Roxor said:
EternallyBored said:
I dunno, maybe its working in a child centered setting where a lot of children's entertainment ends up playing on the lobby t.v., or maybe it's that Lauren Faust and her writers were borrowing pretty heavily from their previous shows (especially foster's home and Ed, Edd, and Eddy, which I really like), but season 1 of MLP was pretty standard children's television, most of my interest came from the fascinating mix of fantasy/ technology/ and mythology, while avoiding the cliche overused humans, dwarves, and elves that infest fantasy settings, and the interesting characters that were probably one of the strongest representations of an all female main cast I've ever seen in children's television to date.
I think this is it. You found it predictable because you've seen a lot of stuff aimed at kids. I hadn't seen anything new aimed at kids in about twenty years (not to mention I didn't watch much TV as a kid to begin with). Season 1 probably introduced me to those various archetypes you listed, and once I'd been through that, it was too easy to spot them coming in season 2.
Yeah, I've seen a lot, and I mean A LOT of little kids shows (ages 3-8 target demographics) over the years, ranging from pretty dang good, to soul-crushingly bad, stuff that would be dumb if you showed it to toddlers, much less young children.
None of MLP's plots are really outside the norm for kids television, Season 1 hit pretty much all the same morality lessons that every other kids show with a morality theme hits, hell, quite a few of the episodes are very close plot wise to other series I've seen. I can understand why you'd lose interest fast if the only thing that was holding you were plot twists, because kids shows have been hitting the same stuff for decades now. Which, to be fair, there's really only so many ways you can tell kids that sharing is good, trust your friends, and don't set your expectations too high before you've basically run out of morality lessons.
Pretty much every morality based kids show runs into this problem, once you've boiled morality down to an easy to digest format, there's really only a couple dozen lessons you can cover before you start having to resort to variations on the same lessons you already covered, or get into strange or more complex themes that might fly over the audiences head. Which is why MLP has started interspersing more vague lessons or variations on earlier lessons into the plots, because they burned through the old tropes back in season 1 so they've been trying to keep it moralistic without specifically calling out the basic morality tales. That's probably why the letter writing mechanic has become much less frequent and changed into a more vague format.
MLP is kind of an odd duck, it was originally contracted for the usual 65 episodes to hit the syndication mark, a death knell for most kid's cartoons, as almost none will get picked up again after the show is syndicated, as most studios bank on kids being satisfied with just reruns for a couple years.
Girl targeted animation in particular has the 65 episode mark as almost a certain death sentence, and Hasbro is particularly infamous for killing shows that hit this mark so they can be rebooted with a new toy line (that's what recently killed the Transformers Prime series, one of the more popular animated Transformers series to air recently). MLP was not planned out or slatted with any sort of storyline or overarching plot in mind, I doubt any of the staff or producers actually planned for the show to survive past 65 episodes, so they are basically flailing in the dark at this point, especially considering that MLP is still primarily targeted at girls.
Outside of Japan, only one girl targeted cartoon show in roughly the same age demographic as MLP has ever made it past the 100 episode mark, if MLP makes it to season 6, it will officially be the longest running Western cartoon in its demographic bracket in animation history, hell, if it makes it to season 6 it will be competing with longer running Japanese counterparts like Sailor Moon.
