Taffeta, I live for this type of ponypuzzles!
I do think the FF ponies (and the concave feets that replaced them the same year) was sold on the same type of card in the UK, as was used in the US the same year.
My thoughts are that there was no need to change the backards until the decition was made to skip the Unicorn/pegasus ponies, and it called for a new artwork.
I would love to see a UK flat feet pony moc up close though, because the advertising say that they were a:
”Hasbro product distributed by the Knickerbocker Toy Company, Workingham Berks.”
And it is possible that this could have been mentioned on the backside in the small print of the UK distributed FF-card.
Edit: Knickerbocker Toy Company was bought by Hasbro in 1983. So thats why the advertising from 1984 ony says Hasbro Workingham Berkshire.
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loginWhat does the small print say on the UK 1984 earth pony backcard?
Because my 1984 ad says:
(Hasbro Logo)
Workingham,
Berkshire
My other thought is that since this Knickerbocker Toy Company distributed the Pretty Parlor as a Grooming Parlor, alongside the FF ponies in the UK, there was already an adaptation made to the market. So for me this suggest the posibility that the FF ponies wasn’t just something imported to UK, but an official release.
Edit: (I can not empasize enough how important the name change from Pretty Parlor to Grooming Parlor is for the history of UK ponies!
My advertising page is all about grooming and braiding the FF ponies, and this must have been an important marketing decision that was made from the start, since the braiding, grooming and styling of ponies had such high importance in the UK pony sets that followed.
The name change shows that the Grooming Parlor wasn’t just something imported from the US).
I know that a few years later Milton Bradley took over the distribution of MLP in UK (I think it was around 1986? When Hasbro bought that company) So it is possible that some information got lost from the early years.
Post Merge: April 08, 2019, 05:34:54 AMAlso it is worth to mention that the way Dream Valley and My Little Wiki categorize the US range of ponies is incorrect.
My Little Pony was released in the US in the easter 1983.
The ”split year” that Dream Valley used to divide ponies in comes from misinformation around the fact that Hasbro started to do a pre-toy fair in September 1984 for selected toy companies. (This is were Hasbro Spring Catalogs comes from).
A few selected toy companies could pre order the spring range of ponies before the Toy Fair (which is held in february), and sometimes this ment that they could get parts of the spring range before chrismas. But this range is still not an official part of that year 1984, but the year of 1985.
Here are a few of my dealer catalogs (I still have many left to take pictures of):
http://snupp.it/EQRnJv Please note that each have a single year on the cover, and not ”split-years”.
US and UK follow each other when it comes to release years, ”year one” is 1983 for you both.
1984 had the first set of earth ponies for you both, and the US also got the unicorn/pegasus ponies, this is ”year two”.
1985 was more earth ponies for both UK and US (but the re-release of Applejack and Bow Tie differed, CP in UK and curly hair in US), US also got more unicorn/pegasus ponies. This is ” Year three”.