sense considering what the show looked like at this stage; this is pre-Elements, pre-Nightmare Moon. there's no sense that it's got any concept of a long-term serialized story to it. It sounds like just a bunch of slice-of-life stories: a premise and a universe, a place where you can create endless episodes of what sounds like nothing so much as a horsier, more bucolic MLP Tales.

I feel like the serialization aspect and the addition of the Elements mythos is a big part of what drew in the adult audience. If the show had stayed episodic like this, it would have surely been well regarded as another success in the post-Tartakovsky-McCracken cartoon world, and it would have received plenty of plaudits for being smart and funny and well characterized and beautiful. But I feel as though a major factor in what attracted bronies to it was the idea that on top of all that, there's also this whole "prestige TV drama" aspect to it, the feeling that this could be like Lost or Breaking Bad, only with cute cartoon ponies. Everyone tuned in to see where it was going as much as to see where it was now. (At least I sure did.)

Twilight as a messianic world-saving character who undergoes metamorphosis and catalyzes fundamental changes in the universe of the show is a pretty big revolutionary idea—and I'm not even talking about actually getting wings, I'm talking about having the show revolve around her changing and growing over time and evolving toward a clear and inevitable goal. Most of S1 was purely episodic, but the stage had been set by the Elements of Harmony two-parter and each successive episode showed Twilight gradually getting more and more comfortable both with magic and with dealing with her friends, so you really got the sense that there was something great in store in the future, not just what we were looking at right now. The fact that the show was retooled to allow the characters to grow at all seems to have been the key ingredient in what made the show such a crossover hit. I mean surely all the other pieces (art, character, comedy) would have contributed, as indeed they have, but I think this is the one that tipped the balance and allowed it to achieve critical mass and meme significance. Look at how much of the early fanwork centered on the Celestia/Luna story and its fantastical implications; it just fascinated people that such a thing could even exist.

Does this make it a better show for kids though? I'm surely no expert on that, so I'd only be guessing. I kinda think it would. Kids like long stories just as well as they like short ones; they have better attention spans than they're often given credit for. I've been listening to the Tolkien Professor podcast lately and he's been talking about a Hobbit camp he's been running for kids in like the 10-14-year-old age group and he's just floored at the quality and depth of the questions and insights the kids have, even on the long-form material like LotR that takes them weeks or months to read. So probably the intended audience can appreciate the published Twilight even more than they would have enjoyed the episodic pitch-bible Twilight.

But that doesn't necessarily mean I wouldn't have liked to see what the show might have been like without all the mythos and without Twilight as the game-changer. Maybe it would have developed an even richer and funnier and more heartfelt texture than we ended up with, since it didn't have to periodically feature Big Bosses and rainbow explosions and (often clumsily handled) portents of great things to come; one of the biggest and most persistent complaints about the show from people on this very board has been that the show just doesn't seem to be cut out for handling subjects like immortality, ancient evil, the roles of Celestia and Luna, the actual nature of the world, and all the other things that we inevitably have to start asking if the show makes noises about playing in the big fantasy leagues. You flirt with a mechanistic magical universe and either you go Harry Potter/Wheel of Time and exhaustively define how everything works, or you go Star Wars/Tolkien and you play coy about it, but either way you have to show all the realistic consequences of the depth of the world you've stepped into up to the knee. You can't keep acting like villains on the order of Discord will make sense forever if you've one-upped them with one too many Tireks.

But then again maybe without the mythos aspect to it the show would simply have been missing something, the one thing that would have put it over the top and earned it our lasting attention, despite its fundamental flaws. Maybe it would have ended up as just another Sym-Bionic Titan or Mission Hill or Samurai Jack without the finale series: well loved in its time, but short-lived and as quickly forgotten by everyone except animation nerds.


Lol @ the glaring-in-retrospect "uhh can't we add some pink to her design" from Hasbro though
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