Tag: lps

LPS Preview: Four and Out

November 6, 2015, 11:25 pm EST Littlest Pet Shop Comments Off on LPS Preview: Four and Out

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It’s always sad when a show you like ends. Saturday marks the beginning of the end for Littlest Pet Shop as it begins their fourth and final season on Discovery Family with a pair of new episodes. Fairly or unfairly, for a show that’s based on toys, it is judged by how many toys it sells. Unfortunately for LPS, that number was not enough.

At its beginnings, LPS was nearly on par with MLP in terms of viewership. However, it later could not take advantage of having MLP as a lead-in and really suffered when it didn’t. While its numbers were still considered good ratings for Discovery Family, its numbers as it related to toy sales were apparently not.

That aside, it will be interesting to see how LPS wraps up its time. Blythe is coming off a successful Pet Fest which became the arc in the second half of Season Three. Youngmee now knows that Blythe can talk to the pets. If anything, Season Four is all about what’s next for Blythe and the pets. All that is known right now is that the show will get its 100th episode, but its 104th will be its last. You can only hope that the show will end on a high as it did for Season Three.

It is a shame that LPS could not follow in the hoof prints of MLP: FiM, but then again, no show on Discovery Family can at this point. The best that LPS fans can do is to support the show to the end and in turn give it a great send-off.

It all starts again on Saturday with “The Tortoise and the Heir” and “Pitch Purrfect” beginning at noon ET/11:00am CT on Discover Family.

StatManDan

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Eschbacher: Season Four to be LPS’s Last

October 6, 2015, 3:57 pm EST Littlest Pet Shop 5 comments

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According to a tweet from Littlest Pet Shop writer Roger Eschbacher, Season Four of LPS will be the show’s last. The season will be 26 episodes in length will would bring its apparent final total to 104 which would make it the either the second or third Hasbro animated series (depending on what Transformers: Rescue Bots does) to reach 100 episodes. Also according to Eschbacher, 21 of the episodes are locked while the remaining five are still being written.

The show last aired a new episode on Discovery Family on March 7th of this year and has been on hiatus since apart from series of four online shorts on the LPS website release just a few days ago.

The latest version of Littlest Pet Shop debuted on November 10th, 2012, and for a time, its viewership on what was then the Hub Network was close to, or even on par, that of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. However, viewership on the Hub/Discovery Family for the show faded since then. Despite the viewership declines in Season Three, a fourth season was already greenlit.

Given that the main priority for Hasbro is that tie-ins of its shows, which are based on toys, sell; LPS was quietly showing gains the last few quarters in sales after its re-invention was announced at the 2014 NYC Toy Fair.

It is unclear what will happen next for LPS as it is one of Hasbro’s seven franchise brands along with MLP, Transformers, Nerf, Play-Doh, Monopoly, and Magic: The Gathering; though more will likely be disclosed starting with Hasbro’s Q3 Earnings Call which is set for October 19th.

StatManDan

[Source: Madame Pom News]

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Rumor: Who Is The Father Of Derpy

September 27, 2015, 10:06 pm EST My Little Pony 1 comment

 

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While typically not our thing to have fun and post about rumors, but when you are a site dedicated to a background “glitch”, you just can’t help it.  Earlier this evening Big Jim from the MLP crew became bored and summoned his Twitter minions for a little Q&A.  Among them was Joel Dickie, crew member and director of Littlest Pet Shop.  Joel asked the question of “who originally posed / animated derpy hooves with crossed eyes and did he or she get fired?”.  In reply Big Jim answered “I don’t know, and you still seem to be working, so…”.

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While the beloved grey mare has always been dubbed an animation error (or glitch), Lauren Faust worded the answer to the question a little differently back in the olden days of late 2010 via her Deviant Art account.  “Probably the result of a bored layout artist.” was the general wording, going further into details that Layout Artists at times hide little easter eggs to keep themselves entertained at work.  Needless to say when the first episodes of MLP were being forged in the fires, no one knew it would take off like a burning train in War of the Worlds.

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Needless to say, someone is found in the credits of the episode under Layout Supervisors.  Could it have been future LPS director Joel Dickie who, one day bored tweaked a background character for his own amusement, spawning a culture icon that generally represents a massive online community of animation fans and is beloved by countless fans?

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Maybe someday we’ll find out.

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LPS Review: Fish Out of Water

August 7, 2014, 8:48 pm EST Littlest Pet Shop 11 comments

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It’s been proven that Merriwether Williams can write good MLP episodes. It’s time to say the same about Guy Toubes writing good LPS episodes. The episode begins by undoing his work in “Secret Cupet” by having Blythe take steps to having a normal conversation with her crush Josh. The plan now is to follow him to his new job–at Largest Ever Pet Shop. This does seem like a 180º for Blythe, but I’m not going to call a character 180º in this instance since this is more like something Blythe would do when it comes to Josh instead of suddenly turning stupid. That’s our A-plot.

The B-plot is that the pets meet a dour goldfish named Goldy and they are going to try to give him some excitement in his life. When Minka’s daredevil act fails, they build him a goldfish ride that Goldy does get a handle of. But Vinnie gives him too big a push and he gets out of the pet shop and into the sewer on a wild ride. So now the pets, except for Zoe and Minka, go in after him and Sunil brings up the “alligator in the sewer” trope while Russell dismisses it as a myth. Sunil follows with a play on the word ‘myth.’

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