Time to dive into fringe of pony history. Many of you probably have no idea what this is, but quite a few of you have emailed recently requesting we talk about it due to it's sudden return after 4 years of silence and the huge amount of early pony-goers involved in it.
As many of you have probably gathered from my various editorials over the years talking about the history of pony as a whole, a majority of the earliest of the pony fandom spawned on a website called 4chan. As always, I would recommend not wandering over there if you aren't aware of what it is, but it's important to mention for the sake of this post. Buried in the wild west of the internet, where image macros were completely dominated by ponies until banned, there was a call to "troll" a certain, loud, blustering capitalist who hosted a radio show on Blogtalk Radio. Usually we'd look down on something like that now days, but Ghost, the host, decided to just run with it.
Head on down below the break for the history of ponies, and their interaction with the man they call... GHOST.
As mentioned above, 4chan is essentially the place you go on the internet if you want to shed any and all persona and simply speak your mind. The culture is very much man eat man, with anything at all politically correct thrown out the window. While it's not too common anymore, they used to "raid" call-ins for various podcasts and radio shows, spouting ridiculous memes and generally being obnoxious. It just so happened that Pony was the big thing to bombard people with at this point in time, and creators around the fandom chipped in to have some fun with someone who absolutely hated the idea of men loving cartoon ponies.
Ghost here was already well known from his days of True Conservative Radio for being a loud, angry, opinion filled Texan with a host of conspiracy theories and some surprisingly good investment advice. Half of his show was stock analysis with yelling and screaming at the "morons" in government, investing, and the news media. No one was safe from Ghost's tirades, and the way he complained about stuff was, even if you disagreed with every single thing he said, at least entertaining.
The other parts of his show were where the concept of "raid" thrived:
Twitter shoutouts with massive explosions at the names he'd have to shout out, from the old Bart Simpson style trickery to bronies4ghost setting him off into an alcohol fueled ragefest.
General Call ins: This was where most of the more skilled people would thrive, with several "characters" being spawned over time. We had everything from a guy calling with a flamboyant voice from his bath tub to the "Ghetto" capitalist capitalizing on welfare and driving Ghost absolutely nuts. If you failed it up, and a ton of people did, ghost would absolutely destroy you, sometimes calling back multiple times just to screw with the person and watch the awkwardness flow. It was a dynamic that kept people incredibly entertained as a tug-of-war of sorts happened between trolls, and the comback king that was Ghost.
Mixed in was a ton of random pony stuff. We even got a bunch of remixes out of brony musicians, including the most famous from Alex S:
(NSFW Language)
And finally, Radio graffiti: Where people would get a few seconds to say absolutely anything. Everything from audio splices of him loving ponies, Fluttershy calling in, or Winter Wrap Up on the piano were brought in here. This is usually where the show ended, with a massive uproar from ghost and eventual shutting down in outrage at his callers.
The reactions ghost would give out were some of the best, with empty beer cans being swiped off his desk (Cans.Wav) or strings of surprisingly creative and fluid insults. It's still somewhat of a mystery if he was always genuine, or just an incredibly good actor, but either way he kept it up for months.
Unfortunately he eventually left the internet entirely. The pony fandom tried reviving the concept of an angry capitalist dealing with an army of liberals via a pony version, but it never quite reached the legendary status of Ghost.
It would be impossible to dive into every single thing this show spawned in the early days in one post, but this should give you a general idea on what was involved. If you want to dive in on his newly revived, Donald Trump hyping broadcast, he just started doing it again last week, and a huge amount of his old brony followers have come out of the woodwork to continue their quest in driving him nuts. I'll warn you now - the show is very much a counter to what the pony fandom tends to celebrate. If you are easily offended, you might want to avoid it. If you are looking for a crazy texan raggin on everything, some of the highlights are all over Youtube, or you can dive in on BlogTalkRadio.
