"Golden Harvest" Dilema

[Zarry]

We all know who this is. This is Carrot Top. Or so the fans have speculated, and even one of the animators had thought. Hasbro has seemed to jump in with a pamphlet in a suprise toy bag this month and change her name to Golden Harvest, which doesn't seem to suit her nearly as well. This made me think a lot about Hasbro's connection or even care & concern about their fans. They seemed to have shown themselves as a big, inflated powerhouse of the MLP fandom which they seem to think they can skew in any way they please. This only seems half true: They can control the canon MLP team by giving them restrictions as to what they will write and what they can animate, but the fandom's perceptions will do nothing but live on through our own imaginations.

Or at least, that's what I have thought up until I saw what the toy & pamphlet actually looked like.



See that? Her tail & tail is really curly, much like Pinkie's toy design, and her illustration even seems to be just an orange & goldenrod Pinkie. I think it's the exact same pose, too. Ontop of that, her cutie mark seems to be striped carrots as opposed to Carrot Top's uniform, regular carrots.

So, what has this taught me? Well, for one, to do research before I make speculations, but it also taught me that Hasbro is really, really lazy. They can't even seem to think of proper designs for characters or toys anymore. Palette swaps & .png replacements are good enough it seems for high end companies in relation to a fandom's needs & desires which Hasbro needs to feed in order to have the support it wants. This was the most pathetic excuse for a "surprise" toy I've ever seen, and it's the biggest slap to the face to us Bronies they really could have done, in my opinion. Sure, the toy may not be made exactly for them, but it's not like we're not the biggest portion of the fans out there. We're the reason Hasbro is making so much money off of their merchandise. "Thanks for the support, here's orange Pinkie Pie."

Hasbro just needs to learn to keep their fans in mind. Without our support, they're nothing special.

[firebird789]

None of this surprises me. As an old avid follower of transformers (another product of hasbro) I know full well the extent they go to be lazy. They come out with a set number a figures, then just repaint them to market them as something different. The annoying part though is that they don't even try to hide the fact that the toy is just a repaint. Which in my opinion show how much they underestimate the intelligence of children (which we have to remember is the true target audience). They've always done it a will continue to do it. The company doesn't care about the fans, but the writers of the show do. So we can take solace in that.