hasbro got one lucky break with mlp G4 and now we're 5 years into the franchise cannibalizing the most recognizable pieces of itself forever and i hate everything
girl help they lost confidence in their IP
this strategy famously worked really great for winx club people kept loving it forever and ever
Friendship is Magic was a surprise hit because Lauren Faust and the rest of the creative team were determined to make a show that kids could watch with their parents without making the adults in the room want to gouge their eyes out.
Make Your Mark/Tell Your Tale, in contrast, was a deliberate effort to focus on the target demographic at the exclusion of the "peripheral" viewers who made FiM a cultural juggernaut for close to a decade. I think they hoped that setting it in the future of FiM's Equestria would bring the "Brony" audience along for the ride, but it didn't.
(For all the suburban banality of G5. It's hard not to look at the loss of magic and the return of segregation and prejudice between the three breeds of Ponykind as anything but a post-apocalyptic Equestria. "Twilight, what did you do?")
Now it seems like they're thinking, "well, we tried to give them more of the setting with different characters, but they didn't like it. Let's try the same characters in a different setting instead!"
I remember reading an interview with Jack Kirby years ago, where he said something along the lines of, "If you want to do what I do, don't do what I already did."
FiM didn't just succeed because they were willing to write a show that didn't talk down to kids and could entertain adults: it succeeded because the things that made it appealing were risks. They flew in the face of toyetic animation in general and "girl cartoons" in particular.
Hasbro, like most corporations, doesn't like risks.
If you want to catch lighting in a bottle, you've got to be willing to brace the storm.
