You can get an idea of this when you look at "The Art Of" books for various animated movies. You'll notice a lot of characters looked vastly different in the early stages and the images vary in style and quality based on the artist.

Has anyone seen the art book for the latest MLP movie?! This is quite true - it shows the transitions from original animated ponies to the movie animations, and it also shows the original concepts for the new characters, and some of them were waaayyy off of what they ended up being. If it can happen within one generation of MLP, it can certainly happen when transferring to a new generation. They can do whatever they like, change concepts as much as they like because it's a clean slate. No-one is supposed to see it, so it doesn't actually matter if a concept pony started out as a pink pegasus and ended up a blue unicorn. No one is ever going to know to be upset about it, so they can change it as much as they like!

I got my Feathermay as the mystery gift with my season one DVD collector's edition, so she was in her bubble on card, inside the collector's case box, so no sunfading, and she has severe mismatch. To me, that's the ultimate evidence that she was made that way at the factory. She wasn't hanging on a store peg for years, or laying around in the light. She went from the Hasbro packaging factory to the madman packaging factory, then to the warehouse and directly to me as a preorder.

She had such poor distribution in my area, it took me forever to get this girl. Love her!

nice finds! Fairy dust can be elusive, at least she has been for me!

Firstly, CONGRATS! What an awesome find!

Secondly... If you decide to clean up the G3's, maybe a de-tinseling is in order, then you could be able to straighten the hair back to silky if you're lucky. De-tinselling can be tedious, but it can make a difference with G3's with bad hair. Don't try to heat that iridescent tinsel though, whatever you do - it'll just shrink up unless it's REALLY low heat - too low to help the rest of the hair.

Einhornbaby I always love your brag posts - such epic fakie goodness! I've never seen these, they're so cute!

^^ this. The new feedback page is a pain in the rear. I also am a fan of batch rating, because I tend to batch buy, and once I have everything together at home ready for purpose, I go and rate the things I bought. Don't get me wrong, I still do it, but it's so tedious!