What Inspired You to Begin Collecting MLPs?

[CupcakePony]

For me I just woke up one morning two years ago and began looking on eBay.  My memories of playing with MLPs were one of the happiest parts of my childhood.  I was trying to recapture this joy during a turbulent time.  I love horses and unicorns!  As a child I thought they were cute, spoke to my imagination, loved brushing their hair, they were small and light to carry around, it was like having a friend, and I loved their interesting color hair, colorful exterior, & cutie marks.


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[Sunshine]

For me... I played with ponies as a kid and I always loved horses... I gradually moved away from MLP to "older horses" like Grand Champions, but, I always had a couple of ponies that I kept, even after most of my childhood ponies were sold at a garage sale. One day while I was in middle school, my mother came to me and suggested we started a hobby... (later on, I found out she was worried because my best friend was all into... "bad kid stuff" and she didn't want me to be involved with that... lol) - she suggested collecting like... really intricate dollhouses and stuff, but I never liked dolls... so I suggested My Little Ponies.

Collecting was slow before eBay, but one that site popped up my collection soared... so... yeah, that's how I started, lol... my mother wanting me to not hang with the bad kids, so I hung with My Little Ponies!

[Corona]

I grew up with G1s as a kid, and kinda forgot about ponies for a while. Every once in a while I'd see them and go "oh yeah, I remember those."

But then Friendship is Magic came out. I saw it all over the internet and finally sat down to see what all the fuss was about. I finished all of what was out at the time (half of season 1) in one sitting.

I picked up a Rainbow Dash at Walmart on a whim. And then it kind of snowballed from there.

[ravengusty]

I grew up with G1 at one stage i had at least 50 ponies if not more including a Princess Royal Blue variant with bright green mane and sea green tail. At 15 I had to give them up because i was 'far to old to play with ponies'
I also had to give up my puppy in my pocket and pony in my pocket.
At 17 I bought a Princess Tiffany, then a few more but then pressure from my Dad and a few bills made me get rid.
Now I'm 29, I returned to ponies when I was 27. I can't help it really every time i see one i want it. I love them my boyfriend likes them because they make me happy. My Dad rolls his eyes when they're mentioned but doesn't say anything negative anymore I told him we're going to UK Ponycon in September too he rolled his eyes and chuckled but he never said anything.
Ponies cheer me up, i can hold them, brush them when i'm stressed it's win win oh and I can make them look pretty again if they're baits 

[Lightning Twirl]

To put a long story short and sweet, I have always wanted to have a huge collection of something to possibly pass down. Something awesome to reflect my hard work and personality! I love the G4 show and late last year after 2 years watching the show I bought my first pony and yeah lolol you guys understand how it went from there! I love all these cute little colorful faces staring at me!  They honestly keep me busy and happy Whats really inspiring is looking at everyone else's herd and pony rooms! Id really love to have a pony room! As a collector and the kid inside I am proud of what I have! Im thrilled about the Equestria Girls dolls, I cant wait to start collecting those too!  Im very happy with ponies, I honestly feel like its a second childhood to me, the one I have always dreamed of having! So many new friends and memories have been made. I wanna keep that going!

[Tap Dancer]

I was only 4 when My Little Pony was introduced in 1982. I'm sure it was love at first sight. I wasn't a Barbie girl; I grew up a MLP girl!

[balletpot]

I grew up with G1s. A couple of years ago I spent a lot of time on the humour site 9gag and they had a lot of nostalgic posts for those young in the '90s, captioned with "'90s kids will know". I started thinking, well what about the '80s? I intended to make an '80s post on my own and started googling for pictures, when I came to MLP I got sidetracked. I spent most of my time on ponylandpress because it's quite user friendly in that you can scroll through pictures of ponies and find out their names and when they were released easily - key word here is pictures . This also led me to check out eBay, "OMG you can buy ponies?!" I also found out about the arena and the trading post and realised people actually collected them. Before I knew it I had dug out all of my childhood ponies and I had six ponies on the way that I had bought - eBay, Etsy and the trading post. That was almost two years ago. For me it's mainly a nostalgic thing but I also like the G1s I never saw when I was little, either because they weren't sold in my area or they were released after I had stopped playing with them, which should be around 1988 when I was 9.

[Sarah-Bee]

I also grew up with G1 and after I left College I had this terrifying feeling about having to grow up so while I had to grow up in some areas of my life I made certain I didn't have to do so all together by starting to collect the toys I loved as a child

[Lightninglover]

I grew up collecting MLP, I only stopped age 11 because Hasbro stopped making them! I kept my childhood ponies & then 2001 I found a magazine article on a UK collector. That inspired me to dig out my collection & it then snowballed from there! 12 years later, I have about 750 ponies & I'm still friends with that UK collector that first got me started

[moonflower]

I had G1 ponies as a kid which I 'grew out of' and then sold them.
I've always loved the 80's and fascinated by vintage toys. Me and my hubby were at a toy and memorabilia fair in 2005 when I spied a Peachy on one guys stall and pointed her out to my hubby and said "I used to have some my little ponies". The guy said I could have her for a pound but I politely refused and quickly moved on. When I got back home I did a google search for "my little pony" and was fascinated by all the different types and characters that I didn't know about - after all, my interest in ponies had ended in about 1987/8. People collected them and there were whole websites dedicated to cataloging everything MLP. There were twinkle eyes, big brothers, so softs, sweetheart sisters...nirvanas and oddities. And you could buy them off ebay.

The first pony I bought was Whizzer as she was one of the ponies which was so new to me. She was closely followed by a few lots and my childhood ponies.

[Stormrave]

I loved ponies as a child and had more than a hundred.  When I became a teenager my mom started pressuring me to stop buying toys.  I remember being kind of jealous of kids I baby sat for having ponies like Pony Bride (I know she's common, but she's so pretty!), Sweetheart Sisters, and other ponies that came out after I'd stopped getting toys as gifts.

Then I went to university and military service.  Suddenly no parents breathing down my neck and my own income.  I bought toys.   G2 Ponies!  I remember getting Sky Shimmer at the Base Canex!  I also bought Transformers and Gargoyles at that time in my life.  I wasn't yet buying or trading on the internet.

...I actually don't remember when I first came to the Arena.  I'd picked up a few ponies at yard sales, but wasn't thinking about them regularly.  Maybe it was because my mom wanted me to get rid of the stuff in her attic...I decided to sell most of my pony accessories.  But then I used the money I made to buy more ponies.  All the ponies I secretly wanted when I was a teenager.

So, my G1 collection is now:  139 of my original ponies, comprising most of Years 1-5 and a handful of 6, and 164 ponies bought in my adult life, mostly Years 6-10 and also any ponies from the first five years that I'd given away to other kids.

I also have G2, G3 and G4.

[HorsingAround]

I also grew up with the G1s.  In 1983 I got my first ponies, the brown My Pretty Pony and a FF Blue belle.   MLP were some of my favorite toys along with Snugglebums, Moon Dreamers, Lady Lovely Locks, Keypers, Wuzzles, Popples and Sylvanians.  Throughout the 80s I acquired probably about 100 MLP.  I would frequently get them as gifts as I've always loved horses.  I ended up outgrowing them and moved on to collecting Breyers.  Then I kind of just grew away from collecting in general. 

Fast forward many years - I saw my niece had some of the newer My Little Ponies (G3s and G4s).  I ended up talking to her about the ones I grew up with.  The conversation made me feel nostalgic and really miss my old toys.  It made me remember the sheer excitement of picking out and deboxing a brand new pony that I had been saving up my allowance for.   Then playing with them for hours on end, alone or with my friends. 

Soon after the visit with my niece, I called up my mom and asked her if I could get my old childhood toys (I thought she was still storing them for me).  She told me that she no longer had any of them, that she had either sold them at yard sales or given them away over the years.  I remember my heart kind of sank a little.   Which seems silly I know, after all, these are toys that I hadn't given much thought to years and years.  Nonetheless, I was really sad.

Last year my husband (who now REALLY regrets encouraging me ) suggested that maybe I try to recollect some of my old childhood ponies...

Now here we are 200+ ponies later. Hey, what can I say, I don't like to do anything half way.

[katrine2309]

Like soo many others on here, I found my old G1s when doing a massive clean-out of old boxes in well, I guess 2006 (since I found the Arena in that period and I joined in 2006!). When me and my sister found MLP we had forgot many of the names, and what kind of accessories that belonged to each pony and started to do an internet search. We found Dream Valley, and the Arena when we wanted to clean them up. After that, my sister bought mommy Glory for my birthday as I really wanted my baby ponies to have mommies when I was a kid. I think it was partly a joke, but it got us both to consider buying the ponies we always wanted as kids. So it kind of took off from there. I think I ended up buying 10 ponies to "complete" my childhood collection, and then of course we both started with backcards and puffies as I always loved the art on the backcards as I kid, but mom made us throw them away after a while. As it was "only the packaging and we couldn't keep everything". She really rolled her eyes at us when she realized that we at age 25 and 28 started to buy back the old "packaging". I think she was shocked that it was even possible! hehe

[Sandi]

I have always been a fan of MLP and had ponies as a child. I wanted to start collect when I was about 14-15 (2006-2007) but I was too ashamed of it to start. I didn't have enough money either.

I started collecting for real in the beginning of 2011. It was FiM that made me interested again. When I had seen the first episode I started to look for ponies on Swedish ebay and bought a small G1 lot consisting of Peachy, Pony Bride, Skydancer, Sundance and Baby Tiddly Winks. Now, 2 and a half year later, I have about 450 ponies, of all generations.

[cleverLC]

For me it was FiM.  I wanted Twilight Sparkle and Rainbow Dash...and then I started remembering my childhood G1s...and now, I have a nice happy G1 and G4 pony family.