I hear dunking them in boiling water for a long time loosens the glue. This goes for all ponies. It’s a good idea to check the body section of the MLP preservation project, if you scroll down it deals with head removal specifically. http://www.mlppreservationproject.com/body.html

Ah sorry you’re having so much trouble! They are looking pretty scribbled on, and often marker pigment has just bled into the pigment and is hard to remove with any cleaning product. I think sun fading is your best bet here.

I know your dear child might be impatient, and that it’s not very sunny this time of year! But, I have a few suggestions. I recently worked at a place that had lights designed to show the true colors of what we were working on. I believe they were called daylight balanced light bulbs. The reason I bring this up is because the room I worked in was in the center of the building and had no natural light. I brought in a pony whose pink hair is prone to fading to decorate my desk and didn’t think much of it...until a little bit in her pink hair faded to white. This usually only happens when it’s exposed to sun, and this room was very much not, to the extent it went fully dark in a blackout. Too bad for the pony, but it gave me an idea.

Now, I can’t promise the following idea will work since I haven’t tried it myself. But I like the idea of lining a plastic box with foil (the foil will help reflect the light) on all sides, bottom and lid, and sticking a daylight balanced light bulb through a hole in the lid. You might have to dremel out the lid hole for the bulb - and maybe your local library rents tools so you can borrow one! I’d lay the ponies in there and just leave the light on for a long while. Bam, all season sun fading! And you don’t even have to leave the ponies outside! It could be a fun activity to check them daily. If you do try it, it would be lovely to see how it turns out! Again, I can’t promise it will work but...science!

Best of luck with your ponies! You might be able to find someone who’s willing to rehair your trimmed pony too.

I like most any stop motion but I’m biased. This is cute! Honestly at first when I saw the toys I was perplexed as to why they had no lower jaws...but it sure does make sticking on replacement mouths for animation easier! (Replacement animation is when a different object is swapped out each time a frame of animation is taken. You can find interesting videos on how, say, Laika uses this process on YouTube if you want!) Not sure ease of animating a stop motion puppet is a good reason to design a toy a certain way, but I do like these puppets. It really looks like they took one of the current toys and stuck it in a mold to make a stop mo puppet.

It’s playful, it’s silly, it’s not as plot driven as FIM but I mean. Not everything has to be FIM, the world will go on. I wonder if they’ll still do the 2D animated shorts? The fluidity of that style was nice.

Please update on how it turns out! I have some ponies with similar stains.

Quote from: Khoufu on May 30, 2018, 12:21:39 PM

Who else has bought ponies that don't mention a smell, and you get them and they wreak of smoke?

Baby Hopscotch. She was perfect apart from the fact she stank. She even had factory curls. 

Oh dear! If you still have this otherwise perfect pony, the baking soda kitty litter trick works wonders. Pour baking soda cat litter into the bottom of a plastic container with a lid. Put a towel over the litter. Put the pony in the box and seal it up... then leave it alone for 6 months or so, longer if you must. Rotate the pony occasionally. If she's really, really bad and the above method doesn't help, you can stick her in a bag with kitty litter, or immerse her in it. After a while the pony should smell fine! I've fixed some pretty stinky ponies this way. You just have to be patient...

I haven't so much had weird seller interactions (the stinky ponies all came from Craigslist so I knew what I was in for) but once asked a buyer in a vintage toy shop how much he would offer for a very nice Skyflier. The place aims at a collector clientele, not kids. This Skyflier had perfect glitter and a ribbon. The buyer accused me of touching up her glitter (in fact he suggested it had been customization, since as far as I could tell he didn't even know some ponies came with glitter, then tried to cover by saying he'd never seen one that old with that much glitter) said he thought the bow was a replacement, and offered me three dollars cash, five dollars store credit. The glitter and bow were both original.

If unicorns are wrong, then I don't want to be right.

Man I was going to ask if anyone had any documentation of some really religious people being irked by MLP and unicorn toys because it sounded to me like it might be a really isolated incident...and then then some of you said you had memories of that happening to you as kids and even book quotes. Guys, I'm so sorry! That's pretty upsetting. The impulse to stamp out fantasy, especially for kids, is awfully stifling.

Also glad to see all the history about the symbolism of unicorns popping up here. That and unicorn art history is a deep, deep rabbit hole that's intriguing to read up on. Whether unicorn as Christ symbol was due to a translation issue or not, it certainly made its way into a lot of art in history. I'd love to see someone analyze how that art history influences modern imagery of unicorns, how what the represent has changed.

I always assumed hornless ponies just got chewed on. If you've got one, I hear Epoxy Sculpt is a great way to patch up all kinds of toys. You can also make a simple mold using a pony of the same shape as the damaged one and make the poor critter a new horn! See the link to the chewed on Rapunzel here: http://mlparena.com/index.php/topic,375746.msg1504005.html#msg1504005

Anyway, hope you guys are all living your best lives, loving unicorns and reading Harry Potter. The coven meets at 9PM sharp first thursdays of the month, and I'm bringing cupcakes! I'll see you all there! Ha ha, just kidding. 

Yup! I have a similar method with thin plastic lidded bins I got from Joann's. I like them because they fit under my bed. The ponies stand in a single later. I also keep mine in zip lock bags within the bin, it keeps their hair nice and keeps the colors of the ponies or their hair from bleeding onto each other. I've never had much of a problem with color bleeding personally, but why risk it? I live in a bedroom in a shared house, and keep the ponies I display on rotation on the ledges above my closet and door. It's nice, honestly. Having room for only some ponies to be on display and getting to rotate them out is a thing I like. It means they add a fun element of color to the room without being clutter-y.