Quote from: ZeldaTheSwordsman on January 29, 2024, 07:27:40 PM

I don't think a "knowing your place" idea was really intended...

Quote from: Taffeta on January 29, 2024, 11:34:27 AM

Also, does it matter if future generations don't get to share MLP? Looking at where it is now, is that really something we want to share with the future? Is it really okay for it just to be there for the sake of keeping the brand alive, even when the soul has long since been sucked out of it? Personally, I'm okay with it fading into the past. I've never loved the hype G4 brought into the pony collecting world.

1. There's always the chance for the soul to return
2. It was the hype from G4 that finally nudged me into actually checking out MLP. And that in turn led to me checking out and falling in love with G1, and meeting the wonderful communities here and on the Trading Post.
I feel kinda unwelcome now...
 

Don't be silly.

 It's pretty obvious that the hype train I'm talking about was the media chaos, the brony explosion, the meme culture and the influx of people whose behaviour damaged the reputation of pony collectors for a long time to come.

That same explosion is what drew me in back in 2011, via a friend who got into it. If it wasn't for that, I might never have met y'all - nor some of my other very close friends. I'm not happy about all the toxicity that hype ultimately brought, but it kinda felt like you were writing off everyone who came on board because of the excitement.

Whether you like it or not, G4's fandom became infested with people whose sole purpose in life is to make other people miserable on social media - and Hasbro marketed towards those people, at the expense of their real audience, which was the kids. The moment MLP stopped being about kids first and foremost, it died

Having seen and experienced the bad side of the G4 fandom, I think I'm entitled to say that I disliked what that hype brought. You would have to be completely oblivious to that impact in order to think my comments were targeting any actual fans, whether they be old or new.

I saw and experienced the bad side of the G4 fandom as well. I tried to get them to be better about how they acted towards people and how they viewed previous generations, but I doubt I achieved much. There are reasons I abandoned any brony spaces aside from Tumblr, and even that's gone inactive for me for various reasons.

Please don't twist my words into something I didn't say. Nobody is making anyone unwelcome.

The thing is, together with something else you said...

Unpopular opinion, too, but I am ok with MLP ending with G5. I feel like we already had 2 generations too many, given the chaos of G4 and then this. MLP doesn't need to be constantly trampled down by repetitive overselling of the same characters. If MLP disappeared completely, well, so what? Those of us who grew up with G1 survived that and we're still surviving it. Will it really make a huge difference if ponies stop being sold? The ones most of us grew up with (G1 or G3 included) haven't been on shelves for years but we're still here for them...

...It kinda feels like you're writing off people who grew up with G4 or didn't come on board til G4. And almost like you're wishing people who grew up with G1 through G3 had gotten to keep MLP all to themselves.

With regards to the other point, does it matter if that was or wasn't the intention when it is the final outcome? Earth ponies do earth pony things. Pegasus ponies do flying things. Unicorn ponies do magicky things. Is that not being categorised into x y and z?

It's unfair to quote that one line without the context I gave it, of how the comic and characters were rendered in the UK and why I feel that jolt. The reality is that when you grow up with a 'ponyland' where the pony species had no impact whatsoever on what they could do, it makes it much more noticeable when ponies are pigeonholed into 'species' in other representations.

1. I was responding in passing because I was sad and tired and mainly concentrating on the other thing.
2. I do understand why you feel that jolt. It's very different from what you were used to growing up.
3. On further reflection, I realized a bit of a wrinkle to this. The backcard stories (and the media they influenced) did attribute magic to Earth Ponies... but only if they were from a special set like the Rainbow Ponies, the So-Soft Ponies (excluding rereleases), etc. So for instance, Parasol has magic (mentioned on both her backcard and Posey's), but "plain" Earth Ponies like the Original Six, Applejack, Bubbles, Tootsie... They got nothing, and I don't think the comics attributed any to them either. The one exception to this is Lickety-Split, whose backcard describes her as turning mountains to ice cream(!) by kicking her heels. But she's an anomaly. None of the other "plain" Earth ponies get anything like that - only the ones from special sets, to make them seem more special.

Of course, by Year Four they had stopped producing "plain" Earth Ponies (at least as far as the US went) and everybody was from a special set.

Going back to that, I think it is interesting that the backcards the US had often informed the UK stories, and that the US often had more detailed backcard stories than the UK (at least early on), but didn't really use them at all. The thing I mentioned about Magic Star being the most magical pony in ponyland comes from the fact file. But I think it's based loosely on Magic Star's card story in the US.

As far as the UK media using the backcard stories goes... the UK backcard stories were all cut down (probably to prepare a shortened version that could be translated multiple times over for the continental release), but Hasbro would have still had the original full-length versions on file to provide to people producing fiction. And of course, comics and the like have much shorter turnaround.
As far as the US media not using them... Well, in the cartoon's case that can probably be attributed in part to when it started. The original specials (which set a bit of a pattern for how the rest was written) were created at a time when they didn't offer much characterization and said little about specific powers for most ponies. When it comes to the movie and series, production lead time (IE, needing to get production rolling before any backcard story was even available) and the action-adventure focus may also have been factors. Also characters' limited screentime from the need to hawk as many toys with the show as possible.
My headcanon is that at least some of the backcard abilities do still exist in the cartoon's universe (since it doesn't outright preclude them in most cases), and just never came up in the events the cartoon showed.

Magic Star doesn't have a backcard story in the UK, because the Movie Star ponies only have a brief one sentence on the backs of their cards for each of them. It's a lovely card but useless for really learning about the ponies. In fact, the one lines there are more in keeping with the actual movie representation.

So there's this beautiful irony whereby ponies like Shady and Magic Star have proper backcard stories in the US (albeit they're SS ponies), that story is then disregarded by the US and used in the UK comics. But Hasbro UK, when promoting our versions of those ponies, connects them to the movie, and thus removes those characterisations that the original backcards (and comics) laid out.

That probably has to do with Hasbro UK trying to give the movie a little extra promotion since it was a big expensive project, the UK releases coming later, and those characters not being part of special sets like they were in the US.

All of that probably ought to be  on the Hasbro's Baffling Decisions thread, because it is nuts, but it's also pretty interesting that it happened like that. It does give the feeling of multiple different narratives around G1 (backcards, comics, animation) and that they didn't necessarily mesh with what else was going on in the same location.

Transformers G1 had a similar disconnect, although to a lesser degree.

In the comic and annual stories, Magic Star could grant wishes. Later on, so could Rainbow Magic, a pegasus pony. But even some of the boy ponies had magic skills. I remember Ice Crystal making ice slides in the 1988 annual. I also am pretty sure Lightning could wink in and out like a lightning flash.

And Baby Lucky had a lot of happy-go-lucky magic going on, which included the random ability to bring drawings of the newborn twins to life.

1. Mind you, a lot of those never even got a chance to appear in the cartoon (and some - like the second set of stallions - were UK-only), so we never got to see what it would or wouldn't have done with them.
2. Who's "Rainbow Magic"? Are they a fiction-exclusive character? I've found an issue by that name, but not a pony.

Compared to that, the "Unicorns do magic, pegasus ponies fly, earth ponies are just ponies" rhetoric just jars with me. It genuinely feels like 'everyone in their place', because it is decided by a pony's species. In the case of pegasi and weather magic, it also feel generic, not individual. And G4 made that even firmer with the cutie marks and their destined meaning. G5 have also not moved away from the idea...although Sunny does break the mould a bit, it's not the same thing.

1. Regarding cutie marks, they never felt to me like a prescriptive "destiny" so much as representing something a pony truly resonates with and feels a calling toward or has a special talent in doing. And they were an effort to try and make the symbols more special.
2. I get more of a sense of "different species are special in different ways/channel magic in different ways" (and hey, weather magic gives pegasus ponies more to do than just fly) or at least an attempt at such, although it's at best underdeveloped with Earth Ponies.
3. G4 does still give ponies their own unique specialties in addition to general species powers.
4. What would you do to balance things so that you don't have the opposite extreme, where a pony's species adds nothing special to them whatsoever?

Hasbro and in particular CEO Chris P. Cocks' stupidity has also lead to sales-killing price-gouging on brands like Transformers that's hurting those brands as well. And I bet the idiot has a golden parachute clause in his contract, too; it would explain why the shareholders haven't fired him in order to stop him from continuing to undercut their value with his idiocy.

Regarding G5... I think starting it up so soon after G4 ended could still have worked.
IF it had been the clean break in narrative and design that it actually needed to be. G4 was exhausted on every level, and retailers and customers alike were exhausted of it and its poorly-balanced assortments.
MLP needed a new setting and a substantial change in aesthetic (like, say, reverting to something more horse-like) that would have actually felt like a new start.
But noooooo, the idiots in charge couldn't bring themselves to fully let go of G4, and so the line basically looks and feels like more of the same thing they were already sick of to retailers.
And wasn't there also a long delay between the movie coming out and the show debuting?

I'm not mad about the obsession with segregating species and then bringing them together, either, it's cliche and hackneyed.

Indeed.

I never bought into G1's fixation with de-magicking earth ponies in US media releases, since in the UK ponies had magic regardless of their species and I liked that better. The factfile states Magic Star is the most magical pony of all of them, so yeah.

In fairness, "My Little Pony and Friends" toned down everybody's magical capabilities compared to the backcard stories. Individual unicorns don't have much variety to what they can do with their magic in that, and the only special thing pegasi can do is fly (although that did make them the cartoon's favorite since the cartoon loved to travel to various locations).
The show does at least make clear that Earth Ponies are still inherently magical - otherwise, their hair wouldn't have been much use in repairing Porcina's cloak.

Maybe because I grew up with it, but I feel like it's not very progressive, having a world in which x type of pony can only do x. It's not quite as strangling as 'your cutie mark destiny', but it isn't great.

How do you feel about G4 giving pegasi weather magic to go with them flying?

Reality isn't like that. I will never understand why Earth ponies should not have magic as an option by default.

I think a lot of people tend to see them as the "normals" of the setting because they're the closest to IRL horses and don't have obvious supernatural features like wings or horns. Hasbro themselves seem to have felt that way in G3 (and it obviously took arm-twisting to get pegasi and unicorns added to the line at all).

Unpopular opinion, too, but I am ok with MLP ending with G5. I feel like we already had 2 generations too many, given the chaos of G4 and then this. MLP doesn't need to be constantly trampled down by repetitive overselling of the same characters. If MLP disappeared completely, well, so what? Those of us who grew up with G1 survived that and we're still surviving it. Will it really make a huge difference if ponies stop being sold? The ones most of us grew up with (G1 or G3 included) haven't been on shelves for years but we're still here for them...

I mean, it will make it harder to share MLP with future generations if it ends, and probably kill throwback stuff like Basic Fun reissues that make getting G1 stuff more accessible for those who didn't grow up with it.

At this rate, maybe it would be better if Hasbro imploded and Takara-Tomy picked up the pieces.

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.

Quote from: LadyMoondancer on October 11, 2023, 10:54:39 AM

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...

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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.

So, an update on this situation.
The seller finally got back to me on the ninth of this month. Apparently, they'd been hospitalized shortly after shipping the item and had only recently been discharged... and when they got home they discovered the item had been returned to sender. They re-shipped it ASAP (and marked it as shipped), and it arrived today. So, the matter has been resolved.

I hope their recovery is going well.

I just hate the fact that they removed the magnets I never understood why they removed them!!

There were safety scares regarding magnets around that time, most notably with kids swallowing the magnets from Magnetix toys. It was also rumored around 2008 that a magnet-hoofed pony disrupted somebody's pacemaker, although apparently that's since been debunked?

Of course, it could have just been a cost-cutting thing coincidental with the safety scares. But I know that LEGO changed to using permanently-fitted and encased magnets on their train couplings at that time because of the safety scares (even though LEGO magnets are probably too low-strength to be a problem), so Hasbro wouldn't have been the only toy company reacting.

Quote from: ZeldaTheSwordsman on January 04, 2024, 06:59:43 PM

Very pretty and I love her wings.

Which one? Sing and skate or the ribbon hair?

The one with the ribbon in her hair. I didn't properly notice the wings on the skating one til now.

I don't own any yet, sad to say, but I went with Nova. She looks to be blue-on-blue done well.

As of December 30th, I actually own her now!

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She's very pretty indeed.

Agreed, congratulations! Fizzy is very pretty and has a nice pose too.