The definition of "mainstream"...

[Stormness_1]

In Australia, we got all different stock from various countries. I distinctly remember choosing between Ruby Lips and Kiss n' Make Up in Toyworld as a child (I took Ruby Lips, she was skinny like me, I was constantly teased for being too tiny) so there were a varying assortment of ponies here. I also have G4 blind bags from both Europe and US, sometimes from the same wave, in the same store, the re-stock being from a different origin. We also got the 'euro' breezies, but not the 'euro' G2s. We have VERY strange distribution as a rule, because there is no such thing as Hasbro Australia.

[BabyIceCrystal]

No, your wall of text was amazing. I shall doubtless respond with a wall of my own, since it's been a long day and I'm liable to be incoherent. But what you said was important and really true. I'm glad that someone from Canada came in on this and I admit, I'm guilty of this one as well. The problem I have being in the UK is that I have genuinely no idea what was or wasn't in Canada. And I feel in this quandary where if I say US only, I feel people think I don't know Canada is not the US, but if I say US/Canada, am I making an unfair assumption?

Actually same here, it seems I've stayed up all night doing pony things and now it's 1:30 in the afternoon, I don't know which end up up, and I'm still thinking about all the variables that might have been weird about ponies in Canada. So I'll just touch a few points and then likely get back to this thread in the future when I remember how to think straight.

I'm also guilty of the same thing that's an issue for non-US 'US' collectors. It's a fact that we did get a large number of 'US' things here, which is why we have to just sort of assume we use the 'US' list. Sadly I also use terms like that because I feel like it's the accepted way of doing things. Which is what this very thread is about. It really shouldn't be the accepted way of doing things.

But you made me think of something I hadn't thought about before.
...
Of course, I mean the Commonwealth. This is a trade relationship Canada has with these countries that America doesn't.

Absolutely. And that is something that we in Canada tend to take for granted as normal. We're actually in a strange position here in that we're in much closer proximity to the States and tend to be lumped in with their products and culture (not just talking ponies here of course). Even more so before the internet. But we also have quite a large amount of our own culture that we assume is from the States because everything else is, AND a large amount of culture from our connection with the UK, the Commonwealth, and from other colonial sources. I was well into adulthood before I realized that there were children's shows I assumed were American that they'd never heard of. I thought Polka-dot Door was a part of Sesame Street because it aired right afterwards (it's Canadian). I thought Simon in the Land of Chalk Drawings was American as well despite the accent. Obviously that one came from the UK. Seems stupid now, but as a child I was so used to hearing Canadian, American, and RP British accents that I just never even noticed the difference. I am still completely confused when Americans say they can't understand the dialogue in Doctor Who (which, BTW, we also had in Canada growing up).

My point is, when we Canadians first started seeing places like DV, we didn't really think twice about being lumped in with the States and just assumed everything stated there was fact for us as well. Our childhood collections were close enough to those lists that we didn't question it. Yes, DV was a huge blessing plus curse. There were so few collectors outside of the US therefore the information available was almost exclusively US therefore anything outside of it's experience was considered outside the norm. Remember how long the argument about yellow Moondancer went on?  It was forever before the community accepted that it was real. And yes, I remember there being numerous things wrong with what was listed on DV. But as it was the biggest, closest thing to official we had, it was the bible of the community. Clearly that still effects us to this day.

I'm also not trying to argue against the US line, or US based sites listing information, or anything like that. It makes absolute sense that US sites being the foundation of the pony community means that what was built on from there was US-centric. The catch is that now that these ways of thinking are so ingrained in the information stream, how do we allow for expanding that view to include other experiences? The reason I use SS Magic Star and NSS Magic Star is because that is the code that grew up in the community and we all know what it means. If I just put Magic Star on my trade list, how do people know without having to ask if she will be standing on all fours or will be flocked? If I don't want to use the term NSS because it doesn't match half the communities' childhood (which makes perfect sense), how then should I efficiently make it clear that this is what I have? If I say UK Magic Star, now it excludes other countries. I will admit my ignorance here and say I have no idea what the collection this pony was in is called, and I'm probably not alone in that. Should we now expect that the community in general stop using SS/NSS and universally learn a different code? Perhaps whatever that collection is called? Although that would be ideal, such a mass re-education does not happen easily.

Another tangent.... this reminds me of reading a German talk years ago about first hearing of SS versions of all these ponies. SS of course having an entirely different non-pony meaning for her.

I'm also fascinated that Hasbro Canada's french name is Ma Petite Pouliche, I think? And France it's Mon Petit Poney.

Uh oh, you've noticed a dirty little not-so-secret! Now, I'm not French Canadian, so I might not be relating this in quite the correct way (where's drucilla?), but here's some light on that for you: the Québecois are fiercely protective of being French! So much so that a number of French words weren't French enough. Poney just happens to be one example. The France French word poney was too close to the English word pony, so Québecois developed a more French sounding French word for it, which is Pouliche. This all happened long enough ago that the French they speak in France and the French they speak in Quebec (Québecois) have branched off into their own dialects. Now they're different enough that the two might not always understand each other. A French Canadian friend of mine with a very thick accent told me he went to visit Paris and had such difficulty speaking to a Parisian that they both switched from their native French to English because it was easier!

Oh, one other spanner in the works..... import stores. We have a large number of British import stores here because we have a large number of British ex-pats. They bring in direct imports, which they are perfectly alright to sell as long as they follow the packaging rules. If ponies were to have been brought in this way, they would have bypassed Hasbro Canada entirely, yet been legally sold in stores here. What would that mean if that were the case? I don't know if MLP specifically was ever brought in in this way, but who knows? More recently, we have a big chain called Starsky's which is billed as a European Import grocery store. They bring in a large amount of products from various countries in exactly the same way. I used to buy Turkish hand soap from there.

If we have so many of these things here, I can't imagine why other countries wouldn't have them as well. So maybe the whole idea of official products belonging only to certain countries is flawed right from the start.

[Taffeta]

That explains why I did 9 years of (European >.>) French and never saw the word Pouliche except on a pony card. So cool to know. I think the same happens with different forms of English. I have a good friend from Michigan who I lived with for a year during my Masters' degree and she and I had some hilarious conversations about the words we both use in our respective countries...and the way they're interpreted overseas. She announced very loudly one day that she was just putting her pants on so we could go out. Fortunately she didn't do that in public, but we were much amused. And so was she, ten seconds later, when she realised what she'd said where

...I digress. I'm heading to bed in a second, but I guess my point is that some things are lost in cultural translation even within the same languages.

Re: Magic Star - Movie Star pony.

The way I see this is that basically, most sets go online by the US name default. As a UK person who grew up with different names, I have had to learn all the US names for ponies and sets in order to communicate with people. Like you said, how else will people know what pony you mean? For example, the POTD recently is Li'l Pocket, the Precious Pocket pony. For me, growing up here, her name is Jingle Pocket and she's a Pocket Friends pony. But I see Li'l Pocket and I know what that means, because I have to in order to know what's going on. Collectors from overseas where their ponies were sold in different languages and with different names have the same problem as well only on a bigger scale. Einhornbaby mentioned in the Cookery pony thread the German names from that set the other day.

 It makes sense for there to be a default through which we can communicate about pony names and set names, although I love the UK names and am proud of them, so I will use them. Still, when it comes to sets not sold in the US, those set names are still valid. Cookery Pony. Romance Pony. Schooltime Pony. Nobody has any issue with those. So for me Movie Star Pony and Play and Care Set Pony are the same as those. The only reason those names aren't used is because the US also had versions of the same pony. Nobody refers to FT Baby Lickety Split as NBBE Baby Lickety Split. Technically she doesn't have BBEs either, so I don't really understand why Play & Care Set Baby Lickety should be singled out for not having a feature. It literally is only because the US already has a version of that pony, and that isn't to me a logical reason to classify a pony as a non-pony. In the past we didn't have all the data for their real set names and stuff available online like we do now, but even the Wiki uses Play & Care Set, I think. It's  not that the information isn't there. I've been using those terms on my site for years. It's more about changing the mindset and habits and unfortunately that's really hard to do.

On another subject, and in regards to both Canada and Australia and weird import, the UK had a lot of weird import relationships through stores as well. Woolworths used to import US MLP sets en masse as store exclusives. So we had the weird issue of the Candy Canes which appeared in most stores in the European style box with the borders, and then in Woolworths in the US box. The European set consisted of four ponies. The other, six. So Mint Dreams and Lemon Treats were Woolworths' exclusives. And yet even though she didn't officially exist here, Lemon Treats is in the story for Sugar Sweet on the UK box. And I thought I never saw any Candy Canes in stores, but I must have done, because I found a childhood christmas list of mine on which I wrote the name "Molasses". Her name in the UK is officially Gingerbread, so I must have seen her in the US box in Woolworths.

I still don't 100% know how the Happytails Ponies got here. I know they did. They were in US boxes, though, so they mustve been imports. And we also had a similar odd relationship with the Brush & Grows. As a kid, my Braided Beauty came in a box. I never thought about it at all until I was talking to another UK person and she mentioned them being on card here. They were. They were on card AND in box. The same six ponies, except the walking pose Twisty Tail on card and the Love Melody one in box.

These little details make things a lot more complex. It's also what really persuaded me that the only way to make sense of all the 'mainstream' G1 is to really look at them all together, because otherwise you're making unnatural separation. I mean, with the B&G, they were all sold in the US in boxes. The same ones were all sold in the UK in boxes. The walking pose Twisty Tail was also sold in the UK on card, all the others were sold here on cards as well. Are we going to segregate just Twisty Tail for having a different version? That really doesn't make any sense at all.

And then there are other oddities like Buttons and Baby Heart Throb. Buttons here has two different versions. They're sold on the same card. Same release. Just one has the US SS pony's symbol, and the other has buttons and stars. Ironically the buttons and stars symbol appears on the card for SS buttons, who doesn't have this symbol. The three large buttons symbol appears on the Movie Star card, and the pony doesn't always have that symbol (but can in the UK and doesn't in some other countries. So much so that some people in Scandinavia think all large button symbol Buttons ponies are deflocks.) There are so many of them here and we didn't have SS ponies that that's unlikely...but why only in the UK? How did they happen? And the Heart Throb - ours has just hearts, like the BBE baby, but in some European countries she has winged hearts, which is how she's always drawn in the UK.

I could add tons of other complications like this. The comic always drew Baby Splashes with purple hair, for example, although she always came here with pink and blue. That means they worked from a US promotion image to draw the pony, and that happened with our promotional stuff a lot. (Blue heart Dazzleglow another example).

And at the end of line we had a lot of continental end of line imports in French, Spanish, German packages. Which makes the idea of a strictly "UK" line kind of ridiculous really...

And a lot of the ponies which get called UK are UK/Europe but not necessarily all of Europe, and maybe Australasia as well, though not necessarily. And some that are called UK/Euro are actually UK only...as far as we know right now >.>.

[Raindrop]

This is definitely a challenge as the pony collecting community becomes more globalized.  I was born in the U.S. but spent part of my childhood and my teen years in Germany, so I saw both early U.S. releases of MLP as well as some of the MLP available in central Europe.  I didn't realize until I became an adult collector that I had a Nirvana pony (neon-hair Italian Parasol) in my childhood collection and that my Princess Tiffany, who I remember buying packaged on a card in a German Toys'R Us store, was released differently than she was in the U.S. (no box, no bushwoolie, although she has white hair unlike the rarer yellow-haired release).  My sister remembers seeing a dark blue rainbow pony in stores as a child (sadly she bought a different one, or we were shopping but not buying at the time), but in the early years of the Internet, U.S. collectors had never seen Nightlight and didn't believe such a pony existed. 

We do need a common language to describe variations in pony releases, however, and the existing terms ("NSS", "NBBE", "Euro", "Nirvana", etc.) may be too ingrained in the community to change easily.  Can we accept some of these for now, understanding that they were developed with a bias toward regarding U.S. releases as "mainstream" but are still useful, and having a tolerance for the evolving provenance of our terms?

Perhaps the first step in addressing these concerns (as it is in social issues in RL) is to raise awareness so collectors are aware of and can share information about the differences in distribution and variations on a particular pony across the world.   I would be interested to hear from Canadian and Australian collectors, for example, what ponies they remember seeing in stores as a child and how they were packaged, since it does appear that their G1 and G2 pony distributions were different, both from the United States and from parts of Europe where the distribution patterns are slightly better documented/understood.  Goodness knows, the G4 distribution is  outrageously crazy to make sense of, and that's even with collectors able to upload screenshots to the Internet real-time when they find something new in a local store!

I like that ponies of all generations are featured in POTD.  I think this helps collectors see beyond the generations/categories where they normally collect.  Perhaps in a similar way interested collectors should post polls and pictures and foster less technical discussions to share information about non-U.S. variations and distribution patterns.

[Taffeta]

@Raindrop, I think you make a lot of sense with what you said.

Re: terms - I don't know what other people think or feel about those. I know that things like Euro, Nirvana, and even "variant" for non-US versions of ponies I can tolerate, but I genuinely find NBBE and NSS offensive because they are generally targeted only towards ponies who are "foreign" and not all ponies who meet the same characteristics. You don't hear people talk about NSS Cherries Jubilee, for example. In a global community there should be no "foreign".

I think though that the terms are only really offensive to me because it's a symptom of the fact that everything has to be looked at from the US perspective rather than from different perspectives. I think if there were more discussions about that, more awareness in polls - even POTD not using "US version" in polls for ponies sold globally would help. I sort of feel like if I can learn all the US names for sets and ponies just to be able to communicate about ponies, though, it's a very little thing for people to stop using negative terms like NBBE and NSS. Even calling them regular versions would be better, if the set names are problematic. Still, if the community didn't feel so US-centric about everything, I don't think I'd notice quite as much. I admit that the terms have become more offensive to me as time has pushed pony stuff into either being US release or Nirvana than I did in the years past when people were talking about other stuff more and still finding out information. I have been in several discussion in the last few years when I've been told what the accessories were for a pony or a playset because that's what the US had, but as Chrissytree's site is proving, there are a lot of cases where different locations have different accessories. It's hard to ID the stuff you have when your country's release and the official information network don't match up. But it's only by challenging the assumed view of pony releases and ponies in general that we find out that stuff. Getting rid of NBBE and NSS is just a step in that process for me.

The term Nirvana may be problematic but at least it is a positive term. And as for Euro...I genuinely don't know how we tackle that one because of the number of permutations. But we can stop calling globally sold ponies US ponies, and reclaim the international term to mean what the word actually means, rather than using it as a byword for stuff not in the US.

I also really want to hear more stuff about Canada and Australia, and also the different releases across Europe in different parts. There are too many forgotten areas of the world which we haven't bothered to find out about yet :/

[LadyMoondancer]

@Raindrop, I think you make a lot of sense with what you said.

Re: terms - I don't know what other people think or feel about those. I know that things like Euro, Nirvana, and even "variant" for non-US versions of ponies I can tolerate, but I genuinely find NBBE and NSS offensive because they are generally targeted only towards ponies who are "foreign" and not all ponies who meet the same characteristics. You don't hear people talk about NSS Cherries Jubilee, for example. In a global community there should be no "foreign".

Actually, right now every pony with "NBBE" in the title on eBay is Cuddles or Tiddly-Winks.   I've seen ponies like Sundance and Surprise get advertised as NSS.  IMO it's just a way to quickly get across "this is the one without flocking" / "this is the one with normal eyes".

[Shy Violet]

Wow, what a great topic. From my Canadian perspective I would like to second everything BabyIceCrystal said. I also hate being lumped in with the US because things are very different here. Unfortunately there isn't very much information about early distribution. I can tell you from current distribution of both ponies and other brands that we get a lot of toys showing up here that the US didn't get but Europe or The UK got. From researching other toy lines and brands there has been speculation of Canada getting UK only items for example UK Care Bears. I'm not very involved in that community anymore but I remember lots of debate back in the early 2000's about some people swearing they had those bears in their childhood collections in Canada. I have found UK bears in thrift stores here and my high school boyfriend remembers having Playful Heart Monkey. In my research on my Unicorn and Pegasus Puffalumps I've discovered they were Canada only releases. In current toy lines I've found G4's here in store that were never found in the US. There are tons of US items that I have never been able to find here in store. I would love to know more about Canadian G1 distribution but there really isn't any information anywhere.

As for the terms used, it's all about perspective. Most of the ID sites are American and that is where we learn the terms and where we learn what was available where. Like BabyIceCrystal said, I have no idea if there are US sets that weren't sold in Canada that I should be buying on ebay because I'll never find them in a thrift store here. I love UK and Euro ponies and I have done lots of reading on them and shopping for my collection. But I have no idea which ponies from the US were not available in the UK or Europe because these ID sites don't tell me that. I have used terms like NBBE in the past but as a positive, more desirable term. Making sure that people know I do NOT mean the BBE version, it's the NBBE I want, don't mess that up, lol. Since I've known that is offensive to you I have changed how I describe ponies so I use the term regular eye version. I don't know all the set names, not UK or US so I won't always remember what is what or I worry the person I'm talking to will have no idea what set I'm talking about so Regular Eye version is safer. So I think sometimes people simply aren't as knowledgeable on the topic and go with the commonly used terms that they see.

There was much more I wanted to say but after reading 3 pages of posts, plus it's 1 am,  I'm forgetting my points. I do want to say that I love these topics because it is eye opening for people and very informative. I learn a lot from these conversations . I think your checklist is a great idea Taffeta and I look forward to it. I did know that your site has better information on different country releases but I seem to always default to the US sites. I will be reading through it to refresh my memory and will be referencing it more now since country releases is something I'm very interested in.

[Taffeta]

@Raindrop, I think you make a lot of sense with what you said.

Re: terms - I don't know what other people think or feel about those. I know that things like Euro, Nirvana, and even "variant" for non-US versions of ponies I can tolerate, but I genuinely find NBBE and NSS offensive because they are generally targeted only towards ponies who are "foreign" and not all ponies who meet the same characteristics. You don't hear people talk about NSS Cherries Jubilee, for example. In a global community there should be no "foreign".

Actually, right now every pony with "NBBE" in the title on eBay is Cuddles or Tiddly-Winks.   I've seen ponies like Sundance and Surprise get advertised as NSS.  IMO it's just a way to quickly get across "this is the one without flocking" / "this is the one with normal eyes".

Ebay is not the pony community. If you do a search for these terms on the Arena you will see what I am talking about. There are very occasional moments where what you say is correct, but if you do a search for those here, you'll see that it's very heavily weighted towards the ponies not sold in the US. You're implying it's not really a term still being used, and maybe it's not being used so much on ebay, but I don't really care what people put on ebay. Ebay is full of nonsense. I care what people put in the pony community, ie here.

Incidentally, when I do a search on ebay, the first ponies that come up for nbbe and nss are Baby Gusty and North Star respectively. I even found a Baby Lickety called Non First Tooth, which was just plain weird.

@ShyViolet, the olny thing I can suggest re G1 in Canada is that Canadian collectors start a discussion about what they remember, what things they had, what things they have found second hand. It sort of begins there. I started my site with my own memories and the stuff I had from hasbro but I had a lot of people as time went on who'd email me and say, I remember this, or I remember that. And it still actually happens. I had it happen just a few weeks ago, people in the UK remembering things from their childhood. It's hard to prove things entirely but there are Canadian inserts in both languages which give some idea of releases. There may or may not be surviving Hasbro booklets but I have seen Canadian ponies MOC appearing online. I think  some of my Megan and Sundance wear is actually Canadian packaged. It really just takes a focal point into which to put the information all of you have from your own experiences to make a kind of general hypothesis about ponies over there.

My site's been almost 20 years in the making and even now I still have gaps and there are still things I am looking for to resolve. I'm a backcard freak which has helped a lot and I have amassed a lot of inserts and comics and leaflets and things over the years too but here as well there's a lot missing that didn't survive. I still don't really know how CF Minty was sold here. I know that the Hasbro booklet for the start shows the FF ponies for here and I've heard it from people here as well, but while I can track releases for all of the other five in CF form (even some weird ones for Snuzzle), I have no idea with Minty. :/ I just know she was here and in some quantity.

Another thing that I've found helpful are old store catalogues. A lot of people online collect those in scan form or physical form. I actually got a whole bunch of catalogue scans for Argos from the eighties from someone online for free and that means I have some information about ponies in stores with prices and what and when they were out. It's only one store but it's better than nothing. And then backcards that have price labels on indicate things like the US boxes being the ones in Woolworths. Thankfully I have some very diligent childhood collectors who kept all of their cards which has made it possible to prove things like that and also things like the Watercolor baby sea ponies being sold here, even though they are not on Hasbro's list or in any of their promotional material.

I think your checklist is a great idea Taffeta and I look forward to it. I did know that your site has better information on different country releases but I seem to always default to the US sites.

It has been a to do thing for me for a long time. I still want to do it, but probably it waits until my PhD is done now, because the sheer amount of research required to make it correct is quite a big deal. Based on the fact that really, only the US story is very easy to access aside from what I already have for my own site, there's a lot of gaps still to fill in terms of trying to map distribution on any kind of checklist.

The frustrating thing for me is that my site is probably now the oldest MLP ID site still online. It's certainly one of them. In spite of that, I'm still struggling with getting some of this information across as common knowledge, because UK information is considered niche and peripheral and therefore not connected to the bigger picture in any relevant way.  I don't expect people to use my site obsessively, that's not the reason it's there - but it bothers me that other newer sites when they've begun haven't always bothered to go and look at all the existing information. Mostly ID sites base themselves on Dream Valley, which is, to be blunt, the site that caused most of the ID problems relating to ponies outside of the US in the first place. It's basically a vicious cycle.

Again, with credit to the wiki, I think they have made a real effort there to do that in a lot of ways. There are always gaps in every ID site but the wiki is the only mainstream site still live that has attempted to bring some of those ideas together. But the Wiki is still structured in the old system of years defined by DV, which means that somewhere along the line there's going to be a problem in terms of categorising what came out where and when. And, symptomatic of that, the Wiki categorises ponies like Shady as "non so soft" rather than as Movie Star or regular release versions.

Just to illustrate this problem in a more tangible way, this is from the Wiki's international release page:
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- North Star and Gusty are listed under the wrong year, and categorised under different labels although they belong in the same set. The rest of the set are missing.
-The above are deliberately referenced as alternate versions of the US ponies, rather than ponies in their own right, subordinating them.
-Tutti Frutti has been put into 86 because the Birthday Party set in the US was then, although she's actually 1987.
-The long list of ponies mixes UK only ponies like Gypsy with ponies not sold in the UK, like Baby Cherries Jubilee. These also were not all available the same year.
-The Rainbow Ponies listed above are all from 1987 but have been put into this year to parallel with the US set (I assume).

This is one tiny section of a huge site :/ Adhering to the old DV framework and pushing ponies outside the US line to the edges means that mistakes and muddling happens. For the record, on Buttons' page, the Movie Star release version appears right at the bottom, even below the Nirvana ponies. And yes, she's also labelled NSS.

I am not picking on the Wiki, this is common to ID sites and it's also a feature that always comes up every time someone says they're starting a new site. It's always structured on this same framework because that's the expected way to do it. I'm using the Wiki here because it's a very popular G1 ID site I also use from time to time and thus I've noticed these things. I just want to make it really vivid for people how big an issue this is and how endemic it is to the community. My site's been there long enough that I know the information on these sets, their names, their releases, their years etc are easy to find with the help of Google. But clearly that's not happening because, as I said, UK stuff is specialist and niche and has no bearing on the mainstream.

And the UK is just one country in a whole lot of countries.

Oh! Going back to Canada a second (I wish I could, I've always wanted to visit Canada!) I remember years ago there were quite a lot of year 3 adult sea ponies coming out of that part of the world. More so than in the States. I remember there was a discussion about it on a mailing list. I remember this only because at the time I was obsessed with these ponies - I actually think some of my shells and ponies came from Canada, although Sea Breeze I know came from the US.

[BabyIceCrystal]

Once again, I'm being terrible and letting ponies distract me too much. I really have to put this aside and focus on union stuff today if I wish to continue being employed. Again, a lot of points I want to get to in this post at a later date, but for now....

@ShyViolet, the olny thing I can suggest re G1 in Canada is that Canadian collectors start a discussion about what they remember, what things they had, what things they have found second hand. It sort of begins there.

This is exactly what I was thinking of doing in the next couple of days. It might be arrogant of me to say, but I think I'm in a strong position to start the discussion off. I am old enough to have been collecting from the very start. I was always very obsessive about ponies and fussy about keeping accessories. I always went to study them in stores even when I couldn't buy. I moved quite a lot and saw many other kids' collections. My own childhood collection numbers just over 50, all but 2 of which I still have. There have been times when I'm not active in the online community, but I have always, and always will be, actively collecting on my own. I've now got 20 years of watching thrift shop stock. Which is why I tend to get a little frustrated when I question things like release years and accessories not lining up with my experience and am forced to assume that I must be incorrect because it doesn't match 'mainstream' knowledge.

Oh! Going back to Canada a second (I wish I could, I've always wanted to visit Canada!) I remember years ago there were quite a lot of year 3 adult sea ponies coming out of that part of the world. More so than in the States. I remember there was a discussion about it on a mailing list. I remember this only because at the time I was obsessed with these ponies - I actually think some of my shells and ponies came from Canada, although Sea Breeze I know came from the US.

Here's my weird pony luck again... I agree with you even though I have not once personally run across an adult sea pony in thrift. It seems like other collectors here do. More weirdness: I had 2 White Caps in my childhood. That was the only doubled pony my sister and I had. Relatives made sure we got different ones from the same collection, but in this case we both got White Cap because that's all they could find. I quite distinctly remember seeing them in stores because the big boxes took up a lot of room and I was worried that it meant stores had fewer non-sea ponies. I have a very clear memory of looking over two shelves worth of lined up White Caps. All White Cap. At the time I didn't think much about how they were all the same one when there were six in that set. But now thinking about it..... what kind of bizarre distribution shenanigans were going on there?? Unfortunately, I have no reference for the exact year this happened.

Off topic: You really should try to take in Canada some day. But make it scattered. The landscape and culture here are wildly varied depending on where you go. Gosh, wouldn't it be great to have some kind of pony community exchange program? I've always wanted to go to the UK!

[Taffeta]

I also have to get back to murderous Japanese warriors from the middle ages, but just a quick note on what you said above with White Cap's clone army...

Argos in the UK during the 1980s would sell one single pony from a set, not the whole set. For example, they sold Snowflake, but not Gypsy or Honeycomb. They sold Wind Whistler, but no North Star or Magic Star. They sold Princess Sapphire and Smokey, but no other Princesses. They had two Flutters, one set of Newborn Twins from 1988 and so on. So it's possible that store you remember had a similar import relationship. Weird as it sounds, sometimes stores just picked one. Absolutely no clue why, but what I've learned over 20 years of doing this stuff is that pretty much nothing G1 makes any sense anyway...

[Shy Violet]

BabyIceCrystal, I'm in full support of you starting off the discussion and taking charge of this. I am super interested and can contribute as much as I know from my childhood collection. I also find a lot of ponies second hand so hopefully we can start getting an idea of what releases we had here and I can't wait to hear from other Canadians. I'm not a very organized person but I'll help as much as I can.

Taffeta, I'm very grateful for your site, your hard work and all the questions you continuously bring up. I think if it weren't for you we wouldn't have half the knowledge that we do about releases in the UK and how things differ. It makes us as a community think about it and want to fill the gaps and gather more information.

I also had Whitecap (and Sea Mist) as a child but the shells I had don't match what I see on US ID sites. Unless we had another sea pony I'm not remembering. I'll have to ask my sister but she's not into ponies so I'm not hopeful she'll remember.

[Taffeta]

Taffeta, I'm very grateful for your site, your hard work and all the questions you continuously bring up. I think if it weren't for you we wouldn't have half the knowledge that we do about releases in the UK and how things differ. It makes us as a community think about it and want to fill the gaps and gather more information.

Thank you Although as I said before it's more about creating a focal point. A lot of the info we have now and a lot of work has been done by a lot of people in the UK to pass on information, or images, or scans, or do research into things like Lady G did Princess Accessories. So it really is the case that I've done what I can and dug up what I can and collected stuff but without all the other UK people putting stuff in to help me there would be a lot more gaps in knowledge.

Again with the weird and your shell comment - Lady G's research and surviving MIB examples of Princess Amethyst and Spiny (2/2 known) show that she was sold mostly here with Princess Sapphire's hat, not the one she was pictured having or that she had in the US. There are some examples here with the pink hat, but mostly she had Sapphire's hat. And all the wands are also quite muddled up - my childhood Sapphire had an aqua wand, the MIB one Lady G has had a blue one. I know that wand belonged to Sapphire as I had one Princess and one wand and it was the aqua one...and since then we've seen French MOC Sapphire with an aqua wand. But I have the dragon, so I definitely had mine in a UK box. And the Hasbro logic continues...

[Ponyfan]

I only had two sets of petite ponies growing up, one set of Twinkle Petites and one set of glow in the dark. All of the information online at the time listed a different petite in that set than the one I have. For a long time I asked if anyone knew if the yellow petite with slippers had been packaged with the others but I had finally decided that either it was a packaging error on Hasbro's part or that somehow I had mixed up my petites with another friend that I played with. Recently I found MIB photos of the same petite set and there was the yellow petite with slippers packaged with the others proving that they were packaged that way sometimes. It was nice having confirmation of what matched my childhood petites.  I still haven't figured out if it was a packaging error or not.

Ponyfan

[Shy Violet]

Thank you Although as I said before it's more about creating a focal point. A lot of the info we have now and a lot of work has been done by a lot of people in the UK to pass on information, or images, or scans, or do research into things like Lady G did Princess Accessories. So it really is the case that I've done what I can and dug up what I can and collected stuff but without all the other UK people putting stuff in to help me there would be a lot more gaps in knowledge.

Again with the weird and your shell comment - Lady G's research and surviving MIB examples of Princess Amethyst and Spiny (2/2 known) show that she was sold mostly here with Princess Sapphire's hat, not the one she was pictured having or that she had in the US. There are some examples here with the pink hat, but mostly she had Sapphire's hat. And all the wands are also quite muddled up - my childhood Sapphire had an aqua wand, the MIB one Lady G has had a blue one. I know that wand belonged to Sapphire as I had one Princess and one wand and it was the aqua one...and since then we've seen French MOC Sapphire with an aqua wand. But I have the dragon, so I definitely had mine in a UK box. And the Hasbro logic continues...

You're right, a big thank you to everyone that had put hard work into getting the right information. What I meant though is it's your questions and always pointing out the differences, make people think about it. I'm excited to start getting some more information from the Canadian community.

And alas my non collector sister has filled some gaps in my memory. She remembers having Wave Dancer after all and I only remembered the green shell. I only have Sea Mist and Tiny Bubbles and 2 floats left from our childhood but she was able to confirm my memory of the 8 sea ponies plus floats and shells. And they match the US ones as far as I can tell. Our memories are a little fuzzy on 3 of the floats but the rest is confirmed between the 2 of us. Anyway, that's a conversation for another thread.

To answer your original question I would agree that main stream should be ponies released worldwide but unfortunately most of us don't know which ones those are. I think there's a lot of confusion on both terms and just general knowledge. Most of my knowledge came from Dream Valley and I imagine it's the same for a lot of people. One of the focuses of my collection is UK ponies and some of the Euro ponies. So as I've been searching for information I found out things like Baby Cherries Jubilee is not from the UK whereas in the early days I thought she was. So unless you're actively searching out this information you wouldn't think to look past what you know from your childhood or the US sites. That's my perspective for why it's still an issue even though the info is now available.

[Juliepants]

Can I just say how much I am enjoying reading this thread! *sidles off back to watch*

Jules x