Are you familiar with the term “Brony”? If you’re not, you’re about to get an education. And if you are, then you’re probably already firing up the squee. And what’s producing all this furor, you might ask? Simple. The folks out at Shout Factory sent us over a copy of My Little Pony Friendship is Magic: The Friendship Express for us to review for you, and this one’s going to be something big indeed.

My Little Pony Friendship is Magic: The Friendship Express gives us five episodes of the hotly popular animated series, following a group of six ponies who have come together in the spirit of friendship to address a variety of issues that spring up throughout their lives. There have been several basic primers written about this one, but to sum up, you’ve got a bookish pony with an unparalleled natural capacity for magic. And when she finds out that an ancient menace is about to make a resurgence, she sets out to try and warn the populace. Thinking that the bookish pony has been spending a little too much time in books, her mentor (and ironically, the one who actually defeated said ancient menace) decides that the pony needs to learn something she won’t find in books: friendship. Thus decided, she details said pony to head to Ponyville, where she’ll meet a variety of other ponies with different personalities, and learn a variety of life lessons instead of things you can get out of a book.

The thing about this DVD is that it’s going to be a wild variety of episodes. You’ll start with the two-part pilot, then proceed on to an episode that didn’t happen until almost six months later. And then, you’ll get two episodes that didn’t happen until well in the second season. The last one on the disc, The Last Roundup, only actually premiered about three weeks ago, give or take. There is an underlying order here, however, that’s really rather disturbing.

I say disturbing here because I often look askance at non-season compilation discs. But this is the first one I’ve seen that’s actually really good. See, this is an introduction, and a pretty good one at that. It’s disjointed, yes, but it’s also going to give you a really good summary. If you were wondering just what this whole My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic thing was about, this is going to be a prime way to get in.

If you weren’t already interested in this series, don’t look for this one to really get you started. It’s too disjointed to get a foothold on. But if you were wanting to get a basic primer on this growing cultural phenomenon (seriously, find out what a “brony” is and you’ll see just how deep this particular rabbit hole goes), then this is the place to start.

And the Screenhead Ten Scale in turn gives My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic: The Friendship Express a seven out of ten for being a non-season collection that actually makes sense and serves a pretty worthwhile purpose, something most such titles can’t say.