My Little Pony was a figurine copyrighted by Hasbro and first produced in 1982. Based on My Pretty Pony, a larger and clunkier toy with unimpressive sales, My Little Pony was, despite the singularity baked into its name, always plural. There was no “pony,” never a one. Only ponies—many ponies, always proliferating, mutating, re-accessorized. Earth ponies and sea ponies and winged ponies and, of course, unicorn ponies. Each pony with its distinctive not-to-be-found-in-nature shade, its shimmering corn-silk plastic mane, its rump printed with an allegorical symbol, a.k.a. “cutie mark”: ice cream, clover, seahorse, stars, flowering plants, and on and on, emojis avant la lettre. The ponies’ bodies were plastic. For now, the ponies would not decay, although fire might melt them or a car wheel crush them. Their eyes were round and bedecked with long lashes. The irises were illustrated in such a way that each pony eye appeared perpetually brimming. Highlights, as on a meniscus of dew, were standard. The ponies might weep soon. They might cry for joy. They might look in your direction. The ponies lived in Ponyland. It is not clear where they came from nor how they reproduced. They were of course inside the television, part of a twenty-two-minute weekday cartoon show called, fittingly enough, My Little Pony, and thus inhabited a visual realm, temporally constrained, yet constantly available if one had a VHS system and knowledge of how to record. They were material, as stated. They were moving images, as stated. They could be purchased and held. They could be watched. They were very smooth, seamless, without any roughness. One might run a hand down their necks, across their shoulders, along their backs. One might brush their plastic-scented, flower-colored hair. The myth-world of My Little Ponies was of a part with other myth-worlds of the mid to late eighties: the land of the Care Bears; the stationery empire of Lisa Frank; the intergalactic realms of She-Ra, of Wildfire the magical horse, of the ThunderCats. These myth-worlds ebbed into one another and got confused; it did not matter that they originated with unaffiliated copyright holders. They had rainbows, lots of rainbows, and craggy cliffs and lush forests and desert planets with buried fortresses, and were elsewhere, always elsewhere, beyond the sky or the solar system. You did not attain these places by walking down the street. They were like heaven, although no god was present. Devils aplenty: deranged scientists and bitter witches and space dictators and reanimated corpses with surprisingly good social skills were available to frustrate bliss. But there was no singular author of the good, no logos. There was only a puffy, sparkling spirit that cheerfully resisted death, corruption, and gratuitous violence—the ponies were mild imps who lived in terror of a Christian Satan. They always won out but it was by no means certain they would survive. These were the terms of the contest: a shimmering tribe of hunter-gatherer horses versus a citadel-dwelling autocracy equipped with what I now take to be early sixteenth-century levels of technology and opposable thumbs. You collected the ponies. You displayed the ponies. You made the ponies move and speak. You had them interact with She-Ra or perhaps Panthro, your favorite ThunderCat. You watched the cartoon series and the mediocre animated movie. You understood the personalities in question, the greater stakes. You sided with the good. You experimented with the struggle of the good and caused the plastic bodies to crash into one another. You brushed their tangled silky hair and sometimes cut it off with safety scissors.
— Lucy Ives, “Of Unicorns: On My Little Pony”
