Tux & Tails Mint in Clearance Package
UK, post-1994
(Image from Babydoll)

Mint in Box Variant Princess Amber
Box from the US release, symbol incomplete, accessories mixed, tail a different colour.
(Image taken at Ponycon)

The end of the line in the UK did not automatically mean ponies stopped being sold over here. Stores often had excess stock, and this continued to be available in pockets around the country for some time after 1994. I found a Bed and Crib Set in box in ToysRUs in around 2000, which is the latest year I've heard of a G1 item still being on a store shelf. A lot of Hasbro's own reserve stock ended up at a store in London, from which we obtained several ponies between 1996 and 1998. Some little stores even still had stock - my sister and her friend picked up Rollerskates and Great Hair Ponies in a tiny toy store in Aberystwyth at some point around 1996.

The majority of ponies found in the UK after 1994, however, came at carboot sales, market stalls, and other second hand outlets. In the time immediately after the end of production, My Little Pony toys saturated the second hand market. Most ranged from around 20p to £1 in price, and it was possible to pick up new ponies more or less every week - sometimes you could find as many as 20 in one go.

The Internet and Beyond

The online Pony Community began in around 1996, with My Little Pony Trading Post and the Dream Valley ID site. From a time when taking a photo meant actually getting it developed (or putting a pony directly in a scanner), and when paying ebay fees involved sending $USD in cash across the atlantic, the last thirty years have witnessed a huge amount of change in how collecting goes on.

When I joined in 1997-8, the Trading Post was still just an advertisment board, and most of the community discussion happened on the pony newsgroups, Ponypeople and Dream Valley mailing lists. Most ebay auctions did not have pictures; most traders had to guess at what they were getting if a name was not included. The internet was littered with mythical ponies, rumoured variations, and a lot of contradictory information about what was sold where.

By the turn of the milennium, however, the Trading Post had become a fully functional forum and trading hub. This screen capture from the wayback captures one of its later iterations from 2003 - although the original page was in black and pink.

A second pony forum, the My Little Pony Arena, also began in the early 2000s, and these two forums formed the backbone of the community for more than a decade.

Art has always been a strong factor in My Little Pony fandom, and adoptables and small graphics also appeared on people's websites. The Pony Name Registry was a place where people could record their individual 'online handles', to prevent someone else using it - many people used actual pony names back then, hence why mine is Taffeta.

These days, most G1 sites are centred around collecting and information, but back then, there were many sites dedicated not just to collections, but extensive fanfiction, and other creative media. A fan newsletter, My Little Pony Monthly, containing material contributed by various collectors, ran from 1997 until around 2006.

The Ring of Rainbows, begun and hosted by Dream Valley, connected fansite to fansite. Sites ranged from ID information and restoration/care to art, fanfiction, and more.

Early internet pony sites were usually basic coded free sites uploaded on hosts like Tripod or Angelfire, with ads aplenty. Many predated the existence of pretty stylesheets and CSS coding. Tables and garish backgrounds were the order of the day.


In around 2000 or 2001, the My Little Pony Community designated August 2nd "International Pony Day." As the below screengrab from my old site demonstrates, this was shared around websites and often involved online activities. This trend has long since died out, but the date was determined by a community vote. August 2nd was chosen because, in American dating, it is written as 8/2, and My Little Pony began in America in 1982.

(As has been mentioned elsewhere on this website, Hasbro marked the tenth anniversary of My Little Pony in 1992 - the idea that My Little Pony actually began in 1983 is a more modern, if anachronistic, assertion).

Most of this side of the community has been lost in technology upgrades and real life changes. But this does not change the fact that the original My Little Pony fandom was as much caught up in character and imagination as it was collecting. For this reason, I have tried to include pony characters and concepts on individual pages, as well as facts and dates, as a nod to that element of our past.

Despite the technological challenges that faced the original pony community, it flourished through the late 1990s. By the turn of the millennium, it had become more diverse, and today, it spans the whole globe. More new collectors of Generation One join the online community each month, proving that the appeal is still there.

The original My Little Pony ended in 1995, but its spirit has lived on, both through later iterations, and through the collecting fandom. In 2018, Basic Fun, under licence from Hasbro, began producing replicas of some of the early, popular characters. Though originally a three year project, the retro reproduction releases were still continuing into 2024, indicating their success. In 2023, Basic Fun produced the Celestial Ponies, still under license from Hasbro, releasing the first 'new' Generation 1 ponies in almost three decades.

Behind the scenes of that release was an intensive campaign and petition from older generation fans, to bring this unproduced design to life. In 2024, plush versions of Medley, Applejack and Twilight - characters never made into plushes in the eighties - were also put on sale. At time of writing, Basic Fun have released four 'Totally Rad' reinterpretations of existing G1 ponies, as well as an exclusive in conjunction with the Stranger Things Netflix drama series.

Generation 1-themed merchandise also continues to be sold extensively in stores all over the world.

Despite the challenges faced over the last thirty years since the end of the line, it's clear that Generation 1 is here to stay.