What's wrong with MLP today?

[Bebopgroove]

So I was thinking the other day about the many G1 mail-order ponies during the G1-run, as well as even the few from the G3 line (not sure with G2 since I'm not as familiar with them). But not just mail orders, but some of the other special releases - which was moreso during G1. Looking back at this, it feels like G1 was treated as not just a girl's toy, but also as a collector's item (all the ponies you had to chase down by mail or catalogue order). They were released and treated as something that would ultimately have value with time. Flash-forward to today's G4s (and also partly G3), and it doesn't seem to be this way anymore, regarded as simply a toy.

Maybe I'm just crazy, idk.. But does anyone else see this?

[lovesbabysquirmy]

No, there was a different attitude about mail order toys at that time.  They weren't trying to drive a collector's or a collectible market.  EVERYONE had some kind of mail-away offer:  MLP, G.I. Joe, every single cereal I can think of.... 

Mail order toys by-passed the expense of large-scale production, warehousing and distribution and enabled the company to make a small run, then put someone else in charge of sending it.  Which was very different from the typical "convince the store buyers to buy these 10,000 units, then convince them to keep making more orders for their store shelves".

Mail order had a very simple premise:  BUY ALL THE PONIES YOU CAN CONVINCE ADULTS TO BUY YOU.  But you will never have THIS SPECIAL PONY unless you mail away for it!!!! 

The tagline for MLP was "I want to be a Pony Mommy". 

The tagline for Pokemon is, "Gotta catch 'em all!"  Hasbro did NOT market MLP in such this way...  most people can be realistic that it was not very feasible for one household to own ALL the ponies... that's why there was such variety! 

I think the downfall of "collectibles" was in the 1990's when companies started calling things collectible in order to drive profits.  All those trading cards, stickers and comics are virtually worthless now.  And now one even contemplates "the market" before they start a new collection!  Used to be that people collected things because they LOVED them, not because it comes with graded, MIB figures that can be sold at 124% of their market value.

[tailrustedtealeaf]

I think the downfall of "collectibles" was in the 1990's when companies started calling things collectible in order to drive profits.  All those trading cards, stickers and comics are virtually worthless now.  And now one even contemplates "the market" before they start a new collection!  Used to be that people collected things because they LOVED them, not because it comes with graded, MIB figures that can be sold at 124% of their market value.

This is a very good point, Squirmy.
Also there are more people collecting in general. There are more people now keeping G4 ponies MiB than there were with G1s in the 1980/90s. I doubt that we will ever see the ponies in stores now go for the prices that G1s can go due to the sheer volume of collectors now.
There are some G4 releases that were clearly meant to be for collectors (convention exclusives, GoH boxes with windows for lights if displayed MiB), but mail order seems to be obsolete nowadays, which explains why we don't see any pony point program for G4. Perhaps due to copiers/ability to fake pony points with computers and printers. Unless they figure out some way to do mail-away pony points without room for cheating, convention exclusives make the most sense to release special ponies that are meant to be for collectors.

[Taffeta]

The UK stopped having mail order ponies after baby Lucky, except in a few odd examples of excess stock, eg Magical Breeze (MM Windy). Most of those were a US and Canada phenomenon and that's a headache for us as collectors in the here and now. BUT there was the collectable aspect in the UK even without them. The packages in the late eighties and early nineties even termed them classic collection and baby collection and they were always talking about 'collect them all' and step into the magical world of ponyland, or whatever it was. Several of the early inserts are titled things like collectafiles, collector's album, etc. Even the My Little Pony Mummy nauseating refrain from the adverts suggests having a 'pony family' - ie, a lot of ponies.

So yeah, there was an emphasis on this as a continuation of one big world of ponies with many different diverse charaters. But I think what has changed most is the fact that G4 thinks it's character driven, but it isn't. It's animation driven and the toys are repetitive because they're constantly feeling the need to reissue the same toys over and over. G1 wasn't like that. It was character driven without enslaving the ponies to a particular storyline. Some ponies got attention but it wasn't as though those ponies were rereleased forever over a six or eight year period. While it is true there are multiple versions of Applejack, Bow Tie, Cherries Jubilee, Posey - in general each geographical location got at most 2 versions of each of those. It';s only when you put all the international releases together that you get an army.

The SheRa animation of the 1980s spent a lot of time focused on the same core characters while still selling a wide variety of dolls with not much attention in the animation. (That annoyed me by the way, but that's another matter). The Jem animation went to great trouble to showcase outfits and released more of those than characters, although with a relatively small cast it was easy to reprise character roles and yet not distort the overall story. My Little Pony got around these problems by not continuing to focus on them in animated stories but rather with the backcards. So each pony came with her own story as a character...but the child could still ignore every part of that, throw the packaging out and play as they chose. Equally, they could watch the show or read the comics or books and adhere to those ideas if they wanted.

Basically, the problem with G4 is it's too close reliance on FIM. And by connection, the Mane 6 concept that drives it. I think MLP is more disposable now in the eyes of the manufacturers, but I am not sure it is with the kids. I mean, when you've seen kids going through shelves looking for specific non-mane 6 characters among the army of Rainbow Dashes and Twilight Sparkles, you kind of know there are still kids like us out there now. And if you look at the Enchantimal line, for example, there's a huge diversity of dolls all out on the shelves together.

The problem with G4 is repetition of character and reliance on the animation. And that's probably a reliance made worse by the advent of people obsessed with the animation and not at all interested in the toys.

[Bebopgroove]

The problem with G4 is repetition of character and reliance on the animation. And that's probably a reliance made worse by the advent of people obsessed with the animation and not at all interested in the toys.

This is actually one of my biggest gripes with G4.. Enough to where I'm looking forward to G5 with hopes of starting off on a somewhat-clean slate.

But I do see the points about mail-orders.. Maybe I'm just being old-fashioned and stuffy, and miss "the good ol' days" when MLP had charm 

[Taffeta]

I actually went and had a look through the images I have on my site (which is only a fragment of the stuff here) and I can't speak for the US or Canada, but here there was a definite intent from Hasbro to tell kids to collect all the ponies...even if that was unrealistic.

Inserts with this kind of wording on the front, such as :
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At least 2, maybe 3 UK inserts have check boxes so you can tick off who you have. The 1991/2 one is basically set names but some, like the blue one above, has tick boxes for individual ponies.

Spoiler

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We also had the factfile which claimed to show the whole collection to date (1987) of MLPs you could collect (although it lied, as some of the ponies in it didn't get sold in the UK.)
And even as late as 1993, some pony cards still urged kids to collect them all, albeit set by set (example below)

Spoiler

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Contrary to LBS I think there was a push from hasbro here to make kids feel they wanted to collect them all, however unrealistic that might be.

I also think inserts were more about mail order ponies in the latter part of US MLP whereas they were about the store sold ponies for most of the UK line. Perhaps that changes the nuance...

[LadyMoondancer]

but mail order seems to be obsolete nowadays,

Yeah, off the top of my head I can't think of any toylines that still do mail order. 

I do know that the G1 and even the G3 mail order ponies took six to eight weeks to arrive.  (Which makes me wonder . . . did companies not actually make the ponies until orders came in?)  Today people flip out if an eBay order or Amazon item hasn't been sent within two DAYS.

Even though the Mane Six get so many toys that they seem disposable to us, they are still valued by kids.  I guess it isn't so crazy if you think about how successful Barbie has been, when she is literally always the same doll, just in a new outfit.

[Khoufu]

A major difference between G1 and G3/G4 is that G1 ponies were $5 new (in the US) back when that wasn't so cheap, while G3 was $4 or $5, and modern plastic toys are also cheaper, even for their size. $5 USD in 1985 is the same as about $11 USD today.

[Taffeta]

Even though the Mane Six get so many toys that they seem disposable to us, they are still valued by kids.  I guess it isn't so crazy if you think about how successful Barbie has been, when she is literally always the same doll, just in a new outfit.

It doesn't preclude the fact that they would still do well without repeating the same characters over and over. I haven't actually ever seen a kid buy a mane 6 pony. I've seen them buy pretty much everything else, or try to persuade parents to...and I've seen a lot of Luna fandom...but not the mane 6 so much. Not sure they're as fixed on these characters as Hasbro thinks. I really think it's just easy to keep churning them out but they could be braver and balance the mane 6 into an annual release for that year's theme along with new characters. I don't think kids recycle their interests so quickly that within 4 weeks we need another Twilight Sparkle.

Ponies in the Uk went from £2.85 (1984ish) to £5.99 (1993ish) for a basic adult pony on card according to my records. In context that's quite an increase over a roughly ten year period. By the end of the line baby ponies cost about the same as the adults used to here. I only have actual prices from Argos and on pony backcards from my own collecting, so it's not a complete collection - but there's also the downgrading of accessories and so on as G1 goes on (and also with G3, removal of the charms, etc). We've seen that with G4 as well. The line my start off more flamboyant but generally peters into cost savings at the end :/

[lovesbabysquirmy]

I agree, there was definitely some marketing about "collect them all" but to be perfectly reasonable, sane, and historically correct, MOST parents in the 1980's did not have the disposable income required to buy ALLLLLLLLLLLL the ponies.  People did NOT spend that kind of money on toys at the same frequency that we do now!

Hasbro could use those words in pamphlets and brochures and catalogues as much as they wanted to, for the majority of kids were just going to drive their parents nuts asking, and not getting.  That's why mail orders were always kind of elite - if your family bought that many ponies, plus they were okay with paying the shipping fee... that pony was already 10X more valuable than most of the commons on the playroom floor.

G1 lasted a long time, ten years!  That was more than long enough for a family with multiple children to have built up quite the herd, if they all played together.  So I think that lent an attitude to collectors that having the largest herd possible was The Goal.  If you started out with many from your childhood and kept collecting as a teen and a young adult... of course you are already in the mindset of acquiring as many as possible. 

[Al-1701]

That's the usual cycle of marketing.  A product will start with a lot more investment in it to penetrate the market.  Once the market has been thoroughly penetrated, things are dialed back a bit.

I think what's wrong with My Little Pony today is what is wrong with Hasbro in general.  Hasbro as a company seems to take no pride in its product anymore.  They see their product as disposable, and instead of making their product better to fight that image they feed into to it by making them disposable.  If you're only releasing six ponies over and over and any others are needles in a giant haystack, kids are going to lose interest.  However, Hasbro seems to figure they're making a profit right now and that's all that matters.

Look at their approach to the 35th anniversary ponies.  They aren't making them, but have passed it off to a third party.  How much campaigning did it take to get Minty into G4?  The original animated series and Tales on DVD?

[Taffeta]

Yeah, I wasn't saying that parents or even Hasbro thought collecting them all was possible. But it's a clever marketing campaign to get the kids into that mindset. Selling family ponies separately here also adds to that (not in gift sets -.- although I think we had some of those too). It's all that mentality of completionism which I guess added into us now as adults maybe? We were all brainwashed .

@Al - try being a collector not in the US. Your voice and opinion counts for literally nothing :/ no matter how hard you try.

[Sparkle Pony]

Speaking of mail order, I've been wondering lately if they could revive that concept in an online format.  Probably not this generation, but I could see them doing something like having a website where you could enter codes found in the box the pony came in and once you had enough codes you could have a pony mailed to you for the price of shipping.  It's probably not very likely, but I think it could happen.

[Sunset]

Speaking of mail order, I've been wondering lately if they could revive that concept in an online format.  Probably not this generation, but I could see them doing something like having a website where you could enter codes found in the box the pony came in and once you had enough codes you could have a pony mailed to you for the price of shipping.  It's probably not very likely, but I think it could happen.

I was just about to suggest this!  I figure it would look like Disney's points program on their movies.  For that matter, maybe Hasbro should just make a "Hasbro points program" where everything Hasbro adds up and the points can be spent on a selection of Hasbro products.

But they seem to have abondoned it for a reason.  Maybe they were losing money on it.  Notice how G3 mail orders are not nearly as uncommon as G1.  All of us adult collectors scrounging for points to buy multiples of the G3 mail order ponies and now they are plentiful in the second hand market.

[Zapper]

but mail order seems to be obsolete nowadays,

Yeah, off the top of my head I can't think of any toylines that still do mail order. 

The only thing I can think of right now is the Breyer Treasure Hunt. But that's more of a collector thing. I don't know if their toys for small kids have Treasure Hunts.
I think not.

Mail Order would drive me crazy because I am a selective collector and would never buy a whole set just to get an additional one. I think what's hot nowadays are blind bags and chase figures.