PONY.MOV
PONY.MOV is an animated web series of fan-made parodies of the television show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, created, written, and animated by Max Gilardi, known online as HotDiggedyDemon. The series ran on YouTube from October 11, 2011, when the first episode APPLE.MOV was uploaded, to February 20, 2013, when the finale SWAG.MOV was released.1 Each episode centers on one character from the show's main cast, but gives them drastically different, grotesque personalities from their canon counterparts, and phrases and scenes from the episodes spread widely as memes in their own right.1
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Creator | Max Gilardi, aka HotDiggedyDemon, an American web animator active on Newgrounds since 20031 • 2 |
| Run | October 11, 2011 (APPLE.MOV) to February 20, 2013 (SWAG.MOV), released on YouTube1 |
| Episodes | Six main episodes, one per member of the show's "Mane Six," plus the April Fools short SPIKE.MOV3 • 1 |
| Episode length | About 7 minutes4 |
| Voice cast | Max Gilardi in many roles; Kira Buckland as Twilight Sparkle; Arin Hanson as Rarity and Pinkie Pie (APPLE.MOV); Kimlihn Tran as Scootaloo5 |
| Notable catchphrases | "Stay out of my shed," "CRUSH. KILL. DESTROY. SWAG," and "Fuck you, I can eat all these apples" spread through image macros and fanworks1 |
Spoilers
Premise and style
The series keeps the original characters' appearances but alters their cutie marks and voices, and rewrites their personalities to grotesque extremes. Fluttershy, gentle and kind to animals in the television show, kills animals and Rainbow Dash with a chainsaw in the parody; Applejack becomes a profane, apple-obsessed character fans named Jappleack.6 The HotDiggedyDemon fan wiki describes the series as intentionally reminiscent of the 1990s cartoon Ren & Stimpy in both its raunchy humor and exaggerated art style.3
Beneath the shock humor the episodes carry a loose plot: Twilight Sparkle tries to gather the Elements of Harmony to stop Discord from destroying Ponyville, while her friends succumb to comedically horrible tragedies, and the story resolves in the finale SWAG.MOV.3 APPLE.MOV remains mostly unrelated to the other five episodes.1
Episodes
TheTVDB lists seven first-season episodes on YouTube, each focused on one character:7
- APPLE.MOV (October 11, 2011), a "cautionary tale about the dangers of eating too many apples" centered on Applejack.
- DRESS.MOV (December 7, 2011), in which Discord returns for revenge and Rarity reveals how she makes so many dresses.
- SHED.MOV (February 3, 2012), in which Applebloom gets her cutie mark and Spike, Pinkie Pie, and Rainbow Dash search for the Elements of Harmony.
- SPIKE.MOV (March 31, 2012), posted on April Fools Day as a joke, consisting almost entirely of Spike playing with a Tech Deck toy skateboard.7 • 1
- MAGIC.MOV (April 11, 2012), in which Princess Celestia takes on Discord herself while Twilight and Spike continue their quest.
- PARTY.MOV (June 26, 2012), in which Pinkie Pie looks for a dress for the Grand Galloping Gala and the R-Dash 5000 learns to duplicate itself.
- SWAG.MOV (February 20, 2013), the finale, in which Rainbow Dash teaches Twilight "the true meaning of friendship by destroying the universe."7
TheTVDB also lists five specials between January 2012 and March 2013, including "Watch out, Ashleigh" (January 8, 2012), the convention chant clip "CRUSH. KILL. DESTROY. SWAG." (July 3, 2012), two convention panel cartoons, and a SWAG.MOV behind-the-scenes short released March 4, 2013.7
Production and cast
Max Gilardi was already a known Flash animator on Newgrounds and YouTube before the series, with earlier work including Jerry and Wacky Game Jokez 4 Kidz.2 When APPLE.MOV became his first online cartoon to pass one million views, he saw the opportunity to make an episode for each pony of the original "Mane Six," and started the series on the first anniversary of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.3 Gilardi voices most of the cast himself, including Spike, Applejack, Rainbow Dash, Fluttershy, Pinkie Pie, and Discord, with guest voices including Kira Buckland (Twilight Sparkle), Arin Hanson (Rarity, and Pinkie Pie in APPLE.MOV), Esther Nho, Jon Etheridge, Stefan Frelander, Garrett Hunter, and Kimlihn Tran.5 IMDb credits HotDiggedyDemon as the production company and YouTube as the worldwide distributor for 2011 to 2013, with special thanks to DHX Media and Hasbro Studios.8
Alongside the videos, Gilardi ran "Ask Jappleack," an Ask-Me-Anything-style Tumblr blog starring the parodied Applejack answering fan questions, which ran from 2011 to 2013.3
Reception and fandom impact
The series drew a strong following within the brony fandom. Equestria Daily attributed this to Gilardi's existing audience from his Flash work and to APPLE.MOV being, at its late-2011 release, one of the few examples of higher-quality animation in the fandom, while warning readers that the series was firmly in the mature category.9 View counts for APPLE.MOV grew from over seven million as of February 20, 2013, per Know Your Meme's PONY.MOV entry, to over ten million per the site's separate HotDiggedyDemon profile.1 • 2
The series reached the show's own cast. At BronyCon on January 7, 2012, Ashleigh Ball, the voice of Applejack and Rainbow Dash, was asked to say Jappleack's line "Fuck You, I Can Eat All These Apples" and delivered it with the profanity replaced by "Forget." In a 2012 Everfree Radio interview she called the videos "really twisted and pretty cool," and in another interview said she was "pretty blown away" and that "a lot of it's pretty gory."3 • 1 Gilardi was invited to My Little Pony conventions including Equestria LA and Everfree Northwest to host panels and sell art prints, and after Bronycon fans chanted "CRUSH. KILL. DESTROY. SWAG" at a concert, he posted a reaction animation in which the quote's original speaker, R-DASH 5000, calls the chanters "What a bunch of freaks."3 • 1
Critical analysis. In a collection of essays on Friendship Is Magic and its derivative works, the author Jen A. Blue analyzed PONY.MOV as an example of carnivalization in fan culture, arguing that it presents exaggerated versions of familiar characters distorted to monstrous extremes, which she called textbook grotesque art. Unlike darker parodies such as Friendship Is Witchcraft, she argued PONY.MOV parodies the source material itself rather than fan expectations, questioning the show's principles of friendship and harmony, and suggested it reflects cultural anxieties about masculinity among the show's adult male fanbase.
Gilardi has continued animating under the HotDiggedyDemon name, with later series including Brain Dump, and had more than 2.1 million YouTube subscribers as of 2026.10
References
- PONY.MOV, Know Your Meme
- HotDiggedyDemon, Know Your Meme
- My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic/PONY.MOV, HotDiggedyDemon Wiki
- PONY.MOV (2011), Bingebase
- PONY.MOV, PONY.MOV Wiki (Fandom)
- PONY.MOV, Urban Dictionary
- PONY.MOV, Aired Order, TheTVDB
- Pony.Mov (TV Series 2011–2013), Company credits, IMDb
- Pony History of the Day: PONY.MOV, Equestria Daily (2016)
- YouTube animator hotdiggedydemon reconsiders assisted death plans after fans rally around him, Dexerto (2026)
Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Series and fictional screen worlds › Unscripted, reality, and web-native series › Web-native and streaming-original series › Comedy, drama, and general-genre web series › Premiered 1999 to 2016
Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026
Your notes
© 2026 EdgeChat AI, a subsidiary of Biostate AI. Free to use with credit under the Edgepedia Community License. Developers: read Edgepedia by API or MCP. Embed a reference card.