[CORRECTION: The original edition of this article confused John Von Neumann with Werner Von Braun, and very unjustifiably referred to Von Neumann as an “Evil Nazi.” Von Neumann was neither Nazi nor Evil. We hear he was a pretty cool guy, and we wish A Beautiful Mind had been made about him instead. OTI very much regrets the error.]
Great heroes are often defined by their villains. Luke Skywalker had Darth Vader. He-Man had Skeletor. U.S. Grant had Robert E. Lee.
But some heroes aren’t defined by their villains, they’re defined by their shiny, brushable hair, their many collectible colors, or their gracefully molded haunches.
Designing villains for heroes that go around saving planets or slaying dragons is easy — some good ideas might begin with a dragon or something that could destroy a planet, not necessarily in that order.
But in the maddening crush to narrativize, syndicate and cross-market every collectible under creation, every once in a while, somebody, somewhere has to confront the one of the most daunting challenges a character designer can face.
How do you make a villain for a hero who doesn’t do anything? Maybe you start with something like this:
Today, we discuss one of the most compelling answers anyone came up with for that question: The Smooze, the sentient Grey Goo that terrorizes the prancing protagonists of 1986’s My Little Pony: The Movie –
Before I get too far into this, it’s important (read: fun) to remember that My Little Pony: The Movie was one of the biggest cinematic failures on record. It had the 27th worst opening weekend for a major theatrical release ever.
(My Little Pony: The Movie made less than $700,000 on 734 screens, which means that less than 20 people saw it on its opening weekend in the average theatre. For reference, that means that it did about four times as much business per screen as 2008’s Delgo and 1/40th of the business per screen as 2008’s The Dark Knight. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . .).
To put that in further context — this very site has produced videos that have been viewed more times in their opening than My Little Pony: The Movie. Of course, we don’t charge 80s prices of $4-$8 per head. And we also didn’t figure out how to make a plastic mold shaped sorta like a horse. This is why we are not millionaires. Hey, life is tough sometimes.
Some movies are underappreciated and get less of a response from the paying public than deserved. This is not one of those movies. It sucks pretty hard. Anyone who’s seen it would be able to corroborate that, but since they’d be remembering My Little Pony: The Movie while doing it, that kind of interrogation would violate the Geneva Convention.
So, why am I talking about this movie?
1.Its all-star cast includes Madeline Kahn, Cloris Leachman, Tony Randall, Rhea Perlman and Danny DeVito as “The Grundle King.” Not counting daytime Emmys or DeVito’s Oscar nomination for producing Erin Brockovich, that’s 3 Oscar nominations and 1 win + a staggering 39 Emmy nominations and 13 total Emmys won across that cast.
None of these actors play any of the really major characters. Nancy Cartwright (1 Emmy) as one of the ponies is as close as the movie comes to having an actual star, and this was three years before Bart had his first cow.
On a recent OTI podcast, we talked a bit about casting directors who convince supercasts of famous and successful actors to do humiliating things. If they gave awards for this sort of thing, Carol L. Dudley should get the Victoria Cross. By the by, she’s still casting movies.
2.My Little Pony is a major pop cultural institution, and I suspect the overall penetration and relevance of this article will surpass just the people who saw the movie in theatres — like, for example, people who watched it on video during the decade when video stores rented out all sorts of random crap, rather than simply the last 18 months or so of random crap + 55 copies of The Da Vinci Code.
3. I repeat: Danny DeVito as “The Grundle King.” Seriously.
4.The Smooze.
So let’s get back to it.
For those of you who have not seen this movie (which, based on box office figures, is probably about 99.7% of the U.S. population, 99.9% if you factor in immigration and emigration since 1986), the Smooze was quite a staggering villain to put the ponies up against. But then again, it would be kind of staggering to put the ponies up against a barn door with a dead bolt.
The Smooze is a planet killer — a Grey Goo / Von Neumann Machine / Ice-9 / stable strangelet analog, except it’s sort of purple with big googlie eyes and sings like the Big Bopper. Heck since we are a tremendously popular Web site that might reach people who haven’t heard of such things, let me explain them:
Grey Goo — Grey Goo is a nightmare scenario related to the study and development of nanotechnology. In this scenario, a self-replicating nanobot is developed that can use basic materials — like, say, carbon, nitrogen and water — to reproduce itself. It then does so to an unlimited and accelerating degree, swallowing all life on the surface of the Earth.
Von Neumann Machine — A Von Neumann Machine is the more general concept, advanced by the Evil Nazi Scientist turned Awesome American Scientist Very Much Not A Nazi Who Fled The Country Before The War turned Awesome American Scientist and early game theorist John Von Neumann. It speaks to a machine that can self-replicate with commonly available materials, swallowing either the Earth or the Universe (as the Manfred Drones do in the Canadian-Sci-Fi-show-I-reference-too-much-because-nobody-has-seen-it-and-those-who-have-didn’t-like-it Lexx).
(I guess Von Neuman Machines, being largely theoretical, could possibly sing like the Big Bopper in practice. It’s also possible that the Big Bopper himself was a Von Neuman machine, and that’s why he had to die in that tragic plane crash. Neither of these conjectures are likely.)
Ice-9 — In the Kurt Vonnegut novel Cat’s Cradle, Ice-9 is a crystal structure for water that is solid at a temperature higher than that of conventional ice (this is based on fact — crystal structures often do form solids of the same material at different potential energies). Crystals propagate themselves when placed in fluid of the same composition and a suitable temperature, so if Ice-9 were to get into the world’s water supply, all the water on Earth would freeze over, effectively killing all life on the planet.
Stable strangelet — “Strange” is one of the flavors of quarks (along with “Up,” “Down,” “Top,” “Bottom,” and “Charm”), and a “strangelet” is a mass composed entirely of strange quarks that have collapsed on each other. Such a mass would have no atomic or molecular structure and would be very dense, with a very low potential energy. Stable ones are generally believed to be impossible — they revert to other types of matter in a normal environment, and in extreme ones, the repulsion of strange quarks’ positive electrical charge prevents them from forming — but if one were to exist, it could have the potential to convert any matter near it into “strange matter” similarly to how a crystal propagates in a suitable fluid.
If the folks at the Large Hadron Collider manage to produce a stable strangelet, there is a nonzero probability that it could plunge into the center of the Earth and swallow it whole, leaving a golf-ball-sized blot the same mass as our home planet (As The Tick says, “But that’s where I keep all my stuff!”) orbiting the sun. From reading reams and reams of anger on Internet message boards, I’ve determined that this is why Ron Paul wants us to return to the gold standard.
Guess that didn't happen. Yet.
I don’t know about you all, but I have had weeks’ worth of nightmares about each of these things, so the Smooze is in good company.
A bunch of witches concoct the Smooze from magical ingredients to use as a weapon against the My Little Ponies (who show little interest in fighting back), and then let it loose on the world, where it sweeps across the terrain, growing as it consumes more and more territory, until it looks likely to cover the entire world.
Once it covers an area, because of a flaw in its formulation — a lazy witch leaves out a key ingredient, “flume,” in a blunder reminiscent of the unfortunately prophetic Richard-Pryor-screws-up-while-making-kryptonite scene in Superman III — the Smooze loses its viscosity and crusts over with an impenetrable shell. This slows down its advance somewhat, but only temporarily, as the googly-eyed part of it still marches forward — and maybe the witches get flume in it at some point. I’m just a bit too lazy to fact-check that right now. Hope that doesn’t ruin your day.
At any rate, the Pony world looks likely to spend the last few billion years of its life before it is pulled into the expanding Pony sun as a barren purple-grey rock face — unless these ornamental horses can stop the Smooze. And as the song says, Nothing Can Stop the Smooze!
Considering how many happy woodland creatures are trying to erect crude barricades before being swept aside and murdered by this stuff, My Little Pony: The Movie probably rocked 1986 with a higher death toll than Top Gun, Platoon and Aliens put together.
Inspiration.
More ponies, more problems
Perhaps fittingly, providing an historical perspective has prompted me to approach things backwards. Especially since the final product is so mired in crap (or Smoozed, as it were), going backward is going to be a smelly process. It’s a bit fresher to start at the beginning and work forward.
Say you sit down to write My Little Pony: The Movie. You’re a fan of fantasy stories, you like to write epic tales of heroism and dastardly deeds; the kind of tales that have horses in them a lot. The producers gave you three main restrictions in writing this movie:
It needs to have the My Little Ponies in it. The My Little Ponies are pretty horses that don’t do anything and have logos on their butts (sorry, haunches) that signify their personalities.
You need to introduce two new products:
Paradise Estates, the new My Little Pony ranch compound, developed to make up for flagging sales of the My Little Ponies castle
It needs to be a 90 minute, G-rated, animated musical.
So, unlike my “Dream Factory” post describing Disney’s Tale Spin, let’s try to follow a reasonable train of thought (and not the kind of train of thought that sets Gummy Bears in Medieval France).
Okay, the My Little Ponies have a new home. Why do they have a new home? Well, something either caused them to move, or they got a second home, or something happened to their old home. The third of these is by far the most interesting from a dramatic perspective. Fine. Something happens to the My Little Pony castle, so the My Little Ponies need to move to Paradise Estates. That covers restriction #1 (the My Little Ponies are in the movie) and the first half of restriction #2 (Mommy, buy me that plastic ranch!).
So, we need to introduce the Flutter ponies somehow. Maybe they live where the new home is?
You know, I don’t think a Mattel-inspired version of The ‘Burbs is going to work here. Besides, we want to write high adventure! That’s why we signed on to write this movie about children’s toys and horses! That and the cool 500 smackers we’re probably making once we finish 100 pages or so — somebody’s getting a new white suit and coral collarless shirt combo for the wardrobe! Don Johnson, eat your heart out!
Mattel gave you some prototypes of these toys to look at while you write, so you hand them to your 4-year old daughter and watch her play with them.
“Oh hi!”
“HIIIIII!!” (she strikes the My Little Pony with the Flutter Pony on the head) “Let’s be friends!”
“Okay, I want to make presents!”
“I want to drink orange juice!”
“Horses don’t drink orange juice! Horses drink grass!”
“Let’s drink orange juice!”
“I love tea party! Let’s go to the DOO DOO DOO.”
“Oh, it’s a cave!”
“Don’t go in the cave, it’s haunted!”
“Oh noooooooooooooooooooooooooo . . .”
“Haaaa.”
“Haaaa.” (the two horses nuzzle for about five minutes while she makes random noises)
“Orange juice orange juice!”
The dialogue could use some work, but the relationships are clear: in every game she plays, the My Little Ponies and the Flutter ponies don’t start as friends, but they become friends. She recognizes that they are different, but it’s hard to avoid the essential similarities once she starts playing with them. Any conflicts are usually petty and short-lived. Also, she is apparently always thirsty. We should do something about that.
The main driving force behind the movie is not going to be a conflict between the My Little Ponies and the Flutter Ponies. Neither of them is going to be the villain — they look too similar, they’re going to be identified with each other no matter what we do.
But, the two groups starting out with some petty differences and then becoming friends in the face of a common enemy sounds like a pretty good B-plot.
So, assuming the My Little Ponies and the Flutter Ponies meet each other over the course of the movie, and the My Little Ponies are homeless refugees (My Little Hobos, ‘natch) for much of the movie, and we have to fill 90 minutes of time where the ponies do nothing other than walk around and chit chat, let’s say that the My Little Ponies and Flutter Ponies live far away from each other, so there’s a lot of ground to cover.
Heck, let’s make them live on opposite ends of the world. We’re epic screenwriters, let’s raise the stakes. The Flutter Ponies live in a faraway magical land where horses have wings for some reason. Fairy Dust Pegasus-land or what have you. And the My Little Ponies need to travel to Fairy Dust Pegasus-land because they are homeless refugees looking for a better life.
You know, I don’t think a Mattel-inspired version of The Grapes of Wrath is going to work here. Besides, we want to write high adventure! We need a villain! Somebody for them to fight and defeat!
But ponies can’t fight. Ponies don’t do anything other than walk around. Well, the Flutter Ponies can fly. They can do that much. Maybe the My Little Ponies need to fly somewhere? Eh, that seems pretty lame — to walk halfway around the world just so you can fly up a mountain right next to where you started. Besides, why would the Flutter Ponies care?
My Little Albatross
So, we stay up late and you write some outline drafts. We put our little plot idea cards up on our corkboard – mapping out potential midpoints, jump-to-third-acts, denouements, but it’s all crap, and it all goes in the trash.
Perhaps the best way to think of a villain is just to pick the opposite of the hero. It worked for He-Man, right? (Actually, no “He-Man with a Modular Skull Head” doesn’t make any sense, but that goes into the “happy accidents” file, and we’ll talk about it some other time).
We try My Big Ponies, but they just crush the little ones into pulp.
We try My Little Alligators, but they eat them. You try My Little Full-Grown Horses, but then you can’t tell anything apart.
You try “Your Little Ponies” as the villain, and then you get pissed at Pixar years later when they come up with Toy Story and prove that your meta-toy-marketing idea was not, as you had thought at the time, total bullshit.
“Your Big Ponies” or “Your Full-Grown Horses” just starts sounding dirty. We write some pornographic fanfiction to amuse ourselves, but we throw it away, because, at the time, there was no electronic repository available to us for erotic My Little Pony fanfiction. Oh, how the times have changed.
Just making half the ponies dark and evil-looking would solve our problem (and save money on animation cells), but it would be idiotic, and we’re not happy at all with the implied racism. Plus, they’d just kick the My Little Pony’s asses anyway.
It drives us to despair. We just wish it could all be over. Thankfully, this helps us write one of the musical numbers from the movie, which really has nothing to do with ponies or anything, but it works in an old-timey show-tune kind of way that we don’t really see in movies anymore, so we keep it around.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pH33Ncy1b1U
We put a dragon and a bunch of goblins in it, because we’re starting to hallucinate. We fight the hallucinations with whiskey. We fight the whiskey with vomit. We fight the vomit with more hallucinations.
“Maybe what this movie needs is a Grundle King,” we say to ourselves. The Grundle King makes it into the final script.
We know we don’t want to drive in this condition, so we walk out into our yard, then into our neighbor’s yard, then across and down some streets, past a field we think we know, to the edge of town, past more fields we know we don’t know, and as we sort of begin to sober up a little bit, we end up in a clearing in the woods, where we collapse to look at the sky.
And right then, it starts to rain. We find ourselves laughing. And that’s when it hits us.
It doesn’t matter.
None of this matters.
This movie is going to be absurd. All movies like this are absurd. The Care Bears fought an evil green sexy face in a magic spellbook at a summer camp or something in their movie. The Cabbage Patch Kids were kidnapped and forced into slavery in a coal mine in their Christmas special.
Why fight it? We are reminded of one of our favorite passages in the Tao Te Ching:
The best of man is like water,
Which benefits all things, and does not contend with them,
Which flows in places that others disdain,
Where it is in harmony with the Way.
So the sage:
Lives within nature,
Thinks within the deep,
Gives within impartiality,
Speaks within trust,
Governs within order,
Crafts within ability,
Acts within opportunity.
He does not contend, and none contend against him.
EUREKA! That’s it!
We rush homeward, following the road signs that point first toward towns we know, then our town, then the Hospital that is on a major street off our street, then the Hidden Drive signs that we never slow down when we pass them on our way home from work every day even though we should, then the Yield sign we always stop at for a solid minute – we stop for a minute – and then we’re home at our, well, what is it, late 1985? Early 1986? Let’s just say we start scratching away with our goosefeather quill pen. That’s what people wrote with back then, right?
The My Little Ponies can’t fight, so it does not matter what sort of active enemy we put up against them. The My Little Ponies are judo-throwing every potential villain we throw against them, using their own strength against them, rendering them useless for the purpose of our plotting.
What if, instead of a villain who tried to fight the ponies, we had a villain who was like the water! Who does not contend, and none contend against him!
Hahaha! We think for a moment of the mature way to write this – a journey of self-discovery, where the ponies learn the depths and possibilities of their own passivity, how accepting the world as it is is part of enlightenment.
And we laugh madly! No, no, no. That’s not what we mean by like the water!
Our villain will be an omnipotent flood of malice that destroys the entire Earth! AND ALL THE PONIES WITH IT!
If the ponies cannot fight any enemy we throw at them, we will throw them an enemy that no one could fight. That way, the fact that they are useless will not be uncomfortable or implausible – it will be the essential fact of their situation.
We have arrived at our main plot by using our restrictions to compel us. The My Little Ponies are powerless against any enemy, so our movie is going to explore the full breadth and depth of that powerlessness. They will find their home destroyed and thousands, nay, millions of woodland creatures downed and suffocated.
They will be driven as refugees on a Mosaic journey through the wilderness, in a useless, futile pilgrimage toward hope that they dare not dream exists. They meet the Grundle King, apparently (How the Hell did that get in there? We try to remember, but we must have blacked out. Oh well, it’s fine, it doesn’t matter.). And what do they find at the end?
Why, they find the Flutter Ponies, of course. The g-d, butterfly-winged little Flutter Ponies.
“Mom, I face the quintessential existential crisis and interminable angst at the futility of existence. All that lives must perish. BUY ME THAT.”
We pat ourselves on the back. We are geniuses.
We tighten up some of the themes and weave together the plots. The ponies are pretty, so it makes sense for something ugly to be set against the ponies – so we make the witches ugly, even though they really don’t matter. It’ll be a cue to the kids that these are bad guys. We throw in a bunch of parts for humans, because who wants to listen to a bunch of horses talk for an hour and a half. We sure don’t!
But we still have one big problem.
Our movie is supposed to be G-rated, and our Ponies are in the midst of a full-on Global Extinction Event, where all the little bunny rabbits in the forest are killed by a flood of vengeance.
Plus, we only have a couple of songs, and most of them are pretty phoned-in. We laugh to ourselves as we realize the solution. We are truly great writers.
We’ll make the world-killing ooze sing!
A world-killing ooze probably bumps you to a PG – We’d certainly want to guide our kids though a meditation on the inevitability of the death of all things – but a singing world-killing ooze? Heck, let’s give it rockabilly influences. Heck, let’s make it a purple one with googly eyes! They’d never bump that above a G. Not in a million years.
In Tribute to George Arthur Bloom
Of course, this isn’t probably the exact thought process of the mad genius George Arthur Bloom, who wrote the My Little Pony movie. By the time My Little Pony: The Movie rolled around, Bloom had a 20-year career in film and television writing, including stints with Welcome Back Kotter, Chico and the Man, The Incredible Hulk. Bloom was nominated for an Emmy in 1973 for The Julie Andrews Hour (and you wonder how he wrote all those wacky show tunes). But it would be nearly another 20 years before Bloom actually won an Emmy – a Daytime Emmy for a broadband show called Cyberchase.
Most notably, at the time of My Little Pony: The Movie, Bloom had been writing for My Little Pony the TV show and for Transformers for a few years already. He would go on to write for other plastic-toy-inspired cartoons, including Potato Head Kids, Jem and the Holograms, and, one of my personal favorites, Bucky O’Hare and the Toad Wars!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6Mh7hhaqhk
To imagine the vast leaps of insanity necessary to put together one My Little Pony plot, I have to imagine a borderline vision quest – a journey into the heart of darkness. Yet Bloom pumped out literally dozens of them.
He had a certain special kind of crazy, which I was glad to see put to productive use for society in his writing for The Magic School Bus, because I fear the rest of his genius may be lost in time. And certainly further study is needed to determine exactly how he did what he did.
Although, you know, I do stand by about 80% of my own narrativization. Especially the part about the Grundle King.