Of Unicorns: On My Little Pony

My earliest memories are of my own interest in perfection. The supreme object of my interest, of my deepest intellectual and sensual love, was a product designed and manufactured with the express aim of capturing the attention of very young girls.

I was hardly unusual. I was obedient, even; in some ways unimaginative. Still, I think we can learn something from my thrall:

My Little Pony was a figurine copyrighted by Hasbro and first produced in 1982. Based on My Pretty Pony, a larger and clunkier toy with unimpressive sales, My Little Pony was, despite the singularity baked into its name, always plural. There was no “pony,” never a one. Only ponies—many ponies, always proliferating, mutating, re-accessorized. Earth ponies and sea ponies and winged ponies and, of course, unicorn ponies. Each pony with its distinctive not-to-be-found-in-nature shade, its shimmering corn-silk plastic mane, its rump printed with an allegorical symbol, a.k.a. “cutie mark”: ice cream, clover, seahorse, stars, flowering plants, and on and on, emojis avant la lettre. The ponies’ bodies were plastic. For now, the ponies would not decay, although fire might melt them or a car wheel crush them. Their eyes were round and bedecked with long lashes. The irises were illustrated in such a way that each pony eye appeared perpetually brimming. Highlights, as on a meniscus of dew, were standard. The ponies might weep soon. They might cry for joy. They might look in your direction.

The ponies lived in Ponyland. It is not clear where they came from nor how they reproduced. They were of course inside the television, part of a twenty-two-minute weekday cartoon show called, fittingly enough, My Little Pony, and thus inhabited a visual realm, temporally constrained, yet constantly available if one had a VHS system and knowledge of how to record. They were material, as stated. They were moving images, as stated. They could be purchased and held. They could be watched. They were very smooth, seamless, without any roughness. One might run a hand down their necks, across their shoulders, along their backs. One might brush their plastic-scented, flower-colored hair.

The myth-world of My Little Ponies was of a part with other myth-worlds of the mid to late eighties: the land of the Care Bears; the stationery empire of Lisa Frank; the intergalactic realms of She-Ra, of Wildfire the magical horse, of the ThunderCats. These myth-worlds ebbed into one another and got confused; it did not matter that they originated with unaffiliated copyright holders. They had rainbows, lots of rainbows, and craggy cliffs and lush forests and desert planets with buried fortresses, and were elsewhere, always elsewhere, beyond the sky or the solar system. You did not attain these places by walking down the street. They were like heaven, although no god was present. Devils aplenty: deranged scientists and bitter witches and space dictators and reanimated corpses with surprisingly good social skills were available to frustrate bliss. But there was no singular author of the good, no logos. There was only a puffy, sparkling spirit that cheerfully resisted death, corruption, and gratuitous violence—the ponies were mild imps who lived in terror of a Christian Satan. They always won out but it was by no means certain they would survive. These were the terms of the contest: a shimmering tribe of hunter-gatherer horses versus a citadel-dwelling autocracy equipped with what I now take to be early sixteenth-century levels of technology and opposable thumbs.

You collected the ponies. You displayed the ponies. You made the ponies move and speak. You had them interact with She-Ra or perhaps Panthro, your favorite ThunderCat. You watched the cartoon series and the mediocre animated movie. You understood the personalities in question, the greater stakes. You sided with the good. You experimented with the struggle of the good and caused the plastic bodies to crash into one another. You brushed their tangled silky hair and sometimes cut it off with safety scissors.

My Little Pony’s bodily gestalt closely resembles that of characters in Disney’s Fantasia (1940)—specifically, a herd of infant pegasi and unicorns who make brief appearances in the Pastoral Symphony section of the film, a visual interpretation of Beethoven’s Sixth. Here a highly stylized version of Ancient Greece, rendered by artists who had obviously never set foot on the Peloponnesus, supports aggressively manicured flora. The rolling hills and pompom trees are reminiscent of Grant Wood’s precisionist landscapes and therefore oddly Iowan, none too Olympian. The little mythical horses gambol in leafy zones, exuding cuteness, youth, and the desire to please. They are impossible pastel shades and offer relief from hetero mating games enacted by Pastoral Symphony’s main characters, a group of nubile centaurs and “centaurettes.”

Ponyland, once it appears over four decades later, is not located anywhere near fake Ancient Greece. In the eighties, visuals associated with woodlands of the European Middle Ages were all the rage, and therefore the ponies do not live in a caricature of the grounds of Monticello, although they are magically connected to a well-to-do part of rural America where their human intercessor, Megan, makes her home. The My Little Ponies inhabit a Germanic forest of pleasure, just steps from the locations of such unicorn-centered films as The Last Unicorn (1982) and Legend (1985). Swords, cauldrons, drawbridges, and magic wands are available, even as roller skates, leg warmers, tutus, boomboxes, examples of anachronistic architecture (e.g., suburban tract homes), plus soft-serve ice cream, proliferate.

Why did unicorns become such a thing in eighties America? I watch a commercial for stationery products by Lisa Frank, a major proponent of unicorn imagery, and the child actor explains that the glut of stickers and paper goods, et cetera, is “impossible to keep up with.” This said, “It’s fun to try!” “Lisa Frank: You Gotta Have It!” was the slogan. She must have it. All the rainbows and unicorns and butterflies and penguins in sunglasses and gumball dispensers and glistening hearts. All the smoothness, cuteness, perfection, palm trees. All the lozenges of light beaming from these ideal forms. Grinning orcas, infant tigers, pandas in overalls.

As if summoned by this deluge of devotional imagery, unicorns seemed to come into actual embodied existence at this time, too. In or before 1980, Morning Glory and Oberon Zell, an enterprising neopagan couple, created a “Living Unicorn” by transplanting the horn buds of immature goats so that the animals’ horns grew together into a single “corn” at the center of their foreheads. The Zells toured Renaissance fairs, monoceros goats in tow, and signed a deal with the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus in 1984. The circus took four of the Zells’ specimens on a cross-country tour that kicked off in Houston, Texas. It was in this way that a unicorn “attends party at disco”—as a headline in the Park City Daily News of Bowling Green, Kentucky, reported on April 19, 1985. Among those also on display were “Eric Douglas, son of actor Kirk Douglas,” as well as “a man with white hair coiffed in a one-foot horn like the unicorn’s” and “baby sharks in a tank.”

In one reading, the Zells’ goats satisfied a collective longing for a fantastical nature religion, inflected by an uncomfortable nostalgia for pseudomedieval times. In another, the circus unicorns seem an example of the unkind lengths to which humans will go to shape that which is living into a desired image. The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the United States Department of Agriculture certainly took note of the Zells’ innovations. In spring of 1985, as controversy swirled, the chief federal veterinarian in New York State, one Dr. Gerald Toms, announced, “There is nothing wrong with the goats, and that is a considerable relief to find.” A week later, the unicorn celebrated its sanity by joining Eric Douglas and the sharks at the club.

The unicorn breed or variant of My Little Pony was less real or realistic than the Zells’ goats and was, therefore, an even more potent site of fantasy. Wingless (apparently turf-bound), she possessed a talent: wiggling, wriggling, twinkling her flank, she was able to disappear from one location and reappear in another. She teletransported—a magic body. She therefore underlines a peculiar quality of the time inherent to the MLP myth-world: this myth-world is not historical, although significant events (crises) in the style of history occur. The My Little Ponies seem to lack the sorts of mnemonic affordances, e.g., writing or social institutions, that would allow them to retain intergenerational memories, and, in any case, although baby My Little Ponies exist, the My Little Ponies appear to be immortal, unaffected by death. They wink in and out of an eternal present. They disappear when the show ends and reappear when it begins again, and nothing has changed. They increase in number but not one of them ages. They have little reason to believe that any day will be at all unlike the last.

In Ponyland of the eighties, there is no god, death, or recorded history. And there is no erotic love. The ponies might have some hermaphroditic capacity, like the velociraptors of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park, who are engineered from amphibian DNA, but their reproductive lives are never explained. It would be unsurprising to come across a “nest” of My Little Pony “eggs”—candy-colored and trembling and ready to hatch. Yet Ponyland, a garden of earthly delights, is ultimately chaste. In it, the unicorn’s traditional association with purity has been so amplified as to become sterility. Here nature is a backdrop and is dead, despite the verdancy of the realm. Is not the world of My Little Ponies an image of post-industrial reproduction, in which images beget other images by means invisible to human eyes? It is a social space at once sexless and intently feminized. This femininity is slavishly devoted to (1) vague expressions of care, and (2) adhering to the personality traits allegorically entailed by the symbols on any given pony’s rump.

Even more enticing to me than this soulless cartoon and its anodyne landscapes were My Little Pony’s mesmerizing commercials, featuring tropes strung together in more or less the same order: cartoon vignette displaying rainbow logo and frolicking characters; introduction of new plastic figurines corresponding to cartoon characters; elaboration of possibilities for play in time to jingle by live child actors. The little girls, always primped as for a pageant, animate their ponies using their hands. They cause them to walk into the Satin Slipper Sweet Shoppe or the Poof ’n Puff Perfume Palace, offer them nourishment or grooming, raise them to their lips and kiss them on their plastic muzzles.

“I’m a My Little Pony mommy,” the jingle goes, “and now I’m happy as can be, because the My Little Pony Perm Shoppe beautifies my family!” The jingle extols “a beautiful place to comb their pretty hair.” “My Little Pony, My Little Pony,” croon soft female voices. The jingle announces, “We’re My Little Pony girls!” Someone sings, “Little Pony, it’s all for you!” “I love you, My Little Pony,” a girl says, briefly able to speak above the music. She murmurs, “I love the way you feel, my So Soft My Little Pony.” She reverently whispers, “You dance wonderfully, my Baby Pony.”

The commercials’ live-action environments were shade-speckled playrooms and artificial gardens. Collectible enclosures—the Dream Castle or Lullaby Nursery or Baby Bonnet School of Dance—were displayed on tabletops. The heads of the child actors nodded close by, their eyes and mouths visible through the windows and doorways of various sanctuaries and salons. The girls manipulated the pastel equines. One could almost imagine that the Flutter Ponies and Secret Surprise Ponies and Fancy Mermaid Ponies and Sundae Best Ponies and Twice as Fancy Ponies and Sweetberry Ponies and Baby Drink ’n Wet Baby Ponies and Twinkle-Eyed Ponies and Brush ’n Grow Ponies and Sparkle Ponies and Princess Ponies and Newborn Twins Baby Ponies and Baby Ponies with First Tooth and Magic Message Ponies and Dance ’n Prance Ponies and Tropical Ponies and Rockin’ Beat Ponies were alive.

***

It was from My Little Ponies that I first learned of unicorns. Thus, I got the idea of an adorable outline, a particular prettiness. This unicorn had a swirled spike, a bit like a third eye. Far from terrifying me, her protuberance emphasized the soft bluntness of her muzzle. She led with her forehead, flirtily butting the air. She must hold her head up high, for the tip of her horn seems lighter than the atmosphere, attracted to rainbows and puffy clouds. The tip is tiny, dainty. Obesity is impossible for the unicorn pony. Roughness is impossible. She is sleek, infinitely sleek. She is sleeker than water, for only my eye touches her outline. She is a slip, luscious as a basking fetus, supple as a cupid.

I am ecstatic and have no idea why. I’m four years old, perhaps a year or two older.

It is not difficult to feel that the unnatural fetish of the plasticky, pastel My Little Pony is a way of celebrating the attenuation of the senses in American culture. Our nation has repeatedly shown itself to be obsessed with pain-killing substances and institutionally managed hypnosis. Yet, the attempt to numb can coexist with other aesthetic possibilities. Indeed, it is not clear to me that the My Little Pony I hold in my lap is an opiate. She may, in fact, be something else altogether, a translating device, a vestige of alchemy.

Yes, for with My Little Pony there is always the matter of tactility. Ultimately, we are beckoned into her world through the sense of touch, although to be sure the sense of touch is so intimately tied to the sense of sight here that the two may be inextricable. The film scholar and critic Laura U. Marks has written of the way in which touch and sight become intermeshed in the new media of postmodernity in Touch (2002):

The difference between haptic and optical visuality is a matter of degree. … In most processes of seeing both are involved, in a dialectical movement from far to near, from solely optical to multisensory. And obviously we need both kinds of visuality: it is hard to look closely at a lover’s skin with optical vision; it is hard to drive a car with haptic vision.

Although Marks has recourse to examples from IRL behavior, she is most interested in how the virtuality of cinema gives us room to feel differently—to inhabit sensory modes that are not reducible to a single sense and require that we navigate moving images in unexpected and highly specific, bodily ways.

I relate to this notion because I grew up watching television. When I write this, I do not mean that I grew up sometimes watching television. I mean that, from the earliest times I can remember, I sat in front of a television for any and all hours I was not in school or asleep. As I can remember a time before I attended preschool, this was often many hours per day. This period of constantly watching television, of begging its then-limited channels to teach me about the world, to interact with me in some pronounced fashion, seemed to go on forever.

What I am saying is that from an early age I had to get creative, had to do something with my mind. I sought a metaphor, one that would describe the exceptional image I wanted. For I knew I wanted an image.

I wrote that I was interested in perfection, but that is just a manner of speaking—what I was interested in was a peculiar visual liquidity, a smooth taste or malleable sound, an image I could shape and feel; an image that would be coextensive with my body and require the collaboration of multiple senses.

When I at last found this image, it was in a terrible movie. This movie was originally created in 1985 and must have been rerun on television sometime later. It is called The Hugga Bunch. It is about forty-eight minutes long. It is accessible on YouTube today.

A summary culled from IMDb, amusing in its curtness: “A girl travels through her mirror into HuggaLand to find a way to keep her grandmother, the only one who knows how to hug, young.”

I had no interest in the grandmother plot, having almost no relationship with my extended family. I had no interest in the dolls, residents of HuggaLand who surveil the girl through her mirror and emerge from it to assist her. All I cared about was the possibility of this portal.

In my memory, it is a miracle that seems possible. It would be a lucky thing for such an event to take place, a mark of one’s life story being a life story that defies all expectation, and it would be a form of rescue, an intervention at the last minute, the universe rousing itself to demonstrate that there is more than meets the eye.

It was my idea that I would walk through the mirror in my own room. The mirror would soften, and I would be in another land. The moment of the mirror’s softening would be perfection. It would be the coalescing of image and sensation into something more and other than either of these two. It would be analogous to learning to fly or practice telekinesis. Having passed through a buoyant vertical curtain, I would find everything to surprise me. All things would be unusual and beautiful while at the same time intended for me, an infinitely complex allegory I had to decipher and continue to decipher and play with and learn from and cultivate—all of which would simultaneously be a form of food and an expression of love, whose I do not know. There would be fruit and blue skies. There might be puppets from children’s television shows. There would be a purpose to my living. Animals would speak, their voices musical and profound.

This mirror-world is additionally an intermediary state, a three-dimensional decoder that helps to explain the way in which the flattish images to which I am continuously privy via the television relate to the real world of time and space, in which I interact with a limited number of other human beings. If one were to stand before the mirror and have a certain feeling, a feeling of confidence but also one of curiosity, then might the mirror not grow porous, bend, dimple, liquify—so that a finger to its surface generates a ripple? And if this is the case, then might one not cross through? Might not that virtual realm become true? Might I not be able to cross over and experience the condition of being human as something … else?

A My Little Pony was a mirror, too.

From An Image of My Name Enters America, to be published by Graywolf this October.

Lucy Ives is the author of three novels: Impossible Views of the World; Life Is Everywhere, and Loudermilk: Or, The Real Poet; Or, The Origin of the World. She is the 2023–25 Bonderman Assistant Professor of the Practice in Literary Arts at Brown University.

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