- by Owen Morton
You might think that Transformers and My Little Pony were totally separate entities. Certainly, at first glance, they don’t have an awful lot to do with one another. Transformers was a little boy’s TV series and accompanying figure line, while My Little Pony was a little girl’s TV series and accompanying figure line. You see where the difference lies? No one could have knowledge of both, for fear of being a social outcast. For me, a boy, it was rather difficult to learn anything of My Little Pony other than a certain annoying song which used to go round Musters Road Infant School playground, which I presume was a corruption of the original My Little Pony theme tune. For a girl, I would imagine that knowing anything about Transformers would lead to peer pressure to forget everything about them.
And the reason that these two very diverse subjects are linked together in today’s article is that I can’t remember a single bloody thing about either of them. You might think, given the above paragraph, that my knowing nothing of My Little Pony is easily explained, but I can here reveal that I have actually watched more episodes of My Little Pony than I have Transformers. (That is to say, I have watched one episode of My Little Pony, and a big round zero of Transformers.) I decided to link the two together here because I felt it would be frankly impossible to pad out an article about them each separately. I know I managed it with Thundercats last December, but I did at least watch that occasionally, whereas neither of these two programmes did I follow with any sort of commitment.
Okay, so for My Little Pony, I’ll begin by talking about the one episode I ever saw. As is usual for me, I can’t remember very much of it (if I could remember it in detail, I suspect I would have already reviewed it some time ago). What I do remember, however, is that two demented looking creatures (specifically, they were dressed in brown sacks and had chalk white faces which actually looked somewhat akin to the baddy in Scream, though slightly less unpleasantly smiley) kidnapped two of the Little Ponies, and the race was on to rescue them! What I can recall of the remainder of the plot is extremely sketchy: the Ponies in question were rescued and everybody was happy, except presumably the two idiots with interesting faces.
Lacking in details as this may be, it tops what I know of Transformers by about one hundred percent. My knowledge of this subject is limited solely to the one Transformers figure I possessed, which I believe I nicked from my uncle (or possibly took it with permission; the details on this are now rather hazy). This was an interesting looking fellow which actually defies easy description. What I can say with relative certainty is that his (or possibly her, but I suspect it was meant to be male) legs were joined together, thus not giving him great mobility. His arms did bend at the elbow, in precisely the way a human’s might, so kudos to the figure’s designer there, but the arms were also of that rare variety which allows one to bend them forward so that your shoulders rest on your chest and your arms hang down the front of your body. (They didn’t bend in this manner in the opposite direction though – that would be just stupid.) The head of this unique individual also had its own ‘special’ features: it extended off the body and eventually ended up at ninety degrees to the body, staring straight downwards, which is a position which one can only describe as deeply stupid and would give no advantage whatsoever in a pitched battle. Though, given the lack of functioning legs, we can probably assume that this particular Transformer didn’t get in very many of those.
All right, so now I’ve let you in on everything I know about these diverse subjects, it’s time I work out in what direction the article next goes. This is a bit of a problem, actually, given that neither of the above subjects provide much fodder for further discussion. I’ve already described how stupid they are, and can’t say much more.
Therefore, I think it’s time we considered something rather important about My Little Pony. The question that needs answering is, of course, whose Little Ponies they are. I mean, one might expect them to belong to the little girls who bought them (or got them bought for them, or whatever), but then if two little girls started playing with them, arguments could arise (“That’s My Little Pony!”, “No, it’s My Little Pony!”, etc), so you would expect manufacturers to have more sense than to provoke situations like that. So the question remains, to whom did these Little Ponies belong to? They obviously belonged to someone, because they were ‘My’ Little Pony. Perhaps they were the serfs of a feudal overlord pony, perhaps called The Big Pony Who Doesn’t Belong To Anyone At All. That would make sense.
Now, can I think of anything about Transformers I could theorise about in such an inane manner? Well, actually, no I can’t. The question of why they were called Transformers is fairly easily answered: because they transformed (or rather, they moved their various appendages in frankly impossible ways, unless the appendage in question is their legs, in which case they don’t move them at all). I suspect the TV series was slightly better than the figure I had suggested, in that on the series, the Transformers probably had to defend their territory against some Skeletor-like baddy, and did so easily because this particular baddy was terrified of contortion artists.
And that’s all I’d like to say about Transformers and My Little Pony. Well, okay, that’s a slight lie. I would like to say more, but I can’t think of anything more to say. So my sentence would be more accurate if it were, “And that’s all I’m going to say about Transformers and My Little Pony.”