1986 in the UK

By 1986, both the UK comic and the My Little Pony Club were in full swing, and Hasbro had acquired control of MB Games. This MB influence is particularly visible on packaging and production of ponies in Spain, some of which have very unique moulds not seen in the main line. Among the more standard releases, many Spanish, French and German language cards bore artistic resemblance to some of the art styles used in the UK, but with modifications as they constructed their own sets according to local demand.

Untangling the muddle of 1986 in Europe is difficult to do, largely because different things were going on at different times. For the most part, this section will focus on sets released on English language cards and include ponies made in Hong Kong (or China, as the China stamp began to appear in 1986).

Meanwhile, in North America, ponies were just going on as usual. In fact,1986 in North America is pretty much the only market that made sense.

In Europe, there were a tangle of releases, some of which overlapped with the UK and some of which did not. Most mainstream ID sites and resources have bypassed these releases, or glossed them into an amalgam with ponies available in the UK. This oversight means that much of what Hasbro was trying to do in 1986 has been lost - but this section attempts to reconstruct at least some of those releases in their proper places.

1986 was chaos. This section, I hope, will not be - as I try to disentangle what exactly was going on in this busy and prominent pony year.

Take a deep breath and get ready for the madness to come.