Box and Packaging Art

I am a sucker for the G4 pony line. Sometimes I get a little sick of the pink/purple overkill, but I've seen that before. G4 has some truly lovely ponies, or maybe I'm just a sucker for blue.... The blind bags have come in some very interesting colors, including the brown "cherry spices", a chocolate brown unicorn with a mane of varying shades of pink.

Recently I received some of the old 80's pony packaging as an "extra" in a pony package someone sent me. I had never really been one to seek out the inserts and such before so I had not previously paid much attention to them. Here's a scan of a little bit of the brochure showing to different sets of ponies.

The set on the left were called "so soft" ponies and came with a layer of flocking that makes them feel fuzzy/furry.

The set on the right were "twinkle-eye" ponies. These ponies had a shiny gem in the place where a normal pony eye would be.

I like this scan as it shows that there was a decent amount of purple and pink in the original sets, but you can see that neither pink nor purple DOMINATE the page. And the insert itself is pretty attractive. I love the pastel colors and all of the poses the ponies are in. Even where some of the ponies are sharing the same pose there are subtle differences because the art was done by hand and not just vectors being recolored.

The thing I find most disappointing about the G4 packaging is the "copy/paste" or "recoloring" of the almost every new pony to have the exact same design as a "mane six" pony, with only the color pallet swapped. I hope the next waves of pony will show a little more variation .