G4 - what happened, what's here, what's next

With the announcement from Hasbro that G4 is coming to an end, much of the collector community is already looking ahead to G5.  I haven't been looking at any of the online conversations because I'm not ready to rush G4 out the door yet.

My G4 collection circa April 2017

G4 is the 3rd pony generation I encountered as an adult.  During G4 I was gainfully employed for the whole run, I finished paying off my student loans, and I generally had spending money when new products hit the shelves.

And hit the shelves they did, with much more regularity in Canada than G2 or G3.  After years of frustration as G3 Target and TRU exclusives failed to make the trip north of the border, we found ourselves in the enviable position of having ponies on the shelves that weren't making it south of the border instead.  It would, of course, have been nice to have more individual background characters made into toys.

G4 also had strong support from a wildly successful cartoon series.  Although the show was strongest in its early seasons, it had some excellent writing, enjoyable characters, and plenty of throwbacks to the G1 era throughout.  Whatever else it brought with it, for good or ill, Friendship Is Magic gave MLP a mainstream presence it hadn't had before.  This level of popularity likely won't make the jump to the new generation, and I suspect that G5 will find a collectors community much more like what G3 was familiar with.

 I am not the hardest collector to please.  Overall, I have loved the G4 run.  There's no character in the cartoon that I really dislike, and many that I really love.  Aside from a brief foray into cheap, bad hair, I've been happy overall with the quality of the toys.  The playsets, although largely flat, are beautiful and make great display pieces (which is unfortunate, as they're also huge).  My only real complaint is with the lack of differentiation in poses.  I had a brief hope after the toy redesign that we would get more variety, but sadly there wasn't much.

There was also a plethora of Mane 6 toys, while many popular background characters either weren't made into toys or were only featured once or twice.  While I'd have liked to see other characters as toys (whether or not they appeared in the show), I wasn't as bothered by this as some collectors.  I do understand the logic behind making sure that you main characters are always available for children just getting into the brand.  But perhaps there's such a thing as too many Pinkie Pies.

I hope that the last year of G4 will offer us a few nice surprises, a few really good figures (I've already picked up three that I really love), and a satisfying finale.  And then I'll be ready to see what G5 is made of.

Elf