Are UK ponies that much from UK ?

[RoseNoire]

Hey guys. I feel like the term "UK ponies" is a bit misleading.

I  have the hypothesis that those same ponies were also distributed on the continental EU as much as in the UK. I'd like to gather some information  that would (dis)prove my thesis. If you're from Europe other than UK (France, Italy, Scandinavia,...), have you found "UK ponies" in the wild ? Like, enough to assume they were not imported as a souvenir ?

Personally, I have a NSS North Star. That's about the only "uk pony" I can recall at the moment.
I'd like to know what you've found and conclude that maybe it would be more suitable to call them "EU Ponies" rather than UK. Because I find that rather misleading and incorrect. I really though those would only exist out there, but I strongly feel it's not the case.

Thanks for your help, have a nice day !

[nessa16]

Taffeta will likely be along to comment on this...

I am not 100% sure but I don’t think that the NSS or more correctly, the movie (? I believe that’s what they are called) ponies are actually called UK ponies, quite possibly Scandinavian instead? But like I said, thise with much more knowledge on this will be along I am sure.

[Taffeta]

Warning ahead of time. Likely to be a long post.

 I admit there is a bit of frustration when this subject comes up like this as if it's never been touched on, as I've been working with this stuff for almost 20 years, and so have other people, past and present. I have folders full of UK and European inserts, adverts, backcards, email conversations with collectors in other places, there have been several threads on here too...

The problem isn't that the info isn't known. A lot of information has been known for years, longer even than the Wiki has existed. We know a lot about the distinctions you mention. The problem is that the mainstream websites often don't include it.

The reason this info doesn't stick is that collectors from outside the US generally conform to the US names, US timeline, US definitions. They use terms like NSS and NBBE (which you also did, RoseNoire) which subordinate UK and European releases to the sidelines, rather than integrating them under their proper set names and release years. If people genuinely want to understand how ponies were sold in the UK and in different countries in Europe (or elsewhere), then those things have to be challenged.

I feel like there's also a possibility some of these ponies are labelled UK because my site existed and they were on it, and that's why there's that assumption, as my site goes back a long way. But I also had to challenge the assumption all ponies from Europe were sold in the UK so :/

I feel like the choice really is either use the US system and accept that no other country releases fit in this timeline, or stop using these generalisations, terms, names, and websites that promote errors. The fact MLPMerch is a European (Dutch) based site that lists "UK" ponies (including ponies also sold in Europe) under Nirvana is a case in point. People are using this site even though it's classification system is beyond weird if you're trying to use it from Europe. But I think there's much more that could be done from the European side. It's just not ever really happened. I think if you started asking US people to go look in two completely separate parts of a website for SS and regular Surprise, they'd blink at you and call you mad - but European collectors have to do that for 1985 Posey and 1986 magenta symbol Posey, because one is seen as "US" and one as "UK" even though...both...were sold...in...many European countries (inc the UK), through various different set releases

I'm going to tackle the Movie Star Ponies specifically just as they've been mentioned. (Noting that magenta Posey, mentioned above, is NOT a Movie Star pony, despite often being listed as one).

Movie Star Ponies were sold in the UK (with puffy stickers and without) as simply My Little Pony (albeit advertised as being from the film and sold in stores as Movie Ponies).

 They were sold as Film Ponies (I don't know the exact translation) in Scandinavian countries but on English cards (without stickers).

They were sold in Belgium and the Netherlands on I believe bilingual cards.

 In France they were on French cards and called Cine Stars. I think these releases had stickers. The French ones had North Star stickers with Cinestar written on them.

 I am not sure what other countries may have had this release, but they are definitely EUROPEAN.

The Movie Star release consists of:
Magic Star (CJ Pose)
North Star
Wind Whistler (pink and blue whistles)
Gusty (painted leaves, green eyes)
Shady
Buttons (buttons and stars symbol - probably sold across Europe)
Buttons (large buttons symbol - only confirmed at this point for France and the UK).

It was sold in 1987.

The other set that Nessa was talking about is the Pony Friends set, which was sold in Scandinavia and in South Africa. This set includes Truly and Cupcake in their regular forms. It wasn't sold in the UK. I have seen some Trulys come up in Germany, but haven't managed to confirm they were sold there. The set also included
Cherries Jubilee (dark symbols, curly hair - European and SA release)
Posey (dark symbols, same as 1986 release)
Shady (probably same as Movie star)
Hopscotch (probably same as 1986 release)

It was also sold in 1987 on English language cards marked Hasbro UK. But not in the UK. (Confused yet? Believe me that's the tip of the iceberg xD)

 I think there is some thought that there might have been a different additional pony in the Pony Friends set. I can't offhand remember who it was in the catalogue...maybe it was Leikin who mentioned it in another thread...

In any case, I'm sure there will be others posting stuff on here. I know there are a bunch of really active folk from the Nordic region who know a lot of stuff about their native releases and have been hugely helpful to me in figuring out some of the sets they had that we didn't.

It's a lot more complicated than being able to just say, this was a UK pony, this was a EUropean pony...if you really want to go down this path, you need to be ready to deal with multiple continuities...

Finally, as a general rule, a lot of the same ponies were sold in the UK and Europe, especially in later years. But there are distinct releases and odd occurrences in many countries. I don't deal with the Nirvana side any more, I left variants alone a long time ago, but even in the mainstream there are some weird things that don't make a lot of sense. There are also a lot of ponies currently thought of as US ponies which were not sold in the UK but were sold in some European places (Italy had Mimic, for example). And even though in later years there's more conformity, if you look at and compare inserts from the same year from different countries, it's like playing spot the difference as to which sets appear and which don't between places.

But the information is there. The problem is that people aren't really looking for it.

[Shaz]

I'm still quite new to ponies (5 years into the pony obsession ), so apologies if I end up saying things that are already widely known. I've been researching pony releases in Europe off and on, and it's a fascinating and complicated topic.

The impression I'm getting is that there isn't really any such thing as a UK exclusive pony: they were all sold in at least a few other countries as well (but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong). Even Gypsy has been found second-hand in Hungary. Snowflake, Honeycomb and Hopscotch all appear in various other countries. The Mountain Boys were sold in Scandinavia. And so on.

It's easy to get the impression that a certain pony was exclusive to one country, but that seems to have very rarely been the case. Living on an island (the UK), I often forget how easily things can travel from one country to another in Europe. So-called "German" ponies were sold in Austria, and perhaps Switzerland as well; made-in-Italy ponies get everywhere; the No Country ponies turn up in many different places. And of course the shops in some countries imported ponies from over the border, as the "German" ponies have turned up in significant numbers in Hungary, and different places have had pony packaging in various (not necessarily native) languages.

And then just when you're starting to get the idea that it might be possible to distinguish between 'American' and 'European' ponies, Italy is thrown into the mix, and you discover that they had what is commonly thought of as strictly US ponies such as the So Softs and the second set of Twinkle Eyes. And then of course there's non-European, non-US countries like South Africa and Israel and India and Australia (and so on and so on) which had their own variations on which ponies were available. It's an interesting topic but it makes my head spin!

[Taffeta]

What Shaz says is true, that's the basic gist of it. As I said in my post before, you're not dealing with one bloc, you're dealing with multiple continuities when it comes to dealing with any range of ponies outside the US year system.

I believe Mountain Boys were also sold in Malaysia.

As for true UK exclusives, I am not sure. I am not certain whether the HK versions of the adult sea ponies were sold anywhere other than the UK, although Italian ones were. And there are things like Sweet Clover - she's not a UK exclusive, but the pink body version was sold here and the peach body one shows up most in European countries like Germany, etc. I don't know, again, whether other countries had pink Sweet Clover because those kinds of variations get even less discussion.

This is why I advocate integrating ponies sold outside the US with ponies sold within it in terms of ID. Because segregating them gives this false impression of a binary system of "US" and "UK-and-Europe." (And since we know that South Africa had some of the sets from Scandinavian release, and since we know that even within Scandinavian countries there are some release variations, meaning that EU isn't an adequate term - Norway isn't in the EU, I think that binary idea has to vanish as well.

In a way, it's almost more logical to put all the ponies together and then try to list with each where we know they were sold, rather than trying to identify them as exclusives.

My site doesn't entirely do this yet, because of it's UK focus, but it's working on it. Just I had a PhD in the way

One further complication is the end-of-line clearance/ store exclusive import. In the UK we had a bunch of US sets sold here either through market stall releases in weird bags at the end of the mlp line or we had stores doing exclusive imports of US packaged ponies. I don't know what extent that happened in other places, because it's also not really talked about - but there's a lot of US packaged pony material that comes up with the stickers from the Dutch/Belgian releases (which may also not be identical). I have Princess Moondust in a US box with a Dutch/French sticker on it. Her box is identical to the two US sold MIB Princesses from year 8 that I have, except for one thing...her box has 2 horseshoe points and theirs has 3. Sometimes the details are that tiny.

I should add to this - I understand its annoying to European people to have ponies from their childhoods classed as 'UK'. I feel that way whenever one of my childhood ponies is classed as a 'US' pony...