The 2010 launch of Hasbro and Discovery’s joint venture The Hub Network saw the premiere of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (Friendship is Magic), the fourth generation of Hasbro’s My Little Pony toyline that proved popular enough to eventually warrant a theatrical film, My Little Pony: The Movie (2017), in 2017. What few in the fandom for this series may know is that there was another, similarly-named theatrical My Little Pony movie in 1986, around the time when such films were not uncommon, to help promote the original generation of toys. While Friendship is Magic would end up being my formal introduction to the brand, I had since been mildly curious about the original iteration, largely the film due to releasing in the same year as The Transformers: The Movie (1986). In honor of the 40th anniversary of its release year, I decided to finally take the plunge, but quickly realized why the My Little Pony movie isn’t as widely celebrated as its Transformers counterpart.
