1991: Teeny Weeny Ponies

LITTLE RATTLES

White teeny pony with pink mane and tail, blue rattle with blue bow symbol.

Little Rattles was the shyest of the Teeny Weeny Ponies, and, according to her story, she rarely ever spoke, preferring to answer questions by shaking her rattle.

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, as I do not have any US bought Teeny ponies to compare with, but the Teeny Twins from the North American release 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.

Little Rattles: Variation

This is the Teeny Weeny pony with the most obvious and clear cut variation.

LITTLE RATTLES (Fading Pink hair version)

Ponies this year with pale pink in their hair generally had two types of hair. If they had the rougher fibre, they tended to keep the pink and the shade was a touch darker. If they had pale pink, fading hair, then it tended to be the finer fibre of hair (although this is not a hard and fast rule).
My childhood Little Rattles has the darker hair colour, which does not fade. There are also legitimate released versions of Little Rattles with the pale, fading hair as well (as pictured above). I have seen loose ones on Ebay which have completely faded out to white. The variation is the type of pink, though, rather than the white!

As you can see from the MOC image, this pale pink haired pony was a universal release and not a US/UK issue situation (although my fading pink Little Rattles did come from the US). I tend to see the pale pink one on sale more often, which leads me to make two suggestions (neither of which I can 100% confirm):

1: The pale pink haired ones were left over from the US release and pumped into the UK and Europe to be carded on UK cards. After these ran out, Hasbro in Europe commissioned more, but they had the coarser fibre hair. This would correlate with the date I got my Little Rattles (Christmas, 1992).

2: Hasbro had more than one factory making these ponies at the same time, hence the variations (for this year there are many).

I cannot confirm whether the version I had as a kid was sold outside of Europe.

LITTLE RATTLES: COMPARISON
As you can see from the above comparison shot, it is not just the shade and texture of the hair that differs. The eyes are far more smudgily printed on my childhood pony, and her symbol is considerably more vivid a blue (rather than the pale baby blue on the fading pink baby). There is a faint body tone difference too, but this could be due to age and cannot be relied on.

Little Rattles had the name Little Whiskers in the North American release. The pony's symbol is a rattle, so I am unsure exactly why...