The MLP Arena
Pony Talk => Pony Corral => Topic started by: Heelys on April 13, 2021, 08:27:42 AM
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Ah, children. Innocent? Or dangerous criminals? I think we’ve all had at least one instance of not treating our toys the way Toy Story intended— what’s the worst damage you’ve seen a kid, well-meaning or not, do to a pony?
I have two examples— one well-meaning, one...not. I was born in ‘97, but when I was 9 I discovered G1 and the world of vintage toy collecting. As such, I was ecstatic to discover that a friend of mine had a G1 pony (who I later found was Mommy Sweet Celebrations) that she didn’t really want, and she let me keep it. I’d been gazing at old fan sites and cleaning tips for ages, and now that I finally had a pony in my hands to keep... that I immediately took a sharpie and scrawled “PROPERTY OF [name and initial]” across her belly on the non-display side. I still have her, and though the marker is gone, the message is emblazoned on her side in pink stains.
I’ll have to post the second story a little later— it’s a bit grisly 😵 but what tales of misfortune do you have?
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As a small child I was a unicorn horn nibbler >.>
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The worst thing I personally committed as a child was to take a pink highlighter to Posey and Lickety Split's faded hair to get it pink again. It worked, but promptly faded again, thus not doing any lasting damage. Unless you count my putting my initials, super tiny, on the bottom of a few of my ponies' hooves in pink pen. The ink faded and spread out over the years, until it looks like a little neon pink blob similar to a regrind stain.
My son, on the other hand, committed a worse crime to some of his ponies: chopped their forelocks off. One of them was my baity-but-beloved childhood Baby Surprise. I'm not too happy with him. I always wondered what possessed kids to cut forelocks, and then my kid goes and does it. When questioned, he shuts down and says, 'I don't want to talk about that', and won't look at me.
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Playing in the water. I loved seeing the rainbow colors swish and swirl in the bath tub and swimming pool. Upon opening Windy one day, water and brown stuff came out and my grandparents tossed her. I didn't play with them in the water anymore. Except for Baby Wave Catcher.
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Ah yeah...water. The above-mentioned Baby Surprise went everywhere with me for a while, including the bath, the lake, and the swimming pool when we were on vacation. Miraculously, her head is still sealed, so I have no idea what is lurking inside. I suppose I shouldn't have let my kid have her; she's probably a borderline biohazard. Guess I'll find out someday when I get around to rehairing that forelock :cry:
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I was always really careful with my toys and never did anything intentionally to damage them. That being said a few of my ponies suffered damage through normal play.
In my childhood ponies I had adult Wavedancer and a few baby sea ponies. All of them ended getting moldy on the inside and my mom threw them away when she saw the mold. The only baby sea pony that survived was Baby Celebrate because my mom wouldn't let me play with her in water.
My grandma bought me Twinkler one day and she came with free pony lipstick. Of course I used the lipstick on Twinkler and it wasn't until I was an adult that I read that the pony makeup was supposed to be washed off after playing with it. Twinkler still has lipstick stains around her mouth.
Ponyfan
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I was a child so I didn’t have the responsibility to take care of toys but I wish I would have known I would have collected them in the future! My mother says she mostly threw them out cause they got gross and they were the g3 castle (I forget what it’s called it had a sun that’s pouring out water and you use the pony’s magnet) and my favorite childhood toy the inflatable air balloon!
I think I had a few more ponies I know I had Sunny Daze (and a Christmas ordainment of her) I’m very sad I could not rescue them! I always keep looking in my childhood toys in the large bins trying to convince myself that they are still some there!
The only ones that were in the bins that I rescued were Cinnamon Breeze and Cloud Climber
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Ho boy. I've opened enough rusty ponies to be familiar with this...
I thought I read someplace where somebody said they peed on one of their ponies as a kid but I can't recall where I may have seen that! I think that's one of the strangest. I myself didn't really "play" with toys as a kid unless the only friend who did that was around so I can't give my own examples.
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Ho boy. I've opened enough rusty ponies to be familiar with this...
I thought I read someplace where somebody said they peed on one of their ponies as a kid but I can't recall where I may have seen that! I think that's one of the strangest. I myself didn't really "play" with toys as a kid unless the only friend who did that was around so I can't give my own examples.
:shocked: That's nasty. Why would they do that?
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Ew.
I'm off work now, so I'll tell my second story. Baby Tiddlywinks was one of my favorite ponies in my collection at age 10-- I do love her sculpt, she's so cute! But I had a habit of leaving her in harm's way. One time I brought her to Chuck E Cheese, thinking I could show her to the prize counter and ask if they had anything like it. Yes, it was the mid to late 2000s, and I was trying to see if they still had the Chuck E Cheese pony in stock. From the late 1980s. Regardless of whether this plan would have worked, I left her at a game somewhere and she got yoinked.
Thankfully, given that the pony wasn't exactly rare, I was able to score another on eBay with some allowance money. I didn't try to take her places, but the only thing more dangerous than a sticky-fingered child at a family entertainment center... is a middle school boy with friends over.
My brother and his friends were going through their "rebellious but not against anything cool" times, as we all did at age 12. They lit fire to some low-value pokemon cards, dunked his Tweety Bird beanie plush in the toilet, all the works. But I guess I left Tiddlywinks out at some point, because when I saw her next, it was... not good. A particularly funny friend sawed through her neck with scissors. Not ripping the head off, but destroying the whole assembly. I tried hot glue, but as you can imagine, it didn't do much. The neck-ring-peg-thing was sealed tight against the body to the point that I didn't even notice it was there-- I seriously believed that this baby pony's head had been attached differently. I was furious.
For some reason, my mom told this friend that he had to make a written apology in the form of a story. He wrote an absurd, gross-out piece of fiction about a pony named Buzz who went on a rampage of revenge. This would have been more fuel to the fire, but I actually found the story genuinely funny, and we made amends.
Until my older brother mistook Baby Cuddles for the pony whose head had already been chopped off and decided to rip HER head off too, since he thought it could be easily fixed. Jerk.
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I was generally careful with my ponies in the broad sense - IE, I didn't scribble on them, cut their hair, or otherwise mutilate them. However I was a kid, and I also had a kid sister. So some highlights I remember...
Naynie wrote her name on the hooves of one of my ponies, thinking it was hers. It wasn't. >.>
I taught Masquerade to fly on the school playground , aged around 5 or 6. Flying meant enthusiastically throwing across tarmac. Her eyes survived fairly well but are a bit scuffed as a result.
Pony nail polish in Star Gleamer's package means that a lot of my childhood ponies have polish flecks on their hooves. (Although I once got one from a carboot sale which had it all over the wings O.o)
Sand Digger and Mainsail abseiled out of my bedroom window to colour change their hair - but they didn't take damage from that.
Sunshower had to be treated for mould. But she was cured.
Star Gleamer and Songster had an irreconcileable difference of opinion when Songster's tail got caught in Star Gleamer's. The one and only time scissors have ever been taken to any of my ponies - though Mum did it so neatly that you actually can't tell.
And the favourite till last, from my sister, who, aged about three, borrowed some of my ponies to take to a friend's house (with permission). Where she promptly and accidentally (she's a bit clumsy) dropped Yoyo down the toilet. FOrtunately, it was a clean toilet, and even more fortunately, her Japanese friend's mum was a neat freak - but Yoyo did have to be disinfected when she was rescued and brought home.
On the less amusing front - two of my childhood mountain boys have hoof cracks, possibly from being trodden on in a school changing room when they were inside my bag. And more grim still, my Wild Flower lost her earring. I don't know how. But the earring was broken off when I came to take her out of my bag. The flower part of the earring was missing, which made me think someone either took her to play with her without permission and broke it somewhere away from where she should have been, or they broke it off on purpose out of spite. I was pretty upset. Her earring was never found.
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I taught Masquerade to fly on the school playground , aged around 5 or 6. Flying meant enthusiastically throwing across tarmac. Her eyes survived fairly well but are a bit scuffed as a result.
Sand Digger and Mainsail abseiled out of my bedroom window to colour change their hair - but they didn't take damage from that.
And the favourite till last, from my sister, who, aged about three, borrowed some of my ponies to take to a friend's house (with permission). Where she promptly and accidentally (she's a bit clumsy) dropped Yoyo down the toilet. FOrtunately, it was a clean toilet, and even more fortunately, her Japanese friend's mum was a neat freak - but Yoyo did have to be disinfected when she was rescued and brought home.
The image of these first two are cracking me up. Anyone remember that "let's fly to the castle" youtube video? Truly elegant. And oof, thank goodness for diligent moms!
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As a small child I was a unicorn horn nibbler >.>
yes all my early ponies have nibbled ears, horns and hooves. LOL
years later I suggested to my best friend, while trapped in the backseat on a road trip, that the ponies caught pony pox! so we drew dots all over them in pen! D:
and Starshine's hair got chopped off by my neighbor's awful brother before I could snatch the scissors away from him >.<
other than that, most of them have been through more mud, bathtubs, and childhood than I could ever remember. I wrote their names on their hooves too.
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I wasn't a child, I was a grown up who committed pony crime! As a kid in the 80's, I was familiar with the early ponies up until so-softs and twinkle-eyed, magic message and sweet berry ponies. I was unaware of the weird sets that followed.
In the late 90's/early 2000's, when I started collecting, I found a Dainty Delilah. I thought some kid had ruined her hair, that they did something to the hair to make it poofy. I cut it off!
Later, I would find a Bouquet. I thought this mane is stupidly long! Why would anyone make a mane this long? I cut it!
I've learned my lesson, though I think having alternate rehairs of the Puffs with normal hair would be nice.
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TBH, the first time you see a perfume puff in person, if you never saw them as a kid, it is confusing.
I remember Naynie bringing Dainty Dahlia home from the carboot sale one weekend and we kind of sat and just stared at her trying to work out what had happened to her hair.
If it had been any of the others in the set I might have recognised her, but Dahlia kind of just blended into the background to the point I forgot her existence completely.
Had a similar reaction the first time I saw a so soft pony. Very odd things. Lovely. But odd.
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I don’t think I destroyed my ponies on purpose because I wanted to destroy them but I used to cut pony hair for no reason or because the end of the tail got frizzy. I also would grab nail polish and markers and draw and paint all over my ponies I still have them today. I think I did it because I thought they looked prettiest like that. I also cut of all my pony’s hair and replace it with clay because the hair was too frizzy or I didn’t like it and I put clay on ponies because I was making accessories out of it and it completely destroyed most of them. I also took ponies and dolls swimming but I never ruined them to the point where they get mold or anything else.
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I didn't have any ponies as a kid...
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Got into customizing and maybe made some horrid paint jobs with nail polish and horrifying haircuts... I am both proud of my artistic experimentation and deeply horrified by what I have done to a few g4 ponies.
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While I was very careful with my later G1 ponies (most of them still look like new), for some unknown reason I cut the first few plugs one some of my earlier ponies like Pinwheel, Parasol, Gusty and Starflower. I didn't just cut them short so they would look like the ponies that had a forelock, no, I cut them to stubbles. >_<. The other thing I remember is that a friend scribbled something on my Posey. As you can imagine, I was furious and tried to "improve" her by drawing a pink highlighter pen heart over it. Not happy with the result, I then drew pink hearts all over her body, which looked even worse, making me angry with myself for my failed improvement attempt. :blink: My friend, being remorseful, offered to trade her (immaculate) Applejack for my poor Posey, which I naturally accepted. At some point during my childhood a collector attitude set in. I didn't play with my ponies any more, left curly hair uncombed because by then I had realised that it frizzes easily (my poor Sparkler's tail was already very bushy by then) and just admired them on my bedside cabinet.
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The heads. It was always the heads. I wanted my Ponies to be able to turn their heads, so I, or my dad, would loosen their heads. I've seen several people say that loosening a Pony's head is damage, but unless the neck was accidentally split in this process I didn't see it as such. A few Ponies did get split neck plugs, but not completely split neck plugs.
Butterscotch, poor girl, was my first & she lost her tail & had her mane covered in marker pen... She later became Head Pony though & holds that role to this day.
ETA: I nearly forgot the tragedy of Ripple. Yep I took Baby Sea Ponies in the bath, but they always squirted the water out afterwards. Splasher loved to do so during!!! But that wasn't how Ripple suffered. Nope, she suffered because my parents got a dog, & said dog got to her...
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Got into customizing and maybe made some horrid paint jobs with nail polish and horrifying haircuts... I am both proud of my artistic experimentation and deeply horrified by what I have done to a few g4 ponies.
I always used pinkie pie and rarity to customize because they were the most I had duplicates of. I also made boy ponies. My ponies were never safe until I realized what damage i was doing to them.
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It wasn't a child that did this, but I think it deserves mention in the Hall O' Shame for pony mistreatment. I have 3 ponies I purchased in a really cheap bait lot that must have been in a secondhand store at one point. Someone had written, in dark black Sharpie marker right on their sides, their price and some kind of ring-up code. What shopkeeper in their right mind thinks that writing prices directly on their wares is going to entice people to buy it?!? And to add insult to injury, poor Bowtie, Peachy and Cherries Jubilee have the shame of being priced for a measly $1 apiece. They have been sunfading for months now, with varying degrees of success.
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It wasn't a child that did this, but I think it deserves mention in the Hall O' Shame for pony mistreatment. I have 3 ponies I purchased in a really cheap bait lot that must have been in a secondhand store at one point. Someone had written, in dark black Sharpie marker right on their sides, their price and some kind of ring-up code. What shopkeeper in their right mind thinks that writing prices directly on their wares is going to entice people to buy it?!? And to add insult to injury, poor Bowtie, Peachy and Cherries Jubilee have the shame of being priced for a measly $1 apiece. They have been sunfading for months now, with varying degrees of success.
omg that's horrific! What, are they gonna spray-paint the prices on a used car?! What are they going to do if there's a price change? What-- okay there's no reasoning here. Criminals.
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I never did anything horrible to my ponies but was given some secondhand G1 and G3 ponies by my sister in law and niece who didn't want them anymore and two of the G1s had had mane cuts at some point.
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I played with them in the bathtub and pool. I don't really consider that "damage" though. I was a kid. I liked to play in the water. I took my toys with me.
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It wasn't a child that did this, but I think it deserves mention in the Hall O' Shame for pony mistreatment. I have 3 ponies I purchased in a really cheap bait lot that must have been in a secondhand store at one point. Someone had written, in dark black Sharpie marker right on their sides, their price and some kind of ring-up code. What shopkeeper in their right mind thinks that writing prices directly on their wares is going to entice people to buy it?!? And to add insult to injury, poor Bowtie, Peachy and Cherries Jubilee have the shame of being priced for a measly $1 apiece. They have been sunfading for months now, with varying degrees of success.
omg that's horrific! What, are they gonna spray-paint the prices on a used car?! What are they going to do if there's a price change? What-- okay there's no reasoning here. Criminals.
No kidding. I guess they would just cross the old price out and write 50 cents right next to it...maybe over the pony's face this time! The spray paint/used car thing cracks me up...sounds like one of those TV gags, like 'would you buy this car and actually drive it around if it had the price spray-painted down the side if it only cost $50?'
Oh well...Cherries Jubilee is almost marker free, so she gets the last laugh in the end. Jury's still out on the other 2.
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I was very good with my toys, I'm not sure if my mom instilled the respect of personally property in me from a young age or what but the meager amount of toys I was allowed to keep from childhood look immaculate, the kind of ponies I always wish to find in the wild haha
when it comes to kids so many adults seem to forget what it's like being a child, they often say things like "oh they're just a child, they don't know any better" But I distinctly remember even far back as age 3 when I did naughty things it was on purpose, I wanted to see what would happen I absolutely knew
So perhaps that was part of it, I really liked my toys and didn't want to see what would happen if I purposefully did destructive things to them. Also my playing was very sedate (more like a collector haha) I'd just line or set things up and look at them
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When Glory's silver stars rubbed off, I drew new blue ones with a marker. But the ink spread and turned into blobs.
I also cut a part of Cotton Candy's tail to make a tail for a Bow Tie I found.
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In the late 90's/early 2000's, when I started collecting, I found a Dainty Delilah. I thought some kid had ruined her hair, that they did something to the hair to make it poofy. I cut it off!
The first perfume puff I ever saw was in a thrift shop. I was convinced they'd put Daisy Sweet into the dryer to get her hair that way!
I remember drawing on my Baby Frosting, but I don't remember why. Now I still have my original and I've picked up another one somewhere. It's nice to be able to tell them apart. :lol:
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Oh boy... when I was a very small child and didn't have my own ponies, I gave my older sister's Baby Cotton Candy a nasty haircut. According to my very small child logic, if I ruin my siblings' toys, they won't want them anymore and I'll get to keep them. 30 years later, I am the only one in my family who collects toys so she did eventually end up with me ^^;
I was a pretty destructive/"artistic" child, but I actually took pretty good care of my ponies once I got my own. IIRC the worst I did was giving Baby Ruby a forelock like some of the other baby ponies had because I thought it was cute.
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Like what SaraMari said, I never really played with my ponies in a sense, just created scenes with them and brushed the hair. So overall my childhood collection is looking good as a result. (Nothing wrong with rough play though!)
However.... I thought myself as an excellent mane stylist and gave 3 of my G3's a fringe/bangs. I just really liked the look of forelocks on G1s :P It might of looked ok years ago, but now it's a mess. I knew G1s where valuable, but I thought G3 would go on forever and ever and they would never gain value so it was "okay" to cut their hair !
I also put nail polish on the hooves of some G2s for some reason?? I think I knew it would easily come off with acetone.
Oh, and taking ponies to school. Luckily Rainbow Dash and Minty survived with no injury, being kicked around the playground by bullies ha.
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I remember one time I went to a garage sale and I saw a G4. It was marked all over and had very little hair left.
That was the first pony I ever saw in the wild. :yikes:
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Let's see...
I drew a bridle and saddle in crayon on my Merriweather
There were quite a few ponies with horns and ears that I chewed up. I remember bringing my Brights Brightly to a friend's house and lying that it was my little sister who chewed her horn. A proud pony owner like me would have never done such a thing. I also had two McDonald's Serendipities, one of which had a chewed-up muzzle. I called her the "runny nose" pony because I thought her chewed up nose had a rather...nasty look to it.
I remember I was disappointed that some G3's had glittery cutie marks, but some didn't, so I put glitter glue on the on some of my non-sparkly ponies' marks. The glitter would wear off over time, leaving a gross gray sticky spot.
On a related note, I had a fakie that I covered with stickers. I tried to take the stickers off at some point, leaving that gross sticker residue behind, which just made her look even worse.
I also put as many stickers as I could on all my playsets.
I only gave one of my ponies a haircut, and that was Royal Bouquet. I couldn't get her hair to be neatly groomed, so I cut the first stripe in her mane short. The result is a buzz-cut forelock with long hair in the back. She also has ballpoint pen "art" on her neck.
Not a child crime, per say, but a novice teenage collector crime-I tried to get some marks off my Sandy Island with nail polish remover, but accidentally rubbed her cutie mark a little bit. I regret this greatly.
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Ouh I have some! As a kid I gave G3 Rainbow Flash a nasty haircut in an attempt to give her normal length hair (She was a G3 super long hair pony), accidentally melted most of G3 Bowtie's hair with my mom's hairdryer, and wrote my initials on one hoof of a G3 Rainbow Dash with a Sharpie. As I got older, I stopped playing roughly with my ponies and just set them up into scenes on the playsets.
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I trimmed off my childhood MGR Sparkler's forelock because it annoyed me.
:cry:
I kept her and plan on giving her a new one soon, though. :)
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If anyone inherited my childhood toys from our garage sales, etc, I'd actually consider them very lucky! I've struggled with OCD all of my life, and keeping my toys as pristine as possible was one of my obsessions. The toys I still have with me from my childhood are like new, most still with their original tags and/or boxes. Since I was so obsessed with keeping them as nice as possible, it would destroy me it anything happened to them. I had a favorite teddy bear, and my beloved dog took her from my shelf and pulled off her nose while I wasn't home. My dad tossed out the bear. I cried and cried. It was a gift from my uncle who has passed away, and I still think about that bear sometimes even though it has been many years. Of course, my dog was the sweetest thing ever, so I could not stay mad at her for long, and forgave her right away.
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If anyone inherited my childhood toys from our garage sales, etc, I'd actually consider them very lucky! I've struggled with OCD all of my life, and keeping my toys as pristine as possible was one of my obsessions. The toys I still have with me from my childhood are like new, most still with their original tags and/or boxes. Since I was so obsessed with keeping them as nice as possible, it would destroy me it anything happened to them. I had a favorite teddy bear, and my beloved dog took her from my shelf and pulled off her nose while I wasn't home. My dad tossed out the bear. I cried and cried. It was a gift from my uncle who has passed away, and I still think about that bear sometimes even though it has been many years. Of course, my dog was the sweetest thing ever, so I could not stay mad at her for long, and forgave her right away.
:hug:
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I had a really long clothesline in my backyard. I discovered that I could use the clothesline to launch my ponies waaaaaaaay into the air. Flutter ponies worked best as they were small(more aerodynamic) and they had long, easy to grip legs.
This has resulted in a few of my child ponies having rope burns on their bellies, and random scrapes from concrete impacts.
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I never damaged a MLP but I did cut the long hair shorter on one of those hard plastic horses - Lady Lovely Locks - because "it was stupid". Now I know how much they are valued >_<
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I had a really long clothesline in my backyard. I discovered that I could use the clothesline to launch my ponies waaaaaaaay into the air. Flutter ponies worked best as they were small(more aerodynamic) and they had long, easy to grip legs.
This has resulted in a few of my child ponies having rope burns on their bellies, and random scrapes from concrete impacts.
That sounds like loads of fun, child me would have done that too XD
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I had a really long clothesline in my backyard. I discovered that I could use the clothesline to launch my ponies waaaaaaaay into the air. Flutter ponies worked best as they were small(more aerodynamic) and they had long, easy to grip legs.
This has resulted in a few of my child ponies having rope burns on their bellies, and random scrapes from concrete impacts.
Well, if they didn't want you to launch them in the air, why would they have made the ponies have wings?
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And the ponies rained down from the air, like arrows loosed from bows: Pony Seige circa 1985