Nice youtube review of all MLP series :)

[LadyMoondancer]

IMO if you ask the average non-collector, who was a little girl during the 80s, which ponies they had, wanted, or remembered, they will generally name off Year 2 ponies.   Year 4 and Year 5 were also popular of course, just not at the same level. 

I think this is also borne out by toy distribution.  I have picked up / seen people selling extras of Year 2 ponies more than ponies from any other year.  There are Year 4 and Year 5 ponies I've never found "in the wild", but I've found every single Year 2 pony in the wild.  Most of them multiple times. 

Whatever the case, Year 2 - Year 5 was the most popular "era" for MLP, and that was also the span from the pilot special to the end of MLP & Friends, so the guy claiming MLP hadn't yet tasted "massive success" was just wrong. 

(Sidenote, Dream Valley also claims Year 3 was a lull for MLP, which I disagree with;  I think it was more a case of kids gravitating towards the new Baby Pony sets at the expense of the other sets--making the babies easy to find secondhand and the other ponies a bit harder to find.  I have a lot of respect and nostalgia for Dream Valley, but at the end of the day the statements there aren't based on official statistics, it's just one person's opinions and observations.)

[Al-1701]

Year 2 was the when My Little Pony became My Little Pony as we know it.  The different poses, the different breeds, Rainbow Ponies being the first gimmick, etc.  And that was all before Rescue at Midnight Castle hit the airwaves.  It was just icing on the cake and probably greenlit because of the toys "massive success" going into the preceding holiday season.

Dream Valley might have been going on gross numbers.  There were almost double the number of ponies released in Year 4 as Year 2.  So, individual ponies from Year 2 might be more common, but there are more Year 4 ponies total.  I don't there is a way to test that theory, though.

Whatever, the case, I think he didn't realize the success of the toys were driving the show and not the other way around.  Something most people outside of the collector's community either don't understand or use to disparage the original series for being a massive toy ad (even though that's what FiM is as well).

[Lore-Lei]

If you were to compare the popularity of Year 2 to that of FiM at its peak, would it say it was bigger, smaller, or roughly the same?

[Al-1701]

I seem to remember a tidbit saying My Little Pony outsold Barbie at least one year during G1, and that was when Barbie was still the Death Star of girl's toys.

[Lore-Lei]

That's a force to be reckoned with. Definitely 'bigger' then.

[Dragonflitter]

Here's exactly what he says:

"With this first bunch [meaning the specials and MLP & Friends] you can sort of tell they haven't yet been effected by the massive success and overwhelming female fanbase, because they aren't afraid to have the ponies going on crazy adventures and fighting monsters."

Keyword: because.  BECAUSE MLP didn't yet have "a massive female fanbase", he says, the show had adventures and monsters.  Of course this is inaccurate in every possible way, including the fact that Year 2 was the pinnacle of popularity for MLP.  MLP was popular for a long time, but nothing ever quite matched the sheer hype of Year 2 (not even when the movie came out).

Yeah you're right, I missed that line the first time I watched it. :\ Strange because that directly contradicts what he says in the very beginning of the review.

Sometimes I wish in the 80's we had the ability to record things as much as we do today. If it was common back then to record yourself doing something as random as just walking through a toy store, I think there would be a lot less misinformation about the original toy line today.

[LadyMoondancer]

I actually have a theory about MLP & Friends . . . I think the main purpose wasn't so much to advertise MLP (although the fact that it did was a bonus), but more to use the already-popular MLP as a lure in order to get kids to watch Moondreamers, Potato Kids, and Glo Friends.

Because, really, Potato Head Kids or Glo Friends could NEVER have made it as a TV show on their own.  Moondreamers, maybe.  It had a more detailed mythos than "We're sentient potatos!".  But even with the MLP & Friends "assist", Moondreamers didn't end up being iconic.  Very nice toyline, but it was no MLP in terms of popularity.

(For those who don't know, every episode of MLP & Friends had two segments: a 15 minute MLP segment, and a 15 minute segment showing Moondreamers, Potato Head Kids, or Glo Friends.  The Potato Head Kids segments were terrible and make me die a little inside.)

[Al-1701]

I've always looked at the decision to make it My Little Pony 'n Friends because they wanted to hitch the wagons of these fringe brands to My Little Pony's rising star.

The first season of My Little Pony also didn't have as much of the "toy ad" moments since all the characters were there from the start and the movie fell on the sword of introducing Paradise Estate and replacing Dream Castle with it.  There didn't seem to be any "Episode X must involve Y doing Z to advertise W."  Watching the series, you would think Megan was sold with Wind Whistler rather than Sundance.

The second season was different with so many new sets coming out and only a handful of episodes.  Reaves was obviously told there had to be a Princess Pony episode focusing on their wands and six bushwoolies.

[lostpony]

This thread has been most informative to read.

As a young teenager during the time of G1, I wasn't even aware there was a show ...it certainly didn't come on the limited broadcast television at any times that I or anyone I knew watched in my rather backward rural area, and the ads made them seem pretty creepy....just being shown a happy tails ad the other day I see it wasn't the ponies themselves that creeped me out but the whole creepy little girls oogling over brushing the hair and such, not like any real people I've ever met...one thing I am certain of though, had it been more known how dark the storylines were I think a lot fewer parents would have been getting ponies for their daughters....at that time there was still a lot of gender role stuff going on.

I was also informed recently that the original creator intended for the ponies to be for all, not just girls, and was very upset it was targeted at girls only.  I am most pleased to find out that it was not all airy peaches and cream and that girls were given real cartoon plots with dark storylines and all that stuff....had something so popular been as the commercials were it might have set a whole generation of girls back quite a bit.  Oh the other hand, while boy cartoons like GI-Joe were plenty violent, for the most part I remember them being totally lame:   no one ever got hurt, the bad guys were never really a force to be reckoned with and good guys behaved plenty bad with very few if any good behavior lessons to be learned.  You could be as bad as you wanted to be, so long as you are defined as "the good guy" and in the US that seems to now be a prevailing national sentiment....actually behaving like "good guys" doesn't really seem to be thought about or popular, let alone required. 

So...guess now that I've blah-blahed I will go ahead and watch the video....

Oh Oky doky, Lokey:  serious bias.  The guy admits he merely skims through the earlier shows with statements like he "assumes" "G2" (Tales) has similar lessons about not littering as whatever boy cartoon he says he likes and then basically dismisses G3 because of the eyes which, um...no, I can't really figure out what his problem was with the G3 eyes (personally I find the G3 teeth kinda weird but I will still watch the show completely and not whine about the teeth when discussing the show's merits).  I am halfway through G1 and I love it so far, and I think the biggest difference I can see in this quick skim-through is that the next generations become pony versions of suburbia as opposed to a magic unconquered ponyland where adventures in cheating on homework (um, not the kind of cheating my roommate started laughing about when that came up in the video) replace evil villains trying to freeze ponyland.  Not a mention of the other times Ponyland was frozen?  (I wonder how many actual episodes this guy really watched), then he goes into a big rant about bronies and G4 which would certainly scare me away from the G4 scene if this was the first thing I had ever seen about it.  The way his voice squirms around when describing G4 stuff was....ok to reuse the same word I used waaay too many times already in one post, CREEPY.  I hope I never ever meet this guy; he makes my skin crawl.  That being said, he did at least make an effort to take a high altitude fly-by over the earlier generations which I guess is more than many are wiling to do, so I guess he gets a C+ for effort.

[LadyMoondancer]

The creator wasn't upset it was targeted at girls only, it just wasn't what she originally envisioned.  She pictured them as horse colored (not fantasy colored) preschool toys. 

[Al-1701]

She was working against the going attitude of Hasbro at the time which was "Make characters and a lot of them."  There was also this going belief that My Little Pony was going to flop and she was told she should get out before it dragged her down with her.  Unfortunately, she listened, and they were full of it.

[lostpony]

OK that's three different pony people telling me about the MLP creator and I don't know her name...where do I look to read up on this fascinating subject?  what's her name?

So many stories in retrospect about successful shows have a lot of expectation of failure!  So important to examine...

Thanks!

[Lore-Lei]

Her name is Bonnie Zacherle.

[LadyMoondancer]

There was also this going belief that My Little Pony was going to flop and she was told she should get out before it dragged her down with her.  Unfortunately, she listened, and they were full of it.

I don't think that's accurate at all.  She changed careers, but not because Hasbro told her MLP was going to flop.  Hasbro made MLP because My Pretty Pony had done so well with minimal advertising.    It's not like she was going to get extra money for every pony sold.  When a toy designer works for a big toy company, the company owns the rights to all their work, even intellectual work.  (This is why the Bratz designers were sued by Mattel;  Mattel claimed they had designed Bratz while they worked for Mattel.  Therefore, the idea and appearance legally belonged to Mattel--despite the fact that the designers did not work for Mattel when they were actually making the dolls.)

[Al-1701]

Then I misheard.  All I know is she left after the first year.

The thing is, what makes My Little Pony as we know it My Little Pony as we know it (the different poses, the different species, etc.) came after she left.  She provided a very basic germ of an idea, but we don't talk about the people who thought of adding new species based on horse myths or designed the more lively poses we saw in Year 2 and beyond.  Those are people I would love to pick the brain of too.