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| EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE |
There’s been some other vaguely negative events which we have not reported on. One of them is that Dracco purged their accounts on both Google Play and Apple’s App Store of every single remaining app in August. It’s unclear why exactly they did this. Some of the Filly games could have been removed because they were linked to the now nonexistent old filly.com which now seems like it is permanently gone despite promises that it would return.
The slide puzzles may simply have been to prove trademark usage as their names match up very closely to the list of trademarks registered by Dracco Brands, which is Dracco’s subsidiary company for intellectual property holdings. (It was formerly called HFDL - “Home Focus Development Limited” and it appears in the bottommost part of the screen in the first and third promos)
However, there were also games there which fit into neither of these categories, like a Zombie Zity game which I never actually downloaded to see what it was. (After all, this is not a Zombie Zity fansite.) Either way, Dracco seems to no longer want to pursue mobile games for now.
In April, Dracco’s CDN went offline, and even though the Filly toy sites have remained online, they no longer display any images, which make them rather hard to use. Since filly.com started redirecting to the Filly Stars toy site (which was supposedly a temporary measure), the main website for Filly which is advertised on enormous amounts of toy packages has now redirected to a broken and unusable website for about half a year. Not a pretty look.
This all seems to be pointing in a rather bleak direction. That’s why it’s a bit surprising that we’ve seen some rays of hope lately, that we’ve not yet been able to report properly on. Proper articles about these pieces of news are coming, but as you may know, we tend to compensate the general lack of news by writing really long and thorough articles when news does arrive, so we have not yet had time to analyze everything fully.
The most notable one is that we now have a new company involved in Filly Funtasia. As reader RaichuWizDom made us aware in the comment section of the last article we posted, there’s a new animation company involved in Filly Funtasia. They are called B-Water Animation Studios. It seems that the main company is based in Germany but that they have animation studios in a number of locations, and the one that’s animating Filly Funtasia seems to be in Barcelona. Hmm.
They’ve even got a promo for us!
Magical World makes a reappearance, and we see a short compilation of scenes that we’ve seen before, but that extends past where the previous promos have cut the scenes, which means that we’ve officially gotten new Filly Funtasia video material! Yes, there’s not that much of it, but that’s still very nice to see.
We’ll certainly have a longer article where we’ll have a lot more to say about this new studio and their promo, soon™.
We have also seen some evidence that Dracco is conducting at least some in-house development of assets for Filly Funtasia. We are going to talk about this too, in another article.
Of course, a lot is still hinging on the outcome of the legal battle between Simba and Dracco. The sum being fought over would represent a rather large chunk of Dracco’s net worth, and despite legal proceedings being initiated in February 2014, the legal process is somehow still going on. Is it finally going to end this year? Honestly, I have no idea.
To sum up the current state of Filly Funtasia, it’s a rather mixed bag. Clearly, Dracco has not given up on the show just yet, but clearly things are also very much not going according to their original plans.
We are now half a decade into waiting for Filly Funtasia, and since the show had already been in development for over a year when this website first started, that means that the show has now been in development for over six years. Hopefully, they will eventually manage to cobble something together out of this after this long and convoluted process.
Well, that’s about all there is to say! Thank you for reading as always, and see ya again next year!
Logging you in...
Rigor Mortiz 87p · 346 weeks ago
as always, and see ya again next year!";} but earlier, you stated
{"We’ll certainly have a longer article where we’ll have a lot
more to say about this new studio and their promo, soon™."}
Also, how soon is "soon"? Like "next month soon" or "2019
soon", etc. and why is the word "soon" trademarked (™)?
Skundi 57p · 346 weeks ago
"Soon" is when we have finished the research and the writing. We've done a bunch of research already - and we've found some interesting things relating to B-Water besides the video itself to talk about. Now we need to get it into text form, and we generally take a lot of time polishing articles. (since Filly Funtasia has been so incredibly slow moving, we sort of feel that it's okay to take our time with stuff like that)
The trademark is a joke I stole from the Blizzard fandom which they use to poke fun at Blizzard's neverending delays. I think they probably stole it from the Valve fandom though.
Wise Cracker · 346 weeks ago
You'll notice some old ties with a very, very bad couple of movies called 'Daddy, I'm a Zombie,' but, and this is the big but, B-Water isn't listed as doing the production for this one, but the pre-and post. That means the animating isn't done by them, but the editing and post-processing is. Also, it doesn't look like we've lost any quality between trailers, but I'd have to check.
What do you think, shall I alert the bronies?
(Also, I really need to keep better track of what aliases I use where. It's getting confusing, even for me.)
Skundi 57p · 346 weeks ago
I'm guessing that the actual animation is at least partially done in-house, since we believe that Dracco has multiple 3D modelers/animators working on Filly Funtasia in-house now. However, it seems that the only people they have working on Filly Funtasia in-house are 3D modelers/animators, which means that the rest of the work is done elsewhere or that our research is incomplete.
As for quality - if anything, I think it's improved. And not just because the video quality is better, but also because stuff like the shading looks like it's improved to me. There are some scenes in Promo 5 which also exist in this new promo (Promo 6?), and the differences are quite noticeable when you pull up the same frame on both promos side by side.
As for the bronies, well, there's nothing wrong with informing people who might be interested that this project has just showed some signs of life. Though personally I am going to hold off on trying to get the attention of the wider MLP fandom until FF's release seems to be imminent.
HareTrinity · 346 weeks ago
From the toy news side: there are now Filly Angel Unicorns. They're exactly like the Stars but without a star-theme. Kind of weird! Where are our winged Elves and Witchies at? The lore's getting a bit convoluted.
Also, as a weird aside: I had a Filly-episode-based dream last night! It was meant to be the festival entry ep, I think, but the main character was Cedric (with his fighting skill and Will's attitude) and there was a Hermione Granger type of Elf who was an older student prefect, and they were getting involved in adventure during a school camping trip. Overall it was a bit cheesy but the scenery looked FANTASTIC. Basically, it was the minimum I expect from the actual series.
Here's hoping it really does make it out in 2019!