After receiving it as a gift for Christmas 2012, Michael's favorite T-shirt was one that bore this graphic. It was perfect for him. However, I found trying to explain it to other people was a mind-boggling task. There's a lot going on in that picture...

First of all... it must be established that Michael is a certified brony. So I'll begin by explaining what a brony is.

My Little Pony is a line of toys originally launched by Hasbro in 1982. For the next 26 years, a variety of supporting cartoon series were produced. Those were... not worth mentioning here. Then, in 2010, Hasbro selected animator Lauren Faust to be the creative director and executive producer for a new incarnation of the show.

Faust felt the property pandered to sexist stereotypes, and sought to challenge the "girly" nature of My Little Pony. She designed her own version of the property with more in-depth characters and adventurous settings to address those concerns, and created a series critically praised for its humor and moral outlook.

As a result of its more sophisticated writing and nuanced characters, My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic has not only proven a major success in its intended demographics, but also unexpectedly gained a large following of older viewers who call themselves "bronies." (Brony is a portmanteau of "bro" and "pony". The term is generally used to refer to older male fans of the program, while most female fans identify as "pegasisters". Collectively the community is known as "The Herd.")

Many fans believe the show's appeal lies in it being a shining example of innocence and purity in an increasingly dark and cynical world. Bronies have been described as "internet neo-sincerity at its best", unabashedly challenging the preconceived gender roles that such a show normally carries. As many of these fans are technology-savvy, the brony community have created a large number of derivative works ranging from graphic arts to fan fiction, music, and video media.

In early 2012, an informal survey placed the U.S. brony population at somewhere between 7 and 12.4 million. That year, nearly a dozen brony conventions were planned. BroNYCon, held in New York City, was a two-day event with more than 4000 attendees.

Equestria Daily, a web hub founded in January 2011 as the Huffington Post of the community, surpassed a half-billion pageviews in early 2014; its blog receives more than 175,000 visits a day. The first issue of a comic book treatment of the show garnered more than 100,000 preorders.

Reasons for this unintended appreciation include Faust and her team's creative writing and characterization, the sharp and expressive Flash-based animation style, and themes that older audiences can appreciate. Some fans are drawn to watching each episode to catch the pop culture references. Elements of the show have become part of the remix culture and have formed the basis for a variety of Internet memes. A lot of the appeal stems from a reciprocal relationship between Hasbro, the creators, and the fans. On a number of occasions, this has resulted in the show creators incorporating fan creations and terms into cartoon canon.

Meanwhile...

Doctor Who has its own fanbase, and holds its own Conventions. Doctor Who is a British science fiction television series featuring an anonymous time-traveller simply referred to as "The Doctor". The role of The Doctor has so far been played by 12 actors, which is explained in the show through "regeneration", in which The Doctor avoids death by changing appearance.

In the series, The Doctor (usually accompanied by a temporary companion) travels through time and space in a Type 40, Mark 3 TARDIS, which appears to people as a vintage blue police call-box. Almost all TARDISes were designed to blend into their surroundings by means of a "chameleon circuit". The defining characteristic of the Doctor's TARDIS is that its chameleon circuit had broken after assuming the shape of a police box in 1963 London. The eleventh Doctor explained the fault: "It's camouflaged. It's disguised as a police telephone box from 1963. Every time the TARDIS materialises in a new location, within the first nanosecond of landing, it analyses its surroundings, calculates a twelve-dimensional data map of everything within a thousand-mile radius and then determines which outer shell would best blend in with the environment... and then it disguises itself as a police telephone box from 1963."

In My Little Pony, Time Turner is a pony that appears in the background of multiple episodes. He was given the name Doctor Whooves by fans who thought the colt resembled the tenth incarnation of The Doctor (played by David Tennant) due to his spiked brown hair and hourglass cutie mark. (Cutie marks are pictographs located on the ponies' flanks, related to the personality, proclivity, or talent of the character.)

The name was adopted by the show's crew. On July 11, 2012, Hasbro informed WeLoveFine.com that they could begin marketing character merchandise using the name "Doctor Hooves", dropping the "W" from the name to avoid copyright issues. Hasbro acknowledged the character's popularity in the Comic Con 2011 promotional poster.

In the T-shirt graphic depicted at the top of this page, Doctor Hooves is standing in front of the iconic TARDIS, holding a sonic screwdriver. The sonic screwdriver is a fictional tool in Doctor Who and its spinoffs. Used by The Doctor, its most common function is to open locked doors, but it can also perform medical scans, remotely control other devices, and track alien life. It can, with the exception of a deadlock seal or wooden lock, open any type of lock and operate many computers, whether their origin is alien or human.

Most people with even a passing knowledge of popular sci-fi can recognize the main reference in the picture on Michael's shirt. An equine figure, labeled "Doctor Hooves", in front of the iconic TARDIS... ah ha, cute. Those familiar with Internet culture even get the My Little Pony connection. But a more specific reference is depicted in the graphic by the winged horse statues on either side of the TARDIS. Here's what those are about:

"Blink" is one of the most popular episodes of Doctor Who. Episode writer Stephen Moffat (who also created the BBC series Sherlock) was inspired by the popular children's game Statues, which he always found "frightening". To play Statues, a person starts out as the "Curator" and stands at the end of a field. The other players stand at the far end. The Curator turns their back to the field, and the "Statues" attempt to race across and tag the Curator. Whenever the Curator turns around, the Statues must freeze in position and hold that position for as long as the Curator looks at them. However, when the Curator's back is turned, Statues are free to move.

Moffat's Doctor Who episode introduces an alien race of eerie statues known as the "Weeping Angels". The Angels are "quantum-locked", allowing them to move incredibly fast when unobserved but when they are seen, they literally turn to stone. They cover their eyes to avoid looking at each other, giving them their "weeping" appearance. As they close in on victims, their features transform from calm angels with normal proportions to more horrific, bestial demons with wide open mouths baring vampiric teeth and clawed hands.

According to the Doctor, the Weeping Angels are "the deadliest, most powerful, most malevolent life-form evolution has ever produced." As he explains: "Fascinating race, the Weeping Angels. The only psychopaths in the universe to kill you nicely. No mess, no fuss, they just zap you into the past and let you live to death... You die in the past, and in the present they consume the energy of all the days you might have had, all your stolen moments."

In the episode, a line spoken by the Doctor, "The angels have the phone box", is rhetorically repeated by a character named Larry who then says, "I've got that on a T-shirt". This led online retailers such as ThinkGeek, WeLoveFine, and Zazzle (among others) to offer versions of such a product for sale, beginning just one of a number of internet memes that originated from the episode. Another popular line is The Doctor's explanation of "wibbly wobbly timey-wimey stuff".

The "Blink" episode was first broadcast on BBC on June 9, 2007. Moffat won the BAFTA Craft and BAFTA Cymru awards for Best Writer, and the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form. In 2009 the episode was voted the second best Doctor Who story in history by readers of Doctor Who Magazine. Here's a transcript of "Blink" if you want to read it. It's a good one...

Anyway— that's what Michael's My Little Pony shirt is all about.