My name's Conspiracy. Not heard of me? That's not really surprising. I
keep a low profile. The ponies who need me know where to find me. The
people who I don't want to find me... well they don't. I like it that way.
Among some circles, I call myself an academic. That'd be for the Princess Pony set... royalty tends to get uncomfortable with the gritty truth. Majesty's an exception of course. She calls me Ponyland's Investigator and usually laughs when she says it. But it's a good laugh, a genuine laugh. Not a laugh to humour me. Not a laugh that says "I'm going to indulge you in your little game." As Applejack would say, applesauce to that. Majesty laughs because she knows that Investigator isn't really an appropriate title for what I do. Investigators tend to find proof. Still, it's the best we've got.
The truth is out there. Maybe one day I'll find it. Until then, I can't offer you facts and evidence, but I have got theories. Yeah, it's all conjecture. I'm not saying you have to believe me. Laugh it off, if you want-I'm used to that. But maybe you'll stop and think a little. Maybe you know something I don't. Where I went wrong... where I missed something... or just another piece in an incomplete puzzle.
**********
It's ironic. Now that pony collectors around the world are working together, the divide of nationalities has pretty much broken down. American release ponies, European, Brazilian... they can all rub shoulders on your shelf. And yet, the fact that not all ponies were released internationally has never mattered so much. Perhaps it's true what they say, ignorance is bliss. Except Hasbro didn't keep you in the dark about everything.
This investigation started in the library at Dream Castle. I spend a lot of my free time down there. So does Paradise-she's into history. A good source, Paradise, if you need to know about the past. She has a habit of forgetting the most important bit when you need it, of course. Still, nobody's perfect.
Today, she was reading an issue of the My Little Pony comic and frowning. "I don't understand it!" she exclaimed suddenly. Paradise has a yen for dramatics. You get used to it.
"What?" I asked.
"This story..." She slid it over to me.
I scanned it quickly but couldn't see Paradise's problem. "I think you'll find that the pictures help."
"No, not the actual story. It's Surprise and Gusty."
"What about them?"
"This is the UK comic, right? Well, why do Surprise and Gusty appear when they weren't sold in the UK?"
I made no comment because I was interested. I know Paradise. She'll carry on talking if you don't interrupt her.
"These comics are full of ponies who were never sold in the UK. Pony feathers, Surprise appears on the front cover of the first fifty or so! Why? What's the point of telling all their readers about these ponies and letting them pick out Twilight, or Flutterbye or Baby Shady as their favourite-and then those ponies weren't available to buy!"
She was getting worked up now. I decided to step in. Her stream of consciousness needed a little navigation.
"A lot of the ponies in those comics were available in the UK-some were only available in the UK. And some ponies never appeared in the comics. Are you sure you've got your facts straight?" I know, it's harsh of me to needle her like that. But Paradise is concise when she's outraged.
"The early releases of the unicorns and pegasi-including babies-were not sold in the UK. And yet these ponies dominate the early issues of the My Little Pony comic."
Paradise was right; this didn't make sense. And that's all I need to be interested enough to dig deeper. "I'll look into it," I assured her.
I noticed one thing as I left the library. Surprise wasn't on the front cover of issue one. The pony sleeping beneath the rainbow looked like her, but it was an earth pony and had no symbol. Perhaps the makers had had doubts about using an American release pony as their covergirl after all. These doubts couldn't have lasted long: Surprise was unmistakably there on issue three. Still, Paradise's research had gaps in it.
It wasn't Surprise I went to see though. She's got too short an attention span to be reliable as a source of information. Has a fondness for practical jokes too. I didn't feel like wasting my time, so instead I looked up Gusty. Gusty's got her share of brains and is usually up for anything you can throw at her.
"Hey, I was sold in the UK," she told me. "Just not at the time this comic came out. I wasn't released with Sparkler, Powder and the others or with the So-Soft ponies. Those sets never made it across the water. Neither did Surprise."
"So what makes you so special?"
She shook her mane with a snort. "I got smoozed, didn't I? When the movie came out, My Little Pony fever reached a new peak. But most of the ponies in it were so-soft ponies who hadn't been sold in the UK. Baby Lickety- split was available, so was Fizzy. But Magic Star and the other main characters? Hasbro aren't dumb-they saw the marketing opportunity."
"The flutter ponies certainly made many Christmas lists that year," I agreed non-committally.
"They weren't the only spin-offs. Six Movie ponies were released so Hasbro could make a nice set of two unicorns, two pegasi and two earth ponies out of the most prominent so-soft ponies in the film-and I was the first to get smoozed so I got included. We lost the so-soft bit though."
"You got in under the wire then."
"Hey, don't think I was the only one. I mean, look at Confetti. She should have lost out when Hasbro decided not to sell the second set of Rainbow ponies in the UK. Instead she showed up as the Wedding Pony for the Brits."
"She's an Earth pony."
"So is Trickles and she didn't get in. And what about Skydancer? Or Majesty? Those and a few other pegasi and unicorns were sold in England long before the Movie came out. Hasbro weren't missing marketing opportunities there, either-hey! Where are you going?"
I turned briefly: "To pick some flowers."
Cotton Candy does my numbers. She comes cheap... as long as Blossom never notices that she has less flowers after I've walked around her garden. From Cotton Candy, I found out that when the comic was released, it ignored the original 6 ponies but took its characters from the next two releases of earth ponies, unicorns and pegasi, the two sets of rainbow ponies, the UK set of sea ponies, the playset ponies, and the first set of baby ponies. That added up to 48 ponies.
By then I'd done my research. Only the earth ponies, the first set of rainbow ponies, the sea ponies, the playset ponies and the earth baby ponies had been available for the UK readers to buy. That was 26 ponies, or just over half of the ponies in the comic. Bad odds if you wanted to buy your favourite pony.
Cotton Candy left me with one more thing to think about. The USA was a much bigger market than the UK. Putting the energy into producing a wide variety of ponies there would pay off. The UK would only buy a fraction of the ponies that the Americans would. Maybe Hasbro had decided to make some subtractions for the UK market. Better to spend their energies promoting 26 (or, counting the original set, 30) ponies than half a hundred.
I had my ideas about where I was going next. But as it was, something came up. A little birdie (Sky, the kingfisher, to be precise) told me that an informant wished to meet me behind the nursery.
When I got there, there was nobody to be seen, so I addressed the porch swing, which was piled high with blankets: "You've got something on unicorns and pegasi not being released in the UK?"
The voice that emerged was childish and female. Not really a surprise, seeing as an adult pony couldn't have fit in there. Even so, I was relieved. It could have been Majesty's pet dragon, Spike. He's often wanted to help me out, but he's unreliable-too excitable and prone to exaggeration. I needed the truth.
"And I s'pose you think that's a bad thing?" the voice asked, a touch sulkily.
I don't make judgments. I rarely have facts. So I use theories. And a theory that's influenced by personal feelings isn't likely to work. Still, sometimes a bit of opinion can get a pony to tell you why you're wrong. "Seems like a raw deal for the UK, yeah."
"Well, just remember that if Firefly and Glory and the rest had been sold here, some of us would never have been made."
"Example?"
"Who were the first baby ponies in the US?"
"Ember was the first." I paused for a moment, and guessing about my mystery informant, added: "Then Hasbro must have decided baby ponies would be more appealing if each baby had a mother to buy as well. It's the cuteness factor." A simple marketing ploy: got the mother? Then you have to get her daughter. And vice versa.
My guess had paid off. She sounded flattered now. "Exactly."
"But this wouldn't have worked in the UK, would it?" I continued slowly. "Firefly, Surprise, Moondancer and Glory hadn't been sold. Which would have left them with a set of just two baby ponies. Baby Cotton Candy and Baby Blossom."
The blankets were pushed aside, and she stood up, swaying gently in the swing.
"So they made me," said Baby Applejack.
I went on my way then. I was looking for some of the ponies who had been in the So-soft release-one in particular. My luck was in: I found Wind Whistler with a bunch of others in the meadow. Wind Whistler's more than objective: this pony lives for facts. She's not long on imagination, but if you think you've missed something, she's the pony to go to.
It's been said that Wind Whistler is more like a machine than a flesh and blood pony. If so, her fuel is information. I filled her in on my findings, and she agreed with Baby Applejack's story. "Three would be the minimum requirement for a set. A trio had functioned competently with the sea ponies. Presumably it would have also been adequate for the babies."
"So why Majesty and Skydancer? And the other unicorns and pegasi sold?"
Her brows lowered, but only for a moment. "The appeal of the castle to the juvenile females that My Little Pony was aimed at would have been immense. All of the playsets would have been profitable for Hasbro. So Sprinkles and Majesty were worth releasing-and as the monarch of Ponyland, it was appropriate for Majesty to be special. As they experimented with alternative ponies, Cascade was eventually produced with the waterfall, but that was a year after Sprinkles became an anomaly: the only pegasus in Ponyland."
"And the rainbow ponies needed a set of six. As with the baby ponies, two would not have been enough," I guessed.
"Indubitably. My Little Pony was flourishing. Hasbro could be reasonably certain that they could market a release of six ponies. The UK commonly received a full complement of six ponies per set afterwards."
I nodded. The pieces all fit together. Wind Whistler, as usual, had filled in the gaps.
"So what's your theory, Conspiracy?" Magic Star half-challenged.
"The rainbow ponies acted as a breakthrough," I said slowly. I'd had my own breakthrough now, and the ponies grazing nearby stopped to listen. "Hasbro were still playing it safe with the numbers of new ponies they were releasing in the UK. But unicorns and pegasi had been introduced to Ponyland. The first babies were only earth ponies so that people could buy mother and daughter-this was where they started branching out into UK alternates. But it's nearly always easier to go with the original American releases. Of the next baby set, only Baby Lickety-split was an earth pony."
"What happened to the mother-daughter thing?" Ribbon asked. She hadn't been sold in the UK, although her daughter had been in that second baby set.
"Baby Tiddly-winks had been released. There was no adult Tiddly-winks, yet the baby's popularity was assured by the Lullabye Nursery that she was sold with. Since she didn't need a mother, why should future babies? Baby Ember and Baby Lucky had also done well, for all they were only mail orders."
"And the so-soft ponies?" Cupcake wondered.
"Too many of them. I'll get Cotton Candy to work out a total someday. Hasbro'd had practice by then at producing alternative ponies for the European market. In place of the so-softs, they came up with a set of 4 alternates: Gypsy, Honeycomb, Hopscotch and Snowflake. Only once the movie was released, did they produce a few of the American ponies in the UK."
Paradise was there too, and now I turned to her, shaking my head wryly. "But that still doesn't explain why ponies not released in the UK were featured in the UK comic. I would suggest that either the first stories were written before Hasbro had decided not to sell unicorns and pegasi or they didn't want Sprinkles and Majesty to stand out."
"Oh!" Paradise exclaimed. "I forgot to tell you. After you'd gone, I found copies of the UK stories in Dutch and German, from countries where more of those ponies were sold. Perhaps the stories were written with the intention of eventually publishing them throughout Europe."
I sighed. The necessary information always seems to come too late when you work with Paradise. Still, the investigation had proved fruitful.
Oh, I agree that it's all circumstantial evidence. But the theory works for me.
Among some circles, I call myself an academic. That'd be for the Princess Pony set... royalty tends to get uncomfortable with the gritty truth. Majesty's an exception of course. She calls me Ponyland's Investigator and usually laughs when she says it. But it's a good laugh, a genuine laugh. Not a laugh to humour me. Not a laugh that says "I'm going to indulge you in your little game." As Applejack would say, applesauce to that. Majesty laughs because she knows that Investigator isn't really an appropriate title for what I do. Investigators tend to find proof. Still, it's the best we've got.
The truth is out there. Maybe one day I'll find it. Until then, I can't offer you facts and evidence, but I have got theories. Yeah, it's all conjecture. I'm not saying you have to believe me. Laugh it off, if you want-I'm used to that. But maybe you'll stop and think a little. Maybe you know something I don't. Where I went wrong... where I missed something... or just another piece in an incomplete puzzle.
**********
It's ironic. Now that pony collectors around the world are working together, the divide of nationalities has pretty much broken down. American release ponies, European, Brazilian... they can all rub shoulders on your shelf. And yet, the fact that not all ponies were released internationally has never mattered so much. Perhaps it's true what they say, ignorance is bliss. Except Hasbro didn't keep you in the dark about everything.
This investigation started in the library at Dream Castle. I spend a lot of my free time down there. So does Paradise-she's into history. A good source, Paradise, if you need to know about the past. She has a habit of forgetting the most important bit when you need it, of course. Still, nobody's perfect.
Today, she was reading an issue of the My Little Pony comic and frowning. "I don't understand it!" she exclaimed suddenly. Paradise has a yen for dramatics. You get used to it.
"What?" I asked.
"This story..." She slid it over to me.
I scanned it quickly but couldn't see Paradise's problem. "I think you'll find that the pictures help."
"No, not the actual story. It's Surprise and Gusty."
"What about them?"
"This is the UK comic, right? Well, why do Surprise and Gusty appear when they weren't sold in the UK?"
I made no comment because I was interested. I know Paradise. She'll carry on talking if you don't interrupt her.
"These comics are full of ponies who were never sold in the UK. Pony feathers, Surprise appears on the front cover of the first fifty or so! Why? What's the point of telling all their readers about these ponies and letting them pick out Twilight, or Flutterbye or Baby Shady as their favourite-and then those ponies weren't available to buy!"
She was getting worked up now. I decided to step in. Her stream of consciousness needed a little navigation.
"A lot of the ponies in those comics were available in the UK-some were only available in the UK. And some ponies never appeared in the comics. Are you sure you've got your facts straight?" I know, it's harsh of me to needle her like that. But Paradise is concise when she's outraged.
"The early releases of the unicorns and pegasi-including babies-were not sold in the UK. And yet these ponies dominate the early issues of the My Little Pony comic."
Paradise was right; this didn't make sense. And that's all I need to be interested enough to dig deeper. "I'll look into it," I assured her.
I noticed one thing as I left the library. Surprise wasn't on the front cover of issue one. The pony sleeping beneath the rainbow looked like her, but it was an earth pony and had no symbol. Perhaps the makers had had doubts about using an American release pony as their covergirl after all. These doubts couldn't have lasted long: Surprise was unmistakably there on issue three. Still, Paradise's research had gaps in it.
It wasn't Surprise I went to see though. She's got too short an attention span to be reliable as a source of information. Has a fondness for practical jokes too. I didn't feel like wasting my time, so instead I looked up Gusty. Gusty's got her share of brains and is usually up for anything you can throw at her.
"Hey, I was sold in the UK," she told me. "Just not at the time this comic came out. I wasn't released with Sparkler, Powder and the others or with the So-Soft ponies. Those sets never made it across the water. Neither did Surprise."
"So what makes you so special?"
She shook her mane with a snort. "I got smoozed, didn't I? When the movie came out, My Little Pony fever reached a new peak. But most of the ponies in it were so-soft ponies who hadn't been sold in the UK. Baby Lickety- split was available, so was Fizzy. But Magic Star and the other main characters? Hasbro aren't dumb-they saw the marketing opportunity."
"The flutter ponies certainly made many Christmas lists that year," I agreed non-committally.
"They weren't the only spin-offs. Six Movie ponies were released so Hasbro could make a nice set of two unicorns, two pegasi and two earth ponies out of the most prominent so-soft ponies in the film-and I was the first to get smoozed so I got included. We lost the so-soft bit though."
"You got in under the wire then."
"Hey, don't think I was the only one. I mean, look at Confetti. She should have lost out when Hasbro decided not to sell the second set of Rainbow ponies in the UK. Instead she showed up as the Wedding Pony for the Brits."
"She's an Earth pony."
"So is Trickles and she didn't get in. And what about Skydancer? Or Majesty? Those and a few other pegasi and unicorns were sold in England long before the Movie came out. Hasbro weren't missing marketing opportunities there, either-hey! Where are you going?"
I turned briefly: "To pick some flowers."
Cotton Candy does my numbers. She comes cheap... as long as Blossom never notices that she has less flowers after I've walked around her garden. From Cotton Candy, I found out that when the comic was released, it ignored the original 6 ponies but took its characters from the next two releases of earth ponies, unicorns and pegasi, the two sets of rainbow ponies, the UK set of sea ponies, the playset ponies, and the first set of baby ponies. That added up to 48 ponies.
By then I'd done my research. Only the earth ponies, the first set of rainbow ponies, the sea ponies, the playset ponies and the earth baby ponies had been available for the UK readers to buy. That was 26 ponies, or just over half of the ponies in the comic. Bad odds if you wanted to buy your favourite pony.
Cotton Candy left me with one more thing to think about. The USA was a much bigger market than the UK. Putting the energy into producing a wide variety of ponies there would pay off. The UK would only buy a fraction of the ponies that the Americans would. Maybe Hasbro had decided to make some subtractions for the UK market. Better to spend their energies promoting 26 (or, counting the original set, 30) ponies than half a hundred.
I had my ideas about where I was going next. But as it was, something came up. A little birdie (Sky, the kingfisher, to be precise) told me that an informant wished to meet me behind the nursery.
When I got there, there was nobody to be seen, so I addressed the porch swing, which was piled high with blankets: "You've got something on unicorns and pegasi not being released in the UK?"
The voice that emerged was childish and female. Not really a surprise, seeing as an adult pony couldn't have fit in there. Even so, I was relieved. It could have been Majesty's pet dragon, Spike. He's often wanted to help me out, but he's unreliable-too excitable and prone to exaggeration. I needed the truth.
"And I s'pose you think that's a bad thing?" the voice asked, a touch sulkily.
I don't make judgments. I rarely have facts. So I use theories. And a theory that's influenced by personal feelings isn't likely to work. Still, sometimes a bit of opinion can get a pony to tell you why you're wrong. "Seems like a raw deal for the UK, yeah."
"Well, just remember that if Firefly and Glory and the rest had been sold here, some of us would never have been made."
"Example?"
"Who were the first baby ponies in the US?"
"Ember was the first." I paused for a moment, and guessing about my mystery informant, added: "Then Hasbro must have decided baby ponies would be more appealing if each baby had a mother to buy as well. It's the cuteness factor." A simple marketing ploy: got the mother? Then you have to get her daughter. And vice versa.
My guess had paid off. She sounded flattered now. "Exactly."
"But this wouldn't have worked in the UK, would it?" I continued slowly. "Firefly, Surprise, Moondancer and Glory hadn't been sold. Which would have left them with a set of just two baby ponies. Baby Cotton Candy and Baby Blossom."
The blankets were pushed aside, and she stood up, swaying gently in the swing.
"So they made me," said Baby Applejack.
I went on my way then. I was looking for some of the ponies who had been in the So-soft release-one in particular. My luck was in: I found Wind Whistler with a bunch of others in the meadow. Wind Whistler's more than objective: this pony lives for facts. She's not long on imagination, but if you think you've missed something, she's the pony to go to.
It's been said that Wind Whistler is more like a machine than a flesh and blood pony. If so, her fuel is information. I filled her in on my findings, and she agreed with Baby Applejack's story. "Three would be the minimum requirement for a set. A trio had functioned competently with the sea ponies. Presumably it would have also been adequate for the babies."
"So why Majesty and Skydancer? And the other unicorns and pegasi sold?"
Her brows lowered, but only for a moment. "The appeal of the castle to the juvenile females that My Little Pony was aimed at would have been immense. All of the playsets would have been profitable for Hasbro. So Sprinkles and Majesty were worth releasing-and as the monarch of Ponyland, it was appropriate for Majesty to be special. As they experimented with alternative ponies, Cascade was eventually produced with the waterfall, but that was a year after Sprinkles became an anomaly: the only pegasus in Ponyland."
"And the rainbow ponies needed a set of six. As with the baby ponies, two would not have been enough," I guessed.
"Indubitably. My Little Pony was flourishing. Hasbro could be reasonably certain that they could market a release of six ponies. The UK commonly received a full complement of six ponies per set afterwards."
I nodded. The pieces all fit together. Wind Whistler, as usual, had filled in the gaps.
"So what's your theory, Conspiracy?" Magic Star half-challenged.
"The rainbow ponies acted as a breakthrough," I said slowly. I'd had my own breakthrough now, and the ponies grazing nearby stopped to listen. "Hasbro were still playing it safe with the numbers of new ponies they were releasing in the UK. But unicorns and pegasi had been introduced to Ponyland. The first babies were only earth ponies so that people could buy mother and daughter-this was where they started branching out into UK alternates. But it's nearly always easier to go with the original American releases. Of the next baby set, only Baby Lickety-split was an earth pony."
"What happened to the mother-daughter thing?" Ribbon asked. She hadn't been sold in the UK, although her daughter had been in that second baby set.
"Baby Tiddly-winks had been released. There was no adult Tiddly-winks, yet the baby's popularity was assured by the Lullabye Nursery that she was sold with. Since she didn't need a mother, why should future babies? Baby Ember and Baby Lucky had also done well, for all they were only mail orders."
"And the so-soft ponies?" Cupcake wondered.
"Too many of them. I'll get Cotton Candy to work out a total someday. Hasbro'd had practice by then at producing alternative ponies for the European market. In place of the so-softs, they came up with a set of 4 alternates: Gypsy, Honeycomb, Hopscotch and Snowflake. Only once the movie was released, did they produce a few of the American ponies in the UK."
Paradise was there too, and now I turned to her, shaking my head wryly. "But that still doesn't explain why ponies not released in the UK were featured in the UK comic. I would suggest that either the first stories were written before Hasbro had decided not to sell unicorns and pegasi or they didn't want Sprinkles and Majesty to stand out."
"Oh!" Paradise exclaimed. "I forgot to tell you. After you'd gone, I found copies of the UK stories in Dutch and German, from countries where more of those ponies were sold. Perhaps the stories were written with the intention of eventually publishing them throughout Europe."
I sighed. The necessary information always seems to come too late when you work with Paradise. Still, the investigation had proved fruitful.
Oh, I agree that it's all circumstantial evidence. But the theory works for me.