My Little Pony: G4 Applejack’s G3 Inspiration?

It is well-known among My Little Pony fans that the creator of Friendship is Magic, Lauren Faust, based the fourth generation Mane 6 on her favourite G1 ponies. While she initially intended to reuse not just the personalities, but also the looks and names of those ponies, the fact that Hasbro had in the meantime lost the copyright to most of those characters led to their names and colour schemes being more inspired by G3 ponies, even if they were not so similar as characters. (Well, and Fluttershy ended up being a pegasus instead of Pinkie Pie. I’m sure you all know that one.) A well-known table from the internet illustrates all this marvellously:

Initially posted by Somebody on mlpforums.com

As you may notice (or already know), Applejack is the only one who kept her G1 name and looks. While an Applejack also existed in the third generation, she was obviously quite different, and may have aided in preserving the copyright, but she was visually quite different. (Incidentally, the same goes for the only other character who preserved his G1 name and colours – Spike.) So, it is generally considered that G3 didn’t have much of an influence on who G4 Applejack turned out to be.

However, it must be said that the G1 and G4 Applejacks are quite different in terms of personality. G1 Applejack was often shy and clumsy, and while it would be unfair to call her cowardly, she was at least somewhat fearful and cautious. That doesn’t quite correspond to the mostly confident, relaxed and brave G4 Applejack. Also, G1 Applejack liked eating apples very much – sometimes to the point of overeating (though she was nowhere as notorious as Cotton Candy, the bane of all flowers in Ponyland) – but the dimension of her growing apples, or harvesting them to make something out of them wasn’t overly pronounced. Neither was her Western/country style – although she may have spoken with a touch of a similar accent in the show, the books and comics, where she appeared a lot more, don’t show her as a farmgirl.

As an aside, let’s also mention that G1 Applejack had a daughter – named just Baby Applejack, as that was the convention for early G1 babies – but that doesn’t necessarily mean that this influenced the G4 Applejack being more mature than the rest of Mane 6 and a motherly figure to her little sister. After all, many G1 ponies had children – so did Firefly and Surprise, and that didn’t make them less adventurous or light-hearted! (On this subject, I recommend Bixel’s short but excellent post on how well-developed G4 Applejack’s character is. It contains slightly more mature subjects, but is well worth the read!) G4 moved away from the idea of main characters having children of their own, presumably in order to make them more young-looking and relatable to child viewers. The theme of family life in My Little Pony is also a very interesting one, and I might write something about it in the future.

 

So, since G1 Applejack didn’t overly transmit her personality to G4, and there was no G2 Applejack (there was an Apple Pie, but she was a very minor character and isn’t too similar), did G3 Applejack have any influence there? Again, unlikely. While she has a beautiful and striking red-and-green colour scheme, she wasn’t a particularly prominent character: she only appears in the show as a background pony, and, to my knowledge, isn’t under the spotlight in any of the printed media, either. (I may be wrong – I haven’t read all G3 books and comics! If you know of any where she plays an important role, please let me know!) There is always the text that came on the toy packaging, but it doesn’t give us much: “If you’re looking for APPLEJACK, you can almost always find her in Pony Park, having a picnic next to Rainbowberry’s fountain! She loves to pack a basket full of yummy treats and share them with her friends. Sometimes she takes her basket to Pony Beach, and goes for a swim after lunch!”

 Image from mylittlewiki.org

            While this picnic basket does evoke a relaxed country feeling, it still isn’t too similar to G4 Applejack, whom we regularly see harvesting apples, pressing cider and overall working on a farm. So, for a while, I thought G3 really didn’t have much to do with it, beyond luckily preserving the copyright on the name “Applejack”. But then I bought a lovely G3 picture book:

            I had known of it from the Internet before, but only reading it in person brought some details to my attention. I do recommend the book if you’re into a light-hearted tale of the meaning of friendship (yes, a very common theme in MLP media, but how could that be bad) and homey pictures of ponies doing autumn things. Do be warned, Applejack doesn’t appear in it at all. But another pony who was only in the background in the show does feature in this book – Butterscotch. Here she is harvesting some apples…

            Here she is making cider out of them later…

            And then serving it to her pony friends:

Scans better than my own photo taken from heckyeahponyscans.tumblr.com

           There are more pictures of her in the book, but I presume this illustrates the point sufficiently. While, of course, she isn’t fully G4 Applejack, the country girl charm is much more present than with either G1 or G3 Applejack, and her colours are very similar to the classical Applejack look. Of course, G4 Applejack is bucking apples, not climbing trees to pick them, and the Apple family cider production is bigger and more professional than Butterscotch’s lone cauldron over the fire, obviously meant as a single treat to her friends. But still – make her a tad more mature and less girly (replace the ribbon with the cowboy hat :)), and tell me you wouldn’t see G4 Applejack in those pictures!

So maybe our favourite pony cowgirl took some bits and pieces from G3 after all – if not from her namesake, then from her cider-making lookalike. In fact, come to think of it… Butterscotch’s somewhat gentler colours and curls might be even more similar to those of Applejack’s mother – Pear Butter, nicknamed Buttercup. Is the “butter” in their names just a coincidence?

Screenshot from the episode “The Perfect Pear”

Or might Butterscotch be Applejack’s predecessor in more ways than one? What do you think?