G3 "Retro" ponies on Target website

[banditpony]

Exactly!!!

[JazzMatazz]

I'm going to need the Applejack if these release. I like this pose more than her original g3 one!

[Moonbreeze]

G2 is basically written out of pony history in the US narrative, to the point the annoying bronies call Tales G2 instead. Since Hasbro is in love with brony-verse and mane-six-ness, I can see this as being them. No other company would care about manesix named G3 ponies. But they do look like nice quality for current Hasbro. Of course they could be yet another company. There are so many questions.

Yup, I know. One can dream right? I can only hope that Basic Fun will pick (the real) G2 up one day
Speaking of the meh-six, Hasbro is now calling first G1's the 'mane six' as well >.<

Anyhow! Back OT, I might get AJ though

[Pinkie21]

Oh I need these so badly! 

[Taffeta]

G2 is basically written out of pony history in the US narrative, to the point the annoying bronies call Tales G2 instead. Since Hasbro is in love with brony-verse and mane-six-ness, I can see this as being them. No other company would care about manesix named G3 ponies. But they do look like nice quality for current Hasbro. Of course they could be yet another company. There are so many questions.

Yup, I know. One can dream right? I can only hope that Basic Fun will pick (the real) G2 up one day
Speaking of the meh-six, Hasbro is now calling first G1's the 'mane six' as well >.<

Yeah. The historian in me despises anachronism.

[Leave a Whisper]

Hasbro is just getting worse and worse with MLP.

[MerryAnvil]

I really don't like how they're trying to pull the older gens into their silly Mane 6 hype >n< It's like they think people aren't capable of enjoying anything MLP related when it doesn't pertain to those characters. Which really couldn't be further from the truth because I think that many people agree they'd rather have variety over 13790482 versions of the same pony (*looks mournfully at my shelf of surplus Pinkie Pies that somehow multiply without my permission whenever I get a pony lot*). The lack of variety is one of the things that made me lose interest and take that five-year hiatus from ponies, and one of the reasons I stopped buying G4s from stores. G1 (and to an extent, G3) was the perfect example of how to have iconic characters while still retaining the variety of ponies to keep them from being boring.

I'm with everyone on the G2s as well. As one of the generations I barely missed in stores but still grew up with (sorta; PC game and all), it annoys me to see them completely ignored like this. I would most definitely buy repros if they sold them in stores!

On the positive side, I would totally get that Applejack though because I adore the pose for her! G3 Applejack is also a personal fave of mine <3

[banditpony]

G1 (and to an extent, G3) was the perfect example of how to have iconic characters while still retaining the variety of ponies to keep them from being boring.

G1 really didn't have that at all. A lot of kids who might of seen their fave pony in a movie or book had a very narrow window on getting that pony.

[MerryAnvil]

G1 (and to an extent, G3) was the perfect example of how to have iconic characters while still retaining the variety of ponies to keep them from being boring.

G1 really didn't have that at all. A lot of kids who might of seen their fave pony in a movie or book had a very narrow window on getting that pony.

I'm afraid I don't quite understand what you mean? Apologies! I'm bad with understanding the wording of things sometimes. Do you mean because the sets were produced for such a short period of time?

[banditpony]

G1 (and to an extent, G3) was the perfect example of how to have iconic characters while still retaining the variety of ponies to keep them from being boring.

G1 really didn't have that at all. A lot of kids who might of seen their fave pony in a movie or book had a very narrow window on getting that pony.

I'm afraid I don't quite understand what you mean? Apologies! I'm bad with understanding the wording of things sometimes. Do you mean because the sets were produced for such a short period of time?

In my opinion if there was an iconic character for g1, it would have to be some of them from either an animated cartoon or a book.

But there weren't a staple of ponies being rereleased so kids could have their faves. And I could be corrected but even merch didn't focus specifically on a main set of ponies. It kept changing with time.

[LadyMoondancer]

G1 didn't really have any iconic characters in the US.  It had iconic toys, but they were never marketed as characters, if that makes sense.  Like Wind Whistler didn't get any special prominence in the brochures, her backcard didn't portray her as a super smarty . . . It was almost like there was an invisible wall between the media side of things and the toy side of things for G1 MLP.

It's interesting, because they went the opposite route with G1 Transformers.  Like here's the packaging "tech spec" for Sunstreaker:

The complete egotist, Sunstreaker thinks he is the most beautiful thing on Earth. Loves his sleek styling, contemptuous of other Autobot race cars (particularly his twin Sideswipe). Fires laser-guided ground-to-air rockets and high energy electron pulses at 300 bursts/sec. Tough polymer-steel skin resists artillery. Not a team player. Can be baited into dangerous situations, but is a very calm, competent, and ruthless war machine.

That gives a clear picture of Sunstreaker's personality.  He's vain, egotistical, ruthless, competent, is mean to his brother, and kind of sounds like a sociopath.  (Especially interesting that he has all these negative traits because he's an Autobot.)

Compare this with Blueberry Baskets' backcard where her personality is "likes blueberries".     That's not a character.

Mind you, I don't think the Transformers way or the MLP way are right or wrong;  they can both work, and they did both work for their respective toylines.  They're just different.

(I do think it would have been kind of amazing if Hasbro had written up backcards for a couple mean, sociopath ponies though.  )

[Lilja]

I guess with TF the intent was more to sell it on story and characters. Also maybe the concept of transforming robots was too confusing for Americans at the time and demanded an explanation. Meanwhile, candy colored horses with pictures on their bums was self-explanatory. Any stories featuring them were just "bonus" marketing, and there was no need to keep them consistent.

TF was similar to MLP though in how Hasbro viewed its characters as disposable. To many childrens horror, when their beloved characters were killed off in the TF movie to make room for new product. But with MLP the characters were so unimportant that they could easily switch them out between TV specials and the movie.

[Dragonflitter]

Also keep in mind the MLP & Friends cartoon only aired for two seasons. It ran from Sep '86 to Sep '87. So while the show was being made, it wasn't hard to find Wind Whistler and Galaxy and Fizzy on the shelves. The cartoon ran in tandem with what the toy line was producing at the time. (Granted, if kids were watching reruns in later years, then they wouldn't be able to find those characters on the shelves, of course.)

But it was more important for Hasbro to have MLP toys in general on the shelves, not particular characters. They knew if little girls saw the ponies on the TV screen in whatever format (Rescue at Midnight Castle, MLP & Friends, MLP Tales) they would go to the toy store and see that familiar logo and take home a pony toy, even if it wasn't the particular character they saw on said screen.

It was really the G3 era (not even the beginning of it, more like the end of it) where Hasbro began a tactic to make kids like a particular character, not just the logo/brand. They wanted kids to love Pinkie Pie, or love Rainbow Dash, not just love 'My Little Pony.' And when that happened, they had to have a way for kids to get those characters all the time.

[MerryAnvil]

Ahh okay, yeah, that makes sense. I guess now that I think about it, that's true, the disconnect between the toys and the media.

That packaging for the Transformer is awesome o: Like, you can seriously tell someone sat down and spent some time thinking about the character and what kind of personality he should have. Wow.

I do agree on the sociopathic/antagonist ponies, that would have been great hehe >u< Tbh that's one of the few things I really enjoyed about FiM - the antagonists, and morally questionable pony characters. Sombra was my absolute fave. Too bad they neglected the antagonists as far as the toys go, though.

[Taffeta]

Ahh okay, yeah, that makes sense. I guess now that I think about it, that's true, the disconnect between the toys and the media.

That all may be true for the US, but the UK had that missing link between story/character and pony. It's ironic but a lot of the backcard stories used in early comic characterisations come from the US, where they really weren't used. So Shady's weird glasses and I think Tootsie's Pollipop Latch are both US story ideas that only got used really in the UK and have become part of those characters over here instead.

I think one reason the bronyverse sometimes absorb details from the comic canon here into their concept of G1 is because it's ongoing and continuous. Ideas like the TE ponies in the mine and Majesty's dread greatness are UK, but increasingly you see people not familiar with G1 just calling those things G1 canon.

All that said, there's a rotating door in a way in the comic with new and old characters, the latter of whom end up on Memory Lane. But you did get a year or sometimes more of certain characters getting spotlight which the US line doesn't have. Almost all ponies sold here - and some not sold here - have a comic persona.

I was most influenced as a kid by how a pony was characterised in the comic and what she/he got up to, what magic they had, and so on. Medley I fell in love with because of her pragmatic character, and her musical ability (playing harp music by waving her tail, drumming thunder on the clouds). Of course where it fell down there was that Hasbro forgot to sell Medley here (-.-) so that was a fail. But it did create that iconic 'character' inside of me of a pony that had adventures, not just a plastic toy on the shelf.

It is true that there's no repeat core cast in G1 that constantly reappears (although this was beginning with the tales ponies, the later comics and so on really show that intent). But the amount of exposure given to a set or a particular pony over the years of her availability (and the chance of a pony you already had reappearing either in an old flashback comic story or a seasonal one like Fizzwhizz night or Christmas or whatever) I think helped to create something here that the US line lacked when the animation fizzled out.