Hasbro's Most Baffling MLP Decisions

[Carrehz]

Ohhhh I want ALL OF THOSE G3s. ;__; They're all so beautiful.

Actually that reminds me of something else that's always puzzled me, why didn't FiM use more of the toy designs in the show? Like didn't Plumsweet ever show up, for example. (as far as I know?? I just did a quick search and it doesn't look like she did, but I'm not an expert LOL) I feel like in the early days of G4 there wasn't much communication/synchronization between the cartoon and toy people (thus explaining odd stuff like the first Trixie toy being called "Lulamoon") so I understand the initial mismatches, but later on... the toyline started borrowing more from the cartoon but not the other way around (as far as I could tell). Just weird to me since it's like.. surely it'd be easier for them to use existing designs rather than keep making up new ponies? haha

Also, why didn't brushable Sweetie Blue ever go into full production? well why didn't _any_ prototype pony go into full production, I guess, but she stands out to me since I think she's the only G4 brushable character that just got cancelled completely and was never released in any form? If that makes sense?

[TheBeatlesPkmnFan42]

Actually that reminds me of something else that's always puzzled me, why didn't FiM use more of the toy designs in the show? Like didn't Plumsweet ever show up, for example. (as far as I know?? I just did a quick search and it doesn't look like she did, but I'm not an expert LOL) I feel like in the early days of G4 there wasn't much communication/synchronization between the cartoon and toy people (thus explaining odd stuff like the first Trixie toy being called "Lulamoon") so I understand the initial mismatches, but later on... the toyline started borrowing more from the cartoon but not the other way around (as far as I could tell). Just weird to me since it's like.. surely it'd be easier for them to use existing designs rather than keep making up new ponies? haha

The opposite sort of confused me, too. Like the staff of FiM made so many unique ponies and other characters for the show, and Hasbro creating more toys of them would have given the G4 toyline the much needed variety it was missing. But instead they just gave many of these various characters toys and merch not part of the main brushable toyline (like the blind bag size ponies), or nothing at all. FiM staff had made so many characters and Hasbro just did really nothing or very little with them. G4's toyline could have had much more variety than it did, and they could have used all these toys to further promote the show, which itself would have been further promoting the toys. Just very strange decisions all around.

[Carrehz]

Oh no, I agree completely that Hasbro didn't utilize the FiM characters as much as they could've, too! We got some lovely blindbags... eventually, and they did put out the odd brushable set here and there like Silverstream the hippogriff or the big TRU exclusive packs, but otherwise there were sooooo many missed opportunities. :/ It felt like the only time the two REALLY tried to coordinate was the Royal Wedding thing.

I'm glad we at least got a great variety of blindbags, that's better than nothing, and... I guess I can understand why Hasbro put a lot of effort into those, because they were tiny and affordable and probably easier for kids to talk their parents into buying for them I just wish they'd put even a little of that kind of effort into the rest of the line.

[Ponybookworm]

THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS!!!!!
All that potential for extra brushable figures & we got, next to NONE!!! Where's our Babs Seed, for one glaring example???

[Taffeta]

SheRa was like that though, back in the eighties. Aside the core group, of which not all were made (Madame Razz, etc), there wasn't a lot of effort put in to making sure many of the (especially later) toy characters were in the line. They actually went to more trouble promoting some of the MoTU characters in SheRa as the villains in that story, but aside Castaspella, Glimmer and a couple of others, many of the dolls were only in one or two episodes iirc. I am pretty sure Flutterina and Netossa, who were two of my favourite dolls, had maybe only one or two episode appearances.

They also didn't make Shadow Weaver, which was long since a gripe of mine. I think they may have done since in some retro thing but it's not the same.

I've never really known why that happened (I know it's Mattel not Hasbro) except that maybe SheRa was more about plugging the boy-targeted toys than the ones aimed at the girls. Maybe Hasbro cared less about pumping toys into the animation and vice versa for FIM because it was targeting an audience who were less interested in the toys and more interested in the show/merch/whatever? Or because they really just thought kids would only care about the M6.

G3 had a lot of BG characters unmade but they did try and include a lot of real ponies in the stories and in scenes. Most early G1 ponies aren't in the animation, but they did at least vary the cast from time to time. But if you think about it, aside the family friends/babies set (which are reinvented) most of the ponies available at the time the Tales ponies were in stores are not in the animation. While the three boys and most of the family members are regular cast members.

Glowing Magic ponies were no longer being sold by the time Tales aired, not even here (Rockin' Beats were also borderline, though we still had them on clearance shelves for quite a while)...It always bothers me that there are no hairdo ponies in Starlight's Salon.

[Lady Frostbite]

This was brought up in another forum and it was something that raised the question with me with Funko's awful NFT lines; why did Funko only produce certain MLP figures? They came out when the bronies were at full strength, and there were a few produced for the movie, so I'm confused as to why only certain ones were made. Rarity wasn't made and is now part of the recent NFT line, same with Princess Luna. There was no Applejack at all, no Princess Cadance despite the uproar about her at the time, Spike isn't his own POP! and is instead Freddy Funko dressed at him. No doubt there's other brony-championed characters that you'd think they'd jump on to make, as well as variations based on episodes. It just seems ... so odd they didn't start off with the Main Six, then the next wave be the Princesses and supporting characters/villains.

I thought Equestria Girls wasn't too surprising, although straying away from the core 'they're horses/animals' appeal, I didn't think it warranted having a tantrum over and was pretty much the sort of AU fans would make. Lauren Faust's rage over it was funny to me; you were brought in to reboot a toy line, that is not your own IP, why are you mad about this.

EDIT: Now I'm thinking about it, there were WAY more characters in the vinyl figure line, why that line and not the POP!s? I really liked the vinyl line and felt Funko did a really good ob rendering the ponies into 3D figures. I have Luna, although her tail has broken twice, and I would like to get either version of Cadance or another Luna

[Carrehz]

The Funko vinyl ponies (not the POPs) were REALLY popular amongst bronies in their day (because they were ~*show accurate*~ even though they're all in the same boring old pose), that's probably why they made so many of them.
No idea why they skipped over so many characters for the POP line, but I've noticed that with other series too :/

I'm guessing the Glowing Magic thing was a side-effect of animation lead time? MLW says that ep aired in August 1992 and the Glows were 1991... so I could see that just being a case of bad timing.

vaguely related, actually I was thinking about this the other day, how the original cartoon almost never(*) made up ponies, and every MLP 'toon afterwards *has*. That's why the Rainbow Pony in RAMC is so weird/mysterious, but if she was in any other cartoon it wouldn't be noteworthy at all... I wonder if bronies/MLP fans that came in from a later gen in general, think all the buzz/theories/etc around Miss Rainbow is weird because of that. Lol.
(if that makes sense... I rewrote this a bunch of times and couldn't get it to sound right. x_x)
(*- I think aside from the Rainbow RAMC pony, the only time they did make up stuff was the crowdfiller Flutters and Seas - which I don't think really count since they were just there to make up the numbers, so to speak, they didn't do anything - and then the odd animation error, like Baby Wind Whistler at the end of the movie. oh, and there's some random crowdfillers in one ep.... Little Piece of Magic, I think? in an imaginary sequence or something? But they didn't have symbols or anything)

rolling back on-topic, that's another baffling thing, WHY did they never make toys of the Tales boys???

PBW I always wanted them to make Babs too!!! I really thought they would sooner or later, especially after the blind bag-sized figure of her, but no

the hate over EQG amused me since it's not like human/anthro/high school AUs are exactly new or uncommon in fandoms? Why is it different when Hasbro does it themselves? XP

[Lady Frostbite]

The Funko vinyl ponies (not the POPs) were REALLY popular amongst bronies in their day (because they were ~*show accurate*~ even though they're all in the same boring old pose), that's probably why they made so many of them.
No idea why they skipped over so many characters for the POP line, but I've noticed that with other series too :/

the hate over EQG amused me since it's not like human/anthro/high school AUs are exactly new or uncommon in fandoms? Why is it different when Hasbro does it themselves? XP

True, Funko is no stranger to weirdly skipping over certain characters. I'm still waiting for them to finish the Direwolves in their main POP!s line (the direwolves are complete in the Dorbz line, the POP!s have Ghost/Grey Wind/Nymeria, and the Mystery Minis have Ghost, Shaggydog, Grey Wind (In Memorandum) and Lady (In Memorandum). I am confused as to how they decide which to make, after presumably which characters are licensed is decided by the owning company, like for MLP that would be Hasbro. Unless Hasbro didn't want it to compete with their own line? I don't know, I'm just baffled at the lack of Rarity and Applejack in the main lines.

For Lauren Faust, she seemed mad it was being turned into 'yet another' girls show, she seems to have this thing where she didn't want her vision of MLP to be about tea parties and dressup (needlessly being trite there) and certainly has a thing against it being made purely for toys. ... Despite being brought on to a franchise that was explicitly made to sell toys, and an IP that wasn't hers. She's come and gone from a few projects and she seems to come across as very difficult and unyielding to work with, it's either her core principles or nothing, with any flexibility very quickly exhausted.

That's just my take. I just remember very explicitly that she drew a version of herself 'Hulking out' upon seeing the Equestria Girls promo images and thought 'really? You're not even part of the franchise anymore and it wasn't yours to start with'.

From the brony side of things, it's hard to really articulate what fans hated in between incoherent rantings. The most I can gather was the fact that they weren't the 'same' as the characters they fell in love with (... happens with such a massive change in setting), hatred over a 'common' setting (as if Monster High didn't make that a gigantic success), discomfort over some of the outfit choices (okay yes, I do agree not giving Rainbow Dash pants instead of a skirt-and-short combo was bizarre, are skirts mandatory in this world), perhaps the idea of a human world being so 'close' to the pony world in that ponies could go to it when a lot of bronies used MLP:FiM as escapism? Not entirely sure. I do see a lost appeal with the lack of everyday magic and fantastical settings, a High School AU is fun for fanfics, but not really something to hang a franchise on.

Still, it gave the series Sunset Shimmer and she was great when she stopped being a villain. At one point she was as hated as Starlight Glimmer, but the sequel with the sirens and her character change made a lot of people really come around to her (don't think that's really happened for Starlight lol man do people not like her).

EDIT: Since I wrote about Kotobukiya in another thread, it's odd how they did the Mane Six first and foremost, then Sunset Shimmer, then two main Princesses (Celestia and Luna) before doing Hastune Miku. This is the order (minus Miku lol) I would normally expect. Although I did find it a little odd they did Pinkie first in line, but perhaps she was proof-of-concept there was a market as her colours and designs could appeal to maybe a broader market

[Carrehz]

yeah, defs think Bishoujo Pinkie was a proof of concept/Kotobukiya's way of "testing the waters". like I can totally see her appealing to anime fans in general - I think the others would too, but she seems the safest bet to use as a test run.

Ugh yes, I remember the "Hulk Lauren" pic. I just... I dunno, I don't like to speculate on people or speak ill of them or whatever, but... mhhh. On the one hand, I can understand being frustrated because something you helped develop is being taken in a direction you don't like/wouldn't have done/etc. On the other hand, that's... what happens sometimes when you don't own the property, unfortunately. and like...... it's MLP, it's one iteration of something that's been around for a LONG time. I guess to me, it's like if someone came in as a writer for... I dunno, the third Pokemon series, and then started whining about something that happened in the sixth. Does that make sense? (was trying to think of another long-running franchise )

She's come and gone from a few projects and she seems to come across as very difficult and unyielding to work with, it's either her core principles or nothing, with any flexibility very quickly exhausted.

Yeah, I've noticed that too. :/

I dunno, I can see both sides of it. Mostly I just think she should've kept the more extreme reactions to herself and been more professional about the whole thing. Oh well.

And I guess in all fairness I can't say I wasn't sceptical about EQG when the news first broke But it ended up growing on me (at least the toys did... only saw the Rainbow Rocks movie and tbh I can't even remember any of it XP).

[Snapdragon]

THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS!!!!!
All that potential for extra brushable figures & we got, next to NONE!!! Where's our Babs Seed, for one glaring example???

Unfortunately, I think when we look at Babs we can see some pretty glaring issues, toy-wise:

1. Her hair is short, thus making her difficult/expensive to trim/style for a brushable, and if you give her long hair you risk collectors complaining about accuracy,

2. She's brown.

I mean, we're talking about Hasbroken here; the people who took the canonically white Princess Celestia and turned her first toy pink, because 'little girls like pink ponies.' If we can't even get the main figurehead of the series the right color, in a traditionally-unicorn-coded color no less, how are they going to get Babs to pass corporate focus groups?*

I agree with you here, for the record! I'm sad we only got a little Ponyville sized figure, and I'm not even sure I ever found that one! But I'm sure Hasbro was better able to justify a tiny figure that would cost pennies to manufacture, over the potential 'failure' of a brushable brown pony toy. I'm figuring that's similar to what happened to the other background characters. A lot of them are really nice colors, but there's also a lot of bold colors, bright colors, colors that might not have "enough pink" to pass Hasbro muster. Easier to make a bunch of pink-purple adjacent original designs, and not bother, I guess?

I wish we had gotten more backgrounders! It was cool that we eventually got Lyra, and even Bon Bon, but there were so many I would have loved to see! I mean, can you imagine an Apple Family Multipack with like, ten apple family ponies?!

*(I do know that we eventually got several releases of Celestia in white, but AFAIK there was a looooot of backlash from collectors before they changed it!)

[Carrehz]

Heh, I always figured Cadance was made so they could have a pink princess and change Celestia back to white for the toyline.

y'know honestly I don't think Hasbro would give a fig about Babs' hair length (they didn't usually bother giving the brushables ~*show accurate*~ hair... Well aside from Zecora and Maud, I suppose), but you could be right that her body colour might've been an issue :O But idk, they made Silver Spoon and she's grey, Babs is way more colourful. I still think she should've been in that set too

[Taffeta]

I'm guessing the Glowing Magic thing was a side-effect of animation lead time? MLW says that ep aired in August 1992 and the Glows were 1991... so I could see that just being a case of bad timing.

It's interesting. I think that depends on who the real target audience was for MLP Tales. The US pony line tended to be one in and one out, they cycled through gimmicks so by the time the episode aired, they might've been on clearance.

In the UK, however, the Glowing Magic ponies (note, Glowing Magic is the UK name, Glowing Magical in the series, Glow & Show in the US) were part of the 1992 line. Tales is officially 1993, according to Hasbro UK. That makes sense with airing dates and such as well - they would be on shelves still here at that point. Unlike the US, the UK also didn't cycle through new styles. They introduced new stuff each year, but it was common for old stock to stay on shelves (and be promoted by stores) after their official release date (eg the first year flutters in Argos in 1987 for one example).

I am never sure about the target for Tales, whether they intended to bring out the whole line we had here in the US after the anniversary range from 92 or whether they didn't. If they did, the august timing would have made sense given how US lines tended to start in the autumn (pre-Christmas) and end the next summer.

But this is the bit we don't know.

Was the name Glowing Magical used simply because it was the name being marketed at the time and the US didn't check back on what they had used?

I feel like the lack of any US-release ponies in the Tales series makes it possible that the target was really Europe, but then why make it in the US? It's all very weird.

Note - Rockin Beats and Glowing Magic Ponies are not US ponies, they were globally released and were part of most countries' lineups in 1991 or 1992, depending on region. This means their inclusion tells us nothing about the target audience.

[Lady Frostbite]

Heh, I always figured Cadance was made so they could have a pink princess and change Celestia back to white for the toyline.

y'know honestly I don't think Hasbro would give a fig about Babs' hair length (they didn't usually bother giving the brushables ~*show accurate*~ hair... Well aside from Zecora and Maud, I suppose), but you could be right that her body colour might've been an issue :O But idk, they made Silver Spoon and she's grey, Babs is way more colourful. I still think she should've been in that set too

That, and this was around the time of the first royal wedding in the UK (ugh) so naturally we had to have one in the show. The amount if vitriol around Cadance was so intense, and I'm surprised how much I like her. She's just so fun and sweet! She comes across as a middle Princess compared to the 'adult' Princesses Celestia and Luna. I wish she wasn't just introduced as a bride and then given a baby, but again, that's probably just following the real-life script. She could have just been so cookie-cutter, I like her design a lot (despite being scary thin in places) including her pretty colours, and her voice is so upbeat and cheery!

Speaking of that, remember when they gave Shining Armour that weird mohawk?! Was there ever a reason for that!?

For Babs, you could make her if you put her as part of a 'sweets' themed packaging and pretend she's made of chocolate  She might be more 'marketable' if she had white patches outside of her freckles or was a different shade. I'm trying to think of another background or main character who is brown from FIM and I can't name any off the top of my head, most heading towards that colour are a lighter brown like buck or a darker orange.

EDIT: Closest is the Kirin? They have a lot of earth tones to them like browns and darker reds/greens. But the fact they're kirin immediately make them different and more marketable

EDIT2: Wasn't Bab's talent revealed to be hairdressing later down the line? Make her with super long hair and have her cut her own hair!

[Carrehz]

I've always been puzzled at "Glowing Magical" too. That's one of the weirdest things about Tales to me, where the heck did they get that name from?

We know the MLP and Friends crew were working off early info sometimes (Score, Princess Lilac) so could that be what happened here? Was Glowing Magic(al) originally intended to be the set name across the board, but Hasbro US changed their minds at the last minute while Hasbro UK kept the name? And what's with Magic vs Magical? Did it change from Glowing Magical -> Glowing Magic -> Glow n Show or (assuming the "US renamed at the last minute" argument is true, for argument's sake) did something get mangled in communication to either the Tales ppl or Hasbro UK?

Or is it just a wild coincidence and Hasbro UK and the Tales crew just managed to come up with almost the same name independently of each other? But then it'd be weird for Tales to just rename them for no reason. Then again, they gave all of them wings and made Tuneful green, so who can say with this show

EDIT2: Wasn't Bab's talent revealed to be hairdressing later down the line? Make her with super long hair and have her cut her own hair!

Oh that would be adorable!

I never got Shiny's troll hair mohawk either. Big Mac and Soarin both had mohawks too though so I guess someone at Hasbro just felt boy ponies should only have mohawks?

There's a few brown-brown (not orangey brown like Babs) ponies in G4... Doctor Whooves is one, and there were a decent amount of brown blind bags too, like Cherry Fizzy and Cherry Spices, I don't know if they're from the cartoon though or if they were toy-only characters. But none of them were ever made into brushables, I suppose.

Also I wish they'd made kirin toys. :< Don't know anything about the FiM kirins, I just think kirin MLPs would be cool (I've wanted them before FiM made them a thing!).

[ZeldaTheSwordsman]

The core 7 wasn't Hasbro's first rodeo at trying to bring out a core group, incidentally. They'd been playing around with the idea since MLP Tales/the 7 Characters, though fortunately we didn't get to see much of that. With G2 there were a lot of rereleases of the same basic character, only I think some of them fly under the radar because of the European only release and the fact that meant some of them changed names between releases. And of course G2 did have a balance of original characters as well.

The core 7 is probably the prototype for the mane 6 and now the whatever the main characters are, though. I feel like it was absolutely a plan for most profit with least effort. But the success of G4 (driven mainly by the cartoon) maybe suggests what kids wanted at that point was different (or was thought to be, even if it wasn't).

Focusing on a core group of characters makes sense from a writing perspective for a show - it gives more room for those characters to be fleshed out and have arcs. Not that the Core 7 thing in G3 seems to have taken advantage of it, but FiM sure did and Transformers has been doing it since Beast Wars. But on the toyline side of things, you don't want those core characters to overly dominate - especially not in a collectible doll line where the basic version of everybody is at the same inexpensive price point. The tricky part is balancing that need with the need to keep the main characters - who people will of course want - available. And that can get worse the longer something drags on... G4 should have either ended years sooner than it did in favor of a proper new generation, or internally passed the torch to a successor core cast.

The sad thing about particularly the way G4 was marketed after the first couple of years is how quickly those same toys showed up at second hand sales and so on. I'm not even talking about online or on ebay, but basic things like car boot sales, charity shops, thrift stores etc. By contrast, in the mid 1990s when we first started carbooting for G1, you would still find ponies from the early eighties. You'd find ponies from the same household from several years. You'd have kids who were selling ponies that they had originally got from a cousin/sibling but had now grown out of. Ponies that had stayed in people's houses and been played with multiple times by multiple kids for several years before hitting the second hand market.

...Whereas when I was in London and going to the carboot sale regularly, I would see G4 ponies that were still in store, regularly. And this in spite of the growth of online selling and collecting and so on. These were being sold as kids' toys tossed in a box for 50p or £1, not people trying to profit from collectors. They just didn't have that longevity.

Yeah. Ironically, in the first couple years G4 had problems with the Mane Six being hard to find all of, especially if you came in after Season 1 ended. But things definitely way overcorrected for that and never rebalanced.

To this day I’m STILL baffled by Hasbro’s decision to move away from collectibility to just a core cast of characters for the toys.

Yeah, doing that on the toyline side of things was just dumb. Doing it in the fiction is one thing - easier to develop a smaller cast.

And that's just looking at it from a personal viewpoint. We NEED things to last, be collected & collectable, be able to be passed down to the next generation, to be easily fixable, for the simple reason the longer a toy is being loved, the more we get out of it AND the less likely it ends up being trashed. And the LAST thing the environment needs is stuff being trashed!!!

Indeed.

I don't understand Hasbro’s baffling hatred for anything that resembles a horse. It's my little pony, not my little human, or my little hydrocephalused chihuahua. The G5s are a little better in this regard in comparison to G4 but not by much. Horses are beautiful creatures. Why do they insist on bracycephalic balloon heads? Of course that unfortunate design choice was in the brand dating all the way back to G1 with the fancy mermaid babies and teeny tinies, then it went onto G2 babies and ponyvilles.

Also, what possessed them to remove the jaws in pony life?

It's irritating that most other companies who make toy horses make them more beautiful every decade, but hasbro makes them more ugly, deformed, and awkward every generation.

I mean, G2s and G3s were decently horse-y. But yeah. I was really hoping that after FiM was over we could get back to more horse-y designs. But nooo, the so-called fifth generation is just G4-but-3D because Hasbro is still desperately clinging to FiM instead of letting G5 actually stand as its own thing (to the detriment of both their stories and worlds).
Shining Armor and the Princesses are my favorite FiM designs because they actually look decently horselike.

I really don't think children today are anymore focused on electronics as kids in the 80s and 90s. I think it's been pretty even the last few decades. I mean, I grew up rich and had any toy I wanted. We also had computers that I played games on and consoles. We also had lots of movies at home. A pool in the backyard. I had a bike and other outdoor toys. I spent time with all of them. I also spent time with my friends playing imaginary games like house and gameshow.

I think kids today seem like they are on their phones all the time because we only see them in public places usually. I know the kids in my neighborhood spend time outdoors playing with friends and sometimes it involves toys. When the big Magic Mixies was the huge toy that year, one kid had gotten one for Christmas and played with it outside. I got so tired of hearing that little jingle that played each time she interacted with it. Someone might say that a toy like that doesn't spark creative play or something, but I had Teddy Ruxpin and loved him and got plenty of imagination out of the stories. Same with read along books on tape and Tiger Electronics.

Parents play a bigger role. They're responsible for teaching their kids to take care of and appreciate their things. Both my parents grew up poor so with me they really hammered in that if I didn't take care of my things, they'd be taken away or if I broke something it wouldn't be replaced. They also taught me to be grateful for the gifts I got from extended family even if it was something I didn't like (sooooooooo many Barbie dolls).

I also think it depends a lot on the kid. I was always content by myself. Heck, give me a tub of Playdoh and leave me to my own and I'd have a great time. Some kids need more stimulation. I believe that not everyone is born with an imagination too, so those kids would probably be on their phones more.

Uh, I started with a point. I've lost it now.

Basically, I don't think "the kids" have changed too much. Toy manufactures have. Parents have. The world has.

Agreed.

I think there was an internal document from around that time that said "Ponies are not ponies, they are six year old girls and they ONLY do the things six year old girls do."

They told us that on the HQ tour in 2008. We were all like...

visitors can't see pics , please register or login

Ugh. What a bunch of Removed by BlackCurtains

It also floors me that the flutter ponies got a second set.  I love the flutter ponies but they have a close to 100% breakage rate on THEIR SIGNATURE GIMMICK.

Ah, but didn't that take a while to rear its head and be noticed? Plus, Hasbro did try to fix it.

The gimmick of the G1 Sunshine ponies is that their one hair stripe color-changes in the sun, but several of them have the pink hair that fades in the sun.

Maybe Hasbro was just unaware of this?  They probably didn't take their prototypes outside a lot.

They probably weren't aware. I think it took a while for that problem to manifest itself, for one thing, and unless people specifically wrote letters in it took longer for corpos to get feedback about their stuff back in the eighties.

why are all the birthflower ponies in the same pose with the same colors??? it drives me crazy!

Probably because they were a cheap gimmicky mail-order thing with the flower designs being the only effort put in. And weren't they from early-on when there weren't many Earth Pony poses?

Actually that reminds me of something else that's always puzzled me, why didn't FiM use more of the toy designs in the show? Like didn't Plumsweet ever show up, for example. (as far as I know?? I just did a quick search and it doesn't look like she did, but I'm not an expert LOL) I feel like in the early days of G4 there wasn't much communication/synchronization between the cartoon and toy people (thus explaining odd stuff like the first Trixie toy being called "Lulamoon") so I understand the initial mismatches, but later on... the toyline started borrowing more from the cartoon but not the other way around (as far as I could tell). Just weird to me since it's like.. surely it'd be easier for them to use existing designs rather than keep making up new ponies? haha

Not to mention it would have made for much better marketing synergy to have the show and toyline share non-main characters.

I mean, we're talking about Hasbroken here; the people who took the canonically white Princess Celestia and turned her first toy pink, because 'little girls like pink ponies.' If we can't even get the main figurehead of the series the right color, in a traditionally-unicorn-coded color no less, how are they going to get Babs to pass corporate focus groups?*

I mean, that was also Target and Mall-Wart's focus groups at work.

Heh, I always figured Cadance was made so they could have a pink princess and change Celestia back to white for the toyline.

Perhaps. What I've always figured is that they made her an alicorn - and specifically a hairswap recolor of Luna's body design - to get Luna better toys than "Standard unicorn head on standard pegasus body". Basically "This character's getting a toy, so we'll take advantage of that on Luna's behalf".

MLP's 40th Anniversary.

Basic Fun did a good job as a third party, but Hasbro was just embarrassing. In general, a complete lack of content.

Tbh the only brand Hasbro seems to not botch the anniversaries of is Transformers.

I always found it baffling that G3 took so long to introduce pegasai & unicorns to the line. I was 10 when the generation launched & I remember reading an annual at the time with the line: 'Kimono loves to tell stories of the days when the woods were filled with unicorns.' I couldn't understand why earth ponies were now the only race. I'd grown up playing with G2 toys & watching G1 videos, so the absence of the other two races was really obvious to me.
I do quite like the way the pegasai of Butterfly Island were eventually introduced, followed by the unicorns. Although it's a shame there were so few of them in comparison to the others; feels like a big missed opportunity.

Hasbro's marketing team was reeeeally hung up on Earth Ponies and slice-of-life during G3, it feels like, and possibly trying to downplay the fantasy aspect. Which they were really dumb for.

Hasbro's questionable name choices are hilarious. My family held quiz nights on Zoom during lockdown, & I drafted a round where they had to guess which pony names were fake & which were genuine. Nobody got any of them right. I had to show them proof that somebody had actually named a children's toy Pillow Talk. 

I strongly suspect that with G1's perennial thirst for new names, people occasionally slipped in naughty suggestions to see if corporate would catch them. And some slipped through.

From me... Here's another bonehead move on Hasbro's part re: G5, and one where they really should have known better: Making the show that fancy CGI. They really should have known from experience that that would make it a fair bit more expensive to add more characters and populate crowd scenes.