The MLP Arena
Pony Talk => MLP Nirvana => Topic started by: Cottononi on December 30, 2018, 02:22:17 PM
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The title might be pretty self-explanatory, but I might as explain myself a bit. The main reason I got back into MLP is the fascinating world of nirvana ponies. While I might not collect them myself, the mysteries and theories (yes, I make them sound really dramatic for some reason...) surrounding them can keep me interested for a long time. More than once have I found myself going through arena archives reading about new pony finds and the community's theories.
I'm not an expert by any means but I do know the basics, like what ponies were made in which country and what traits are typical for each nirvana type. But what really hit me the other day is that I have no clue how the first non-china/HK ponies were brought to the community and how they were received. I remember reading that at least Spanish piggys and Columbians were first considered fakies. If there is any old time collectors who were around that time, would you like to enlighten the curious me a bit? What countries were discovered first and how did you come to conclusion that they were indeed a Hasbro licensed product?
Reading about this stuff is something I enjoy so if you want to write a little bit longer answer I'd be happy to read it, but I do understand that posting pony history isn't the highest priority in anyone's life so I'm thankful for all answers I get.
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People found them in carboot sales or flea markets in UK/Europe. Obviously ponies were bought on holidays!
Warehouses of old store stock found in wholesale in South America.
Collectors in other countries
Collectors who knew Hasbro had a MLP presence in those countries
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Ooh, what a fascinating thread. Im excited to hear who chimes in. Im merely an uninformed Nirvana admirer :P
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I don’t own any nirvana ponies, but this thread does seem quite interesting. I would imagine in the early days, knowledge of nirvana ponies spread probably through primitive forums/internet, word of mouth and people visiting other places and purchasing those ponies, old has to factory workers who saw the nirvanas, etc. There might be nirvana ponies still undiscovered! Oh imagine if one was found!
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Many people had nirvana ponies as their childhood ponies :) if you lived in the countries that the ponies were made in or exported to, they would be your usual pony.
Nirvana ponies were only really "discovered" when collectors started meeting up and the internet appeared bringing collectors together.
Long before everyone had camera phones people used to share descriptions :P
I am trying to think back and I am pretty sure Nirvana ponies were just referred to as international variants or something similar or simply variants. Someone who round in the 90's would know or remember (Taffeta!), I didn't join the community until 2003, so the term Nirvana (a term which was coined by JLM then nirvana mod) was already in use.
Love pkw xxx
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Pony history makes a nice distraction from mediaeval Japanese history and thesis editing ;) And I can talk about this because I was involved directly in variants in the late 1990s.
The Nirvana term definitely came a lot later than the concept of variant ponies did. I still have some difficulties with it as a term though it doesn't surprise me that JLM came up with it xD.
So in terms of what happened with variants in the pony community, there are a lot of factors and different country ponies and types of Nirvana also have diverse histories, some of which do not predate the Nirvana term in our community. In the early days of the pony community, there were mostly US and some Canadian collectors. There were only a handful of UK people online, even in, 1997-8 when I started being involved in the community. There was Reaperfox as well, and a girl called Lily I remember...and a couple of others who were around.
There were very few continental European collectors online at this time, and basically nobody from wider regions (one exception was Joss in SA who was there very early and to whom we owe knowledge of the regular versions of Truly and Cupcake, but that's slightly different). I remember there was Cookie (then in paris, she's still around now on here if she wants to pipe in xD) Locket in Austria and Lieneke and her daughter in the Netherlands. But basically when I came online the collector market barely knew what was out in the UK or Europe as mainstream, so there was no real understanding of a difference between regular and Nirvana and anything that didn't make sense was just called a UK pony. DV had the Argentinian FLutterbye on the site for a long time claiming it was a European variant that went with the parlour or some such thing, which kind of illustrates all of this.
I saw my first Brazilian, Argentinian and Peruvian ponies in April 1998, when visited by my first (US based) trade partner. She had a lot of these before anyone online was talking about them, so they didn't really get discovered by the community at this point and I didn't really know what to do with the knowledge. I know now what they all were, but it took a long time for the community to catch up, especially with Peruvian ponies.
The first variants in proper discussion online were Italian and I am to blame for that, because I found an Italian Surprise at a carboot sale here and was confused by it. So I asked questions and nobody really knew. And when I got a HK one and realised the eye colour was different, I was really interested. But it was people like Lieneke and Cookie and so on the continent who had access to these ponies trading with curious people like me which brought variations to the forefront.
I only began with Italians but there were other people bringing to light Indian ponies, then Macau ones and NC ones (at that time we didn't know NC = Spain). Also French ponies arrived around then too. I was also sent a scan of the Takara leaflet back then too. Those were all shoved on my website in a messy way because I did't know what to do with them, and no other website was tackling them (at the time, there was only really DV, which couldn't cope with regular European releases, let alone variants...websites weren't as plentiful as they are now and mostly were through free servers with tons of ads).
It didn't take long for Italian ponies particularly to get a following, but the others kind of lagged behind a bit until floods of MIP Argentinian ponies and Greek ponies started appearing. The name Ladybird comes from that time, as we didn't know anything about her but she was one of the early greeks to show up and that seemed a logical name to give her.
At the same time the princess variants were identified. This is really Reaperfox's work because she had them as a kid, but I put them on my website for her as I had a site and she didn'.t. I took photos of them with my physical camera when I visited her home in 1998 and I expect some of those images are still floating around somewhere. Bobbie was also discovered by her, but the name comes from mine because again, I had the website, and people just copied from that.
Since that time much more work has been done by more people. I stopped working on variants pretty much because I wanted to focus on the UK market, especially since so many false ideas were still in circulation about UK stuff. Unfortunately a few of these are still around because of mistakes on websites, so my work there is far from over. NIrvana became a huge deal with so many different strands, and as time went on, more and more people appeared from places where they were sold...so more real information became available rather than just a bunch of photos (which is all the variant section of my website amounted to if I am honest). The ugly dregs of that website, including torture-by-scanner imagery still exists here for some reason o.O.
http://taffeta.tripod.com/italy5.html
Just to show you how far we've come since then...all the variant links work but not all of the images still do. But it gives you an idea...of how it was before the Nirvana term existed. The site is probably from around 2000-1 because I took a hiatus from the community not long after that point. A lot of Nirvanas were discovered after that point, and a lot of knowledge about the ones I list there as well.
It is also true that Piggies were first seen as fakies, albeit the first ones that were found weren't even really talked about online. They were known about in at least 1998 outside of Spain, but the ones I know of were kept as a joke, not because they were thought to be real - and now we know better ;)
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What a fascinating thread! I'm not a nirvana collector, but oh boy do I love history, theories and mysteries :blink: :biggrin:
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As pinkkittywinks said, nirvanas (tbh I really don't like that term) were the regular ponies kids had in those countries. Plus many people didn't know/don't know English so the information wasn't easy to pass on/get.
I have a lot of variants from my childhood and I remember the confusion years ago when I discovered that my Sugarberry, Milkyway or Cupido weren't exactly the same as the ones shown on ID websites. I thought we all had the same ponies. For me, the "exotic" ponies are the ones sold in US only :P
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Thank you for all your answers, these were really helpful! When I made this topic I was secretly waiting for some bigger than life stories about how first found nirvanas sent the early pony community searching for answers like a group of private investigators but looks like the reality wasn't as thrilling, though it was still really interesting!
Also Taffeta, I asked for in-depth answer and you really delivered it! :biggrin: That was an amazing read! I really enjoyed it.
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Thank you for all your answers, these were really helpful! When I made this topic I was secretly waiting for some bigger than life stories about how first found nirvanas sent the early pony community searching for answers like a group of private investigators but looks like the reality wasn't as thrilling, though it was still really interesting!
Also Taffeta, I asked for in-depth answer and you really delivered it! :biggrin: That was an amazing read! I really enjoyed it.
You are welcome :D Anything involving pony information and pony history is fun to write and remember :) And especially better than proofreading and editing a PhD thesis ready for submission xD.
It wasn't really that archaeological or systematic, it was all mostly accidents that ultimately led to some people to do serious work to create what we know now. The only downside of that is that because Nirvana began almost at the same time as the UK and European ponies started being known about online, and because the community origins are based around the US line and US information, they kind of got blurred for a while.
Now more attention is given to the Nirvana and the US line and the bit in the middle - mainstream Europe and the UK, and other places like SA, rather drops into the black hole.
But it is quite incredible how far we have come with variant knowledge compared with where we started. That's why I linked the dregs of my old page, as it really shows how little was known then vs how much is known now.
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It is definitely an interesting read about the history of Nirvanas (great topic and great information so far!).
All I can add is that when I came online in 1997 Nirvanas already seemed to be 'discovered', although it wasn't anywhere near as much of a big deal as it is today.
Basically the only thing I can recall from this time (I was only 11 so memory has faded quite a lot by now) is that the ever-famous family Delaneys had Brazilians on their wish lists which had me quite intrigued. But, as people have mentioned, there weren't that many photos online back then so aside from a descriptions there wasn't much to 'ooh' and 'aah' over. (Probably adding to the cool interest at that time.)
What people mentioned though, that the 'Nirvanas' were normal ponies for people in those countries, did make me recall my first encounter with So Softs XD Growing up in Sweden in the late 80's and early 90's the 7-tale ponies etc. were the norm for me. So when I got online and started buying ponies I assumed all ponies were regular, plastic ponies with no special features. Imagine my shock after purchasing So Soft Truly (after only seeing the name Truly and the price on a sales list on the old MLPTP and having my mother help me buy it) and opening the box to find a fuzzy pony :shocked:
So this grand discovery quest goes both ways ;)
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Oh yes! The So Soft! The first So Soft for those of us in countries where SS ponies didn't happen!
Mine was a Hippety Hop and it was at a carboot sale. I remember wondering what horrific thing had been done to this pony when I first saw her, or if she could be a fakie, but she looked so real. It was so weird. I did buy her of course. I still have her xD.
At the time I knew of the "So Soft" ponies but in the UK plush ponies were sold as So Soft so I assumed from DV that was what these were too. And then after lots of searching around and some serious thinking I realised...
SO SOFT PONIES HAVE FUR!
...Yeah. Good times :D
Regarding the variants, there was an online trade in weird variant ponies that wasn't mainstream and public before they started to get talked about and appear on websites and so on and so forth. The trade partner whose Brazilian, Peruvian and Argentinian ponies I saw in 98 told me that she had "trade partners" who were interested in these things but that they weren't really known about or understood, just a curiosity...also that probably they were changing hands for quite considerable sums relative to regular ponies which for the most part were quite cheap then. Also there was risk involved in buying ponies that didn't have standard hoof markings when the only ID page was DV which mostly dealt in US stuff. I think a lot of South American ponies also got into the US in the same way as the European made ponies got around a bit over here. I am certain that there were people in the US working on South American ponies a long time before they were properly investigated or written about online with any real knowledge.
I do remember conversations about Estrela and I think that was the first licenced company to be discussed although it could have been Funskool as Indian ponies were really early too.
This was all muddied as well by the appearance of European and UK ponies which were easier to get hold of (though not necessarily cheaper) as more of Europe got online.
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I've been around since the early days too. (though I don't post often at all) I started about '96 or so at the old TP. Back then, there were SO many mysteries with anything associated with other countries and anything that popped up outside of Italians was considered very rare and/or possibly fake. I actually picked up an entire set of MOC Dutch ponies at that time because no one else was buying them because we weren't even sure if they were real. $30 each for my MOC Dutch ponies :-) Another example of "we didn't know they were real" came when I accidentally got traded a Funskool Indian Butterscotch. I just wanted a plain CF Butterscotch because mine was in terrible shape, and when I made my trade, this weird squishy, not-quite-right Butterscotch came in the mail. I didn't know what to do with her! It wasn't what I wanted, and I wasn't convinced she was an actual MLP. Almost considered just donating her, because I thought she was a very close to real fakie! Glad I didn't. Still my only Indian.
On the other hand, things that are considered very common now -like German baby Cherries Jubilee and Hopscotch were valued like gold then! We knew they were there and were real, but hardly anyone had them. I paid > $150 each for my German babies in the late 90's. Shortly after that, when more collectors from other countries came online, I could have had them for like $30 max. We didn't know it then, though.
Also, Taffeta- I can't believe someone mentioned Lieneke! I talked with her for YEARS from meeting on the TP, and got most my MOC g2s from her. Wonderful person. Her daughter was Eva. I'm not sure why we lost touch, actually. We'd send each other stuff all the time, and she'd tell me anytime something new came out in the Netherlands and ask if I wanted her to pick me one up. I think about them now and then, and hope they're doing well ^_^
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Also, Taffeta- I can't believe someone mentioned Lieneke! I talked with her for YEARS from meeting on the TP, and got most my MOC g2s from her. Wonderful person. Her daughter was Eva. I'm not sure why we lost touch, actually. We'd send each other stuff all the time, and she'd tell me anytime something new came out in the Netherlands and ask if I wanted her to pick me one up. I think about them now and then, and hope they're doing well ^_^
Yep, Eva as well :D THey were amazing people and I learned such a lot about ponies in the Netherlands from them. Most of my loose Dutch collection was also thanks to trades with them. I often wonder what Eva is doing now too - she was just a kid at the time but it was so long ago...makes me feel old xD.
I had a lot of the same experiences as you did, with the trial and error that was those early days. But it was also a fun time of finding stuff out and sharing information. OK, so DV never updated the information or corrected its mistakes but we eventually got around that. But reading all the new information all the time from all over the place as people appeared from different areas and posted about different finds was great.
I have 3 MOC Dutch ponies, too. One came in a trade from LM, I'm pretty sure about that. The other two were like yours. In a time when odd things were often cheaper because they were odd...good things could be acquired. Now it wouldn't happen that way. couldn't afford a lot of those things now. But like you said, the prices of other things have dropped in balance and so have trade values. We live in a better educated pony world now. But its maybe not as exciting in terms of new stuff being found on a literally weekly basis.
I also remember having conversations with people and talking about ponies from my childhood, like Snowflake, and the other person going, "who?" I remember my first trade partner asking me if I'd ever heard of any special boy ponies sold in the UK as there were all these rumours about them (this was by phone, my internet access was really limited at this point) and I was like, oh, Mountain Boys? And then I had to take photos. Mail the photos. And they caused much excitement among her and her friends because there was actual proof they existed, rather than just a rumour. Seems weird now thinking back to that.
I was fifteen when I first came online and I feel like I was lucky to come at a time when UK ponies were in demand and I could get hold of lots of them at carboot sales. I wouldn';t have a collection otherwise. I did a lot of trading, mostly to fill in the gaps in my US collection. Because you know, here in the mid 1990s it wasn't that hard to find Mountain Boys. But I had no other way of getting Firefly, Medley, etc...
And sad, thinking about the people who are no longer here.
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OMG...you know, I just realized Eva was about the same age as my own daughter now. I think she was about 8 or 9 at the time ;_; I'm SO old.
DV was my go to source for info at the time! I've got the entire website printed out and in a binder still to this day. The original version of it. Every. Single. Page. ^_^ So many ink cartridges died that day. I'd lurk, and listen to what other collectors had to say (Same as I do now) but DV was really THE place for pictures of all these ponies I didn't know existed. DV was the first place I even found out that there were ponies outside of US versions. And you UK collectors were like Gods to us early day Pony people! So much stuff we didn't have access to.
Ah, nostalgia. Ponies are ready nostalgic, and then here we go reminiscing about the early days of the online pony world too! Someday, when we're instantly connecting to other collector's minds and seeing their ponies through their eyes, and teleporting our trades to each either, us old folks will probably be nostalgic about the quaint days when we still relayed information and stories through writing to each other on the internet. ^_~
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I have DV printouts as well. I printed many from the library before we had net at home. I learned about ponies in the US from it - that Firefly etc were real ponies, not just in stories...and all the mail orders. Also some weird ponies I'd found second hand in the UK who I could now identify. I think DV was fine until it started to add UK stuff and then it imploded because all the info came at the same time and it could never keep up - and then she kind of gave up trying, so it got messy. But when I first found DV the only non US ponies mentioned were the last 2 years and everyone assumed that we had the same stuff as the US till then. And I assumed everyone else had what we had in the UK. And yeah. Culture shock all round. Followed by trading hysteria...
I really hope we never connect collector minds. Imagine the chaos. Imagine the apocalypse.
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DV was my go to source for info at the time! I've got the entire website printed out and in a binder still to this day. The original version of it. Every. Single. Page. ^_^ So many ink cartridges died that day.
I did the same, and still have it too! The early pamphlet version. It looked so colorful and shiny. I just had to print it all out so I could sit and drool over the pictures without having to dial up to the internet, wait minutes for a page to load, cause the phone to not work for hours on end and cost a tremendous amount of money... Who said everything was better before? :lookround:
Can't say my mother was particularly happy about me using so many ink cartridges, but I think the alternative would have made her even unhappier ;)
For me, though, it was the tons of US ponies that I never knew existed that blew my mind and that I drooled over on that site :dropjaw:
When it came to the UK ponies I actually always referred to Taffetas page :) I thought that was, hands down, the best guide at the time for those.
I can't remember the name anymore (I've been racking my brain for a while now), but there was a German collector I believe (possibly Dutch) also back then which had quite an informative page about those ponies. I remember seeing Dutch Baby Flower on it especially and how I became just as mesmerized about those ponies as I was about the US ones :P
Today, for me personally, the MyLittleWiki has become the go-to place for pony info even though it lacks that personal feel to it. It is very informative though!
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I have printouts of Dream Valley. Also the My Little Pony Collector site with all the checklists! :blush:
I don't even know how long I've been dealing with MLP and the Internet... LOL I think I was on the Yahoo mailing lists, and of course, the 3 different iterations of the TP and hmmmmm... yeah... it was probably one of the first things I started using the Internet to research. Mom had to get an ebay account for me and everything...
Hello fellow old-timers who remember buying lots on ebay without pictures :D
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When it came to the UK ponies I actually always referred to Taffetas page :) I thought that was, hands down, the best guide at the time for those.
Thank you for that ;) I'd like to hope it still is, though the Wiki has become the go to site (and is much better than DV), it still has a lot of errors around ponies not from the US, esp in timelines.
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I do mostly use the Wiki these days when quickly checking things.
However, when in-depth info or comparing info is needed to make sure things are right I always check with the other websites such as yours, Taffeta, the Dream Valley when that was still around, Strawberry Reefs site, the Rainbow Forest before that went down, Silverfalls Ponytopia back in the days for G3's, the Arenas Nirvana gallery and so on...
Unfortunately, many of those personal sites with info has gone down / become long forgotten by the owners :( Which is a shame because, like I said, I much prefer that 'personal feel' that those sites always have had :) Not to mention, all those different sites combined gave really good, complete info in the end after reading through them all in search for answers.
The only thing that always has been missing it seems is a personal site for Nirvanas (or perhaps I have just missed it?)
I completely understand why the owners of those sites that went down or have been forgotten can't / didn't want to keep up with them though. It must have been a monumental task. One I most certainly couldn't have kept up with. So you and all those who have worked on such sites over the years to provide the community with as accurate info as possible definitely have my respect.
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I actually think the more websites we have the better for doing exactly what you said, and cross-referencing. Strawberry Reef is awful for G1 but I find it really helpful for G3 stuff. I use the Wiki a lot for quick reference on other gens as well, and I think as the go to mainstream site it takes on a lot and does a good job. It's just a problem if people only go to one site and assume it's 100% accurate because lets face it, we're all humans and nobody knows everything.
One big reason I left variants behind when they exploded into madness. Better not included that not right...<--my mantra for websites.
Erm, there have been specialist Nirvana websites. Marco used I think to have something on Italian stuff. Way back. I may be misremembering. There is the Gallery here as well, PKW would like me to point that out - so that's kind of specialist in its own way.
One other. But if you don't mind, I won't be talking about it.
I don't really know why other specialist sites didn't spring up. But to be frank, I think it's a question of effort. Running a website takes time. Energy. Research. And access to the product as well. A lot of the time you see posts here asking for image donations for new sites, which is fine, but it makes it harder when you don't have the ponies yourself to check. Especially with variations. And some of the Nirvana ponies are and were expensive or hard to source. Then there's the other problem that very few new websites are actually new.
Almost every new website since DV to now doesn't start from scratch, but takes the DV years timeline, and bases their information around that. For US sites that's fine, but it doesn't work with European or UK releases, and it is even worse with Nirvana. So because you'd have to begin from scratch with a totally different template, that's also a challenge and extra work.
I admit, although I integrate the US, UK and European lines as much as possible, there are still threads of that timeline in how I organised my site as it currently is - more so people could find things than anything else. Although when my PhD is done and I have some time, I am going to do something about that.
It's very hard to take a different narrative from the one DV carved out in 1996. My site may be the oldest surviving ID site online now - I began it in 1998, and its changed over the years but it's been there in some form the whole of that time. But in spite of that fact, there's a lot of stuff on my site that later websites have ignored, including the Wiki, and Strawberry Reef, in order to adhere to that system and that's frustrating. It means that somewhere between the personal/specialist and the mainstream, information is getting lost. We know a lot less know in some ways than we did ten years ago, even if we know more than we did 20 years ago, because of sites lost that haven't been replaced and the dominance of that mainstream system even when it contradicts proof. In that situation, cross-referencing becomes really important, and the disappearance of sites problematic.
I think we would benefit from having sites for ponies in other countries than the US, UK, and sites for Nirvana ponies from experts in those areas, but we won't get them. If we get anything, it will be yet another ID site for US ponies based on DV's system, just in a new layout.
It's a bit like Generation 4 keeps pumping out the mane 6. These days the pony community is content with reworking ID around years 1 - 10, even though it's pretty much obsolete as an organisational system in a global community. Maybe it's a symptom of the remake trend, but l feel about ID sites the way people feel about mane 6 releases vs other characters. I badly want to see the other characters. But I am pretty doubtful it will ever happen.
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I think we would benefit from having sites for ponies in other countries than the US, UK, and sites for Nirvana ponies from experts in those areas, but we won't get them. If we get anything, it will be yet another ID site for US ponies based on DV's system, just in a new layout.
Yes please to Nirvana websites by experts in those areas! That would be a dream come true :inlove:. But I do understand that websites take a lot of time and energy to produce and maintain.
Here are a few sources on Nirvanas that I've found, though I don't know enough to vouch for their total accuracy:
Italian ponies: http://miominipony.mlparena.com/ponyelencogenerale.htm
This French website has pictures and names of ponies from various countries: http://petitecollection.free.fr/Section_Pays.htm
Mexican ponies: http://www.mexicanponyparadise.com/mexican101.html
And of course there's the Arena Nirvana Spotlights, which are always super useful and informative, and really well-researched: http://mlparena.com/index.php?topic=390275.0