WOLFIECHICK's AUTHENTIC REVERSE GUSTY found in 1997 in the UK!

[Ember1]

Ok everyone..

SQUEEEEEEE

 SO today was the best day ever for a myriad of reasons.. I got some great news work wise and also The original REAL reverse gusty arrived in the mail sold to me by Sarahbee. She got her from Stormy who got her from Brickheaven who got her from Wolfiechick who got her from a lady in the UK circa 1997.. She was the very first one ever to surface and one of the two confirmed Reverse Gustys ever! And as you can see shes been owned by some very famous and reputable collectors. She's perfect.. Gorgeous and I can just look at her for hours.. I am so in love!!!
 
Ok Ok so now onto business!

 Now I had an unconfirmed gusty in my collection for over 10 years and was dying to do a comparison to find out if the one I had is real too.. It turns out that the one I have is fake and it can be proven.. There are noticeable differences between the unconfirmed one and the real reverse gusty that only can be noticed if you have them both side by side.

*The real reverse gusty has slightly different symbols than the normal gusty. Reverse gusty's symbols have a heavy silvery glitter tinge to them and the normal gusty has a dark purple glitter symbol.. Also the real reverse gusty has finer more delicate symbols and the normal gusty symbols are clunkier by comparison..

*And lastly... the proof is in the pudding.. The unconfirmed gusty had a larger tail washer and the normal gusty and real reverse gusty have smaller tail washers.. I believe whoever was putting a fake reverse gusty together probably got a tail from cherry treats which was released much later and the washer by then may have been larger??? This is just speculation until I can behead a cherry treats myself to find out.

*The real reverse gusty has a perfect factory weave and its flawless inside while the faked one has a messy weave.

I will be uploading photos shortly.. I just thought this bit of evidence has not been seen before and would be very interesting to the community.

Here are the PICS.. Ill try and take better pics in the future but these will do for now.

Real Reverse Gusty
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Real Reverse Gusty
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Fake Reverse Gusty
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Original Factory Weave
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Fake Factory Weave on Fake Reverse Gusty
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Real Reverse Gusty has Brown eyeliner and black eyelashes
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Symbol Differences
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Washer size is bigger on the fake gusty
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There is another thing I have noticed since its now daylight and I can put a mint off card gusty right next to the real reverse gusty..
I noticed that the stripe in Real reverse gustys mane is darker than normal HK gustys tail... Check out the photo.

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Ok ill get a ss gusty and do a comparison
Here is an eye comparison and a closup of the silvery symbols versus hk gusty symbols

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My reverse gusty doesnt match my red haired tootsie either.
Her hair color is still more pink and tootsie has an orangy red.

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[shadowlark]

Oooh so exciting! Very interesting about the differences! Can't wait to see pics! I'm so jealous!!

[Artemesia's Garden]

Congratulations, wow!!

This seems the most conclusive to me:

*The real reverse gusty has a perfect factory weave and its flawless inside while the faked one has a messy weave.

Can't wait for pics!

[Taffeta]

I was under the impression that the presumed source of that pony (wherever it was sold from originally online) was actually somewhere in Europe. Reason being there are no glitter symbol Gusties in the UK. Ever.

But there are glittery symbol Gusties in parts of Europe, and that seems much more likely. Maybe bought on holiday or something.

Congrats on your acquisition As you know, I'm pretty sceptical on the reverse Gusty front because of all the fakes and scams, but I do know a couple have been authenticated over the years, so far as we're able to do so

[Ember1]

Hi taffeta. Here are the posts that concern the one i got which is the original reverse gusty aka the first one ever found.

Now as to the topic of if she was made in the UK no one really knows.. We do know that the UK was a dumping ground so its possible she might have been made for another country or is a prototype of some sort. We do know that the other confirmed reverse gusty that was owned by the delaneys was found in a car boot sale in the UK.. So that means both Reverse gustys were found in the UK.

Anyway here are the posts that trace her owner history and lineage. She was in a lot of ponies from a UK seller circa 1997.


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[jrr74]

Congratulations again!  Talk about well connected!  Every time I see your avatar, I am just going to turn green with envy    

You have to do what SoSilver did, and create a gallery so people can see your awesome collection.  You have all of these ponies that others can only dream of!  Well me anyway 

[Taffeta]

You might want to put that in spoiler tags, but my point isn't questioning her authenticity, just that the idea of everything being a UK version gets pretty wearing. A lot of ponies travelled into the UK through people buying them on holidays and that could've happened with kids quite easily.

There is no paper trail for glittery Gusty here. I know at ponycon last year we had a big discussion on this subject, and I know it was suggested maybe she was a part of the Fable Ponies - a bad batch or something that means a few got made the wrong way around. That would mean Scandinavia, but I don't know that for sure. The comment about eye colour may support this, though, bearing in mind Scandinavian Gusty with greener eyes and glitter symbols, a variation unique to that release.

I've found a lot of ponies in the Uk that weren't ever sold here, including Macau and Italian ponies which migrated here from Europe. Also Mimic and others that migrated from further afield. Doesn't make them UK ponies, though, and I genuinely want to separate the idea of something found in the UK originally from being a UK variant. I think that muddies the waters and makes it much harder to validate the pony's real story.

Also, people back then decided everything unknown was a UK pony, and that was because DV kept saying everything, from prototype images in US catalogues to variations she didn't have in her collection were UK exclusives. Blue heart Dazzleglow was a Uk pony. Argentinian Flutterbye was a UK pony. Baby Cherries Jubilee was a UK pony.  The never made prototype dolls were UK exclusives.

Reality is often quite different. Ponies travel, and in Europe, their travelling is much more of a reality than maybe it would be for them to travel stateside. European countries are mostly small and people from here travel abroad on holidays (and vice versa) often. Also, with the EU, people move here for work from within the union. Ponies travel a lot, because the distance to cover is far smaller. It's less than an hour from here to France, for example, and less than 2 hours to fly to Copenhagen from London.

 I suspect this one travelled, and her origin is not really here, which is why her secrets remain secret. You have to take that into consideration when talking about anything unknown and unusual. I've worked for a very long time on UK pony history, and I've known about reverse Gusty for as long as she's been around. But there's no glittery Gusty in the UK. So she may have been bought from here. But she didn't start off here.

[Ember1]

Absolutely no doubt ponies travel.. I believe the UK was a dumping ground for prototypes so both Reverse gustys ended up there together.  In fact I suspect she might be related to the US red haired tootsie prototype I have.. The red tootsie was bought in the rhode island hasbro employee store by a girls father who had a pass to go there and brought his daughter to pick out some toys. The girl kept her through adulthood and sold her on the arena 4 years ago and told us how she came to own her. Reverse gusty and tootsie have the same red hair and both have differences in their symbols compared to the normal releases.

[Taffeta]

Absolutely no doubt ponies travel.. In fact I suspect she might be related to the US red haired tootsie prototype I have.. The red tootsie was bought in the rhode island hasbro employee store by a girls father who had a pass to go there and brought his daughter to pick out some toys.  They have the same red hair and both have differences in their symbols compared to the normal releases.

You'll have to just excuse me, because I get a general twitch when I see things labelled as "UK". It's a lot of long years of stress and strain caused by Kim/Dream Valley's consistent insistence that everything not in her collection knowledge was a UK variant, and so now when I see people say "UK variant" I want to clarify that being found in the UK doesn't make it a UK pony xD. And actually things mistakenly being called UK ponies in the past have caused a ton of stress and hassle for UK collectors ><.

I have heard about the Tootsie. I genuinely believe the biggest scope for these kinds of factory 'blips'? is for them to have originated in the US, where creative control for MLP was strongest, so who knows how many more oddballs found in other countries actually originated from there...

I would believe the authenticity trail you posted for that pony. I am less convinced about the Delaneys' one and never have been, wholly. There are so many murky secrets with this pony that I become suspicious. The only one I consider 'authentic' at all is the one you have in your possession now, for a wide variety of reasons...not least because of the amazing coincidence of two appearing at UK sales within a short enough time of one another and then not at all for years after...

So yours I believe is probably the real deal, but I am suspicious of pretty much all others without the same kind of detailed authenticity history.

[Ember1]

I call her UK reverse gusty because she was found there.. but not because she was made there... I like to trace ponies back to where they were found..We really just wont ever know which country she was made by.. but obviously both her and the delaneys confirmed gusty were both found in the UK.

[Taffeta]

I call her UK reverse gusty because she was found there.. but not because she was made there... I like to trace ponies back to where they were found..We really just wont ever know which country she was made by.. but obviously both her and the delaneys confirmed gusty were both found in the UK.

I may be wrong but I'm pretty sure there was a fair amount of suspicion over the Delaneys' one back in the day, and it's convenience of appearance right around the time of the other one. It's unclear really, since someone may well have sold it to them under false pretences, but the person who customised RG and sold them for profit was active at this time, and I think it's very possible that the Delaneys were early victims of this (UK based) person, who helped to perpetuate the idea of it being a UK variant. I dealt with them quite often back then, and they were always keen to get the latest UK variant. I remember discussing it with Helen, too, and she was very wary about the sudden proliferation of red haired Gustys coming into the hands of prominent collectors like them. Not the original one,but the fact that there was a sudden little swell of them which ended abruptly when the scam was outed.

It's actually more suspicious that two were found in close proximity of time in the same country where no glitter version of Gusty ever was released. It was considered suspicious at the time, and I still find it suspicious now.

[Ember1]

I know the one i have was originally wolfchicks and i can 100 percent confirm the one i have is just as real as any hasbro gusty.

[Taffeta]

I know the one i have was originally wolfchicks and i can 100 percent confirm the one i have is just as real as any hasbro gusty.

She's the only one whose authenticity I wouldn't question xD. Which is a brutal state of affairs, but I think she probably IS real, just I don't believe any of the others are.

Far as I'm aware no authentication tests were done on the Delaneys' one, just their word for it, as it was after that that the scam was exposed by Kcat with that girl who had customised them. I can't find any evidence the Delaney one was ever really investigated like others have been. The main argument seems to have been the assertion people didn't customise then, but the RG custom scam with sophisticated weave patterns disproves that, and there were actually many very skilled customisers at the time.

I don't know about Babydoll's, which has the right eye colour, but the issue I have with that is that it would be so easy to swap a UK head onto a US body and root it in red - or reroot a Scandinavian one - and then toss it up on Ebay in a lot and pretend not to know anything. To be honest, that'd be the absolute ideal way to convince the community it was real after all these years of doubt, so I really don't know. It wouldn't take ten seconds to find out about RG and her value by hitting google, it's right there on the Wiki that she's a rare variant and we KNOW that RG scams have happened.

 I think I'm right that Babydoll's isn't glued? That makes me think it's a reroot, but I may be thinking of another RG.

So yeah. THe only one I'm at all persuaded by is the one you now own, and that is onlyl because its history is so documented and it was originally bought with no description or pictures by someone whose integrity is beyond question.

 But the fact the scam came out of the UK originally as a result of the RG hype makes me really worry about it being labelled consistently as a "UK variant". That kinda reinforces the possibility of creating and selling one from the UK and people automatically believing it because of that idea that it's a UK variant.

I am very cynical, I admit it, but I remember Ebay UK sellers trying to sell faded Posey as a UK variant, because some dishonest collectors tried to put about that she was one. It took a LONG time and a lot of work to break that myth in a time when "UK variants" were hot property. The RG scam came out of this time, too.

It is quite possible that there was a glut of maybe 100 red haired glittery Gusties which for some reason were here - maybe as rejects, maybe they were damaged or wrong so didn't get packaged and exported. It is possible, but we currently have no evidence of it happening that way, and no glittery symbol Gusties ever made it here in proper sale terms.

In my opinion, and based on history, so long as she is called a UK variant, the risk of customs coming up on UK ebay and appearing authentic to less experienced collectors is relatively high. It has already happened in the past. I think that everything should be done that can be done to prevent it happening again.

It is also in the interests of the authentic pony and the person who owns it for that risk to be reduced as much as possible, because all the doubt about this pony stems from the fact someone claimed it came from the UK and thus a UK based scam ensued.

So I'm not questioning the authenticity of the Wolfchick red Gusty. I am questioning the ethical responsibility of traders on how they promote and advertise this variation considering the complications that doing so has created in the past and in the present.

She's not a UK pony, she was a pony found in the UK, and I think that is how she needs to be termed until there is some way to prove she actually originated here.

[shadowlark]

Very interesting discussion, but where are the pictures??!! LOL

[Ember1]

I agree with you completely Taffeta.. Which is why I am trying to do my part to help differentiate the real from the fake..
If you look at the photos I provided there are some noticeable differences in the real one versus the fake one that might
be able to aid us in the investigation of the unconfirmed reverse gustys in the community. I hope whatever information I am
provided might help other collectors

*hugs*