The My Little Pony Bootleg Rabbit Hole

Correction: the story about the donkey symbol comes from Chile, not Brazil

my little harry obama

I work at a dollar store and we get SO MANY MLP bootleg toys it's ridiculous. And then we display them right next to legitimate MLP merch.

I wouldn’t call piñatas “bootlegs”. Piñatas are mostly used at children’s birthday parties here in Mexico, and most companies don’t sell licensed piñatas for themed birthday parties, so piñata makers have to make them themselves. It’s a really inoffensive thing that requires quite a lot of effort to make, so I would compare them more to fan art or commissions of unlicensed characters than to bootlegs.

I will take absolutely NO filly slander whatsoever. They were so much more common and iconic here in Germany than mlp. Everyone collected them and i had a few playsets (the filly tower was my holy grail and i was very cool and trendy for owning it thank you very much). Like i knew some kids who were into mlp but fillys were everywhere and every little girl owned them. On a different note, when i was a kid and had to go to the dentists office, you would get a small cheap toy at the end of your appointment and i got these two fake mlp toys that were butt ugly but kinda iconic tbh. Kinda sad i threw them out....

i can see why filly got popular in the fakie scene, they don't look like they're being squeezed like living glittery stress balls (plus, they're actually pretty cute)

Filly Funtasia really isn't considered a bootleg by most people as it was merely a different company trying to do their own thing.

i just adore the horrified looking mlp bootlegs they're my absolute favorite in the whole world

A problem that people never think about with bootleg merch is just how deep into it organized crime is. It's not about "oh no I might hurt Hasbro!" It's about "gee I hope this is sold by some random guy in China and not the triad!" Like theres a difference between items that are off enough that they're clearly not the real deal and the ones that are trying to replicate the real product. Organized crime often focuses on the latter because the profit margin is higher.

The Filly franchise was way more popular than MLP in Poland back in 2012; those blindbags were everything, and as much as I am not a fan of the series whatsoever (it really felt like they were pushing it) the blind bags are one of my favourite toy brands of all time.

I don't even know what emotion I would feel if I saw a random pony drawing I made in middle school end up on the news in connection with a drug bust.

Without Filly I would never become a Brony. They were the first pony franchise I knew. I've been collecting them from the very beginning. I have a huge collection and also some some toy houses for them. I come from the Czech Republic (that's right next to Germany) and I can confirm that they were huge in central Europe back in 2010s. They were biggest in german-speaking countries (Germany and Austria). Some sets and vast majority of the magazines, that were usually sold with a special Filly figure, that you coldn't get anywhere else, were available only in those countries. I haven't watched Filly Funtasia but from the snippets I've seen I can tell that the show does not correspond to the toy franchise that much. Yes, the main characters, the bat and some supporting characters have their toy equivalent but the evil demon and most of the supporting characters don't. The architecture in the show is also very different from the toy branding. Not only do the buildings in the show differ from the toy sets and images in the collection brochures, that were included in every blind bag, but they also differ from the comics that were in the filly magazines. The original idea for the show, where the ponies have magical crystal crowns, would correspond to the toy franchise more. Since Filly Unicorn (the 4th series of blind bags), all figures had a jewel (not always a crown) with a Swarovski crystal. The colour of the crystal determined to which family the pony belongs to and what magical power he possesses. For a while It seemed like the toy franchise is dead but over the last year, the German Filly magazines have been issued again. Yup, I'm completely obsessed with them. anyway, thank you very much for making this video. I haven't seen anyone talking about Filly lately. best wishes from the Czech Republic ❤❤❤

The chibi plushes you showed at 22:34 aren’t bootleg. They’re fanmade plushes made by Sugarstitch (their deviantart watermark is even in the pictures)

as a kid i was a huge fillys collector, it makes me still happy to this day and reminds me of the nice winter months. they used to come in advent calendars too

I quite like the Filly figurines, even if people call it a MLP copycat. They remind me a lot of the Puppy in My Pocket toys as they’re flocked too.

You just unlocked a section of my childhood with Filly. I am German and I had SO MUCH STUFF from them. The horns always broke off so I made up a storyline about the evil witch fillys stealing the unicorns horns to make potions.

It's so sickening seeing people's hard work and lovely fan art getting plagiarized by companies who are money hungry, it's so sad

filly was amazing for me, i just wish i could find the blind bags somewhere, but unfortunately they stopped selling them :( i used to have so many of them back in the day. they used to even sell them in shoe stores lmao

I typically don’t pay that much attention to bootlegs (outside of watching some videos of them), but a lot of bootlegs are often cursed, such as the Cupcakes backpack

3:35 "Animal Jam lookin' moose". That ain't Animal Jam, that's Creature Jelly.