The MLP Arena
Pony Talk => Pony Corral => Topic started by: TornadoLovesMelody on November 20, 2019, 08:01:11 AM
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I have been looking for a collectors guide to go with the book that Summer Hayes wrote on the G1's released in the US.
I love the layout there and how it lists the pony accessories for each pony etc.
Has there been a UK Guide made like that? :what:
Do you know where I can find it?
I would prefer having it as a book but if it's a web page - that would be ok too.
Thank you very much
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I don't think so? There is a nirvana book, but not one with specific UK information.
Taffeta's website has all the best info, but it is nice to have a book (hint hint Taffeta)
Love pkw xxx
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According to Summer's publishers, she was supposed to be making one a few years back but have not seen or heard anything since. I thought Summer herself had mentioned working on it around that time too. Maybe she'll pop in and give us an update. Too bad we cannot tag people in these threads.
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I forgot that book existed. There is also a book by Debra Birge that says ponies around the world. I don't own it so I can't say if its any good but it might be worth looking into.
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I thiink Ponies Around the World is intended to be for Nirvanas.
I agree that Taffeta's site is the best for UK information, but she has no checklist up yet.
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@PKW, I already have one academic book I'm struggling to put together, and now you want a pony one too? Tsch.
The problem with a checklist - which was my original intention - is what to include in it. It's not my policy to separate out the different releases, but that makes for a complicated checklist, so I never really worked that out to make it viable.
I am a bit protective about the UK pony information since a lot of the information out there about the UK came in one way or another from work I did or work done by UK people from which I have built stuff. Everyone else who talks about UK stuff tries to either segregate the exclusives or force the ponies into the US timeline, and neither of those things work. Our timeline is different and our releases intersect with the US and Europe but do not match either.
I should also add that for accessories, Chrissytree - who is also based over here in the UK - has done some stellar work with not only listing accessories but identifying the differences between the releases in different places, as the same pony doesn't necessarily have the same stuff in each place. I have some of this on my website as well but she has specialised in it.
If you want UK and European stuff that's a different question to the UK stuff - but the answer is probably the same as regards resources.
The bottom line is that you can't write a book about MLP in the UK unless you have material about MLP in the UK. Which is not as easy to come across as US information...even when you live here. It's taken me 2 decades to amass the information I have and to be able to say with confidence I understand how MLP worked here. :/
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@PKW, I already have one academic book I'm struggling to put together, and now you want a pony one too? Tsch.
The problem with a checklist - which was my original intention - is what to include in it. It's not my policy to separate out the different releases, but that makes for a complicated checklist, so I never really worked that out to make it viable.
I am a bit protective about the UK pony information since a lot of the information out there about the UK came in one way or another from work I did or work done by UK people from which I have built stuff. Everyone else who talks about UK stuff tries to either segregate the exclusives or force the ponies into the US timeline, and neither of those things work. Our timeline is different and our releases intersect with the US and Europe but do not match either.
I should also add that for accessories, Chrissytree - who is also based over here in the UK - has done some stellar work with not only listing accessories but identifying the differences between the releases in different places, as the same pony doesn't necessarily have the same stuff in each place. I have some of this on my website as well but she has specialised in it.
If you want UK and European stuff that's a different question to the UK stuff - but the answer is probably the same as regards resources.
The bottom line is that you can't write a book about MLP in the UK unless you have material about MLP in the UK. Which is not as easy to come across as US information...even when you live here. It's taken me 2 decades to amass the information I have and to be able to say with confidence I understand how MLP worked here. :/
Just wanna say thanks for the amazing job youre doing :)
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I have the book by Deb Birge. It is basically a "Not The US Ponies" book, and it is a bit outdated, but it is still really pretty. It was made when the internet was still fairly young, and lots of information hadn't been gathered yet. Most of the pictures are ponies that Deb actually owned, so it is not complete, even for the knowledge that was available at the time. It is split up into countries, not years.
If you are hoping for a guide like Summer's, this is not the right book. But if you want something to hold in your hands that has bright colors and a passionate author, this is the only book that I know of right now. The most honest review I can give is that my first copy got destroyed in a water spill, and I immediately ordered another one.
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I have Debbie's original (US) book and it had a lot of issues so I figured for the sake of my blood pressure I would not get the others.
Pony by country is also not helpful, given there are a lot of overlaps between countries and releases, with minor variations or accessory differences.
You might be able to do this for Nirvana, but the question was UK ponies, which is not Nirvana.
I have to admit it's hard for me to discuss that more without getting angry, because a lot of the bad information about ponies outside of the US came from that time and were consolidated into pony knowledge by people in the US guessing or generalising.
As Europeans there are some of us still now trying to sort out the information so that it's correct - outdated information dogs some of the mainstream sites too, and is not helpful to anyone.
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I do not recall if Summer's publisher said it was just "non-US" ponies or if it was UK only or Nirvana only she was trying to put together. I am guessing she ran into the same things Taffeta has said about overlapping, etc.
I also have Debra Birge's "Ponies Around the World" book. It is outdated, incomplete, and sometimes, inaccurate. However, at the time it was very exciting to have something to look at with SOME info about ponies not available here in the US. I still have it for "reference". She also expanded on stuff that was not in her first MLP collector book including merch and G2's (in the US only I think) even though this may also not be totally accurate. It's fun, if not nostalgic, but a shaker of salt rather than a grain is needed when perusing it. I also do not think that it said much for accessories included, just ponies even though one, if not both, books had a section showing MIB/MOC/MIP ponies to which Deb had access.
Taffeta, it's too bad you and Summer could not collaborate on a UK book?! That would be awesome to have one to look over with all the UK info you have amassed over the years.
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Summer is someone with integrity so I imagine she would have wanted to do something that was accurate and maybe realised that it's a lot harder to piece together stuff outside of the US because, frankly, nowhere outside the US is as organised and logical in anything that it does xD. Maybe the delay is that she is trying to do the research...though I would imagine a US person would look more at doing an 'international' pony book, not specifically a 'UK' one.
I feel like if you try to go down the rabbit hole of 'non-US ponies' - as a collective term, though you are kind of creating bigger problems because of the overlapping, though. I wouldn't support a book like that, whoever wrote it.
To be really blunt, there are only 2 ways you could write a book on UK My Little Pony. One is to focus specifically on pony history here, how they were sold and when, the promotional stuff, adverts, backcards, sets, catalogues, etc...including all ponies sold here but ignoring any ponies not available in this country. That would include overlap ponies that had multiple countries of origin, but would not reference information about them in other countries, or other versions of them that may have been available.
If that above description sounds impractical, it's really because it's outdated. That is the basis on which all our pony identification is currently founded (stuff in the US - other stuff). It's not a fit for purpose system for any country, to just isolate it as special or different from others...because ponies are way more global than was understood in the mid-late 1990s when DV first started putting information together.
So the other way to write about UK ponies is to write about ponies. And that involves working out different perameters. It involves working out dates of release for multiple countries, noting small variations in accessories or backcards or years or names and stuff between a whole bunch of places. And that is so detail centric that it's almost an overload in its own right (and why I have no site checklist at the moment).
You would also need a more concrete definition of Nirvana than currently exists - ponies like Raindrop etc don't really belong in Nirvana, but still get included there. But even on the Wiki they're listed under something like 1984 or 1985 because that's when the US had rainbow ponies, even though their backcards say 1987, because that's when they were on sale. And here is where data begins to fall apart, because instead of writing about ponies as they are or were, they're being forced into an existing template. This is where mistakes occur. A detail centric book would need to take those things into consideration and deal with them.
I am not quite sure how to resolve this. You could just pare it right back to bare bones and have sets with photos, names, years of release, countries of release - a fun way to do that would be with a little map graphic, but that information is still very fluid - and accessories (with variations or MOC examples that show variations).
Sorting by year, by name, by set name all are complicated by the variations between places.
We've already proven that the Netherlands had ponies the UK didn't, but that the US did. We know that Scandinavia and South Africa have crossovers but there are still sale differences between Norway and Sweden. And a lot of the ponies sold in the US - maybe 60% - were sold in the UK...most all of the ponies sold in one country/identified online by one country were sold in multiple other places.
I don't really know how to make that into a book that wouldn't be confusing.
So the choices right now seem to be inaccurate or complicated :/
One major issue as well for collectors not in the US is how these ponies are catalogued.
If you have a US book and it has Posey and Cherries Jubilee in it, for example, but not Snowflake or Honeycomb, is that not confusing? You may have all four of those ponies from childhood but you need to buy two books to identify and catalogue them all? Even though they may have come at the same time on the same card in the same set?
The way I try and explain it for people from the other way around is imagine if you were browsing a website for So Soft Posey, and all you could find in the main section was a regular Posey and a dark symbol Posey. Imagine having to go to a completely different section of the website to find SS Posey...imagine having to know the year she was issued and which country she was sold in in order to find and identify her, because the website calls her "foreign" and thus doesn't put her with the other Poseys.
This is how international pony identification is for collectors outside the US and has been for 20 years. And until that is fixed I don't want to see a book on ponies from outside the US in print, because, to be blunt, the fact that not even the Wiki can get the set right for some of these ponies right now doesn't give me any confidence someone writing a book would be able to do better. And you can't edit a book once it's in print, so you end up spreading misinformation to a lot more people without being able to fix it.
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Would honestly love a book that showed the UK line its entirety. Not just UK exclusives, but ALL the ponies and accessories officially sold there through Hasbro UK. Just like there have been books focusing exclusively on the US line. I just think it'd be a nice thing to have. Maybe it could also help clear things up a bit about which other European exclusives weren't sold in the UK (but are still often called "UK ponies").
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Would honestly love a book that showed the UK line its entirety. Not just UK exclusives, but ALL the ponies and accessories officially sold there through Hasbro UK. Just like there have been books focusing exclusively on the US line. I just think it'd be a nice thing to have. Maybe it could also help clear things up a bit about which other European exclusives weren't sold in the UK (but are still often called "UK ponies").
I do agree with you to a point, but with a note of bitterness in that that's basically what my website was set up to do. It's been around longer than any of the mainstream sites, so should have been there as a resource for them to draw on, but a lot of the time that didn't happen and so those mainstream sites are still clogged with mistakes or gaps.
Also, for the record, my site does make it clear what exclusive ponies were sold in the UK, in Europe, and so on. It's been doing that since 2005. I do think it could probably do it in a better way, but it does do it.
UK people have been attempting to clear up those things for a long time before that, too.
There's only so much a handful of people can do, though, to get that message over. Mainstream websites have more clout, even if they are wrong.
It's Strawberry Reef, I think, that still calls white Tootsie a UK pony. Which she wasn't, and everyone in the UK has been saying so since about the year 2000, but I still see her called UK Tootsie at least a few times a year on trade posts.
You can go back through old Arena posts too to see the battle that transpired over persuading MLPMerch that there was no such pony as UK NSS Paradise, because some US site they found said there was.
This has been going on for 20 years and it should have stopped by now but these pony myths keep getting recycled from one site to another. This is harsh but not a lot of grass roots research happens any more. I don't think the info sharing is a problem in general, but they tend to just take the info and don't check it, thus carrying errors over. That is also how a UK book would happen in the current climate - so no thank you.
Also wouldn't be thrilled if anyone lifted my site information to write a book. I wouldn't rule out working with someone if they were serious about getting it right, but I am naggy, picky, and geeky about detail and would probably get socks thrown at me. So there we are.
With the Reef, it's a dead site that no longer gets updated. So there's even less logic to use it, but "it's pretty", so apparently that's good enough.
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Also, for the record, my site does make it clear what exclusive ponies were sold in the UK, in Europe, and so on. It's been doing that since 2005. I do think it could probably do it in a better way, but it does do it.
UK people have been attempting to clear up those things for a long time before that, too.
I absolutely do love your site! It's an awesome resource, and I'm sure without it a lot of European MLP knowledge would be lost. But it would be nice to also have something that listed the UK line in full year by year, including pony wear releases, without referencing or comparing it to the US line. It would at the very least be refreshing to see, since listings of the US line have been reproduced so many times at this point.
I actually wish we had that for every country MLP was sold in, but it seems very unlikely we ever will. Most countries didn't have their own catalogs/booklets the way the US/UK did, ponies travel easily between countries and collectors in general haven't shown much interest in keeping track of this. Most are fine with splitting everything into two groups, US ponies and Non-US ponies. As long as people know about all the ponies that exist, exactly where and when they were sold isn't all that important to them. And it's fine if people think like that, but personally I want to know more. I want to be able to know the context of every release. Like what year/country they were sold in, what ponies could be expected to be on the shelves at the same time, what preceded them, what came after them and so on. I just find this stuff exciting to think about. :biggrin:
People will probably always be mixing things up regardless, because G1 MLP isn't easy to keep track of. But it'd be good if the most popular ID sites could be as accuarate as possible to prevent this. Just the other day I saw someone in a facebook group list one of the Flower Ponies as a German exclusive, likely because that's what MyLittleWiki claims they are.
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Also, for the record, my site does make it clear what exclusive ponies were sold in the UK, in Europe, and so on. It's been doing that since 2005. I do think it could probably do it in a better way, but it does do it.
UK people have been attempting to clear up those things for a long time before that, too.
But it would be nice to also have something that listed the UK line in full year by year, including pony wear releases, without referencing or comparing it to the US line. It would at the very least be refreshing to see, since listings of the US line have been reproduced so many times at this point.
This
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I don't disagree with what you're saying. I certainly have all that information for this country at least, and more. I have a lot of UK material not on my website, too.
In the early days, my website did do that, but I got so sick of some of my childhood ponies being called US ponies, or being told by people that I couldn't possibly have had silver star Milky Way as a kid because Europe had the white star version that it became necessary to contextualise.
But I also agree that my site as it currently is is tied too much to the US timeline and I don't like it either. I am hoping to do something about that, but it depends a little bit on circumstances outside my control right now. I just feel like if I'm going to keep going with this site, it needs to be centred around the UK timeline a lot more.
I'm also really interested in what was going on in other European countries but that's even more difficult to piece together, especially now. And Europe is not one composite block for ponies, either. Every country or group of countries had different stuff going on.
I've been doing the UK information thing since 1995, when I corresponded with Hasbro UK. That's what - 24 years? It was before I was even online. When you write to Hasbro now they just give you a generic copy paste response. I suspect Hasbro US knows a lot more than the UK branch does now, given how MLP is these days, but it makes it hard to know where to begin researching other places.
The US version of pony collecting is still the only one considered valid by a lot of collector people, from all over the world. That's pretty hard to go up against when looking for details about a different narrative. Even though the US line (and I mean US, not necessarily Canada) is also the most straight forward and easy MLP release to understand, and all the mysteries are in other places - it's kind of sad how many people no longer care.