Ultratwinkie said:
Ah crap I was right the first time around. I changed it in an edit because I thought I misheard since its been years since I watched it.
Hehe, understandable.
And I think you are very right about MLP calling back to the cartoons of the '80s '90s (very much explaining why those of us who grew up in the '80s '90s love it so much), and I think I know why. There are a few cartoons out now which have hit it big, finally solidifying what cartoons are in this new post-millennium era. Things got pretty bad for cartoons during the reign of Spongebob, but now Cartoon Network is taking back the baton with Adventure Time, Regular Show, The World of Gumball and the like.
But here's the problem: Those cartoons are, for the most part, geared toward either a primarily male or unisex audience. They aren't particularly feminine. Even in the '80s and '90s and early 2000s we had shows with female main characters and feminine subject matter which flourished (As Told By Ginger, Pepper Ann, The Powerpuff Girls, The Little Mermaid, etc.). But you haven't seen "girly" cartoons like that for a while, or at the very LEAST cartoons where the main character is a female. I think it's because after Spongebob changed the paradigm, they simply forgot how to make "girl" cartoons without being sexist or having a devastatingly small viewership.
So in a desperate move to recapture and rediscover the magic of those old girl cartoons, they went with MLP and its more '90s style. And I think it's safe to say it worked, but not quite in the way they imagined. Rather than capturing a new viewership they did get a few younger kids, but mostly they recaptured the nostalgia us older people have for our cartoons which were really shoved out the door when Spongebob rose to the top, without so much as a thank you or a farewell.
