1991: Teeny Weeny Ponies

LITTLE LULLABYE

Raspberry pink teeny pony with aqua mane and tail, dark purple teddybear with purple bow symbol

Little Lullabye was cast in the UK backcard stories as being the youngest of the young Teeny Tiny Ponies.

The pony shown above is the one I had as a child, and I have chosen to head the page with her, despite her dubious hair condition, for a couple of reasons. Not least because I know her provenance and she illustrates perfectly a very very common issue with this set, especially here in the UK.

The hair.

As with many of the ponies from this year, the Teeny Weeny Ponies suffered and benefitted from a coarser fibre of hair. I am unsure whether this is unique to the release in Europe, but the Teeny Twins from the North American release seem to have very soft hair, and it is my conjecture that they probably had a finer quality of hair in the issue over there. I cannot at present prove this, though.

In 1994/5, when I was corresponding with Hasbro UK, they sent me two loose Teeny Weeny ponies as a "gift to my collection". The person writing to me simply said that they were "lying around the office", and, indeed, they look very normal. I do not believe they are prototypes or anything that exciting, but I do think they might have been kept as examples of the ponies they were manufacturing. They show minor differences to the ponies I had as a kid, but this is *probably* batch related. Nonetheless, I have photographed them for a comparison below:

As can be seen from the image, my childhood one has much worse hair *lol*, but other than that, it's quite clear that the one from Hasbro has a distinctlylighter body tone, with a lighter tone symbol. Her hair seems a slightly greener shade of aqua to me, but I couldn't get the camera to pick it up properly. The Hasbro one also looks a mite larger than my childhood one in proportions when I hold them next to each other. I measured the hoof span of the tip of one front hoof to the other, and it measured 35 mm on my childhood one and 37mm on the Hasbro one.

I think it likely the ponies Hasbro sent me were from an original batch and for some reason they never got packaged for sale. They might have been examples Hasbro kept for their records, but we will never know for sure. I am unsure how they compare with the ponies sold in the US, but it is possible they originally came from there to Hasbro UK as samples.

Little Lullabye was known as Little Tabby in the US.