@CMC Scootaloo 
I’m not one for long-winded pretentiousness, so I’ll sum up my points in less than three paragraphs.
 
Aside from the animation itself, humor is something I greatly value in cartoons because they’re naturally equipped for it. There are thousands of exclusive ways to be funny with animation (heck, even a still drawing not saying or doing anything can be funny through sheer exaggeration), but special uses for drama that’re only possible through the medium are rarely ever explored; only Fantasia and The Wall have really pulled it off from what I know. And as far as MLP is concerned, its animation and design have benefited its comedy much more than its drama (especially when Pinkie’s involved). Even the show’s “dramatic” elements have an over-the-top tone about them, which keeps the show consistently light-hearted even during the times where it feels like trying for some semblance of “serious”, because it knows that anything subtler would be jarringly out-of-place in a cartoon show about cute, funny ponies. So while some parts of the show could be considered dramatic, they’re not potent enough to overpower its more prominent comedic bend.
 
Also, the characters aren’t just pegs set to follow certain beats. All decent series are character-driven because stories are nothing without the characters and their motivations driving them. If I don’t care about the characters and what they like and want, I care even less about the story. Having that said, “story-driven” series hold no appeal in my eyes, especially if they don’t actually use the medium of animation to their advantage as MLP does.

@CatsTuxedo
 
Regardless of what you think humor entails, this response shows that you really only value cartoons for humor, just as I thought. It’s sad that you take one aspect of cartoons and define them by it, when cartoons can be so much more, as the 70s and 80s demonstrated.
 
@CatsTuxedo
 
“The rest is character-driven slice-of-life comedy”
 
You are only the second person in this fandom that I saw classifying MLP: FiM as “comedy”. That’s not at all what it is.  
First thing I want to point out here, is, that almost every TV show, animated or not, has some humor sprinkled in. This is done to create variety and to strategically lighten the mood again after sad/tragic/heartbreaking episodes.  
MLP: FiM is no exception. Completely grim shows without any lighthearted, humorous moments are very rare.  
The second thing to point out here, is, that MLP: FiM has a lot of everything; it has humor, serious drama and epicness all at once, the latter two outweighing the former. If there is humor in MLP: FiM then it’s either sprinkled in, just like any TV show does it, or it’s a specific episode focusing on humor.  
To slap you with an example too, “Amending Fences” is not comedy. It is a very serious and dramatic Slice of Life episode, in which humor is very rare and barely existent, not any different than what you find in other drama shows. Another example for this is “Flight to the Finish”. Tons of drama, barely any humor. As more recent example, “Parental Glidance” falls under this category as well.  
Or are these seasons too late for you? Have “Sleepless in Ponyville” then. A drama-filled Slice of Life episode, sprinkled in with more psychological horror than humor, whose dramaturgy gets more intense with each passing minute.  
An actually accurate classification for MLP: FiM would be “A drama show with several other genre elements, such as humor and horror, sprinkled in to form a varied genre mix”. Some humorous moments don’t make a show “comedy”.  
I have no idea how someone, if those episodes are considered (and those are just three examples), can view this show as “comedy”, which brings me to the conclusion that you didn’t consider these.  
I know there aren’t many in the fandom who miss the point about MLP: FiM that much, but that makes it all the more unbearable when it does happen.
 
And about this:
 
“FiM’s “story-driven” stuff is restricted to the season premieres and finales.”
 
This isn’t right either. What you’re referring to here is one plotline of many. And even this mold was broken with Season 4, where the Opener started a whole arc that went like a golden thread through the whole season up until the Finale.  
And it gets broken more since Season 5, with the map missions by the Tree of Harmony, which contribute to a goal or desired end result that yet needs to be revealed.  
What you describe as “character-driven” here is isn’t any less story-driven than the Opener and Finale episodes of a season. The term “character-driven” doesn’t make much sense anyway, as every story told in any TV show is character-driven, because it’s the characters of a show those stories are about.  
MLP: FiM has tons of storylines, big and small. Not all of them are front and center, but they are always present to some extent, and can be followed if one pays actual attention while watching the show.
 
I find this quite insulting to MLP: FiM, that you don’t bother enough with MLP: FiM to actually get behind it and its storylines and behind the nature of it, but that you make claims about it anyway.  
This is proving my point, that you see humor as the only defining factor of cartoons, better than anything else could, because that’s apparently all you can see in MLP: FiM, while every other aspect of it goes completely over your head.

@CatsTuxedo 
Those two questions were separate.

@Ihhh 
FiM’s “story-driven” stuff is restricted to the season premieres and finales. The rest is character-driven slice-of-life comedy with some fantasy and adventure thrown in, which gives the animators plenty of room to play around and have fun like they’re supposed to. And it goes without saying that FiM’s design, animation, character-acting and humor are leagues above anything from the 70’s or 80’s, let alone G1.

@CatsTuxedo  
How do you story driven cartoons fit into all of this?  
How does MLP:FIM fit into all of this?

@CMC Scootaloo 
Humor isn’t just about the slapstick, as you unfairly generalized. It’s about creating visuals that aren’t possible in any other medium, not to mention having funny-looking characters emote and act like real human actors without being restricted by the mandate of tracing facial expressions off model sheets that modern Korean-sweatshop animators are trapped by today. To provide a clearer example of what I mean, animator Rob McKimson in particular had photographic memory and it was used to the cartoons’ advantage in the form of highly-specified expressions and acting, and with rare if any recycling amongst them.
 
You won’t likely ever see anything like that in modern cartoons; starting with the late-60’s, the standards and principles of what made cartoons good were thrown out in favor of bland, dull, preachy garbage that had no hope at all of entertaining the way the cartoons before them did, and we still haven’t completely recovered from that mess in spite of a handful of early-90’s efforts (Mighty Mouse, Ren & Stimpy, Rocko’s Modern Life, etc.)

@CatsTuxedo
 
You really are strongly opinionated, I see.
 
What you say seems like you mostly value cartoons for their humor, the amount of gags and slapstick. Of which there was a lot in the era you talked about, if not even all that the cartoon genre had to offer at this time. 
Letting aside that this era was marked with experimentation (which isn’t a bad thing), the genre was terribly bland in this era, the creators having had no better ideas than characters chasing each other and smashing each other with giant hammers and the like. Or doing silly dance numbers….. 
Maybe I should define better what I mean with “experimentation”. That era was experimentation regarding animation techniques, character movement, finding things and actions they could portray with those characters on-screen and learning how to do that. I guess that’s where the heavy focus on quick, casual comedy that relies on much movement such as running, beating each other, ect. came from. The animators simply wanted to learn how to let those characters that they or others had created move properly and fluidly. 
There may have been a few exceptions, but story- and plot-wise, this era didn’t have much to offer. It was quick and simple slapstick, often utilizing a lot of violence (and I’m thankful the genre has grown out of this violence-based humor for the most part), but there was barely any storytelling. 
I guess you can say that in the 60s, another experimental era started, when creators of cartoon started to add actual story to their creations, giving them deep characters and meaningful storylines. Something Japan had already done much earlier with anime when this era came for cartoons, but we’re not talking about anime here, so I would digress if I would delve into that now. 
Unfortunately, I mostly remember anime from that 60s/70s/80s era, so I can’t really name a reliable example of a story-telling cartoon that was made during that era. But I do remember having watched cartoons with heavy storytelling from that era as well. 
Letting opinions aside, I am clueless how you can favor that experimental era of the 20s/30s/40s/50s over what came after and even call it a “Golden Age”, considering how little cartoons had to offer at this time. 
I think my point here still stands, it is merely nostalgia that lets you, and perhaps others, call this era a “Golden Age”; it was when animation started out, when it was something new and sensational to see drawn characters move around on a screen and perform actions like they’re alive. 
Something never seen before, so some people see this as “Golden Age” simply because of this great feeling this new kind of creating entertainment and fiction, that didn’t need actors, caused in them. 
It was the time where animations were done for the first time and were animators learned to master animating and first times of anything are always remembered overly fondly and with a great amount of nostalgia. 
But speaking of actual quality in that genre, it was only after those decades of experimental animations that things took really off and when the potential of cartoons was used.

@Mr grump  

 
“Scooby-Doo” and “good” do not go together. It was Hanna-Barbera’s bland and ugly attempt to imitate Filmation’s equally-bad Archies show and is a definite mark of the Golden Age’s miserable end.
 
@CMC Scootaloo  
Seriously? The 70’s were just as bad as the 80’s if not even worse. That was a time when actually having fun with cartoons and making them funny was practically outlawed by PhD-holding know-it-all know-nothings who had no business being in cartoons. No experimentation in technique, no funny character-acting or gags that benefited from the medium, no distinct voice-acting, no regard for the animating principles that made Golden Age cartoons look good, just stiff, bland, ugly, garish tripe.
 
My point relating to G1 is that it and all other 80’s cartoons were terrible and unfunny and have nowhere near the lasting appeal that Looney Tunes or Walt Disney or Popeye or Betty Boop or any other Golden Age figure have had.

@CatsTuxedo
 
An era of experimentation can hardly be called “Golden Age”. An important era, since a lot of groundwork was done there, but as the fact that it was an experimental era already shows, it was the era where creators were still learning and therefore, made a lot of mistakes as well. 
If the characters created in this area are really still so popular these days (I doubt it, personally), then it’s out of mere nostalgia; older people of today where children back then and those shows were the first attempts at animated entertainment and there was nothing better at this time, so of course those people will always have very fond memories of those animation pioneers. Besides, popularity is hardly an indicator of what’s good or what’s bad, anyway. 
It was after this era of experimentation, when creators had learned how to do it, that animated shows became really good. First signs for this could already be seen in the 60s, but it was in the 70s where this really took off. 
At this time, creators and the industry had the knowledge and experience, gained from the experimental era, and really knew what they did, so pretty much every show was pure gold. 
It stayed like this until the early 90s, then, it began to go downhill again. I have some theories how this could happen all of a sudden, but I’m not going into those now, it would lead too far away from what we should actually talk about here.
 
I don’t know if that comment of yours here is still meant to talk about the quality of G1 vs. other 80s TV shows, but either way, portraying the era from the 20s to the 60s as the real Golden Age still does not make any points for what a certain G1 fan is claiming here, that G1 was only terrible because all shows from the 80s were terrible. 
G1 still sticks out as a stain on the 80s TV entertainment.

@Mr grump 
If you want to talk about good/still well-known cartoons from the 60s there is more than Scooby Doo. Namely The Flintstones and The Jetsons.

@CatsTuxedo 
The only good cartoon that I can think of to come out of the 60’s that is still relevant today is scooby doo.

Hey, just happened upon this little discussion in the comments and I’d like to throw out my opinion that the 80’s were an near-total garbage time for cartoons and don’t deserve any title resembling “Golden Age”. You want a real Golden Age that was more experimental than any era after it and spawned dozens upon dozens of iconic characters that casual passerby around the world still recognize to this day? Take a look at this block of time called the late-20’s-to-late-60’s. Compared to the output of Warner Bros., Disney, MGM, the Fleischer Bros., Tex Avery and Hanna-Barbera during that time, nothing has ever really matched that level of experimentation and humor. The 80’s in particular utterly pale before that, and the 90’s attempts to imitate that time are nothing but an insincere insult.

I’m just wondering if this version will have a scene involving a giant plant monster that will never be referenced in the movie again.
 
’cause when I think MLP, I think human witches and man eating plants :v

@Mr grump  
Can’t go wrong with Philoctetes, Lorax, and the TRASH MAN!

@BlazeHeartUnicorn 
Yep, That’s the name.
 
“Grundles good Grundles good grundles good!”
 
blech. Worst song ever. Saved only by the gravelly tones of Danny DeVito.

@Mr grump 
Grundles

@Philweasel
 
“Personally I just thought it was a ugly, bleak, icky movie that I didn’t want to watch again… Spielberg felt the same apparently.”
 
Steven Spielberg said, five years after the movie came out, that he wasn’t happy with the movie because he thought it came out too dark. 
He said that, after tons of criticism, negative reviews and generally people picking on him for making it that way. 
He was in no way sincere about this. 
That is more of an example of how audience pressure can intimidate a creator and make them think bad about their own work in hindsight.
 
 
“And kids were traumatized, and parents did complain, and it did make it worse for everyone.”
 
And where are those traumatized children? I researched it up, I didn’t find anything about traumatized children, children in psychological treatments after that movie aired or children having become violent or sadistic after watching it. Only mentions of parents complaining because they assumed the movie wouldn’t be good for their children. And I bet a 1,000 bits with you that those parents didn’t even notice that their children, after initially getting terrified by the ruthless villains (which was the intent), didn’t even bat an eye about it anymore once they left the cinema that day, but rather talked about how cool everything was. 
You say there were traumatized children with the reasoning that parents complained, because you assume that parents only complain if their children get actually traumatized. 
The truth is different, though, parents always complain if their children see something of which they think they shouldn’t see it, without paying attention that their children are actually handling it very well. 
Overprotective parents are a very real thing and soccer moms exist today and they existed back then in the 80s. 
The answer on my question from above is simple:
 
Those traumatized children don’t exist, except, in the heads of their Worried Parents™.
 
The problem of dark elements in children or family entertainment is not the creators who handle it badly and make it too dark, the problems are solely the parents who belittle their children and think they are too weak to take some violence and darkness and who, as a result of that, fault the creators of dark movies and shows for their own overprotectiveness and demand from them to dumb down their creations to help protecting their children from something they don’t need protection from in the first place. 
Those parents are who create problems for everyone, including the creators, not those who make such movies. 
This is victim-shaming you’re doing here.
 
 
And, just before you now say that I have no idea what I’m talking about because I don’t have any children, that I have no idea of children psychology and that I would be a terrible parent, I’m leapfrogging you on this:
 
I was a child too once, a normal, average child without any mental problems (except for those that heavy bullying at school caused me to develop) or abnormalities, but also a child who watched horror movies on the level of “Friday the 13th” (look it up if you don’t know it, it’s as brutal and violent as a movie can get) at an age no older than FIVE. 
Do you want to know how I reacted to those movies? I was excited from the suspense and the thrill, horrified as much as you would expect it from horror movies and then, once they were over, I went to bed and to sleep, hoping that those movies get aired again soon because they are awesome, and had a happy and peaceful night of rest. 
No nightmares. No crying at night. No developed fear of the darkness. No sudden tendency to violence. No traumas. No scars on my little soul. 
This is one of the earliest memories of my foalhood, how I became the fan of the horror genre that I am today, back when I was five years old.

@CMC Scootaloo  
Personally I just thought it was a ugly, bleak, icky movie that I didn’t want to watch again… Spielberg felt the same apparently.
 
And kids were traumatized, and parents did complain, and it did make it worse for everyone. The overall bleak and cynical nature of Temple of Doom and Transformers the Movie successfully made sure that it would be a very long time before any mature and edgy content would be allowed back into children’s progamming again, just because they handled it so badly.
 
You know what. I loved Watership Down, because it felt true and real, and because the blood and death had real emotional weight. ToD and Transformers the Movie on the other hand I felt simply wanted to depress and upset me, because they didn’t seem to give a damn about their own characters.

@Philweasel
 
“The more stringent censorship of TV and Film was Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom’s fault”
 
That’s like saying “Every movie with very dark elements deserves to be censored”. Nothing could be more wrong.  
Do you know why such censorships happen? Because of the power of Worried Parents™ and the general attitude of society that children, and people in general, can’t take anything.  
As I said, tons of children saw “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” in cinema. Did their minds become screwed by watching this? No, no they didn’t.  
Instead of censoring everything, it would be far more important to teach children the difference between reality and fiction better and that it’s just a scripted movie with actors who pretend, which is why there is neither a reason to be scared nor why any of this should actually be tried out in reality.  
The massive censorship that goes on today might lead to children’s minds degenerating one day, if they don’t already do, because they aren’t exposed to enough challenging stuff.  
I think the danger of a degenerated society once the current children generation has grown up is far higher than the danger of children getting traumatized over a scene where a man gets his heart ripped out in a fictional movie.

@Mr grump  
I agree that Skeletor was actually pretty smart, which is why I did actually like him. His big problem was… well He-Man once went one on one with Silver Age Superman, and didn’t do too badly. Put simply, He-Man could just run through pretty much anything he could offer. He was explicitly as ‘Strong as he needed to be’. That was his actual power.
 
The Decepticons had the same problem. I remember one two parter that actually had some threat. The Decepticons had a good defensive position, hostages and numbers, and our heroes were pinned down. How did they get out of this predicament?
 
Run straight into the Decepticons’ field of fire and steamroll them without a single casualty. The Autobots were pistol sniping targets with perfect accuracy, at the same ranges the Decepticons were failing to hit anything. Hell, does anyone remember the Starscream against Rainbow Dash Death Battle? A perfect representation of why the Decepticons were about as threatening as tissue paper.
 
The removal of the Autobot’s iron clad plot armor in the movie feels even weirder after all this to be honest. And frankly, killing most of your main heroes off screen doesn’t feel like the best writing, even if it was pretty hardcore.

@Philweasel  
I don’t know about skeletor. I watched a few he-man episodes on netflix the other day and he came off as quite competent. Usually it was his underlings screwing up or he-man being a badass that ruin his plans rather then incompetence or cowardice on his part. Concerning Megatron, Transformers the movie. nuff said.
 
Cobra commander though, now that guy was useless. So useless that his own troops mutined and replaced him in the second season. I actually started to feel bad for him.

The more stringent censorship of TV and Film was Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom’s fault, and Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were the only directors on earth powerful enough to push that through as a PG.
 
One of the reasons I liked G1 MLP over other, more ‘boyish’ shows, is the sense of threat was so much higher. The bad guys from the 80’s are the most toothless, incompetant, useless idiots ever to set foot on screen, and the heroes were by and large invincible.
 
Skeletor? Megatron?

@IceKitsune
 
No trolling. Just observations I made.  
Most of the bigger popularity of modern TV shows simply comes from it that those shows are new.  
It’s very common that “New” is often associated with “Better” by most people, despite that those terms don’t match up.  
“New” is not an indicator for greatness, much as “Old” isn’t an indicator for bad quality.  
It depends on the effort put in, on the care for the art and on choosing the right methods to achieve the right results. And when comparing old TV shows/movies from the 80s with shows/movies from today, the latter most of the time fade in this comparison, because that care and effort just isn’t put into the creations anymore today.
 

 
To give an example for that, too, I think where the downfall of quality of entertainment shows the most and affects movies and TV shows the heaviest is how little most creators of today trust the audience (especially children, but not JUST children) with how much dark or serious or mature things they can take.  
The Indiana Jones movies were considered family movies in the 80s. Even though none of the movies were explicitly made as children movies, a lot of parents watched those movies with their children.  
Yet, “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” shows in close detail how a man gets his heart ripped out of his chest while still being alive:
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBIdcUxdgo0
 
 
I remember how I watched “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” in TV a few years before I found MLP: FiM. I knew the heart scene from seeing it on TV before, but on this day, the same TV channel had all of a sudden cut the scene.  
Which of course has nothing to do with a creator decision, it was the channel thinking that it wouldn’t be appropriate to show that in the primetime. But this shows nicely how the mentality has changed today. And this is something that happens for creators as well. It’s not always the rating or the moral guardians or soccer moms they’re afraid of, sometimes, they simply make the decision to dumb down their creations voluntarily.
 

 
Such dark elements or maturity like the example above would not be in today’s shows or movies anymore, or, if they are, the shows/movies would get slapped with an 18+ rating.  
A lot of people would call that “progress”, not exposing children to things that might be harmful for them and not showing adults tasteless things, I call it “a step back”.  
The human mind grows with experiences and everything, even the things considered the worst today, let someone grow stronger when seeing or experiencing them.  
Children can also take a lot more things than our overprotective society of today gives them credit for.  
The example above was seen by everyone, including children. If you would go around and ask thousands of people who grew up in the 80s if they remember the scene from “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom” where the guy got his heart ripped out alive, 90% of the answers you’ll get would be “Oh, yeah, I watched that with my parents in cinema as a kid.”  
In the 80s, creators had a much more daring attitude and were not hesitant about showing such things to their audiences. That scene with the ripped out heart was extreme, yes, but it served excellently to get across the danger of the situation and how insane, ruthless and obsessed this cult is. If that movie would be made today (or heaven forbid, get a remake!) the bad guys would come across a lot less threatening to the point where you’re having a hard time perceiving them as a threat.  
Such darkness and seriousness is rare in today’s entertainment.  
And none of the children who have seen such things in the 80s have grown up to become murderers, psychopaths or heavily traumatized people because of having seen those things.  
As I see it, children of the 80s who were exposed to mature things like these in movies and shows became stronger personalities and developed a stronger mind because of this.  
I think creators deciding to dumb down the seriousness and mature things in their creations today is more harmful for audiences, children and adults alike, because it keeps their minds and personalities from growing stronger.
 
 
There are other examples for how the quality of TV shows and movies today has declined, but that’s the one that irks me the most and the others would require heavier analyzing and going much more into detail, something I simply don’t have the time for, so I leave it at that.  
TV shows in the 80s had that kind of more exciting and more engaging storytelling, all of them, but today’s shows don’t have that anymore, for the most part.  
That alone shows how excellent almost all TV shows in the 80s were. It’s not that G1 was terrible because all shows in the 80s were terrible.  
G1 is really just one of the few, bad examples of that era.

@Ihhh 
I honestly think he is either trolling at this point or has the biggest 80s nostalgia goggles I have ever seen in my life. Those are the only ways I can think to explain him thinking 80s cartoons had more creative integrity and better productions than stuff today.

@CMC Scootaloo 
I think you have confused this decade for the 80s.