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Variety broke the story yesterday that Hasbro is finally going to release a true
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic animated feature film to theaters in 2017! You can read the full article here:
http://variety.com/2014/film/news/my-little-pony-movie-in-the-works-at-hasbro-studios-exclusive-1201334144/About. Damn. Time. What took them so long to green-light this? With a show as popular as MLP:FiM, creating an animated feature film based on it should have been a no-brainer decision
2-years ago! The fact that they are waiting until now to finally capitalize on this opportunity, which was handed to them on a silver platter, is practically criminal!
Now the interesting thing to wait and see about will be which MLP:FiM animated feature gets released first: the official one, or the one being made by certain members of the MLP:FiM fan community,
Journey of the Spark. I remember seeing a panel hosted by members of the Journey of the Spark team in-person at the Midwestria MLP:FiM convention back in 2012, and at the time they said, in complete seriousness and with a straight face I might add, that they thought that they would have their full-length feature film completed by, well,
now. At the time I voiced my concern to them about the feasibility of such a goal, especially since Journey of the Spark was being created only by fans on a volunteer basis, but they brushed me off and told me how they were the best of the best in the fandom, and that they knew what they were doing. Uh huh. A couple months ago they released
10-minutes of footage that was largely
extremely rough animatic, and not a fully-completed full-length animated feature film, so you can see just how far off their lofty time-tables were. With that said, 2017 gives the Journey of the Spark team another 3-years to work on their project, so who knows, maybe they will complete their own film by then. A race to the finish of who could put their movie out first between Hasbro and the fan-based Journey of the Spark team would be
extremely cool to see. And despite my being a bit critical of the Journey of the Spark team's over-optimism of when they could get their film done a couple years ago, I do truly want to see their project succeed and have been excited about it since I first heard about it.
In any case, it is great to see that the pony fandom is going to get new official material all the way through to at least 2017, and that this wonderful fandom will have new fuel to keep it cruising along on for a while! I sincerely hope that the official Hasbro MLP:FiM animated feature ends up being worth the long wait and keeps us excited about ponies until the end of this decade and beyond!
Update: According to
this Equestria Daily article, the
Journey of the Spark team announced last month that they were ceasing production of Journey of the Spark as an animated feature and were instead releasing it as an audio drama. Ug. As much as I knew that they were setting their sights too high as soon as I saw their panel talk at Midwestria a couple years ago,
I was still very much hoping that they would prove me wrong. Sometimes it's a bummer to be right. Hopefully the audio-drama version of Journey of the Spark will turn out to be good. In any case, it now looks like we'll only have the official MLP:FiM animated feature film to look forward to unless there is another fan-made MLP:FiM feature film in the works that I haven't yet heard about.