Not to bring down the mood of the thread, and not to annoy the moderators, but I think I am justified in pointing out that if you borrow an image from someone's website, it's common courtesy to credit that source. I don't really like that the image of Butterscotch in the parlour, which is clearly watermarked from my site, has been reuploaded to photobucket and posted as if it's a random find as opposed to something put online in context. I don't mind people using my images and such, but I think its respectful to credit the source so that people don't have the image out of context.
I'm not interested in trying to prove Sundance doesn't exist. As far as I am concerned, I haven't seen her, and I don't comment on things I haven't seen. I am just fed up with the forced assumption she belongs in the UK line.
Basically what bothers me about this is that Argos took their own images of items. The Butterscotch one is a potential exception, but by 1985, when the similar Show Stable image appears, they are taking their own photos. The existence of a very similar photo to the Argos one raises flags and makes me wonder how and why. The matching Argos image is from Autumn/Winter 1985. Megan and Sundance came out in the UK in 1986 and 1987. We did not have Megan's Place here, and we had Home Sweet Home as the second Show Stable in 1990ish, with China Lemon Drop. If this image was taken at the same time as the Argos one, that suggests it was taken in summer 1985 at the latest, to go to print for Autumn.
But even if the people who took the Argos photos also took other photos for other stores, and this was a weird coincidence, the fact of the matter is that if this image got into a store catalogue, it must have been up for sale. And even if it was pulled at the last minute, it would have to appear in Hasbro brochures. And we have people in the community with the Hasbro brochures for all of the UK years, I believe. Someone would have flagged this up if it had happened in 1985. If it's not in Hasbro's books, it can't be in store catalogues. I am pretty sure that what happened was that Hasbro sent their brochure to stores, who chose what they'd stock and then got on with it. Argos were very pedantic about the things they stocked. They often had only one pony from certain sets (ie Bluebelle, Wind Whistler, Snowflake, Princess Sapphire). They DID have their own weird store exclusive releases, but again, they took the photos of those. Nothing from Hasbro. So that would imply an actual product that was there and was photographed. And that is a problem for me.
If we know from the other images that Argos are taking their own from actual stock, how do we get a pony that isn't in Hasbro's image catalogue for the UK into a UK store catalogue?
Bascially, the only answer is that if it's a store image, it comes from somewhere else. Somewhere we don't have catalogues for yet, and somewhere that happened to use the same photographer as Argos. But that's the missing factor in the equation.