By Don L. Stradley
I remember a kid in my old neighborhood who owned a Ken
doll. Ken, you may remember, was the sexually ambiguous boyfriend of the
infinitely more famous Barbie. If that wasn’t weird enough, this kid kept his
Ken doll in a state of near nudity, stripping off his safari gear until poor
Ken was down to a pair of bright red swimming trunks. The kid would walk around
the neighborhood with his near naked Ken doll tucked under his arm, and
occasionally visit my yard, where I and my Neanderthal pals were having fun
with our far more manly “action figures,†which included the likes of GI Joe,
and Stretch Armstrong. Ken wasn’t a
natural fit – he was too small, his hair too perfect, and he was always
smiling. The kid claimed that if you left Ken in the sun for a while, he’d
actually get a tan. We eventually let the boy join us because we didn’t figure
Ken would last long, not with the way we brutalized our toys. Yet, as we
dragged our guys through the mud and hurled them from rooftops, Ken showed
surprising durability. Barbie hadn’t totally emasculated him, after all. Then, a fat kid named Bobby Harris showed up
with an Evel Knievel doll, perhaps the toughest damned toy in the history of mankind,
and all bets were off. Ken joined GI Joe
and the others in immediate obsolescence.
I thought of that kid and his Ken doll while watching A
Brony Tale, a cute, good-hearted documentary about the surprising male
fandom surrounding ‘My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.’ The Pony program is made for young girls, but
apparently attracts everyone from military men to bikers. “Don’t underestimate the things that make you
happy,†says one of the movie’s more emotionally fragile fellows. He’d returned from military duty a depressed
wreck but was rejuvenated by his love of the animated show. His comment is
perhaps the most useful of the 97 minute feature, and he’s certainly more to
the point than the various grown men who drone about their right to enter a toy
store and buy something in the Pony aisle.
One practicing psychologist suggests the phenomenon of
“Bronies,†as the male fans are called, is a reaction to the post 9/11 decade,
and proposes these burly misfits are just trying to get away from the violence
and uncertainties of the past 10 years. Ok, maybe. No one understands better than me that pop
culture can help shield a person from what ails him. Yet, the spectacle of 200 Bronies gathering for a group hug strikes me as less about the alleged magical
elements of the show and more about lonely people trying something, anything,
to find a connection.
The movie loses steam in its middle, as director Brent
Hodge focuses on younger Bronies. Neither the junior high school fans nor the
older, college age fans add much to the story. When you’ve heard one melancholy loner tell
about the redemptive qualities of My Little Pony, you’ve heard them all.
The meat of the film involves Ashleigh Ball, the young
Canadian woman who provides the voices of Applejack and Rainbow Dash, two of My
Little Pony’s most beloved characters. Ball is slightly bewildered by the
show’s swelling fandom, and after attending a Brony convention in Manhattan,
she’s still slightly bewildered. She’s
involved in something with a power she hadn’t imagined – Ball was a voice over
artist who played in a band and took the Pony gig because it offered a
paycheck. Now, to her surprise (and discomfort?), Ball may end up as the
William Shatner of Brony world.
It’s disappointing that Hodge misses out on the most
obvious question: What do little girls think of these much older men who watch
the show? How do they feel when they go into a toy store only to learn that the
last available book of Rainbow Dash decals has been scooped up by some
38-year-old loser? I found it unfortunate that the Manhattan convention was
devoid of the show’s real target audience, and that Ball didn’t get to mingle
with some of the very young girls who would’ve loved meeting her. Instead,
she’s on a podium fielding questions from a bunch of depressed types who should
really be trying to bust out of their arrested puberty.
It’s also odd that no mention is made of the show’s
creators, illustrators, or producers, as if the program simply exists in a
vacuum. It’s impossible to imagine a
documentary about Star Wars fans that
didn’t mention George Lucas, but not a single Brony interviewed gives credit to
any creative types. Apparently, all that goes on in a Brony’s mind is his own
love for the show, his own needs, and his own impossibly sad depths that can
only be eased by a girly cartoon.
To Hodge’s credit, he doesn’t dwell on what could be
construed as the more prurient aspects of the story. He lets us think what we will of grown men who
are strangely attached to images of sweet little horses made to sound like
young girls. Is watching the show merely a safe way to stare at little girls,
to enter their innocent fantasies? I can’t say for certain. The old ‘Davey and
Goliath’ series offered positive messages, too, but I don’t recall a lot of
middle-aged guys being into it.
I’d never heard of ‘My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.’
From the clips in the documentary, it appears to be a friendly program about
girl ponies learning life lessons. It’s
a safe place to be, this world of pretty ponies, probably much nicer than a
muddy backyard in the suburbs, where an afternoon with your buddies might be
interrupted by a half-naked Ken doll.
*
A BRONY
TALE is the first title in the new
"Morgan Spurlock Presents†line of documentaries to be released by Virgil
Films in conjunction with Morgan Spurlock's Warrior Poets and theatrical
distributor Abramorama. It opens in select theaters on July 8 and will debut on Video on
Demand July 15.