Final Draft credited as Associate Producer, gets history wrong

Yesterday a new poster for "A Brony Tale" surfaced, confirming something that many had heard for quite some time (and never bothered to follow-up on); that Final Draft is actually an Associate Producer of the film. The name Mike Bernstein appears in the credit footer of the poster, opening a whole new series of questions about the contents of the documentary. We have received reports from several who have seen the film that Draft himself makes an appearance, and also a critical mistake.

The origins of the fandom and key moments in its history, would be considered an integral part of any documentary, especially one of this scale and scope of production. That being said, the origin of the word "brony" would be pretty important to a film called "A Brony Tale". Horse-News has heard from several who have attended premiers of the film, that Draft attributes the creation of word "brony" and the fandom at large, to 4chan's "Random" board, /b/.

Names omitted to protect the innocent.

While it is a correct assertion that the fandom came from 4chan as a whole (despite the modern community's best efforts to bury that fact) it is a major error to say that it started on /b/. Any community member that was actually around at the dawn of the show would be able to tell you, that the fandom actually started on the /co/ board, with threads leading up to the premier, as well as the famed October 10th "The Zam" thread which truly kicked off the community. /b/ did not begin involvement for many weeks. The word "brony" was also invented on the /co/ board, being a combination of the words "bro" and "pony".

Provided above, is the origin of the word "brony", being posted 13 days after the airing of the first episode, on the /co/ board. The /co/ board is where Lauren Faust first visited the fandom publicly in the early days of the show.

Some may believe that this detail isn't that big of a deal. But if you're going to go on the record, talking about 4chan's history, you probably shouldn't take the word of somebody who doesn't even LIKE the website, such as Draft, who has a long history of feuding with the board. Especially when the whole point of the film is to provide accurate representations of the community and the fandom, saying that it spawned from /b/, the most NSFW board on the website, as opposed to /co/ which is much tamer, could give an entirely different impression of our roots.

So why would an Associate Producer mess that up?

Well I suppose you should ask first what an associate producer DOES.

According to IMDB, a producer is tasked with...handling the money matters. "Raising funding, hiring key personnel, and arranging for distributors". Right in the fine print, Drafty may have had some pocketbook control over the film. Is it really just "EFN: The Movie"? Maybe. But it will depend what actual tasks he was given by the producer.

We will see when the film is released where we all can see it, andwhat other mistakes or errors were made.