Looong post incoming, sorry for my rambling guys:
Pony Life, is...harmless, but overall it just feels like a less good version of Unikitty. Some episodes and lines are funny but most of the episodes just left me feeling nothing. Just a hard “meh.” As for the advertising, the song they used in that first trailer is pretty popular among kids (at least according to my little sister, apparently she’s heard it a lot and didn’t even realize they said “Hell” outside of the title) so that’s why they used it, it wasn’t really thought of as inappropriate for that reason I guess. As for the toy design, G4.5... they’ve really grown on me, but they have more of a (not as good version) LPS aesthetic rather than an MLP aesthetic if that makes sense. I like the body but the head just throws the whole thing off.
...but anyway, I've been daydreaming about G5's cartoon a little (don't judge me), and I think the ideal G5 show would have a tone similar to--hear me out--Tangled: The Series, also known as Rapunzel's Tangled Adventure.
FiM has had some cool lore and magic since the beginning but at the end of the day, it’s mostly a slice-of-life show with magic, lovable characters, and the
occasional adventure and villain to defeat. Later on, they tried to have more arcs and “epic adventures”, and it was a good effort but it just didn't completely fit the tone or structure the show had set at the beginning. The best “arc” they had was probably Season 4, the one where each of the Mane 6 had to collect a key relating to their Element of Harmony. It was a good mix of the slice-of-life format of the show and the magic adventures. That’s actually
part of the reason Season 4 is my favorite season, it was a good mix and felt like a natural progression of the show's structure. Some of the other arcs they tried doing after that just didn't fit the structure of the show all that well imo. Again, good effort, but not quite there.
Anyway, so why do I think TTS would be the best inspiration for story structure and tone? Well, Tangled: The Series has a lot of slice-of-life episodes (which usually involves something that could only happen in the show's universe, not IRL which is fun), but it’s not the heart of the show. Even at the very beginning, they were teasing an over-arching plot. The story surprised a lot of people since it actually got pretty epic with really cool lore and mature moments that respected the target audience (kids), and it was all still character-driven, and it still had cartoony comedy and such that kids (and adults
) love.
Along with FiM and others, it's one of those cartoons that made people realize femininity =/= stupid.
TTS and FiM actually have a lot in common but TTS’ format almost feels like the more polished version of the tone late-stage FiM was going for. Not that TTS didn’t have its own problems, but I don't think the story structure was one of them.
It has been a trend recently that more children's cartoons have been getting more anime-inspired over-arching plots, so why am I using TTS specifically as an example? Well, because shows like Steven Universe and Avatar have an older target audience is all. I don't know for sure, but I always thought the target audience for TTS was similar to FiM's target audience which is partially why I think it would be good inspiration.
...I got off-topic, but yeah, basically I’m saying that I think a tone and story structure similar to TTS would fit MLP well and be an awesome direction for G5.
And I don’t think you guys gotta worry about G5's cartoon looking like the Hello Pinkie Pie shorts. Those were made with very little time, meanwhile, G5 is opening with a full-on movie. Idk about the art style (fingers crossed that it'll be good) but the animation will probably be fine, or even great. And it looks like the plan is for the show to be 2D so that's a relief, 3D shows tend not to look great since there just isn't enough time.