To Twilight's Castle We Go

Ever notice how FiM doesn't have a soundtrack? Oh, occasionally a quick, simple, repetitive little tune consisting of, like, three notes will play, but for the most part it's just a series of context-sensitive sound cues strung together. When I was growing up that was the sort of thing you'd expect from a slapstick comedy series, not a semi-serious linear story. Ask me to hum a tune from the background music in Ducktales or Gummi Bears and I'd come up with one or two dozen fairly complicated orchestral songs, each about a minute or so in length.

Gummi Bears and Ducktales did have context-sensitive tracks and, of course, there's nothing wrong with a little mood music, but the episodes gave them enough time to breathe and set said mood for a minute before seamlessly merging with another track which often could've been mistaken for another part of the same song. They didn't jump all over the place like a fennec on crack, giving my eardrums the auditory equivalent of whiplash by shoehorning short instrumental cues into almost literally every second to make absolutely, positively, 6000% sure I understood that "oh, this is a sad scene, Zummi's feeling doubtful, play five sad notes. Alright, now Sunni's cheering him up, play three high and happy notes. Zummi's still not sure, play three descending notes. Now Tummi's slipped on a banana peel! Play a funny little trumpet, the audience is too stupid to decide how they feel for themselves, keep spoonfeeding them!"

Now, don't go telling me Hasbro can't afford an orchestral track, Odin knows they're not spending any money on their "animation" department. Shallow soundtrack, paperdoll animation, minimalistic designs, incompetent writers who think we'd rather see a football or babysitting episode than explore the royal sisters' pasts or probe alternate dimensions, a marketing department that insists on targeting the little girl demographic with zero disposable income rather than the massive single adult male demographic with Spanish galleons of disposable income...  I wonder what Walt would think of this. I don't know if he'd laugh, cry, or buy the rights to the show and team up with Bluth for a kickass reboot just to rub the modern animation industry's nose in it's own crippling mediocrity.

Honestly, if this were any other franchise but MLP, I would not be watching this show. Same with Welcome to Care-a-Lot and Lion Guard: it's lucky it's a reboot of a thing I used to watch as a kid, otherwise it couldn't stand on it's own merits and I wouldn't give it a passing glance. =/