Merchandising Fail

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Tis the season and all of that, and no blog of mine on the subject is complete without a gratuitous link to my Amazon.com wishlist and a semi-serious plead for you to buy me stuff. Now that that’s out of the way, I’ve always had an uneasy relationship with this time of year, coming from a family without any Christians that still went through the gift-giving ritual most commonly associated with Christmas in this culture. The whole gifting thing, along with the hilarious “War on Christmas” gobbledygook thrown out there by the right-wing, and peppermint mocha everything, almost makes the coming sub-freezing temperatures and icy roadways worth the hassle. Almost. Still, I can’t rid myself of that child-like delight at the thought of presents, even if nowadays it’s tempered by me giving presents when I can.

Although my tastes have evolved over time, this used to be a time of new toys for me, as I’m sure it is for most children whose parents have the money to afford to put lots under the tree. In my early years I craved knickknacks and such, but then I began asking for more media, CDs and books and DVDs and video games and the like. For the past few holiday seasons and birthdays I’ve even cut out video games and DVDs since I don’t really have the time for them any longer (my pile of DVDs I’ve bought/been given but haven’t watched is absurdly huge), but now that My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic has four hooves firmly planted in my heart, of course I want show-related merchandise. Unfortunately, what is out there now, at least officially, kind of stinks, and in the seven or so months I’ve identified as a pegasister/brony I’ve found little to encourage me that this will improve soon.

The great irony here is that My Little Pony basically evolved from one of the less talked about, but still profound, decisions pushed through by Ronald Reagan. Before Reagan took office, companies weren’t allowed to create cartoons just to push toys; there had to be another purpose. This was one of those “burdensome regulations” that Reagan and his ilk felt had to be undone to allow capitalism to prosper or what have you. The end result was a flurry of really bad cartoons that were pushed on us children of the eighties in an attempt to get us to whine at our parents to buy us the latest toys at the toy store; I regret that I did this to my parents a lot back in the day, although I was more of a Transformers fan in the eighties. I know kids were bad about needling their parents to buy them new toys long before the Reagan presidency, but there’s no doubt in my mind, from having lived through that age, that this was another Reagan deregulation that just made things a whole lot worse for everyone.

In fact, the latest incarnation of My Little Pony is basically the culmination of toy companies sticking their greedy fists into media; a couple of years ago Hasbro bought a stake in the Discovery Kids channel and rebranded it as The Hub, removing a lot of the educational programming in favor of cartoons to push Hasbro’s lines of toys like Strawberry Shortcake, Pound Puppies, and My Little Pony. Looking at it from the outside, this is the sort of thing that I probably would have been appalled by if I’d known of it when it happened; I’ve paid so little attention to television these past few years that an awful lot slips by me in that field of media. Had I known of this back in the day, it’s possible that I might not have even given My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic a fair chance, even with a steady stream of my friends and online acquaintances raving about the show.

I’m glad that I saw the show outside of that lens first, though, because it not only enabled me to see just how incredibly well-written the show is, but it also led to me joining the pegasister/brony fanbase and seeing all the amazing artwork — songs, videos, drawings, animation, everything you can imagine — being produced, as well as the incredible force for good the show has become. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic has done something many of us thought impossible: It has made love and tolerance cool. That is enough of a feat that I am more than willing to overlook the show’s corporate underpinnings, because the show is such a positive force on the balance.

That leads to the big question of this holiday season, though: Why, for a show that is so successful and has such a huge fanbase, that comes from one of the top toy manufacturers in the world, are the merchandise offerings so paltry?

I realize that Hasbro has a huge difficulty in trying to market a show that was originally aimed for pre-teen girls but has managed to attract a fanbase that shatters all known demographics. That said, the PVC figures I’ve seen in stores look so little like the ponies on the show that I can’t bring myself to buy any of them. Worse yet are the “baby” versions of Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash, which look so atrocious as to be laughable. Unless Hasbro had extra pony toys from previous My Little Pony generations that they needed to offload by giving them a quick paint job, I can’t believe any self-respecting toy company would put them out on the market.

Plushies of the ponies should be a no-brainer; “stuffed animals” transcend generations, and the young girls who are the show’s original targeted audience are the most receptive to them. The only commercially-available plushies I’ve seen are the tiny ones they sell at Target, and again, they don’t look much like the original versions on the cartoon. (I understand there are slightly larger Hasbro plushies available at Walmart, but you all know how I feel about Walmart.)  The fanbase, crafty as it is, has made a number of good plushies that look a lot more like the cartoon ponies, but the demand for them is  exponentially larger than the supply available, so they’re too expensive for most bronies and prgasisters, including me.

Even more inexplicably, in the two back-to-school seasons since the show first aired I have not found a single My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic two-pocket folder or notebook, to name just two of the most common of school supplies. Again, the show’s (original) target demographic should make these items  a given for Hasbro to produce, and with the expanded demographic the show’s gathered I should think that Hasbro could practically print money by putting these things out on the market.

The fanbase has stepped up and produced a lot of high-quality merchandise — the fan-made fighting game being produced now looks a lot better than the official Farmville-style game that just came out last month (I can barely play it for how buggy it is, to say nothing of how ludicrous some of the game’s requirements are; I may do a whole separate blog on the problems with that game over the holidays), and there are lots of wonderful t-shirts and such out there thanks to all the bronies and pegasisters working to fill the void created by Hasbro’s own inaction. For all the difficulties posed by a toy company producing a hit cartoon, one of the benefits is supposed to be that the toy company will put out a lot of readily-available merchandise to capitalize on the show’s success. Why Hasbro’s own offerings have been so paltry, and so ill-conceived, is beyond me. I hope I have a greater variety of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic toys to look for next year, because Hasbro’s offerings so far have been, to be blunt, disappointing.

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