In the 80s and 90s, My Little Pony had a special promotion going with Chuck E. Cheese restaurants. One of your prize options was… a special My Little Pony with the Chuck E. Cheese logo symbol on her rump exclusive to Chuck E. Cheese locations. (Symbols are what cutie marks used to be called, youngster. )

She’s a pretty collectible G1 pony because of her rarity but I think she’s unusual for another reason. She’s the one and only MLP to ever have a corporate logo on her rump!

Doesn’t everyone like a little pony with their pizza?

Oh, Petite Ponies!

My littlest ponies!

You’re this little, but I love you this big!

Your world is this little, but I love it this big!

Petite Ponies were plastic ponies of an inch high, some of which had brushable hair. Their bases had a horseshoe pattern that allowed you to activate their playset features. You can find a complete record of every Petite Pony and Petite Pony playset ever released in The My Little Pony G1 Collector’s Inventory.

I couldn’t find the original commercial with an English dub but the visuals are the same in this one:

I loved Petite Ponies. The Prancing Pretty Carousel was my favorite because it was more like a whole theme park. I especially liked the Petites as a kid because they were smaller and easier to get out without having to drag out all the full sized pony playsets. That said, I could never get into Dream Beauties.

Did you have any Petite Ponies in your collection?

The Original 2003 Pinkie Pie
[photo credit MyLittleWiki

I’ve been wanting to do a series like this for a long time so a big thanks to trviamaven for teeing me up with last week’s trivia question. Now if only we can sneak them all in as trivia columns, I might actually get to do the whole series.

Pinkie Pie debuted first debuted in 2003 as part of the Glitter Celebration Set. She was actually in both the first and second set of Glitter Celebration ponies in two different poses, an early example of the overexposure that would eventually make her infamous with collectors.

See, Hasbro has long insisted that pink ponies sell better than ponies of any other color and Pinkie Pie soon became one of the most hated characters ever as the market was flooded with version after version of this same pony in a variety of poses and styles. Even many of the collector exclusive ponies during the early years of G3 were just special versions of Pinkie Pie. The situation only got worse when she was named one of the Core 7.

For collectors who were used to a wide variety of ponies, colors and symbols, the glut of Pinkie Pies lead to collectors getting sick of her, begging Hasbro to turn their attention to new ponies or, at least, different ponies. But while collectors may have had mixed feelings, Hasbro embraced her fully making her the unofficial face of the new wave of ponies that began in 2003 and continues into today.

Pinkie Pie was also the very first pony made into a walkaround character.

In 2010, Pinkie Pie joined the cast of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. Though there was talk of changing her into a pegasus (as they did with fellow 2003 release, Rainbow Dash) they ultimately left her as an earth pony. As the show brought her to a whole new audience of children and bronies, Pinkie Pie has enjoyed new found popularity with her new bubbly personality.

Has the new show finally redeemed this MLP black horse? Only time will tell.

But with Friendship is Magic borrowing so heavily from the first generation of MLP, I had to take a look back to see if maybe there was a proto-Pinkie Pie hidden somewhere in a past generation. Let’s see… pink hair, pink body and balloons… Might her distant ancestor be Twice as Fancy Up, Up and Away released between 1986-87? Her balloons are green and yellow instead of blue and yellow but the similarities are there.

How do you feel about Pinkie Pie? Do you still harbor some ill will or has she wormed her way into your heart?

Princess Twinkle Star

The second generation was different in a lot of ways but none more obvious then when it came to pegasus ponies. In addition to the fact that this was the first generation where some unicorns also had wings, the pegasus ponies of the second generation could… remove their wings entirely! As Princess Twinkle Star on the right shows, their wings were removeable and clipped either onto the pony’s back or in your hair.

Once you had a pair of G2 wings, this let you make any G2 pony into a pegasus… just like that! Pretty nifty, huh?

One thing I find strange, though, is that… of all the pony conventions and meet-ups I’ve been to over the years, I can’t ever remember seeing someone wearing a pair of G2 wings in their hair. See how cute it would look?

Why isn’t this fashion trend sweeping the collecting community? Have you ever rocked this look? Pictures are absolutely welcome!

PS: I know that G1 Flutter Ponies wings come out but since they aren’t supposed to be removed, they don’t count as being removable.

Here me out. I’ve been a pony fan for a long time. I have never seen this absolute creative frenzy of custom figures and plush like we’re seeing now. It’s like the fact that the toys look so different from the television show kicked the art form of pony customization onto a whole new level and everyone has kicked it up a notch. The market for customs has exploded because fans want things that look like what they see on their TV (or YouTube) and they just aren’t finding that in stores. The really exciting part about this is that… while it may have started with FiM, it’s effected the custom world as a whole and given us some amazing creations that have nothing whatsoever to do with the new show. It’s like we’re in an MLP renaissance for artists whose chosen medium is pony and I would just hate to lose that.

Obviously, Hasbro can never make enough toys from the FiM show or make the characters look enough like they do on the show to kill the custom market completely (especially since it’s thrived for years before it occurred to anyone that friendship might indeed be magic) but I do wonder what effect these new toys will have on this burgeoning custom boom.

What do you think?

The name Bettina Bush may not be immediately familiar to you but she’s an actress, singer and, most importantly for our purposes, was the voice of Megan in My Little Pony and Friends (1986). But what you might not know was that she was also the voice of another 80s icon… Rainbow Brite!

Image via Wikipedia

Bettina’s also had roles on Rugrats and has done a ton of familiar commercials and video games so I recommend taking a quick pop over to her official website at Bettina Bush.com and listening to all the vocal clips. She’s also a singer with several albums to her credit that you can sample and purchase from her website.

Not bad for a girl that used to hang out in Dream Valley!

The following guest post is a bit longer than our usual articles but it’s well worth the read. A big thank you to Rando for this great guest column! -Hillary

Image via Wikipedia

The 1980’s – From Muscles and Missiles to Pink Ponies

I can’t be sure how many of you remember the 80’s. Some would say I have no claim to the 80’s – but I was born in 1981. That means I was alive for most of it, but those memories of mine are of childhood. Still, this means I experienced the decade much differently than any teenager or adult and this is where the story begins.

Let’s get the gender issue out of the way. I’m a male, I have always been a male, and I have never felt otherwise. Growing up, I played with Hot Wheels, G.I. Joes and He-Man. I helped my dad hammer nails and build things. I played in the mud, broke things to find out how they worked, caught bugs, and probably touched more gross things than I ever should have. Now, none of these acts should particularly be called boy/male activity, but for all intents and purposes of this article, the general public considers them so – which means, in turn, my 80’s childhood was typically ‘boy’.

Enter our neighbors: three girls around the same age as myself (3, 4, and 6). These girls had a castle with rising pink towers capped with baby blue turrets. It had pastel colored horses with colorful manes. I these ponies from television. Just like Thundercats, G.I. Joe or He-man – these little ponies had their own slice of 30 minutes on television, and yes… I watched it.

Why not? I had nothing better to do and our TV didn’t have a remote, so while getting my fix of the Joes or He-man, My Little Pony would be somewhere in the mix.

Re-watching these episodes now, they are a bit (very) crude today (G1 Pony fans are screaming at me for that one) – and well, let’s face it, the show was typically 80’s. The little ponies saved Dream Valley from an assortment of typical 80s baddies, and in the end it all worked out with some messages of friendship thrown in.

Maybe it was the fact that they had a show, or maybe it was that these bright colored ponies were more punk rock then I could ever imagine (not that I knew anything about subculture movements age of four) but whenever I went to the neighbor’s house, we played My Little Ponies in that big old dream castle of theirs.

Photo copyright Summer Hayes

No – I didn’t comb their hair, or braid their tails, and I can’t to this day tell you why they intrigued me so much back then. Perhaps it was because they smelled like fruit loops and showed me a hint into the world of girls. A strange world I never had at my house (I had a brother and my friends were boys) and a world so different than the guns, swords, muscles and missiles I’d grown so accustomed to playing with at my house, that it was mind opening, and slightly bizarre.

Granted, I also knew these were indeed ‘girl’ toys. If I had asked for them for my birthday, my progressive parents probably would have got me one (probably hoping ‘it was just a phase’), but regardless, at that age it never crossed my mind to ask.

As I grew up, mostly obsessed with video games, girls, and the outdoors – My Little Pony faded into the back of my mind for quite some time. Ten or eleven years later – they came back into my life and never went away.

Into the 90’s

Photo copyright Summer Hayes

When I was 16, I was pretty typical. At the same time, I also had become quite comfortable with who I was. Straight, white and 16 – but I wasn’t afraid to step into those styles and worlds of what might be called ‘girly’. I wore hot pink Chuck Taylor’s (back then I had to buy size 13 white Converse and dye them hot pink because the brand was neither popular or relevant to offer such a shoe), and in the fashion of what MIGHT be called improv – I started a skirt day my senior year of high school where the guys (and girls joining them) jokingly all wore skirts to school (you’d be surprised how many guys joined in for this, and surprisingly the tradition carried over to the next year after I had graduated). I even let my girlfriend at the time paint my nails hot pink. Let’s say I wasn’t afraid of messing with gender roles at an age where everyone is completely awkward and confused about them. Perhaps it was my height (I was 6’3, still am) and broad shoulders that gave me justification to wear hot pink in this sort of world (Oh, I got it plenty bad with some kids) but what it came down to was that I wasn’t afraid to like what I liked and to be who I wanted to be.

However, I had also gotten back into 80s culture. I had uncovered a heap load of my old He-Man stuff, and so I began the get back into the decade of excess. Back then, we didn’t have youtube as a source to watch our memories play across the internet – but we did have ebay.

And I bought plenty of 80s crap.

The real part of the story begins in 1997. My girlfriend at the time had a ton of My Little Ponies from her childhood. Bringing them out of the storage box brought back a lot of memories. It was part of the 1980’s I hadn’t touched since I was a kid – not because I didn’t want to, but because I didn’t think of it. Somewhere in the dark dusty recesses of my mind, ponies were prancing around – but now they finally trotted back into the light again.

As I filtered through the bin of ponies, I noticed the sheer amount of accessories. These ponies had different sets and types, they had stories and names. It was a collectors dream – and I also liked the color pink.

Then I went on ebay. Together, with my High School sweetheart we bought a small lot of G1 ponies for a fairly low price. Of course a few G2 and non-Hasbro ponies made their way into that mix, but it was still pretty neat.

We spent hours cleaning up that batch of ponies. We were in High School. We grew up in a place where winter lasted 8 months. There wasn’t a lot to do (though that would be my excuse, I would have done it anyways). And so the collecting took root.

via MyLittleWiki

G3 and the Early 2000s

As life moved on, after the eventually break-up, I did get away with some ponies for my own. As I went off to college, these ponies followed, being displayed with my other 80’s collectables. Then I noticed something. Visiting friends always mentioned the ponies.

Mind you, this was a time when the only people who remembered MLP were those children of the 80s and their parents who raised them. The My Little Pony fan base was obscure and exclusively on the internet across a few websites and a dozen message boards. It had been ages since anyone had glimpsed the television show unless they went out of their way to find it.

So for these guests, friends and family entering my apartment, seeing these old little ponies the first time since their childhood, had turned those few ponies into a major talking point.

And I won’t lie – the girls I invited over liked them the most. I’m not going to say I was sleazy about it, I mean, I didn’t walk a woman into my apartment with the intention of showing them ‘my ponies’ – but being a 6’3 guy with a huge head of hair and a loud personality, well, the brightly colored ponies probably did help break the ice a little.

Regardless of what they did for my love life, I loved those ponies for what they were.

Then I received a gift one day. A G3 pony. A friend had seen my old G1 ponies and had picked up a Kimono G3 pony as sort of a joke. I was pretty impressed – here Hasbro had forsaken that awkward G2 design and gone back to a nearly original pony design, streamlined and nicely executed all around.

I was 19 now, almost 20. The G3 ponies rolled in as gifts, I began taking trips to Target and Toys R’ Us. I can’t say why I went out to summate my collection. Perhaps that, even though I was comfortable with my gender, my sex, and all angles of male-hood, these ponies brought me somewhere safe, different, colorful, bright, and let me tap into a side of life that was just a tad girlish.

I need to emphasize this now: the My Little Pony fan base was not huge. There was no such thing as a Brony, there was no witty/cool/hip show to go along with it. There were no onslaughts of internet memes. I was the only male I ever found (in real life AND on the internet) who collected My Little Ponies. I seemed to be alone.

So did it all happen as a retreat away from the standard societal male gender roles I was forced to instill in many places in life? Maybe My Little Ponies were just cute and colorful (doesn’t our life need cute, bright, and colorful?), but throughout my late teens and early 20s, from my first years in college to my first years in the real career world, those ponies followed, and all my friends knew about them. Over the years I would receive MLP birthday cards, toys, and everything else in the mail or on Christmas from even the most distant friends. Was it okay for a 19 year old guy to like these? I never thought otherwise.

As the G3 line grew (and so did my collection – both of G1s from ebay and G3s) friends came and went in my life. Some thought me strange, some thought me ironically hip – but everyone still enjoyed the fact that when they stepped into this guy’s apartment (now 21) he had a fairly large collection of ponies.

Image via Wikipedia

The FiM Renaissance

One day, something strange happened. I went on the internet and I saw ponies everywhere. They were different from those 80’s ponies. Digitally drawn/animated – differently designed. I had been out of the pony loop for a few years. I had begun work in the film industry and my time was fully consumed. Finally leaving the world of production to focus on my writing in 2010, I found myself looking at these new my Little Pony toy line releases.

I can say they didn’t vibe with me at first.

It seemed ponies were everywhere – and how? Where was I when this happened? What was going on? What bizarre world did I venture into? There was a new show. What was the hub? Not just that, but the male fan base was huge! These questions needed to be answered. I felt lost, and suddenly the world loved ponies – I had put my head under a rock for a while and suddenly there were male pony fans everywhere… and they have a name: Bronies. “I was a Brony first!” I cried out to my collection, my dog cocking his head curiously at me, looking at me like I was crazy.

It took a few months to accept this new world we were living in. Maybe I was bitter I hadn’t kept up on the world of ponies, or now I just sounded like a hipster: “I liked ponies before they were cool.”

I did eventually watch the show and I did realize how charming it was. Lauren Faust’s My Little Pony makes fun of itself, teases at the cheesiness of the 80’s, but at the same time, embraces it, makes it important, delivers a good story, with good morals, and at the same time, offers a level of creative humor that is rarely seen in both children or adult television shows. Now I understood – there was an excuse for a male to like MLP now. Why? Because the show is legit – but regardless, I know for many bronies there’s still the ability to escape their forced gender role for a small sliver of time and enter the world of Equestria where it’s okay to be whoever you want to be (there’s a chunk of cheese for you) but on the other hand, My Little Pony has also become a bit more diverse.

Male ponies may not be any of the major players, but they exist in large quantities unlike those old shows where there wasn’t a single male pony mentioned. Well, I mean, the G1 series did have a collection of male ponies, but they were just a tad Village People. There may also be the aspect of ‘ironically hip’ for some of these bronies and current pony fans. Plenty of males in their late 20s, early 30s remember watching Sailor Moon when it came to the states – and there was a lot of ironic, hipster love for that show too… even though it is insanely incomparable (don’t think I’m comparing shows here). I suppose what I am trying to get across is this: FiM doesn’t take itself too seriously, and perhaps the fan base realizes that, and this makes it easier for the male to play off his love for a ‘girls’ thing.

Image via Wikipedia

The Gender Identity

And I would hope our society is a bit more accepting of ‘boys who like girl stuff’ these days. Fulfilling your ‘proper’ gender role as deemed by society is ridiculous anyway. If you’re a real man, you’ll know that being a man isn’t to like beer and football (besides, just as many women like that stuff anyways) or knowing how to fix a car, or being a macho meathead. All those things are perfectly fine (like what you like) – but being a man takes so much more in terms of maturity, morality, humanity, and emotion. It’s about knowing how to stand up for your loved ones without being the typical ‘tough guy’ and its about the accountability of your actions.

But I’m not here to write about what it takes to be a man. I’m here to write about brightly colored ponies.

The first impression I give off to many is that I’m a typical male who wouldn’t have anything to with something like My Little Ponies. As I said before, I’m 6’3, have a broad frame, and now I sport a shaved head and goatee. As far as hobbies, I work on cars, I shoot guns, I love beer and hockey, hiking, camping, SCUBA diving and the outdoors, I ride horses – I like Thai kickboxing. Some of these are typically associated with males (even though hobbies and likes should NOT be associated with a certain sex) and I have a bunch of other hobbies that might make the outsider perceive me as a man’s man – and yet here I am with a collection and love for My Little Ponies. So can I say that I am proof that you don’t need to be a certain type of male to like a little pony? Maybe.

But alas, I still hear males going on about how they are nervous to venture down those bright pink aisles in the toy department (those aisles which were such a foreign and forbidden land in their childhoods). They are scared to walk past the dolls and pick up that Applejack pony they’ve been wanting. Let me tell you fellow bronies: there’s no shame in it. Embrace who you are. I have done so since 1985 and it’s brought me nothing but good things.

Image via Wikipedia

Hasbro has a bit of a dilemma on their hands. Obviously, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic on The Hub is a runaway hit and a big part of that success was the fact that episodes were so easy for anyone to watch online on sites like YouTube. Originally, Hasbro’s stance seemed to be that they didn’t care that episodes were being streamed on the web… they only cared about sales of the toys itself. But once they started selling individual episodes on iTunes the situation got a little more complicated.

Having worked with a variety of toy companies, let me just take a second to tell you that Hasbro is AMAZING to their fans. If you knew how often other toy companies were suing the heck out of their fans for the slightest things, you’d have a renewed appreciation for just how fantastic and fan friendly Hasbro is with their properties. They let us all happily run amuck with their characters when it comes to fan art, fiction, customs, websites and more.

But the streaming video issues is more complex. It’s hard to fault them for wanting to profit on their own content… they have every right to! But they don’t want to give up the ease of viewing that got them this huge fan base in the first place.

You can make the case that fans are just being lazy when they complain that they need the episodes streaming, especially when legal downloads of the show are just a quick visit to iTunes away. I can’t help but feel like a proper DVD release of each season would go a long way to help this situation and I believe that’s on the radar… eventually.

But the question a lot of people are asking, and rightly so, is why doesn’t Hasbro just stream the episodes themselves? Either directly through a partnership with YouTube or on The Hub website, they should be able to run advertising on the streaming videos and still profit off the content… without limiting its availability. Is the issue with this the advertising itself? Is it because they wouldn’t know what sort of ads to run, ie would they target parents and little girls who are the target demographic or us adult fans? It’s left a lot of people wondering why they aren’t doing this and I can only assume it’s because of a very good reason… that we just haven’t thought of yet!

What do you think is the biggest problem with Hasbro doing their own MLP: FiM ad supported streaming? How do you think Hasbro should handle this situation?

Related articles

• My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic finally coming to DVD with The Friendship Express (mylittleponycollecting.com)

CNN: ‘My Little Pony’ Goes Geek

The good news is that MightyFine is having another My Little Pony T-shirt contest and the prizes are huge! Lots of money to be won and the pot gets bigger the more people enter so start designing!

Now for the bad news… it seems like this contest is for Bronies and Friendship is Magic fans only. Both of the judges are from Brony and Friendship is Magic fan sites. Couple this with the fact that they still haven’t added adult sizes for their Retro My Little Pony shirt and this doesn’t mean great things for vintage MLP fans. While they don’t specifically prohibit submitting vintage MLP designs, how can they possibly win if the judges are only fans of the new stuff?

I love the new show as much as anypony but I’m a little mystified why they’re excluding the original fandom in such a big way like this. As someone who loves ponies new and old, I want to celebrate all of ponydom, not just the new stuff. I know this is a case of the squeaky wheel getting the grease because Friendship is Magic is getting a ton of press but I’m starting to get a little annoyed that it’s become an either/or thing. If MightyFine isn’t willing to make retro merchandise, can’t they at least sell that license to a company that is? It feels like squatting.

You can be a fan of both Friendship is Magic and the original MLP content. Or you can just be a fan of Friendship is Magic or just a fan of the vintage stuff. There is no “right” or “wrong” way to be an MLP fan. One isn’t better than the other, it’s just different. The fans “taking sides” is annoying enough but to have the companies holding the license to make merchandise taking sides seems like a new level of slight.

I don’t want this to deter anyone from submitting designs to the contest because I still want there to be awesome FiM designs out there and I want one of you to win that nice big prize. I just wish people weren’t trying to make this a fandom Civil War.

What do you guys think?

But I really wanted to call your attention to it because of this awesome Where’s Waldo of hard to find MLP toys from throughout the generations they used.

(Click it to make it bigger to study in greater detail.) There’s even a fairy tale bird and some pony friends in there! Not to mention ponies from all three generations.

What other cool pony finds can you spot in this crazy collage?

• Could My Little Pony Be Raising the Next Generation of Geeks? Feature from GeekDad in Wired
• Welcome to Pony Brook University: Article about bronies gathering together to watch the premiere of FiM and doing super cool chalk drawings of the characters around campus
• To Love and Tolerate From a high school paper
• Meet ‘bronies’ — grown men who are fans of My Little Pony Feature in The Oregonian on the increasing interest in the show

The Invasion of the Lesbian My Little Ponies

This article is very “I don’t like your tone buddy!” but it’s worth a read anyway. You can read the original article here and then there is a follow up with a few corrections here.

The coverage of all this FiM/Brony movement is bothering me in was I can’t explain and this article is a part of it. I can’t quite put my finger on what about it is rubbing me the wrong way. Is it me or are you also feeling a weird vibe from the media on this?

The Hub has embraced Bronies in it’s marketing, and hopefully other executives are taking note. They key to a successful children’s program isn’t churning out increasingly stereotyped shows in which girls pretend to be princesses and frolic with woodland creatures while boys fight and play with cars (or fight with robots that turn into cars). Men aren’t allergic to everything aimed at women, and with interesting characters and plots (and a dose of ’80s nostalgia) people of all ages, and genders, are likely to become fans.

If you weren’t at the convention, I compiled all the info from that presentation (plus some more) into an eBook called Beyond Amazon, eBay, and Etsy: free and low cost alternative marketplaces, shopping cart solutions and e-commerce storefronts. It is only 99 cents so if you missed the talk or just didn’t feel like taking notes while you were there, it’s an inexpensive way to catch up.

Happy pony selling!

Check out their overview here and thank you to EcommerceBytes for the shout out!

However, a recent niche pop-cultural fascination represents a potential evolution in this schism: the unexpected unisex popularity of the children’s television show My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, specifically the cult of “bronies,” or adult male Pony fanboys. It’s hard to think of something that screams “for young girls” more than the big-eyed, Lisa Frank-colored ponies that fascinated young girls in the ’80s, yet adult male fans are embracing this revival as a paragon of the “neo-sincerity” movement. Friendship Is Magic and bronies certainly inspire confusion and even mockery from the general population, but their genesis in and acceptance by stereotypically judgmental online forums like 4Chan suggests a potential for “girly” entertainment to be folded into the same warm embrace “nerd culture” has enjoyed in recent years.

Or maybe it’s just an unrelated anomaly, the ouroborus of online irony circling back on itself. Frankly, I’m not sure what it means yet, especially since My Little Pony has its own nostalgic baggage for women today. But I hope it points toward an increasingly tolerant view of sincere, enthusiastic, irony-free enjoyment of youth culture and nostalgia, and that the teenage Justin Bieber fans of today will be able to squeal along to his 2025 comeback concert, free of shame or scorn.

Please give your answer in the high brow style of the article Really? “the ouroborus of online irony circling back on itself”? Sheesh!

If the offer button is there, go ahead and offer the price you are willing to pay for the item. If the seller likes it, boom!, the item is yours and you just named your price. If the seller doesn’t like the price you offer they will either reject or counter-offer. You, then, have the option to either counter-offer to their counter-offer or just make another offer. You only get a total of three offers on any single item so just make sure you remember how many you’ve done. Once you run out of offers, your only option is to buy the item at full price.

It’s remarkably like haggling at a flea market or garage sale.

Some quick tips for Best Offer success:

• The closer the offer you make is to the listed price, the better your chances are of it being accepted. You’ll have a better chance with an offer of $7 on a $10 item then if you make an offer of $0.01.
• If you are making offers on multiple items from the same seller, mention that in your offer note. Sellers will often take a slightly lower offer if they know they’ll be saving on shipping and fees with a multi-purchase sale.
• Don’t be a jerk. This is a big one. Speaking as someone who sells, if I get a snippy note that says something like, “WTF is wrong with you, this item isn’t worth that. You should take my $1 and be happy with it!” I’m not going to look very favoriably on their offer, even if it’s one I would have normally accepted. You’d turn on the charm when haggling in person, the same applies online.

Want to test out your new eBay negotitating skills? Priced Nostalgia *just* happens to have over 115 Best Offer enabled My Little Pony items up on eBay right now with more coming through out the summer. Check them out here to start making offers.

*= or, like me, they are just tremendously lazy and just price everything at the same price because it’s faster

The Official My Little Pony Convention is this July 8th and 9th in Pawtucket, Rhode Island at the Hasbro Headquarters.

First let me tackle a few misconceptions

• There will be men there. There have always been men at the MLP convention (I’ve been to several of them over the years). Some are MLP fans (yes, they existed well before FiM, they’ve just been quiet) and some are our husbands, boyfriends, etc. But, in the past, it was always about 30 to 40% men. I’m sure it will be more this year. Traditionally there are men only contests (with sweet prizes) so I imagine that will be the case this year as well.
• There will be love for Friendship is Magic AND the older stuff. I don’t know a single MLP collector that isn’t also a fan of the new show. Just keep in mind that there are many more years of older stuff so it’s inevitable that there will be more of that stuff around for sale. (Just FYI, to collectors Friendship is Magic toys are still part of the third generation (G3) so don’t panic if you don’t see the words G4 bandied about outside of brony circles. There will still be the current toys there.)
• The collectors and the Bronies don’t hate each other! This is not a thing. Most of us consider ourselves Bronies/Fillies. Just because we started earlier doesn’t mean we’re all in a blood feud. We’re grown people who love magic ponies. We’re not exactly violent. But seriously, everyone is welcome. Love and rainbows, y’all.

I’m not part of the organization of the fair so I can’t speak to how geared towards FiM the majority of the events are but, this year, the fair is two days. If you’re a fan of MLP I highly recommend checking out the first day (ie, the day of the Hasbro tour) even if you don’t think the second day (which is more of the collecting related events) is for you. Speaking as a fan of toys in general, getting to see how they make the toys (and last time they let us see how they make other things such as Transformers and a few other brands) and the headquarters (which is something to see) is really a once in a lifetime chance. When the convention was last in RI a few years ago, we also got to see some prototype toys that were coming to market soon and the process behind how they created them, previews of the new animated specials that were coming out (keep in mind that this was pre-FiM so I wouldn’t be surprised if they had clips of next season to show this time), and they unveiled some new stuff coming to market.

Let me put it this way: My husband doesn’t care one bit about MLP and even he thought the Hasbro tour was one of the coolest things he’s ever seen. So, in short, if you are into toys at all but especially if you are into My Little Pony I don’t think you can go wrong with trying to get into that.

There will probably not really be a chance to suggest new products. You can try, I suppose, but that’s not really the vibe.

As for the second day, it’s is going to mostly be like this: People will be chilling at their booths and chatting ponies. Almost everyone will have stuff for sale. Yes, much of it will be old but some will be new. Events will be going on and, at least based on prior years, some people will pay attention to them and others will ignore them completely and keep on doing their thing. Think of it like a brony meet-up where money occasionally changes hands or random things happen in the background. It will be very chill and laid back. If you wanted to just sit in a corner and ignore us all I suppose you could do that though it would be kind of sad.

Don’t make me remind you that friendship is, after all, magic!

If this doesn’t sound like your scene, well then it’s probably not for you. However, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that one of the big things going on will be trading which can sometimes be a great way to snag something you really want (say a hard to find blind bag item) by trading another item for it instead of paying cash. It’s a magical world where ponies are currency so if your little sister has some older G3s she doesn’t want anymore and you could, say, trade them for the Friendship is Magic McDonalds ponies without spending a dime, wouldn’t that be sweet?

Anyway, in short, I hope this gives you some idea of what to expect and lets you make an educated decision about whether its for you. I for one am totally behind on FiM and am cram watching them all so I can be caught up by the convention and chat with you all. Stupid day jobs!

If anyone reading this has been to an MLP convention in the past and wants to chime in, please do. Or if you have questions post them below and I’ll see if I can get the Fair organizer (who is named Summer Hayes and is a lovely lady) to answer them.

My Little Masculine Pony – Opinion by Kara Tsukashima