Hi everyone
I’m a zoomer here so I grew up with generation 3 and then generation 4 came out when I was a tween so I wasn’t around in the days of generation 1 or 2.
I currently do not own any g2 figures but just in research it seems like I never find any or I assume they’re so rare because the boxed ones are so expensive and some of the loose ones are pretty expensive.
Was generation 2 that popular in its time?
I also never see retros of remakes of the generation 2 style and I’ve grown fond of it they kinda look less like ponies and more like Arabian horses
I'm also a zoomer! Or perhaps a zilennial? I'm from 1997 anyway! G3 was my generation as a kid (which is why I love doing your commissions so much) and I have all my childhood ponies.
However, when my dad came home with a copy of G2's Friendship Gardens game for our PC, probably when I was about 5 (the game came out in 1999 but I was playing it in the early 2000s) I was absolutely obsessed with it. And I mean OBSESSED. Getting into trouble repeatedly for using the family printer to spew out hundreds of screenshots and colouring pages and art pages obsessed.
I thought the ponies in the game were SO pretty and elegant and even though I loved my G3s I couldn't understand why they were so different from this game, why there was no pony toy of Ivy or Light Heart, why A Very Minty Christmas was a totally different style to the ponies in my game. It was the number one mystery that deeply troubled 5 year old me.
Then one day, at a car boot sale with my grandparents, I found a small very shiny plastic pony that DID look like my beloved game - it had the long legs and cute round head and short snout and I recognised the colours and cutie mark. It was a McDonalds Sweet Berry (not even a 'real' G2 lol more like a figurine). But I was SO excited, I had a pony from my game, they did exist! Pretty sure that £1 McDonalds toy from a junk box at a car boot went on to be my prized posession for many years, I even remember being worried my G3s would be jealous of her because she was 'prettier' than them.
(not my photo but it was one of these)
Fast forward, I get older, childhood ponies get carefully stored for the future (thanks mum and dad they're still mint condition today because of this). I lose interest in ponies for a bit until G4, become a teenage pegasister, make a lot of G4 art while in school and college, cosplay Princess Luna, get embarassed for a while when bronies were at their most hated, fall back in love again with the release of the G5 movie, move into my own house with my partner - and that was when it happened.
Moving out I found my copy of Friendship Gardens and my very very VERY old laptop that can still run it. It brings up soooooo much nostalgia just from the blue disk with the pink pony on it. I play it for a few hours, I remember my McDonalds Sweet Berry - for some reason she's the only pony from my childhood that went MIA during my growing up so I can't find her. But I'm an adult now and I know about pony generations and how to google things, I find out there were proper toys made, and merch, and not just of those 5 ponies but lots! With accessories, and babies, and playsets. And I LOVE to collect toys with my adult job and adult money.
And yeah I got bitten by the G2 bug and despite not actually playing with the toys as a kid, they've become one of my biggest passions for a few reasons:
1. The pure nostalgia of it all and how much that game defined some of my best childhood moments (if you know the joys and wonderment of being a kid in the era of PC CD ROM games, you get it)
2. The fact G2 is definitely the 'underdog' generation, many pony fans don't even know it existed and Hasbro themself have ignored it almost entirely even during thr 40th anniversary stuff. And I kind of live for niche, obscure, highly specific things like that.
3. My interest in 'lost media' and media preservation - G2 is pretty much totally catalogued now but still bits of merch will appear that haven't ever been seen / documented on the wiki etc before. There were a few UK comics and a few more French ones but that's all we have in sense of lore and not many are archived online! The game is preserved with online emulator downloads and people like me who are lucky enough to have the original disk and technology that will play it. I'm so interested in trying to uncover all the pieces and help the other people in the community member who work like pony archaologists trying to archive everything.
4. The unending love affair with the art style. I loved it as a kid, something about it just spoke to me deeply. As an adult I have interests in animation history, as well as being a long term wearer of Lolita and kawaii Japanese fashion. Cartoon styles from as early as the 1930s are clear influences on the G2 style, and of course Disney's Bambi from the 40's, and it has a much more vintage look and feel than 1997 which I find really timeless and beautiful. Similarly, in the 1960s in the west, kitsch hyper cute animal illustrations were extremely popular, especially for children and babies with retro kitsch lambs and deer actually coming back into style now with coquette aesthetics. Interestingly, in 1960's Japan almost the EXACT same style became popularised as 'kawaii' with plastic cute deer and other animal ornaments becoming a huge home style trend. This has translated into today's Japanese Lolita fashion by having so many dresses with animal illustrations and motifs heavily inspired by 1960s kitsch and kawaii, and I love wearing these dresses and I'm obsessed with the art. So when I was reminded of G2's pastel 1930's-1960's wonderland it was like everything I love colliding at once. It's such an intersection of all my personal interests, or perhaps even subconsciously my love for this style as a child led me down the Lolita fashion path? At least in part? Who knows!
For example here are some circa 1960s illustrations:
It seems very clear to me that these influenced G2's style:
And then here's some fabric designs from Lolita brand Angelic Pretty:
I am just so obsessed with this kind of art and I think it's so cool to be able to find it's kind of a running theme throughout multiple different hobbies and interests I have! It feels like part of my own personal thing like my brand haha.
5. It's as old as I am, both being from 1997!
But like.......did that answer your question? Uhm, sorta
What that small essay about what G2 means to me is supposed to say is, in my opinion, G2 is very popular with the people that love it and I think it's intensely loved by that group, but overall it was and still is niche. I view the G2 community as the weird but cool kids who are super passionate about something kind of obscured by it's much more popular siblings.
By all accounts, it was pretty unpopular at its time due to people dislking the huge leap from G1, and I feel like if I was born in the 80's I probably would have been pretty mad too....like how people are with new pokemon. I think it was really underappreciated for it's art and for taking a risk, but the fact it was 'soft' discontinued in the US in 1999-2000 and formally discontinued worldwide in 2003 shows that it was NOT the phenomenon that G1 was.
Super interestingly, it was WAY more popular in Europe which is why the European G2 market has so many exclusives, as well as them just being more common here than the US, especially France and the Netherlands which is where most of mine come from.
G2 definitely wasn't popular then, but I feel like it's maybe gaining a little more popularity now? I joined this forum in 2022 and I definitely see more G2 discussion and appreciation and sales now than when I first joined, I thin while still super niche G2 is on a bit of an upswing. G2 art, photography and discussion is also steadily increasing on Tumblr and sales in the Facebook groups seem to be steadily increasing too. I feel like we're close to a very mind G2 renaissance, or that it may even hit peak popularity in the 2020s! At least we got two G2 images included for the 40th anniversary - though I wasn't expecting much G2 stuff I was a little disappointed that's all we got!
Your custom Minty looks great
@Moonbreeze!
Obviously as an 80s kid I saw the G2s and thought they did not look like proper ponies. I've never passed them up
if I find them in a thrift store, I just never find find them. If the price is right, I'll buy just about any MLP.
I think the G2s have some super cute accessories and have been buying some G2 lots recently. I want Sweet Berry and her kitchen. Her TAF style painting is super cute.
I do wonder if the blanks
@Grace Ruby and others have worked on getting produced will increase collecting interest (and prices) of G2s?
I really hope Project G2 Redo will increase interest in G2 ponies and encourage people to try making some cool customs! I do hope it doesn't affect the prices though, in fact part of the goal is to make the originals not become any rarer (aka not decrease the amount of original surviving G2 ponies through customisers - which I absolutely don't have an issue with people customising ponies - but if there's a few more originals left on the collector market AND new G2s especially for artists we all get the best of both worlds!)
Pricing a lot of G2 stuff is really tricky - merch moreso than ponies - because so much of it is so uncommon it doesn't really have a price history. I have NO idea if some of my merch pieces were bargains or extortion haha but they were all absolutely worth the price I paid to me!
I also think that G1, 2 and 3 are all benefitting from a sort of 'post brony economy' where the old, pastel, nostalgic and girly is back in style! I absolutely loved G4 and FIM but in fashion and culture we're having a pink, hyperfeminine, retro aesthetic revival as an empowering celebration of girlhood and along with classic Barbie aesthetics, vintage MLP is being lifted high by this trend too. Personally I love it, I love that I can find G1 merch in so many shops, buy Basic Fun and HQG1Cs, catch a G2 pony in someone's coquette tumblr collage. It's so great! What a time to be alive!
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