I think the Greek ponies were FAKIES!

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francyfair

Teeny Tiny Baby Pony
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Hello everyone :D

I just came back from a holiday in Greece and i talked to a shop owner there to see if the greek ponies were still available.
Anyways to cut a long story short, the ponies were fakies i believe!
They sell all kinds of "brand" toys in souvenir shops there like turtles, hello kitty, spiderman, whatever, and those toys are all fake too, the use the same molds as the real toys but they are made of cheap quality plastic and overall lesser quality than the real deal which would explain the softness of the pony bodies and the bleeding of their symbols.
I went into a real toystore there (similar to toys r us) and they had a lot of the original G3 ponies.
Talked to those shopowners too and they confirmed the souvenirshop ponies were fakies... :?

Doesn't mean i don't want to have one, i think they look really cute and i didn't find any there :cry:

I was just wondering what you ponies think of them being fake...?
Hope i didn't offend any proud greek pony owners coz that's not my intention at all!

Fran
 
Well, all the artwork and things are the same as well - I suspect that Hasbro would have sued if they were fake?

I can't remember where I put mine to check, but do the backcards mention Hasbro at all? If they do, then I think we can say they are real.

Also, Hasbro did license other countries to make them other than Greece as well.
 
re:

I don't know if the backcards say hasbro, but i do know for a fact that the other brands toys have the brandnames on the boxes & cards.
I'll give you an example, my son loves spiderman so when he saw these toys he jumped at them. The box said spiderman and brandname but the dolls inside were horrid.
They clearly were from the same mold but the paintjob was horrible. They got the colors wrong and there were alot of misprints too.

When he played with his doll an arm fell of within a minute and when i tried to fix it i noticed how soft the material was.

The shopowners i talked to confirmed that these weren't from the original suppliers nor were the ponies.

I would think Hasbro would have sued them also but since they only sold in small souvenir stores they might not have noticed? dunno really...
 
when you said they had greek ponies, you mean G3's? Or like Windy, Ouranous, Astrapi etc G1's? wow. I wanna go to greece! Cant speak the language though. "My little pony...please? where?" lol I like the squishier ponies. My German Wigwam can have his foot squished all the way in like a drinking straw!
 
Actually, this always confused me as well. It always seemed to me that many of these ponies from different countries were not made by Hasbro and some were of poor quality-I never understood why others didn't consider them fakies then. What I eventually got out of it was that Hasbro didn't make them themselves, but sold the MLP license to other companies in other countries, and these compainies then produced them as MY Little Pony, even if they made them more cheaply. That would make them true MLPs then.

Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, as I'm still a bit confused about how it works.

But if that is the case, then perhaps the companies that made the other toys you're seeing also licensed companies in Greece to produce their toys. This would explain the different quality toys produced under the same logo.

Kukapetal
 
lol, no they didn't have G1´s anymore *wishes* only G3´s but i don´t think there were any that we don´t have here.
I´ve edited my first post, sorry for not making myself clearer before...

The man of the souvenir shop i talked to used to have them but that was quite some time ago.
The "real" toystores never sold them, only original hasbro's.

It is interesting though that a `fakie` -coz i really think they are- sell for such high prices.
*wonders if she should have bought all the spiderman crap* :D

oh, i also heard the story about the molds being sold, didn´t hear that in greece btw, i think i read it on the old TP a long time ago
 
Greece does indeed have a ton of brand named fakes, which are just blatant rip offs and copyright violations, but none of them carry the name of the company in the form of a logo. I found turtles and such there myself (and in Cyprus), and was curious about the MLP thing like you. But NONE of them had the company names on their boxes or cards....

MLPs do. They have the Hasbro logo on their cards. So no, I don't think they're fakes.
 
does anyone have pics of the greece g3's? I've never seen one...
 
i was talking about Greece G1's, the only G3's i've seen were the regular ones we have here :)
Well there was one, looked a bit like G2 silverswirl and had a greek box covering the English part.
When you removed that you had your regular G3 box.

I didnt buy it or remembered the name since i'm just not so into G3's
*smacks herself in the head for not taking a picture*
 
I think every pony's a fakie.

Just kidding! It's an interesting theory, however, the ponies are DIRECT reproductions of already-existing ponies, just with different colors. That'd be a huge copy-right violation, I believe. Correct me if I'm wrong, I usually don't venture much into the realms of copy-rights. I myself like to think that they're real. And I quote: I'm a REAL pony!!
 
re

i don't think they would copy the different ponies so carefully if they were fakies or have such similar packaging. It just seems like so much work to rip something off, ya know?

Skye
 
*thinking back to my business law class*

As far as I know, the ponies made in greece (and Argentina, etc.) were "real" ponies, as in licensed products, not unlicensed fakies.

I think Hasbro gave the legal right to produce ponies to foreign toy companies (El Greco, Top Toys, etc.) That's why the MLP symbols and art work are used on the ponies and packaging. I don't know how involved Hasbro was in the production of these ponies (based on the quality, perhaps not very much).

Licensing is still done today. Who makes all the MLP merchandise? Sure Hasbro makes a little, but generally they license out to other companies. Hasbro didn't make the (American) G3 toothbrushes, or the comb and brush I got the other day. They licensed the MLP logo and artwork to other companies.

It's cheaper, easier, and usually more profitable for a company to license out. Imagine if Hasbro had just shipped regular ponies to Argentina back in the 80's? They would have had to set up distribution channels, and pay all those shipping charges, which would have meant higher-priced ponies, which the average person might not be able to afford. Much better for Hasbro to license to Top Toys, which already knew about making and selling toys in Argentina. The ponies probably sold at a lower price, and Hasbro got a piece of the profits.

Tif =:cool:
 
don't think they would copy the different ponies so carefully if they were fakies or have such similar packaging
Click to expand...

TRue but there are argentina fakies that have baby nectar on the cards..so who knows?
 
Fakies= bad?

I honestly don't see what's so bad about my little pony fakies. I know that, for hard-core collectors, it can get annoying seeing them everywhere, but it's not like they're hurting us, or Hasbro. (Hasbro is still the leading brand; the "Phony ponies" aren't changing that).
I grew up with lots of fakies, but it didn't change how I used my imagination. It may have even helped, since I could make up my own characters out of the nameless fakies (nothing against Hasbro; Their characters are fine). My point is, even though we're collectors, we have to remember that ponies are designed for children, who could care less whether a pony was made from a leading company or not. We should know more than anyone that my little ponies can be pretty expensive, whereas you can get some pretty well-made fakies for a much more reasonable price. Anyway, prefer both real MLPs and fakes, and I just think that we should stop all this fakie hate. No one's forcing us to buy them, and we know how to tell if a pony is fake or not, so these phonies aren't harming us at all.

Just wanted to put that out there. :unicorn:
 
Woah! Really? What a shame... Oh well they are still cool!:allecto:
 
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