WeAreBorg back with a teaser on what you’ve all been waiting for: The Friendship is Magic Season 6 release date!
THIS IS NOT OFFICIAL INFO! This is just fun speculation based on facts anyone can obtain.
Head on past the break for a look into air dates, fiscal years and pony.
So let’s get a few fundamentals out of the way. Hasbro is a publicly traded toy company out to get the big bucks. “Entertainment and Licensing” does account for a notable percentage of their net revenues, and is included as a Segment reported on quarterly, but the vast majority of their business is in their toy sales. We won’t say a Transformer’s movie doesn’t make a hefty impact on their yearly gains, but even Michael Bay can't pump one of those out every year and thus you can’t rely on that “Entertainment and Licensing” monies.
“But what about My Little Pony?” You say. Well Friendship is Magic, like Hasbro Studio’s other current and popular shows, including, Littlest Pet Shop, and Transformers: Rescue Bots, exists to sell toys. These season long commercials for colorful plastic shapes are what we fell in love with. Like changelings they feed on people’s love but via their wallets, and in turn make more seasons of ponies for us to draw, ship, and write about. And believe me, Hasbro has gotten plenty of money from me:
This is literally my living room…
So let’s take in a few more facts: in order to calculate yearly earnings, losses, taxes and other such unfun money numbers, Hasbro has to pick a “fiscal” year. Now a business can pick any date they’d like for their fiscal year end/beginning. For public trade reasons, they also want to appear strong at the ending and sometimes beginning of their fiscal year. Happy investors means more money spent investing. So it stands to reason for a toy company to look the best at the end of their fiscal year, they would set it to end right after the holidays when toy sales are the highest. So that is exactly what Hasbro has done, with a fiscal year that ends on December 28th with quarters ending 3/28, 6/28 and 9/28. They then report their quarterly earnings to the public about 20 days later.
So if we make a graph that shows air dates of their “Season long commercials” as they correspond to Hasbro’s fiscal calendar we find some very interesting things.
From top to bottom: Pound Puppies, Littlest Pet Shop, My Little Pony, Rescue Bots, and Robots in Disguise (Cartoon Network)
Going as far back as 2010, every season of their most popular, or most promoted shows, has either straddled the fiscal year end, ended in the 4th quarter or began in the 1st quarter/1st week of 2nd quarter. We can see that in many cases hiatuses of varying lengths have been inserted to stick to one of these plans. In the most extreme case, the short second season of Pound Puppies had its final 3 episodes delayed 12 weeks just so it would end in the 4th quarter, closer to the holiday season. These trends also show that nearly every 1st quarter has at least 3 shows airing inside it.
So let’s fast forward to today. Currently, Littlest Pet Shop is in its final season, which, of course is straddling the fiscal year end, and should air its final two episodes on 4/16. In addition, Cartoon Network’s Transformers: Robots in Disguise is slated to premiere March 2016, inside the 1st quarter. But this has left a rather large gap in the 1st quarter programming for Discovery Family. With only the 2 vetted shows, Rescue Bots and Friendship is Magic, remaining to fill this gap, it's not a big leap to expect Season 6 of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic to begin before the end of April.
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