Hasbro Littlest Pet Shop Pets in the City Puttin' on the Glitz #24 Pony Hasbro, 2017
Day #1,746: July 13, 2017
#24 Pony Small horse, big hat
Littlest Pet Shop Pets in the City Puttin' on the Glitz Blind Bag Figure #24
Item No.: Asst. A8240 No. B4743 Manufacturer:Hasbro Includes:Pony, white crown bed, blue crown tiara hat Action Feature:Easily lost hat Retail:$2.99 Availability: ??? Other: Also available in pink
A line known for being expansive, the Littlest Pet Shop has run for years. Years. It's a 1992 franchise that continues to this very day, with its pastel Lisa Frank-esque creatures invading toy boxes and shelves, delighting small children with mail-in offers that are sometimes quite popular and are sometimes dumped en masse at 99 Cents Only stores. I've never actually seen one up close in my hands before, despite seeing a ton of them at work. Someone handed me a sack of free toys and this was in it - so I could look at it, or give it away, or both. Both is good.
This 1.5-inch pony has no name, but is numbered #24 on the flyer. My sample has a blue tiara, a large white crown bowl/bed thing, and but one joint. It's not fancy, but it's nicely painted and tiny.
There's a certain idealized look to this entire line with bulbous heads, giant eyes, and heads that if you squint could be another animal entirely. The face could pass for a bird given the colors, just sharpen the snout a bit and it could probably pass for a beak. There's a whimsical style that's certainly distinctive, which evolved out of more mundane kitties and birds from Kenner in the 1990s. According to Wikipedia there are thousands of these dang things, and according to conversations I've had with Hasbro the main drive is collecting itself. Kids don't want one or two, they want tons - and new, fresh product is what keeps kids buying. They won't collect them all, but seeing new product drives more buying - be it new or old stuff. This is a pattern we saw in Star Wars and Marvel too, but it was never stated explicitly to the public - Hasbro definitely had a plan to get new Star Wars in the hands of fans every month or two, but this fell by the wayside around 2009 or 2010. Littlest Pet Shop stumbled with the flow of new stuff and sales suffered - now we see more variety, and often.
The paint job is surprisingly good for a blind-bagged cheap toy. The front hooves have two colors of paint! The hair is white! The eyes are huge! Transformers blind bag toys are practically unpainted by comparison, and they certainly don't have accessories. Hasbro definitely favors this one in terms of paint applications and deco but the sample I got had some SKU info and a date stamp carved into the head. I don't assume this is a special case - Hasbro did this on a lot of its products in this century, and it's often in obvious and poor places. The body would be OK. The bottom would be great. The head? That's the worst place you could probably place such an eyesore.
The figure stands in the big crown with no problem, and stands freely on its own. The small tiara plugs in via a small peg. It's charming, I don't doubt that kids could want armies of these little animals populating their toy world. It works.
Since I needed to get a lot of toy reviews done because I'm crazy, I'd say this is a perfectly nice figure that I could see collecting were the format more suited to my tastes - this is why I like Bit Figs. This is a decent figure for the price, but I've got a lot of toys around - this one didn't make the cut. Along with so many unopened kid's meal toys and old shirts, it's off to the thrift store to hopefully delight a small child for a few cents. It's a nifty figure, but what am I going to do with it? Better rehome it and make someone else happy. I don't think I'll be looking at more of these down the road, but if anyone has some old Mattel C.U.T.I.E. be sure to send them my way.
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