Horses in the Wild 3
May 12, 2024.
Since the last entry to the MLP blog, quite a bit of time has passed. I have slowed down on collecting and photographing ponies for the most part, but admittedly I have been slacking on some of my photo backlog. I do also have quite a large collection that goes undocumented, largely "official" My Little Ponies. For now though, I will show off some pony toys I saw at retailers, namely Five Below.
The Five Belows near me carry "Pretty Ponies" as their resident fakies and have for a while, though they were not always the same ponies that one might find there today. The Pretty Ponies are variations on the same toy mold in various colors, rarely including a pony with a horn. There was an earlier incarnation of the Five Below "Pretty Ponies" with similar branding, but the toys included in those packages were quite different looking-- inspired by G3.5 My Little Ponies. The first time I saw the newer Pretty Ponies at the store was back in 2023, in another Horses in the Wild segment. Though I only have photos of the pony multipacks, there is also a box display with slots in it hat allows for customers to pick out an individual pony to take home, all of the ponies included in that box were of the smaller size.
These Pretty Ponies were photographed back in October, 2023. The packaging containing the first group of ponies uses unicorn clipart with characters loosely corresponding to the toys that are included in the box. The ponies are deep, vibrant shades of blue, green, and pink-- the pink pony being the largest. The second box has similarly generic branding on the package. The box reveals two ponies: a large pink pony, and a unicorn rendered in semi-translucent white(ish) plastic with gold glitter embedded in its body. Included alongside the two ponies is a third mystery character, a pony obscured behind cardboard where the plastic window cannot reveal it. Not sure what the final pony looks like. It was a bit awkward in the toy aisle, so I decided to move on, leaving the pony's appearance a mystery. This was the first instance I have seen of the pretty ponies using any sort of gimmick.
These ponies were seen in March, 2024 at Five Below. The ponies here are housed in a cardboard box with backing that resembles a rainbow. There is no plastic window on this box-- one could touch the ponies if they wished to inspect them further. Both color variations feature a large pony and two smaller ones, like the fully-enclosed pretty ponies did. These boxes tout "GO PLAY!" and "RMS" logos that were not as readily apparent on the other Pretty Ponies boxes. Though I have said it before, the appearances of the Pretty Ponies are unusual, as their gaping mouths unnerve, and their legs end in strangely oblate stumps.
The "One LOVE" unicorns were found at Daiso, a Japanese dollar store that usually has a nice toy section in April, 2024. These ponies are inspired by the G3.5 style of My Little Pony toys that have bulbous heads punctuated by a bizarre beak-shaped snout. They look pretty cute, if low quality, and are available in three different colors. If my memory serves, the comb packaged with the ponies is highly remniscent of the G3 My Little Pony Brush, which was a round brush with a ribbon or some other detail sculpted on the back. One Love seems to make a lot of plays in the pony toy world, as I have stumbled across their products looking for the origin of the Alicorn Babies, and there is a pony figurine on my backlog that also includes One Love branding.