Thought this feature was dead, eh? I don't blame you, real life has been keeping me from getting the motivation to contribute to this feature but I'm back and with an important bit of early fandom history!
Back in what many will call the 'Golden Age of Pony' in 2012 when our fandom was exploding and brand new, John de Lancie and a loyal crew were quite busy getting together a documentary about the world of bronies and how they came to be. This effort led to the documentary "Bronies: The Extremely Unexpected Adult Fans of My Little Pony" and the saga that would follow it.
So strap in and get ready for a blast from the fandom's past!
A long, long time ago, shortly after I joined Equestria Daily, news started to spread of a documentary possibly being made by John de Lancie about our little fandom. He seemed to be genuinely enthralled by our fandom, and hearing that from one of the first big guest stars on the show was really something. Originally the documentary was about Bronycon called simply "Bronycon: The Documentary".
Buzz about the possible documentary started in May 2012 when he made mention of it during Ottawa Comiccon at a panel he was hosting.
It wasn't a few days later that a Kickstarter for the project was launched and posted by yours truly to Equestria Daily. Originally asking for $60,000 the project eventually ballooned into a $322,000 project, well above the original goal that had been set for it.
After reaching their goal things were pretty quiet on the documentary front, but I can attest to seeing them during BronyCon 2012 that summer as they had asked to interview Seth and the rest of us, showing the cameras how we ran Equestria Daily for what we assumed to be a segment on our website.
It wasn't until the release of the documentary in January 2013 that things began to take an unexpected turn. After a couple weeks past we began to hear some troubles from the documentary team about the production, particularly that production was shutting down as indicated in this Kickstarter update from the team.
Plus it didn't help when John himself posted this:
In true fashion, this turned into a firestorm over piracy of the film and a great debate among fans flared up between fans. The controversy was so much in fact that the next day the team issued a clarification on what they meant in their original posting.
Even though the production had reached its lowest point at this moment, things took a noted upturn as the team began to release the documentary piece meal. Whether it be a DVD/Blu-ray release, a release on Netflix or an airing on the Logo channel that was picked up on by Conan. Things seemed to be going better for the documentary crew.
Eventually the team began to release segments cut from the documentary called the "Unreleased Tapes", a Youtube series covering all different aspects of the fandom at the time such as John Joseco, the fire at Bronycon, and even the interview with Seth I mentioned earlier.
As with most things in the pony fandom, the documentary went through an amazing journey that I'm sure I only just scratched the surface here through archives I was able to dig up. For those of you new to the fandom this was quite a big deal back in the day, up there with the Thank You commercial that actually aired on the Hub all those years back (another thing I'll eventually tackle here in Pony History).
For those of you who haven't seen it I recommend giving it a look! It's available on so much media nowadays that you can find it almost anywhere with a simple Google search.
As another episode of Pony History draws to a close I hope to see you guys next time and I hope you enjoyed this little segment on fandom days long past.
Seeya soon!
Twitter: Calpain
