Hasbro's Most Baffling MLP Decisions

[Artemesia's Garden]

Hasbro is never good at My Little Pony from day one. They never respect little girls enough to put in meaningful effort. The toys keep getting worse.

I agree that the toys keep getting worse, but I think some magic must have happened for G1 to be created. Some alignment of talent produced a truly magical thing and that's certainly why I'm here.

[Taffeta]

I agree with Artie, there seems to have been a lot more freedom to experiment in G1, which I think made for a better line. Accidental success, maybe, but some effort went into the marketing, at least in the early years.

@Carrehz, great point on the set name. It could have been a development name that the UK kept (like Cherry Berry). Do we actually know for sure btw that Score and Lilac were development names? I ask genuinely as I have no early US information like this. I only have the UK ones, by which point names were determined (and Lilac had a different UK name anyway). But going back to the GM set, it could be that the name was a production name that was changed. The only spanner in the works for that is the other things you said - green earth pony Tuneful and the GMs all having wings. None of which comes from development. I don't want to say 'they just made it all up!' but maybe they did. Maybe we're all just overthinking xD.

On the fading pink hair, I may be wrong about this, but I'm sure there was something earlier than the sunshine ponies about pony colours fading in the sun. Maybe on backcards. Going to go check my scans and see if I can track it down, since getting out my folders is a big of an undertaking right now. There's definitely a warning about combing curls when wet on the Groom & Style cards here (Posey, CJ etc)...I may have hallucinated it but I just have a feeling there was something, somewhere. (I also found the grooming when wet warning on the US TE cards, so that one was universal).

But then if what I'm remembering was a UK only thing, we didn't have the two from the set with fading pink colour change streaks, so maybe it wasn't universal. It could also have been in the comic or in the club material...I really can't remember but I'm sure it was somewhere.

I can't find it right now but not all my backcards are scanned.

[Carrehz]

Yeah, Score/Lilac being production names was confirmed with some of the materials Rhaegar's posted:
https://mlparena.com/index.php?topic=405074.0

The sticking point w/ the Glowing Magical name is that it's close enough to the UK name - and so far from the US name - that it's hard to imagine them coming up with it by themselves. And re: Tuneful, for all we know maybe there *was* an early prototype of her that was green (I'm assuming her being an earth pony in Tales was a deliberate change rather than anything meaningful, ditto the GMs all having wings). Or maybe they just messed up or decided to change her for the hell of it! I wish we knew more about Tales' development.

Haha we're definitely overthinking things, but it's fun

I do remember seeing a scan from a UK comic somewhereabouts that said to keep ponies out of sunlight to stop their "pretty colours fading" (or words to that effect). They might not have known about the pink hair specifically being an issue but they did know sunlight could cause colours to fade back then.

edit: Aha, I found it! It was on LadyMoondancer's blog!

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[Ponyfan]

I do remember seeing a scan from a UK comic somewhereabouts that said to keep ponies out of sunlight to stop their "pretty colours fading" (or words to that effect). They might not have known about the pink hair specifically being an issue but they did know sunlight could cause colours to fade back then.

edit: Aha, I found it! It was on LadyMoondancer's blog!

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And yet a lot of MLP commercials shows kids playing with ponies outside in bright sunlight.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nprTKZiS9Bc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZZNLH6cGDI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAyc-Nt3Z_s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLgZo6RA7MU


There are others, but I don't want to overwhelm the thread.

I just looked at Tuneful's backcard and it looks like she was drawn as an Earth pony instead of a unicorn.

http://mylittlewiki.org/wiki/File:Sweet-notes-backcard.jpg



Ponyfan

[Taffeta]

I do remember seeing a scan from a UK comic somewhereabouts that said to keep ponies out of sunlight to stop their "pretty colours fading" (or words to that effect). They might not have known about the pink hair specifically being an issue but they did know sunlight could cause colours to fade back then.

edit: Aha, I found it! It was on LadyMoondancer's blog!

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That's it! So it was from the comic, by the looks. Thanks, Carrehz, you have saved me from going mad The ponies shown in that picture does suggest it was a lot earlier, too. Sometime in the early/mid 1980s.

And how you are meant to play with the sunshine ponies without putting them in the sun is an ongoing mystery xD. But as I said, the two with the fading pink streaks weren't sold here. It wasn't unusual for us to have 4/6 in sets at this time, but I do wonder if Hasbro UK looked at them and went, nope, that's silly, let's just not.

I will have to look more closely at the stuff you linked to. It's interesting how some of those names changed a few times, though. I am sure I heard Casey mentioned before but I can't remember the context. I remember because it was such a silly name.

It does show how much change was going on during production though, with names, symbols, etc. I know this happened in the UK, but it must have happened in the US at a much higher frequency, given so many of the designs began there.

I just looked at Tuneful's backcard and it looks like she was drawn as an Earth pony instead of a unicorn.

http://mylittlewiki.org/wiki/File:Sweet-notes-backcard.jpg

Ponyfan

Hrm, that's also interesting on the Tuneful. I did know the US name had the double L, but I don't think I ever noticed that before. I don't think I have the US Rockin Beat card in my collection. I know that in the UK she was used on all of the cards from that year, under the rainbow and on the front of the insert - and she was drawn as a unicorn. Though I think the artwork may have been based on prototype photos from the US release, as many that year were...

Borrowing a picture here, not my image:
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I don't know if this was a weird thing or not, but between 1990ish (when they introduced that border style) and 1992 (when it ended) Hasbro UK would have three 'tiers' of pony advertising the line. The 'under the rainbow' pony (which I think was Mainsail, then Rainbow Rider, then Tuneful). The 'set mascot' pony (which was one from the set drawn on the front and back, in the above image it's Brightglow, but each set was different). And then the actual set (which would be a photograph of the group. If the set was sold in the US, the picture would be of the US set, which is why blue-heart Dazzleglow is shown on the UK card).

Going back to Tuneful, though, I suspect she was dehorned simply to fit into a non-magic world (Glowing Magical Ponies are on Patch's reality cusp, so don't count).

[Carrehz]

I'm open to the idea of Tuneful legitimately being an earth pony (and/or green) at some point in production, but it also wouldn't surprise me if the backcard was an error and her lack of horn in the cartoon was a deliberate choice, as Taffeta said. FWIW I always assumed the cartoon made the call to de-horn her, but then I've never noticed her backcard has her as an earthie before now :O

I suspect the GMs were all given wings to seem ~extra magical~ and really stand out, compared to the rest of the earthbound Tales characters. It's kinda weird they decided to keep Dazzleglow's horn as well though.

The warning to me comes off as less "Keep ponies out of sunlight AT ALL TIMES" and more "Don't leave them in sunlight for prolonged periods of time", if that makes sense? It could also be that everyone else at Hasbro US/UK were clueless and it was just one person involved with the comics that knew how sunfading works Who knows.

"Casey" was in a catalogue too. Weird thing is I think it was for the second set of BBs, not the first. I'll see if I can find the pic later. It's always stuck in my mind since it's such an un-ponyish name (I get it's referencing Casey Jones, but it's still so odd next to all the other BB names!).

Taffeta, I hadn't noticed that about the UK backcard "mascots" before, but that's really interesting.

[Leave a Whisper]

Why was G3 the only one without males?

[Carrehz]

Why was G3 the only one without males?

YES!!! I've never understood this!! I know Hasbro had their ridiculous idea of "the G3 ponies are six year old girls " but like ??? six year old girls hang out with boys too??? what's the excuse Hasbro! It's not like they'd have to make a new mould for them either - G2 never differentiated the boys like that. Heck, G2 had Clever Clover as one of their first ponies!

I love G3 but man, Hasbro made some weird decisions with it. No boys, very few unicorns and pegasi... Which is especially weird because they DID do those. Why go to all the trouble of making unicorn/pegasi moulds and then only use them a handful of times each?

[Shadowperla]

Especially cute baby pegasi

And 0 baby uni.

[MJNSEIFER]

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.

I still maintain that Pillow Talk is a cute and nostalgic name for a Little Pony, and may have just been something like "talking to your friends during a slumber party/sleepover" (she is part of the Slumber Party Gift Pack) - I have some (non-pony) books on tape that end with a segment where the two kids are talking before bedtime, and the book uses the term "Pillow Talk" for that too.

Ultimately, I just find it cute and nostalgic - the silly thing though, is that part of my nostalgia comes from me liking a song of the same name, and associating it with the pony, and I think that song does refer to the other kind of Pillow Talk, but I'd already associated it with the pony before really taking notice of that...

On topic of the thread (and keeping in the theme of names), I don't know why the Big Brother Ponies were so called, when (from the look of it - I am admittedly going by the cartoons here), they weren't brothers to any pony. I feel they should have done what they did with the Mountain Boys, and just given them their own collective name, like the [Something] Boys, each time.

I also don't get why the Baby Ponies were treated like new characters, rather than just the younger version of the pony they resembled. I don't know if all canons did this (the cartoon did, and there's a comic that has the baby ponies being cloned from a mirror), but I find it strange that they made baby versions of the adult ponies, and made them new/different characters (I'll check what the toyline did, but the cartoon could have easily have had flashbacks to when the adult version of whatever baby pony they wanted to market was younger...)

[LadyMoondancer]

Frankly I completely understand the Equestria Girls hate.  The first couple waves in particular were terrible fashion dolls (molded on tops and ugly ugly ugly skirts).  They are cheap and created to try to lick up the crumbs falling from Monster High's plate.  They are just so lazily made, like it's unbelievable to me that they just molded dolls legs in green or pink or whatnot to give them "tights" instead of of actual cloth tights.  Who cares if their actual, not-able-to-be-removed legs clash with other outfits in the line, right?  They're only FASHION DOLLS where switching clothes is the main mode of play.

But more to the point, ponies have never been fashion dolls and I think that is very freeing.  There usually are clothing sets that either come with the ponies (like G3) or that you can buy separately (like G1), but they're totally optional.  And it's really rare for a girls toy to go "hey, fashion is fine but not caring about it is fine too."  And with G4 specifically, two of the characters are tomboys.  It doesn't make sense for their humanized versions to wear preppy skirts on the daily.  But there they were, wearing them.   One thing I noticed with those prototype(?) G5 "human dolls" is they put Zipp Storm in stylish clothes that a jock girl would actually wear.  But with G4 Equestria Girls, they didn't.

Also the high school setting is so uncreative, boring, and, again, obviously just a desperate attempt to ride Monster High's coattails.  IMO Monster High and Bratz are the only two doll lines that have EVER made the high school setting work.  With Bratz it worked because it subverted Barbie's campy, fantasy vibe (that she had at the time), plus they look like they would gladly push you down a flight of stairs which is a very high school vibe, and with Monster High it worked because the idea of monsters doing something as mundane as going to high school is funny and made for all kinds of silly puns and dark humor, like going to Home Ec class and making Eye Scream Cones out of eyeballs or whatever.  With horses it's like . . . okay.  They were adults as horses who had jobs and saved the world and stuff . . . don't see why they couldn't do that as humans . . .

Also high school is usually an exciting, aspirational place for tweens, but the major MLP market is for young girls (like three to eight) so it isn't even a sound marketing decision imo.  But, once again . . . Monster High was selling like hot cakes.  Why think about your audience when you can just copy Mattel's homework?

Rainbow High is another doll line where I absolutely hate the high school setting.  It doesn't even make sense because the dolls HAVE MAJORS.  But god forbid a toy company even branch out enough to put them in college instead of high school.  Girls are only allowed to fantasize about being in high school, and after they get out of high school . . . I don't know, I guess we are to assume that the earth opens up and swallows every female fashion doll character immediately after they graduate.  Except Barbie. That is actually why Barbie owns so many planes, she needs them to save her from the pit.

Man I miss Jem.

I also don't get why the Baby Ponies were treated like new characters, rather than just the younger version of the pony they resembled. I don't know if all canons did this (the cartoon did, and there's a comic that has the baby ponies being cloned from a mirror), but I find it strange that they made baby versions of the adult ponies, and made them new/different characters (I'll check what the toyline did, but the cartoon could have easily have had flashbacks to when the adult version of whatever baby pony they wanted to market was younger...)

Because mother-daughter sets / play is cute and endearing.   The babies look identical to the moms so that children can immediately identify which baby pony goes with which mom pony.  Also in the 80s Hasbro was all about collectibility, which meant collecting new characters.  I think their feeling was "If a kid already has Pony XYZ, why would they want a new version of her?"  Like, why would Baby Glory being "Glory as a baby" be any more engaging than "Glory had a baby who looks just like her"?  If they're separate characters, you can have Glory nuzzling her baby, putting on her diaper, and feeding Baby Glory her bottle.  If they're the same character that deletes the mother-daughter play and interactions between the toys wouldn't really make sense.

I mean you could make up a time travel plot, but what about when you don't want to have time travel, what about when you just want the ponies to go to a party?

[Taffeta]

Jem's problems were body proportion and price point. The series has always outstripped the dolls in that way, although I love them as they are.

Going back to the Big Brothers, I think the idea was that they were meant to be 'big brother' type figures to 'little girls' collecting them, doing 'boyish' activities. Or something. I don't really know. In the UK the original set is called the Adventure Boy Pony set. We used Big Brothers in the second release in 1989, largely because we defaulted to a lot of US packaging design in 1989, but Adventure Boy seems a bit more logical.

Back to Jem and EQG. I actually love EQG unashamedly more than I do the FIM series. Yes, most specials have the same underlying plot. And yes, I do cringe at the 'they do things on merit but we do things on popularity!" statement in Friendship Games which they seem to be proud of. The main reason I like it better is that Sunset Shimmer has a personality and has a plot development arc. And so does Twilight II. It makes the rest of the M6 seem more relevant rather than just annoying. Although there is one Pinkie Pie short that...yeah. Anyway.

But what amuses me about it is how much Rainbow Rocks' ending overlaps the concept of the Battle of the Bands at the end of Jem's Truly Outrageous (first five eps). Remembering this coincided with the trainwreck Jem movie a bit, I feel like Hasbro decided, "Jem won't survive on its own, but if we shove Jem stuff into MLP and make it all magical, then we'll sell stuff." And that did actually work.

Not to go off topic, but there are some things in the Rainbow High cartoon, given it's aimed at kids, that really bothers me (mostly the way certain characters treat each other). I love the dolls. But the series...reinforcing popularity memes and social hierarchy is not a healthy model.

[LadyMoondancer]

I found a Jem doll at the thrift store and I was FLOORED by how tall she is.  An amazonian queen!  But I get it, it would deflate any of Mattel's attempts to sue Hasbro and claim that Jem was a copy of Barbie.

[Taffeta]

I found a Jem doll at the thrift store and I was FLOORED by how tall she is.  An amazonian queen!  But I get it, it would deflate any of Mattel's attempts to sue Hasbro and claim that Jem was a copy of Barbie.

They used the Darci mould I think as a basis...I have one Darci that I customised and her proportions are more or less the same (assuming this was also owned by Hasbro at the time). But this was also one reason it failed - because the standard doll clothes didn't fit Jem as well as they did other fashion dolls. Win some lose some I guess.

[Carrehz]

I was surprised when I saw a Jem (well, Clash) in person for the first time, too. They're so tall and beautiful! I love it but I can see why it was a problem.

I like the baby ponies matching their parents :B I like the symmetry (? I guess you'd say) of it all. But then I'm a Sylvanian Families collector too, so I'm used to "identical family" sort of things, I suppose.