....ok, seriously, what the hell are you talking about? i checked my little ponies on wikipedia and under the part for the show they dont even MENTION a badguy/villen at all.
Sowelu is kidding. MLP wasn't deep -- it's just that the creators believed in making villains that were actually somewhat scary to the target audience of children. Care Bears did the same thing in both its movies.
Apparently, there is a new MLP TV show that completely discards the old continuity. We're talking about the 1980s cartoon. It had no
recurring villains, but the Movie and some TV episodes had one-shot antagonists.
The villian I was thinking of when I compared to the UNICEF-Smurf incident was Tirac, a centaur-like creature. He had a "Rainbow of Darkness" that let him transform animals into dragons loyal to himself, and used them to capture more animals and make more dragons. The TV pilot opens with the dragons raiding the ponies, grabbing any they caught in the open and hauling them back to be transformed. The rest of the story is how the remaining ponies get their friends back.
Yeah, I'm a child of the 80s....