wanna take a walk down pony memory lane? (Dream Valley website)

[Taffeta]

In the interest of fairness to MLPMerch, they have now removed Paradise from the site. But the information was taken uncritically from a site that used DV's system, while we were expected to provide proof that that information was wrong.  But eh. This is how mainstream ID sites work. They copy data from each other and thus corroborate each other's errors. And then those errors are used to shout down people with actual information to share, which also goes back to DV and how DV dealt with international information.

(In MLPMerch's favour, they did actually sit down and try to do something to repair that. Whether I agree with their current layout or not, they did try.)

I don't know what happened with Pretty Bow because Kim always claimed that she would only add information she could verify. There's no evidence for her German parlour theory, although both the pony and a pink parlour do exist (Argentina)?

The best guess I had is based on circumstantial evidence with how other things were handled. The pony friends doll image came from a US catalogue and I knew the person who sent her that image. She told Kim that it was a US catalogue, but Kim's site says that they were meant to be sold in the US but actually sold elsewhere. The person who sent that image to her is in Canada, though. Maybe Kim made an assumption there based on where the person sent the image from, not the information being conveyed.

Which means maybe someone in Germany had the Argentinian items and sent her images and Kim made the same assumption. Collector in Germany has these = German product. Because S. American ponies were not widely known about back then. I saw a handful of them when Helen came over in 1998 but I think most variants being talked about then were European still.

Making mistakes back then was easily done given how little material was out there. The big problem for me remains that she spent about 5 years refusing to update and not listening to an increasingly frustrated and growing group of people who were literally just trying very very hard to help her out with her information.

I actually wish people didn't dig the site up out of oblivion, or that if it gets dug up, it really needs to come with a disclaimer about the fact it's not a reliable source of pony ID any more. It's a piece of history, but then so are crinolines...it doesn't mean that they have a modern day application.

[shabbychicdee]

awwwww memory's    it was like my bible back in the early collecting days, i use to hop on daily when i first found it, drooling over ponies i only ever dreamt about having and making check list of accessories i needed and getting info on ponies i just remembered as a child, early days before i found scrap book and strawberry reef and before a friend put me onto the arena 

[caseysealia]

I never got to use this site (I would of been still playing with the toys 😆) But its great seeing old sites like this from back when!

[mercynova]

Aww this brings back some lovely memories! This was my go-to pony site way before I even knew about the collecting communities online. I used to spend hours browsing through and being amazing seeing all those ponies that were never sold in the UK!

[Sunset]

What a blast from the past! MLP was one of the first things I searched when we got internet service at home in '97-'98. Dream Valley and the TP were the first sites I found. I browsed for hours (when someone didn't need to use the phone), and I based my first collection checklists on its info. There were so many more ponies than I realized! Haha!

what other new info I can find on there.

Same for me! Except my only access to the internet was at my mom’s work on the weekends when she wasn’t using her computer.  So I printed out the whole site and put it in a binder.  This was back when it was just the backcard  images and not the photos.  And since the printer was black and white I colored in the images myself.

I still have it, too.

[LadyMoondancer]

I started collecting ponies a couple years before internet access and I had sooo many I didn't know the names of!  When I finally got online and found Dream Valley . . . I was floored.  I spent hours and hours going through the ponies there, identifying the ones I had and adding new ones to my want list!

We were so lucky to have someone who knew, like, 99% of the US ponies AND their accessories (how did she remember them all??) AND what year they came out.  Plus summaries of both G1 shows and files of the songs.  I've seen modern fandoms that have a lot less comprehensive info!

About the songs--This was back before Youtube existed, and song files were sooo big (comparatively) that most people wouldn't have had them on a site.  IIRC Dream Valley didn't have them all at once, but did have a "song of the week".  Somehow she even had the lost song from The Glass Princess episode, "Hurry".

My favorite era of Dream Valley was when most of the ID pics were scans from the backcards.  I loved the backcards and--I don't know why--found it easier to ID ponies off them compared to photos.  Unfortunately a different ID site (MyLittlePonyCollector.com or something like that) shamelessly lifted every single one of Kim's scanned backcards / brochures, after which she started using photos, probably because it didn't have any grey area of "Well, HASBRO technically created them & you only scanned them."

But anyway.  So many fond memories.

[Beth3346]

aww this brings back fond memories. DV was the first site I used when i started collecting. I was a little late to the party in 2009 but it helped me build my first checklists when I was totally overwhelmed by ebay.

[Carrehz]

We were so lucky to have someone who knew, like, 99% of the US ponies AND their accessories (how did she remember them all??) AND what year they came out.  Plus summaries of both G1 shows and files of the songs.  I've seen modern fandoms that have a lot less comprehensive info!

this!! Don't even get me -started- on how difficult newer stuff can be to ID. Heck, even some more obscure G4 MLP stuff can be hard to find info on!

Somehow she even had the lost song from The Glass Princess episode, "Hurry".

She must've been taping the eps from the beginning, that's all I can think of. I'm thrilled that not only did she have that, but she shared it *and* someone managed to keep a backu-up and eventually put it on YouTube - we'd never be able to hear it otherwise. I still wonder what the heck happened to that sequence.

[Taffeta]

Kim had all of them off air recordings from probably some time back then.

I didn't get all the eps from her so I didn't have that one, but there are bits of really old ads between the breaks on the Jem vhs and the MLPtales ones. So I assume that she had them from the time. She also had all the commercials which she would have had from back then as well.

Almost certainly she had the lost song for that reason.

Whatever issues I have with DV over international ID (and they are big issues), the reason DV was able to put together so much US information is because, basically, she was the only one doing it at the time. She had to do it herself from scratch with the knowledge she built up and had, she couldn't just piggyback another site using google because...I'm not sure there even was google back then to do that with xD.

Most G1 ID sites now are not set up by people with that kind of research base or personal knowledge. Mostly they're built by googling existing online ID sites. It's easier to do that, but it's not great. It means there's no real check on errors slipping through. DV actually shows that really well, because the difference in quality between the US DV and the international DV is entirely a matter of her not having the same wealth of information available to her in order to know (or ultimately care) what was going on.

I don't think it's hard to build a knowledge base of G1 in the way Kim did. G1 is also not that complicated in the US, and thanks to her, not particularly mysterious either.

 It's more that sites now don't bother going through the steps she did, with the cards and inserts and so on. The internet has got lazy basically, so people think it's hard, but it's not hard. Or maybe I'm just weird.

[Strawberry Swirl]

I didn't visit her pony site a lot but I remember pretty religiously viewing her Pokémon site back in the day. I think it's a little sad she didn't leave them both up for archival reasons. I'm sure lots of people would still like to visit, even if they aren't being updated anymore.

[Taffeta]

I didn't visit her pony site a lot but I remember pretty religiously viewing her Pokémon site back in the day. I think it's a little sad she didn't leave them both up for archival reasons. I'm sure lots of people would still like to visit, even if they aren't being updated anymore.

She would have to pay for that, though. It was on her own domain.

Besides, an ID site should not be left up if the info is out of date. It's not quite the same as a site about fanfic or other kinds of website.

[ChocolateStarfire]

Oh gosh, I miss this website and I am sad it got taken down vs updated. I know...onward and upward...still. Brings back lots of good memories for me. <3

[Arkseil]

I spent so much time on that site when I revisited MLP! I think she even had the OG logo font available for download. I've since only been able to find a slightly similar italicized version of it.

I need to check these old songs out on YouTube! I feel like I remember downloading some of the songs to an old laptop, really wish I still had them as mp3 files.

She must have spent so much time on it, thank goodness for the wayback machine archiving things. Remember web rings? Man that was a bit of nostalgia!

[Carrehz]

I spent so much time on that site when I revisited MLP! I think she even had the OG logo font available for download. I've since only been able to find a slightly similar italicized version of it.

The best "G1 logo" fonts I've found are SoutaneBlack and Souvenir Lt BT, do you have either of those?

[Wildshadow]

I enjoyed it more for the stuff about the tv show, like the lyrics and such. And where I realized that I hate how I don't know where my VHS went of the Glass Princess because it was taped from the tv and I had the whole episode with the SONG  I watched that part with the song, over and over, memorizing it and didn't know that the distributed VHS never had that song in it, then the Disney Channel not having it either. I COULD HAVE SHOWED THE WORLD. 

And still sad that I could have also had the songs missing from the second episode of Tambelon and second episode of Flight To Cloud Castle because I had those taped from the tv as well but I taped over one with stupid stuff and the other was probably my dad. That's the only thing I'd want to go back in time for, the precious MLP animations...

Anyway, didn't know all that other stuff with the information was happening, I was in my own little world