One of the best things about Schaumburg, aside from the sheer volume of chain stores with a lower sales tax rate than Chicago’s, is its absolute blandness, which makes it really easy to imagine yourself somewhere else—like, say, Ponyville.
“There are boys coming in!” she informs her mother, Cindy.
“They feel that they put so much time and effort into this niche collecting community, and then all of a sudden bronies come out and start getting all this attention,” Hayes told Collectors Weekly in 2012. “And it’s like, hey, well, what about us? We’ve been here forever, and nobody seemed to care. But now that there are all these guys in their 20s that are crazy about it, it’s suddenly important and it means something.”
“. . . that men do not,” Patrick finishes.
It becomes even easier to understand bronies once you’ve seen Friendship Is Magic. It’s a really good cartoon, funny and smart, with enough color and action to entertain kids, interesting characters and pop culture references to amuse adults (my personal favorites are Doctor Whooves and Maud Pie, the pony Daria), and “fan service” to make the obsessives feel important. It is upbeat and joyful without being saccharine. A few weeks before the fair, I started watching on Netflix for research purposes and quickly became addicted. It made me happy.
The story goes like this: In the early 80s, Zacherle was working at Hasbro, then a small New England toy company, where she was one of the few female designers. She was supposed to be thinking about toys for girls, but she found this difficult because as a little girl, she’d never played with dolls. She was more interested in her record player and in horses. Then she realized that lots of other little girls loved horses too. For three years running, she presented a design for a plastic horse. Her bosses rejected it every time. “Most girls aren’t like you, Bonnie,” one told her. “They like to cook and clean and iron.” One fateful day, her bosses’ boss suggested she design a plastic pony. “Pony, horse, what’s the difference?” Zacherle remembers thinking. But she went back to the drawing board and came up with My Pretty Pony.
