Thanks for this! I’d never seen this amazing write-up. I’ll just point out one thing:

Like Cowboy Bebop/Yoko Kanno before it, MLP benefits from a remarkable range of catchy Broadway-musical-inflected songs from Daniel Ingram which fused with plot and musical videos (“PMVs”?) elevate otherwise merely good episodes to unforgettable. Ingram does song after memorable song in the first five seasons, even deftly managing several Weird Al Yankovic homages for his guest appearance. That’s just downright unfairly talented. If Ingram had not been involved, I wonder if MLP would been a fraction as popular as it is?

The answer is “certainly not.”

I was there in the MLP thread on 4chan/co the evening Daniel Ingram accidentally left a song for an upcoming episode unlocked on his YouTube channel: “Winter Wrap-up.” The quality of the song and animation, the coordination between animation and character work, all in just four minutes, was the perfect teaser we could show our friends so they wouldn’t have to sacrifice time to watch an entire episode.

It also sparked endless discussion: Why couldn’t Twilight Sparkle, mage extraordinaire and doctorate student in the thaumatalogical arts, use her magic? Had she lost the ability? Was it restricted by law? Why didn’t the seasons work on their own? Was their world a post-apocalyptic paradise where the machinery of the cosmos was stuck on “manual” by some previous era’s war?

It was the first leak from the studio, and it wasn’t the last; Flash character puppets and entire episodes would end up leaked through the run of the series, and even a gigabytes-large copyright-busting work product leak during the final season.

It helped us realize that the show was as much a work of love as it was a toy commercial, from the voice actresses taking multiple parts like an old-timey radio show, to the animators and inbetweeners pushing Adobe Flash to the very limits, to the writers putting horse puns in every corner of the script while making a cohesive high-fantasy / low-fantasy universe, to the team at Hasbro that realized they were on a bucking bronco of a cultural phenomenon and gave unprecedented free rein to the creative team.

I’ve never been a part of something so much larger than myself before. 2010-2013 was an amazing time, and Winter Wrap-Up was a huge part of making it happen.