I am always intrigued by deleted scenes, especially when they’re presumed lost to time. It ties into my fascination with unreleased media in general and the innate appeal of uncovering a secret. Whether it’s the spider pit horrors in the original King Kong, a gruesome death scene from Disney’s The Black Cauldron, or just a short and meaningless clip excised to trim down running time, there’s a certain thrill in encountering something that you, the audience, were never meant to see.
That might be why I went through the trouble of seeking out a deleted musical number from the 1980s My Little Pony cartoon.
I should explain my history with this show. After my family moved to Germany in the mid-1980s, my grandmother sent me and my sister tape after tape of cartoons she had recorded (even going so far as to edit out the commercials, bless her heart). These tapes had a variety of Looney Tunes shorts and semi-educational programs, but they were heaviest on episodes of My Little Pony and Friends.
I scoffed at the cartoon until my family moved off-base and loss access to the Armed Forces Network, and then I was grateful for any shred of American television. That’s why I have seen every episode of the 1980s My Little Pony series multiple times, and why I still can recall the personalities of every toy-shilling horse, from Wind Whistler the sesquipedalian pegasus (and, for the record, the show's best character) to Gusty, a grouchy unicorn voiced by Nancy Cartwright with the same voice she’d later use for Bart Simpson.
My sister and I were discussing this unavoidable childhood diet of My Little Pony not so long ago, and we learned something: the original broadcasts of the show’s “The Glass Princess” episodes featured a song called “Hurry” in the fourth and final part, but this song and the accompanying animation were removed for all subsequent airings. The rest of the episode was sped up slightly (meaning that the song wasn’t cut for time) and the missing footage has never reappeared, not on VHS or DVD or streaming services like Tubi. It was also nowhere to be found online.
I actually remembered seeing this musical number on the old tapes my grandmother sent us, and that made me all the more curious about why it was pulled from broadcast. My sister did all the work of digging up the old VHS tape and recording the screen, and you can thank her by checking out her comic.
Here’s the song sequence in full. Now everyone can find out what the My Little Pony cartoon deemed too shocking, too extreme for the airwaves of the 1980s.
As you can see, it’s a brief and anodyne little number that shows the ponies and their sentient tumbleweed friends, the Bushwoolies, making a quilt. Meanwhile their human allies, whose hands would presumably provide more dexterity than hooves, offer no assistance and merely look on with vacant smiles. There’s no hint of controversy in this “Hurry” song and no inappropriate detail in the animation. In fact, there’s nothing objectionable about this scene.
Or is there? Check out the Bushwoolie creatures around the 39-second mark and you’ll see them dashing around with a pair of scissors and wielding them perhaps a bit carelessly. That might’ve been enough to draw complaints and get the whole musical interlude yanked for fear that impressionable children would ignore that ancient wisdom about scissors and running.
It may seem odd that the show would delete the “Hurry” scene and leave much darker elements untouched in other episodes; for example, the very first My Little Pony cartoon features a demonic centaur king who kidnaps ponies and transforms them into giant helldragons. Then again, there’s far less chance of a child imitating that.
We can’t really wrap up the mystery until someone from the production team confirms that, yes, this My Little Pony cartoon generated complaints about improper scissors usage. Yet seeing the deleted song bit is enough to satisfy my curiosity—and to free it up so I may focus on other things lost to the ages, no matter how trivial they might be. A secret is a secret, after all.
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