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Author Topic: Could the toys have a more diverse cast of characters being released?  (Read 6944 times)

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Offline Sweet Daes

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Re: Could the toys have a more diverse cast of characters being released?
« Reply #45 on: July 12, 2018, 07:57:17 PM »
Not so Sweet Daes, kids enjoy diversity. But Hasbro bo longer cares, because they've been pulling this crap early on and never stopped.

 My daughter and my cousin were into MH dolls and asked for specific ones,  Abby Bominable, Venus McFlytrap, Ghoulia Yelps. Not Draculara, Draculara and Clawdeen for example. Transformers and DC/Marvel has a butt ton of characters that kids go looking for. So yes, it is too samey. MLP isn't Barbie. Nor should Hasbro treat it as such.

 I say that because of my experience in the field.

And, to be more fair, not every franchise has a death and rebirth as often as MLP.


Well here's experience for you. You seem to believe that kids are only interested in characters that they recognize and that unrecognizable ones don't sell well. Yet it is KIDS, not adults, that have had 30 decades of diversity with MLP before all this bore core/mane sux nonsense.

All other gens before this had tons of random ponies and kids liked/disliked this, that and the other without issue.

I also edited this into my other post:
***And the fact that the show is specifically made to sell the toys of the main characters, partially for the secondary characters, but not all for the background characters.

Just because a few dislike it doesn't mean that they won't sell well. The remolds of the characters, I think, are dumbly doofy as all get-out and I dislike how they've taken a larger departure from how I see the characters in the show. Because of how they look I've only collected the baby seaponies, the mane 6 and some other characters from the show. That's where I stop with G4.5. However, just because I don't like them doesn't mean that there are not droves of others who do and are willing to shell out the money.

The marketing for MLP is not for the picky part of the fan population, I'm afraid.

Offline Leave a Whisper

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Re: Could the toys have a more diverse cast of characters being released?
« Reply #46 on: July 12, 2018, 08:03:54 PM »
Not so Sweet Daes, kids enjoy diversity. But Hasbro bo longer cares, because they've been pulling this crap early on and never stopped.

 My daughter and my cousin were into MH dolls and asked for specific ones,  Abby Bominable, Venus McFlytrap, Ghoulia Yelps. Not Draculara, Draculara and Clawdeen for example. Transformers and DC/Marvel has a butt ton of characters that kids go looking for. So yes, it is too samey. MLP isn't Barbie. Nor should Hasbro treat it as such.

 I say that because of my experience in the field.

And, to be more fair, not every franchise has a death and rebirth as often as MLP.


Well here's experience for you. You seem to believe that kids are only interested in characters that they recognize and that unrecognizable ones don't sell well. Yet it is KIDS, not adults, that have had 30 decades of diversity with MLP before all this bore core/mane sux nonsense.

All other gens before this had tons of random ponies and kids liked/disliked this, that and the other without issue.

I also edited this into my other post:
***And the fact that the show is specifically made to sell the toys of the main characters, partially for the secondary characters, but not all for the background characters.

Just because a few dislike it doesn't mean that they won't sell well. The remolds of the characters, I think, are dumbly doofy as all get-out and I dislike how they've taken a larger departure from how I see the characters in the show. Because of how they look I've only collected the baby seaponies, the mane 6 and some other characters from the show. That's where I stop with G4.5. However, just because I don't like them doesn't mean that there are not droves of others who do and are willing to shell out the money.

The marketing for MLP is not for the picky part of the fan population, I'm afraid.

Yet you still disregard 30 years of kids who grew up with it, the documented history of a diverse toyline, people's personal experiences with the kids in their family and parrot Hasbro's sorry excuse to be lazy.

Nm that there were plenty of non show characters that KIDS owned in whatever respective mlp period they were in. Hasbro sells them so they're going to sell, but that doesn't mean kids don't get tired of it too. Sorry, but in this case your wrong in saying that kids only like and want recognizable characters.

« Last Edit: July 12, 2018, 08:08:39 PM by Leave a Whisper »
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Offline Sweet Daes

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Re: Could the toys have a more diverse cast of characters being released?
« Reply #47 on: July 12, 2018, 08:09:29 PM »
Not so Sweet Daes, kids enjoy diversity. But Hasbro bo longer cares, because they've been pulling this crap early on and never stopped.

 My daughter and my cousin were into MH dolls and asked for specific ones,  Abby Bominable, Venus McFlytrap, Ghoulia Yelps. Not Draculara, Draculara and Clawdeen for example. Transformers and DC/Marvel has a butt ton of characters that kids go looking for. So yes, it is too samey. MLP isn't Barbie. Nor should Hasbro treat it as such.

 I say that because of my experience in the field.

And, to be more fair, not every franchise has a death and rebirth as often as MLP.


Well here's experience for you. You seem to believe that kids are only interested in characters that they recognize and that unrecognizable ones don't sell well. Yet it is KIDS, not adults, that have had 30 decades of diversity with MLP before all this bore core/mane sux nonsense.

All other gens before this had tons of random ponies and kids liked/disliked this, that and the other without issue.

I also edited this into my other post:
***And the fact that the show is specifically made to sell the toys of the main characters, partially for the secondary characters, but not all for the background characters.

Just because a few dislike it doesn't mean that they won't sell well. The remolds of the characters, I think, are dumbly doofy as all get-out and I dislike how they've taken a larger departure from how I see the characters in the show. Because of how they look I've only collected the baby seaponies, the mane 6 and some other characters from the show. That's where I stop with G4.5. However, just because I don't like them doesn't mean that there are not droves of others who do and are willing to shell out the money.

The marketing for MLP is not for the picky part of the fan population, I'm afraid.

Yet you still disregard 30 years of kids who grew up with it, the documented history of a diverse toyline, people's personal experiences with the kids in their family and parrot Hasbro's sorry excuse to be lazy? Nm that there were plenty of non show characters that KIDS owned in whatever respective mlp period they were in. Hasbro sells them so they're going to sell, but that doesn't mean kids don't get tired of it too. Sorry, but in this case your wrong in saying that kids only like and want recognizable characters.

If Hasbro is raking in the money off of the marketing plan then they will keep doing it. That's the basics of marketing and why the cycle repeats itself with a thriving company.

If the formula works then there is little to no reason to mess with it as much as what some outsiders looking in think it should be.

Offline Leave a Whisper

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Re: Could the toys have a more diverse cast of characters being released?
« Reply #48 on: July 12, 2018, 08:12:00 PM »
Not so Sweet Daes, kids enjoy diversity. But Hasbro bo longer cares, because they've been pulling this crap early on and never stopped.

 My daughter and my cousin were into MH dolls and asked for specific ones,  Abby Bominable, Venus McFlytrap, Ghoulia Yelps. Not Draculara, Draculara and Clawdeen for example. Transformers and DC/Marvel has a butt ton of characters that kids go looking for. So yes, it is too samey. MLP isn't Barbie. Nor should Hasbro treat it as such.

 I say that because of my experience in the field.

And, to be more fair, not every franchise has a death and rebirth as often as MLP.


Well here's experience for you. You seem to believe that kids are only interested in characters that they recognize and that unrecognizable ones don't sell well. Yet it is KIDS, not adults, that have had 30 decades of diversity with MLP before all this bore core/mane sux nonsense.

All other gens before this had tons of random ponies and kids liked/disliked this, that and the other without issue.

I also edited this into my other post:
***And the fact that the show is specifically made to sell the toys of the main characters, partially for the secondary characters, but not all for the background characters.

Just because a few dislike it doesn't mean that they won't sell well. The remolds of the characters, I think, are dumbly doofy as all get-out and I dislike how they've taken a larger departure from how I see the characters in the show. Because of how they look I've only collected the baby seaponies, the mane 6 and some other characters from the show. That's where I stop with G4.5. However, just because I don't like them doesn't mean that there are not droves of others who do and are willing to shell out the money.

The marketing for MLP is not for the picky part of the fan population, I'm afraid.

Yet you still disregard 30 years of kids who grew up with it, the documented history of a diverse toyline, people's personal experiences with the kids in their family and parrot Hasbro's sorry excuse to be lazy? Nm that there were plenty of non show characters that KIDS owned in whatever respective mlp period they were in. Hasbro sells them so they're going to sell, but that doesn't mean kids don't get tired of it too. Sorry, but in this case your wrong in saying that kids only like and want recognizable characters.

If Hasbro is raking in the money off of the marketing plan then they will keep doing it. That's the basics of marketing and why the cycle repeats itself with a thriving company.

If the formula works then there is little to no reason to mess with it as much as what some outsiders looking in think it should be.

Ah so we're all outsiders now.

Just like those two ladies who said that little girls only want the same thing and only play the same way? Sounds like they aren't the only ones disconnected from the actual customer base which is...wait for it....kids.
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Offline Sweet Daes

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Re: Could the toys have a more diverse cast of characters being released?
« Reply #49 on: July 12, 2018, 08:14:31 PM »
Ah so we're all outsiders now?  Just like those two ladies who said that little girls only want the same thing and only play the same way? Sounds like they aren't the only ones disconnected from their actual audience.

I'm sorry that you feel that way.

Offline Taffeta

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Re: Could the toys have a more diverse cast of characters being released?
« Reply #50 on: July 13, 2018, 02:46:06 AM »
I'm going to go back to the suggestion that it's not about the formula changing or kids being fundamentally different in what they want - but that it's what they have. WE have seen (as LAW said) lots of diverse attempts at MLP over 3 decades (LAW, 30 decades of MLP sounds awesome though ;););)). But I remember that little girl at Wondermint's exhibition in Dudley, explaining to her parents how G3 were the old ponies and then G4 the new. She had zero connect to G1 and G2, although the G1 were probably the larger part of the exhibition - I think in some places G3 and G1 were intermingled and she didn't seem to register a difference between them.

My point is that because we know there's another way, we compare. But if you are a kid, you grow up at the mercy of the marketing trends popular at the time. Things have changed in a business sense from gotta catch 'em all to core cast and supporting cast. This all relates as well I think to accessibility of media. When we were kids, I dunno about you guys over in the US, but in the UK we had about four tv channels. There were no kids tv channels, cable hadn't really taken off until the middle nineties and even then a lot of people didn't have it. Kids' TV for school age kids here was thus in a slot on the afternoon after school (3-5) and then in the morning on the weekends.

That means that TV cartoons were competing for these rare slots. I don't remember MLP ever being aired on TV before it was on cable (I think Sky 1?) in the middle 1990s, and we didn't have cable, so I only know that it was because my sister's (rich) friend had cable and her mother recorded the episodes. Naynie borrowed the videos so most of the episodes I saw for the first time via that method.

If your ability to put the TV show into the hearts and minds of the children is more limited, then you aren't going to centre your marketing around a core group of characters. It's harder to make that group stand out. I think for that reason, the comic highlighted many characters, and kept up with new releases (new sets tended to move to Ponyland, or arrive in Ponyland, or occasionally get rescued, such as the MGR ponies in the Whispering Whirligig.). The comic was dictated by the toyline and the illustrations were often based on prototype toys.

Now we live in a multimedia world. It's a lot easier to make and promote a successful TV show (and animating it takes less time because of our technology now), so this approach is more logical. There's the net, some lines have webisodes as well and digital media fandom is also more possible and encouraged.

It doesn't mean kids are different, but the means through which a concept is promoted to them has changed. The kids can't really choose about this because they have what they have and don't know another way.

I think all of this has also made toy companies less directly hands on with their toy. There's more franchising, licencing of other media etc because we now live in that kind of world. So they're not as connected to the imaginations of children as they maybe were. They don't have to work as hard to be creative because they can leave that to the show people. They just have to churn out some plastic figures that look vaguely like the show and their work is done.

The only other thing I will say is that I fundamentally disagree that FIM is based on adventure and offers something that G1 didn't. I mean, G1 opened its animation with RaMC, so nuff said.

Aside the disgusting advertising campaign, I think actually G1 is the least gender-bound of all generations in a lot of ways. I'm not saying there's nothing stereotyped in it, of course there is. But I feel like the G4 characters are bound into their gender stereotypes in a different kind of way. It's hard to explain, but for example, Rarity is a businesswoman and an artist. So far, so good. BUT that's qualified by making her not only a designer but obsessed with fashion to a superficial degree, as well as jewellery. That's not the same as Sparkler's magpie habit (at least the Sparkler in the comics I remember). Rarity is much more gender-bound as girly than Sparkler ever was.

I feel as though the mixture of canons for G1 allows them to be more fluid with the characters and their actions. I grew up more with the comics, but I don't feel as though most of the stories really harped on the fact ponies were girls or guys. I don't remember the guy ponies having to run to the rescue of damsels in distress. I remember Majesty (female) being both decisive and sympathetic, without any need to focus on her as a "girl" or a "boy" in the story. The early stories here mixed the genders of AJ and Bubbles in the stories and then changed them back from guy to girl, but didn't change the ponies' characters or behaviours at the same time. There are pink boy ponies. In the comic, I remember Chief babysitting the baby ponies and getting involved in the slitherwig incident with...Caramel Crunch perhaps? So even though the 1980s were more gender stereotyped than now, the ponies were less so until very late in the line. Even the packaging isn't obsessively pink for most of the line, unlike now and unlike G3.

So I think it's much more about what's about now and what the kids know or expect compared to what we know with longer experience. But I also strongly feel I chose MLP as a kid because it allowed me to use my imagination and wasn't forcing gender roles on me in terms of how I should behave or think as a girl. I hated dolls, I hated pink boxed blond haired barbie, and I hated the colour pink with a passion because it was "girl".  I loved watching transformers, turtles, I had ghostbuster toys, an electric railway...and I had My Little Pony. Because it didn't tell me what to be, unlike all the nauseating toys trying to make girls pretend they're a mother with a baby to look after from the age of five.

« Last Edit: July 13, 2018, 02:48:28 AM by Taffeta »
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Offline Leave a Whisper

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Re: Could the toys have a more diverse cast of characters being released?
« Reply #51 on: July 13, 2018, 08:47:04 AM »
Yeah. I meant to say 3 decades. :facepalm:  Thanks for catching that. There are also many good points in your post.
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Re: Could the toys have a more diverse cast of characters being released?
« Reply #52 on: July 13, 2018, 10:09:42 AM »

Now of course Hasbro never stops surprising me with their cheapness and laziness. So I'm not vouching for them to change anything. But just saying... the Descendants are on their last movie. Forces of Destiny flopped. They need to have something to keep their girl line strong and currently that's partially MLP (the other part is baby dolls). So they better groom those ponies a bit.
That would explain why Forces of Destiny is on markdown at Target. I'm sad that it flopped because when I was a kid I would have LOVED them.
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Re: Could the toys have a more diverse cast of characters being released?
« Reply #53 on: July 13, 2018, 06:49:03 PM »

Now of course Hasbro never stops surprising me with their cheapness and laziness. So I'm not vouching for them to change anything. But just saying... the Descendants are on their last movie. Forces of Destiny flopped. They need to have something to keep their girl line strong and currently that's partially MLP (the other part is baby dolls). So they better groom those ponies a bit.
That would explain why Forces of Destiny is on markdown at Target. I'm sad that it flopped because when I was a kid I would have LOVED them.

Calling it a flop is my personal opinion, I don't know if they will continue. Problem is the dolls were badly executed. Their features didn't work and because SW doesn't have many female lead characters the line-up had to include women that could have never met each other and three of them look samey. It had a great premise but it was done poorly. Maybe because Hasbro is so out of touch, who knows. They see a blossoming market and go "aha! These girls want adventure and female heroes... mmhhhh... let's make big dolls that can't change fashions but let them be same-body anyways because we are cheap. Also make them nonfunctional and distribute them badly! Oh and we should have a Kylo Ren doll before we do Queen Amidala. Because little girls love violent murderers instead of a fashionable female royal."

 I hope they can reboot it soon. I would like to see original SW doll characters instead of the limited range they have going on right now. SW is full of different alien species, they could have done something like Monster High with it. Just instead of going to a High School they would be padawans or whatever. It's like they are all allergic to diversifying their line-ups.

Btw I forgot Hasbro is doing Disney Princess because their dolls are already getting redesigned (turns out giving them all huge heads wasn't that popular, go figure).

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Re: Could the toys have a more diverse cast of characters being released?
« Reply #54 on: July 13, 2018, 09:05:46 PM »
As said before, yes, it sucks that G4 depends a lot on the animation and because of that they're going to produce the same ponies over and over and over again, the ''Hasbrocs'' where super pretty ponies and it would be great to see them again.
I kinda suppose a solution could be not focusing on the same idk, 6 or 7 characters for a whole generation, it could be nice to have different ponies on every animation release, like an specific core for every season of the series. I mean, it's a win-win-win situation, kids could buy toys of different characters that they will like, collectors aren't going to be tired of seeing the same 6 ponies over and over and over and Hasbro probablly could make a whole lot of money.
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Re: Could the toys have a more diverse cast of characters being released?
« Reply #55 on: July 13, 2018, 09:51:24 PM »
@Zapper Leia has an extra outfit or two, so I thought they could change outfits? Oh well. I'll probably pick up Leia or whoever comes with R2 next time I see them on clearance.
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Re: Could the toys have a more diverse cast of characters being released?
« Reply #56 on: July 14, 2018, 07:06:14 AM »
@Zapper Leia has an extra outfit or two, so I thought they could change outfits? Oh well. I'll probably pick up Leia or whoever comes with R2 next time I see them on clearance.

Only that particular Leia can wear the outfits because the others have moulded on clothes for the most part. If you want to pick one up definitely go for that Fashion Leia because she is the only one with removable clothes (she has a moulded on bustier but it's subtle enough).

I really like the look of these dolls and I still try to get that elusive Ahsoka that should be out by now. But they are like action figures with rooted hair. Except the action feature is hardly doing anything and the soft goods are awkward (for instance, you can take off Sabine's and Ahsoka's pants but there is no reason why you would swap those when the rest of the outfit is moulded on. It's like... you can reveal their butts but they permanently have to wear a shirt oO).

Why even do pants as soft goods when other characters have moulded on pants. The more I think about it the more I believe they just didn't give that much of a damn about how these dolls were gonna work.

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Re: Could the toys have a more diverse cast of characters being released?
« Reply #57 on: July 14, 2018, 04:48:13 PM »
I hope they can reboot it soon. I would like to see original SW doll characters instead of the limited range they have going on right now. SW is full of different alien species, they could have done something like Monster High with it. Just instead of going to a High School they would be padawans or whatever. It's like they are all allergic to diversifying their line-ups.

Ohhh no lmao why did you have to say that, now my heart hurts because that will never happen! I'm so obsessed with the alien races in Star Wars but have only ever found one doll of one, ever- my Cantina Man from '98. I get so many compliments on him, too! I wish they would make more aliens. :'( I've been forever searching for a Twi'Lek, specifically, but will never find one.
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Re: Could the toys have a more diverse cast of characters being released?
« Reply #58 on: July 14, 2018, 09:03:42 PM »
I like how it went from ponies to Star Wars. If there isn't a Star Wars/Trek toy topic in the appropriate section, I may have to make one.
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