My Little Pony 'n Friends: Somnambula (G1 TV Episode, 1987, 2x 10 minutes)

Part 1

Big Brother Ponies are coming home! They've been away for a year travelling all around the world? Okay, so everything prior in this series occurred all within one year, but we're finally getting stallions. Think about that; sixty episodes have past, we've got five more to go before the end of the series,and these are the first male ponies we've seen. This is *way* worse than FiM's in-show demographics.

Calliope!

Somnambula is some kind of witch, and controls a magic songbird that hypnotize any pony that hears her. Spike seem unaffected. And ponies dealing with loud noises aren't affected either.

Somnambula is using the ponies to make herself younger.

So the only real differentiation between mares and stallions is that stallions have neckerchiefs and feathers (long hair on the lower leg just above the hooves). With reference to real horses, not all horses have feathers, and it has nothing to do with gender. It's a breed thing. Though many do shave the feathers on breeding mares to prevent the foals from nibbling the hair off. The bit that's usually distinctive on real stallions (outside of genitals which there're not going to do in this show, of course.) is a highly defined 'crest'. Basically the part of the neck where the mane attaches is taller and thicker on a stallion than it is on a mare or gending.

They've been to Paradise Estates before. So they were here after the Movie, but we didn't get to see it.

Magic song doesn't affect the young ponies either, just adults.

Ah, witch is normally an illusionist, but is using the pony dreams to make the stuff real. Either she just took the name Somnambula due to this, or it's really the name of the bird and the witch is appropriating it.

The song affects the male ponies.

Being knocked out of the spell works for a while, but they eventually fall prey to it again. How long is different for each pony.

Part 2

Big Brother Ponies refer to the mares as 'All the Little Ponies' several times now. That just strikes a bad chord for me somehow. It's a bit too close to how women were often regularly referred to as the 'little women' as a demeaning insult, in response to Louisa May Alcott's immensely popular novel Little Women (1868).

Ponies are being aged by the power drain.

The song just overrides all free will.

Heck of a beak on that bird.

Okay, all the Unicorns are apparently imprisoned separately.

The unicorns are powering the 'reality bending' powers, by channelling their magic into some kind of crystal.

Crystal just poofs away. likely it was also an illusion being stabilized, making it a kind of perpetual magic machine.