I've never heard of Hasbro purposely producing a Sundance with only one symbol.  My guess would be factory error.  (Or customized?)

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Starshine sweater vest by a different Chinese fashion brand, Bronze Lucia. This is like, the number one thing I regret not buying. At least I saved pictures!

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Imagine having to ask a beautiful model to wear this. Licensed swimsuit by fashion brand Balnaire.  It costs the equivalent of $125 USD.

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And for some non-MLP items, here's Cute Rabbit Planet, a blind box compact toy.  This company makes a lot of compact toys and these are my favorite!  Six sets in all.

Yeah, I don't like "cutie mark" either.  But it is probably trademarkable, ha ha.  I remember during G3 a lot of collectors would call just the hoof-heart (on the magnet foot) a cutie mark.

I agree that G3 brought My Little Pony to the forefront again. I counted how many individual ponies were released one year and it was a crazy amount. Like, 90 different characters.  And then the HUUUUGE playsets.  I wonder if G3 was more of a monetary success than G4 in terms of toy sales. (But MLP FIM did better with merchandise sales for sure . . . Funko Pops etc.)

About names, I like how they gave the G5 ponies last names because now they can use whatever short name they want (like Sunny) and add the last name to make it unique enough to trademark.  Much better than calling a pony Hitcharoo or Pipp-a-Dipp-a-Dee or whatever.

I watched a fan video explaining the different Littlest Pet Shop generations and it was very interesting, but I must confess . . . all the generations look exactly the same to me. (Except the Kenner ones.)  This must be how non-MLP collectors feel when I show them my ponies.

Oh, same.  I look back and I'm like . . . maybe toy ponies didn't really require my dramatics, maybe I could have not worried about what other people thought and been a little kinder, a little less hot-blooded.  I do feel very privileged to have been on the internet at that time, though.  It was so much less commercial.  Even with the arguments, being part of the MLP community was a blast.  A really special time.

A lot of community discussions were also on the Ponypeople Mailing List!  I remember when people would go on there and be like "Please no one bid on this eBay auction because I want to win it" (until they made a rule against that, lol.)

There's a Tumblr called Old Web MLP that digs up old MLP sites!  I love it.

https://oldwebmlp.tumblr.com/

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Man, I miss the days when everyone had individual websites.

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Who remembers FLAT BED SCANNERS?

I dug up my old Tumblr post on this subject . . . here we go!

Do you know why we call pony generations G1, G2, etc?  The term didn’t originate from Hasbro--except it also sort of did.

We must first look not at ponies, but at robots.

The first Transformers line ran from 1984 to 1991.

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Then in 1993 Hasbro released Transformers Generation 2, a toyline so advanced that the logo was being sucked sideways by some preternatural force.

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The truth was most of the G2 Transformers were previous Transformers in new color schemes . . .

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But the point is that if THIS toyline was Generation 2, aka G2, it implied that the 1984 - 1991 Transformers were Generation 1, or G1.  Thus the terms G1 and G2 were born in the Transformers fandom.

Let’s go back to ponies.

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The original line of MLPs ran from 1982 to 1992 in the US, and a few years more in select other countries.

MLP then lay dormant until it was rebooted in 1997:

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Collectors did not call the new ponies G2s.  They called them “the ’97 ponies” (even the ones made in 1998, 1999, etc) or “the new ponies”.

The original ponies were called “the 80s ponies” (even the ones made from 1990 to 1992) or “the old ponies”.

Then in 2003, My Little Pony was rebooted again:

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Suddenly two labels were not enough, because what were THESE ponies supposed to be called?  “The new-new ponies”?  No, the community needed a more clearcut way to describe these three generations iterations of MLP.

And so discussions began on the then-central hub of MLP collecting, the My Little Pony Trading Post. Suggestions included calling the new ponies “the 2003 ponies”, or referring to each generation by their location (Dream Valley, Friendship Garden, and Ponyville).

Then a MLP collector who also collected Transformers remembered the “Generation 2″ robots.  She suggested the ponies be called G1, G2, and G3.  Not only were the terms clear, but they were short--an important consideration when collectors were buying, selling, and trading on forums with limited subject-line space.

There was no “aha” moment or immediate consensus; for a while each collector called the ponies whatever they preferred.  But gradually the G1 / G2 / G3 labels gained favor and became universally accepted.

As for the pony collector who made the suggestion . . .

It was me. 

The Gx term is still mostly fanon, you don’t see it used in official merchandise much.  But when Basic Fun released their retro G3 ponies . . .

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Well, it made me smile.

---

Monster High has also started using G1, G2, and G3 . . . I asked a Monster High collector when this started and she said it really kicked off when the third generation was released.  Which I found really interesting.

G1 feels the most MLP to me, then G3.

G2, G4, and G5 are all tied.  None of them give me the full MLP vibe, but none of them are totally off the mark.

After that: G3.5 and G4.5.

Then Dream Beauties.  They are very beautiful! I like them a lot more than some of the gens I previously mentioned! But they aren't My Little Ponies.  They're just horses.  They aren't even smiling.  Because they're just horses who live in a barn and poop in their stalls.

Then Newborn Cuties. They aren't ponies either.  They're freaky human babies.

Dead last: Equestria Girls, which aren't even pretending to be ponies.

Edit:  Oh yeah, the late 90s / early 2000s were wild times.  I didn't like the "new ponies" (as G2s were called at the time) and I remember some girl called me a Nazi because of that; she said that not liking the new ponies was "the same as belonging to a hate group."  Like, girl, get a grip.  They're just toys.  I remember just ROASTING her in response.

Looking back, and looking around at the current fandoms on the internet, it's pretty obvious that teenagers just like to fight over dumb things.  (Most of the MLP collecting community was teens or young twenty-somethings at the time.)  But at least the 90s MLP community mostly just insulted each other via emails.  On today's internet I've seen teens actually dox people over such important issues as . . . "I don't like that that person ships such-and-such anime characters, they are Problematic *frowny face*".  More problematic than doxxing people??

I can't wait for Twitter to finish dying.

The thing is, as I said before, the labels G1 and G2 didn't even exist till G3. LM will confirm it was borrowed from the Transformer community, since old ponies and new ponies couldn't wash when even newer ponies came out in 2003. There was such a consciousness about G1 and G2 being different, that those labels were always collective. The .5 was first in G3, towards the end.

Yep!  Man, I wish the old MLPTP board was still up.  If anyone knows how to use The Wayback Machine on a message board then lmk.  But yeah, a few years ago when it was still up I was like "I vaguely remember the Generation 1 etc thing coming from Transformers, I wonder who suggested it" and when I looked up the conversation on the old MLPTP, it was meeee, lol. I should have known.

I made a post about it on Tumblr, I should post it here too!

When (what is now called) G3.5 came out there was actually a lot of debate, and you probably CAN find that on the newer MLPTP and on these boards.  Some people wanted to call it G4, since the molds were different.  Others said it should still be G3, because the characters and setting were the same. And some people had this argument that I always found baffling:  they believed there had to be a "break" where Hasbro wasn't producing ponies in order to kick off a new generation.  Because there'd been breaks between G1/G2 and G2/G3 (even though there actually wasn't a gap between G2 and G3 in, like, France.)

Nobody really makes the gap argument anymore, ha ha.

Anyway, we ended up splitting the difference and calling the new molds G3.5;  at the end of the day we were toy collectors and it was important to understand whether an eBay auction was for a G3 Pinkie Pie versus a G3.5 Pinkie Pie.

I love her!

But her name makes no sense.