I remember way back before the pony years when Anime Music Videos were all the rage. Video editing was still a relatively new thing for hobbyists to do a decade ago. People forget that Youtube was only 5 years old when Friendship is Magic released!
With how appealing the designs of the characters in this show are, it was inevitable that we'd want to convert scenes into music videos. Little did we know that a veritable tsunami of these would inundate us. There was such a flood, that the genre of "Pony Music Video" was born, becoming an entity of it's own!
Intros are boring, so lets get to it. Celebrate the world of pony videos below!
A Celebration of Pony Video Makers!
(Note: All images are clickable to watch the video they came from!)
I don't think it was the first on the PMV scene, but the Rainbow Dash "You're Gonna Go Far Kid" with a sped up version of the song to sound more Dashy was one of the earliest and most influential.
With it's over 27 million views, I'd argue it's definitely one of the most watched from the earlier days.
From here we saw thousands of people all slapping ponies on to every song on the planet, along with tie-ins to the budding music community of the time. The variety was the coolest part.
Pony was, for the most part, a very positive show. But if you wanted a more serious or dramatic feel, plenty of creators were out there posting things up for the plethora of tastes in our fandom. Horror was a common one, especially as we got more and more scenes that could be re-interpreted as dark with a bit of clever editing.
Others were simply filled with ENERGY like the old series of mane 6 videos from Shiropoint. Especially the Race Like Rainbow Dash, which was always my personal favorite.
Others combined masterful editing of both sound and video to create a subgenre of "YTPMV" where pony voices were clipped out of the show and used to sing along with, or straight up sing the song being played. I even had this one on my running playlist for a while!
At some point, the concept of just scenes and ponies became the minority as people got better and better. Expectations quickly rose, and with that quality of videos. The Garden here is probably one of the best examples of the crazy progression in video making we've seen over the years. Telling a wordless story with some of the best use of simple effects I've seen even to this day.
Another good example since it was by far one of my favorites!
Crazy effects and motion graphics became the norm as we got older. In some scenes it got slightly obnoxious, but many used their editing tools in a way that was both technically impressive, while still managing to avoid being overly oppressive on the flashyness.
With that came the ponified game, TV, and anime openings, because no category of brony creation is complete without converting other things into our glorious horsey overlords.
Also memes. Cause, again, pony is domination.
Many editors have pretty much made the jump to full on animators at this point. I'm not even sure where you'd put this one by TheeLinker on the scale that separates the two of them. It's still one of the most impressive pieces out there.
With rising expectations among the fandom and a huge drop in interest in regular scene's n' ponies style, people started creating massive collaborative projects to meet what the fandom demanded, focusing on super-well-done short segments across a bunch of separate video makers. Similar to Doors in the SFM scene, but more focused and regular.
These days, creators like Tridashie have taken over with a variety of different styles and ideas completely unique to their specific channels. "Friendship is Musical" has become a staple of the pony world, while Pony Girl still gets stuck in my head sometimes. In that case, it really is a full on animation.
I already mentioned voicework in the animation shoutout earlier today, but I feel like they need another heavy dose of love. In both that and the video editing scene, they have been instrumental in bringing everything to life. People like Eile Monty, Caitbug, and swarms of others have all put in tons of work over the years, and they deserve loads of credit for it.
With that out of the way, back to the main topic here! Thank you video editors! You have kept us entertained with so many hours of carefully crafted footage that we really are lucky to have you. Not only have you helped spread pony on one of the biggest platforms out there, you've managed to constantly impress an ever-more picky fandom for years without stopping. I can only imagine how far this genre will evolve as we venture forward! May your computers render without issues long into the future!
Meanwhile, I'll be over here getting this nightmare stuck in my head again.
(If you want more, we still have these archives with a bunch of fandom classics over here. I should probably get those updated.)
