While My Little Pony design leadership changed hands over the years, there has almost always been a female mastermind at the helm. The simplest answer to how MLP has changed so much and touched so many fans might be hiding in plain sight. The phenomenon of the ponies and their 40-year journey from little girl bedrooms to national fan conferences populated by mostly adult men do not have a definitive explanation. Unlike their kindred Barbie dolls and American Girl Dolls, however, MLP (the first design or “generation” of which launched in 1981) has seen drastic shifts in design, and an incredulous shift in audience. Like Barbie and American Girl Dolls, My Little Pony was a female-designed toy with a female intended audience.

There’s the hyper-femme and highly-debated world of My Little Pony, there’s the newly-re-politicized propagandist realm of American Girl Dolls, and there’s the boss bimbo herself: Barbie. Toys have so much to do with identity, and evolving discourses on gender, appearance, and social position also mean we have fresh eyes with which to regard some of those Christmas classics.įor girls in this country – and in this century – there are a few inescapable case studies for comparing “then” to “now.” All these toys were originally designed by women, though they still exist in a world that is fundamentally not designed by women. In thinking about this year’s holiday season, and thinking back to my past few decades of Christmases, it’s striking to see how the iconographic toys that still permeate our pop culture have aged. Toys themselves spark nostalgia in all their meanings, and can serve as useful markers of the zeitgeist. And, of course, there are those festive reliquaries of personal meaning, significant to children and adults alike: toys. From gingerbread worlds to flying reindeer, the activities and mythologies of Christmas are playful and childlike. The holiday season often brings back memories of childhood, as children are uniquely centered throughout the pervasive traditions of Christmas. Nostalgia literally means the “pain from an old wound,” but today its connotations include both sentimentality and irreverence for the past. If the holidays can be counted on for one thing – regardless of region or cultural moment – it’s turning back the clock for a month or so, and offering up brightly-wrapped nostalgia.

Pony shifty eyes