MLP Cassettes

The cassette tape. Outdated audio in physical media form. The mark of an era past.

All who know me are aware that I am the biggest fan of phsyical media, especially cool retro stuff. No digital games for me thank you, I'm content with my bulky Sega genesis 32x combo, a dirty 80s gameboy, the earliest playstations you've ever seen, and my library of games and movie dvds lining my shelves. I'm not gonna pay a shit ton of money every month for a streaming service when I could just buy dvds of a movie that I could keep forever. I hate companies trying to erase the concept of "owning" a game or movie, just pay us a subscription. With that model, you'll spend way more money over months and years to watch these movies rather than just paying a one time fee, and even then you aren't actually guaranteed the thing you spent money on if the company decides to shut down its services or revoke your access to the product for one reason or another. Consumerism and capitalism at it's worst.

I think the same thing applies to music. It's easy to pull up literally any song you want on Youtube, and I think it's great that people have easy access to songs or audiobooks. But MAN is it cool to have a phsyical little box you can hold and own and play, not having to worry about some copyright holder striking it down from your place of listening online. I was too young to have been around for the popularity of cassettes (though I have distinct memories of a cute, purple ipod that I literally only put the soundtrack to the original pokemon movie onto when I was around 7 or 8... good times), but recently I have been bitten by the cassette tape interest bug, which I am sure my older readers are beaming down at me with delight to hear.

It started a few months ago when my mother and I were shopping at the Goodwill bins. For those who haven't gone, it is a wonderful (but very hectic and at times grody) place to hunt for treasures. I have gotten my fair share of MLP stuff at the bins, including g1 baby Countdown, many many generation 3s (the coolest of which has to be Starcatcher 2) and many g3 playsets (including butterfly island, ponyville and 3.5 playsets). We go often, to look for pony stuff and also to look for other stuff to possibly sell (I really enjoy selling care bears or beanie babies for example). My mom walked over to me with a big grin on her face, hefting a large, stuffed bear into the cart- The one and only Teddy Ruxpin.

Of course, I knew who Teddy Ruxpin was immediately. I may not have been alive when he was all the rage, but I knew about him as a lover of vintage toys and animatronics. I believe I first learned about him in middle school, when the horror game "Tattletail" came out, with a character that was based on a mix of both Furby and Teddy Ruxpin (which makes sense, seeing as they were both electronic toys that some people found creepy). Teddy Ruxpin was the world's first animatronic doll, costing $70 when he was first sold in 1985. If you do the math for inflation, that would make him over $200 today! No wonder my mom called him a rich kid toy! He had a cassette player embedded inside of his stomach, and was sold with various storybooks and cassette tapes. The cassette tapes held audiobook recordings of the storybooks he was sold with, and when played in Teddy Ruxpin, his eyes and mouth would animate and move.

Teddy Ruxpin was the catalyst for me to go deep into cassette tapes. I learned a lot about how he was programmed, how to make cassette tapes myself, and even converted my fanfiction audiobook projects into cassette format. But all of that is for another day, possibly a video essay. Let's make this relevant to all of our favorite toys: My Little Pony.

I quickly discovered that yes indeed, there are many generation 1 cassette tapes. Some were sold with ponies, some came with story books, all were incredibly whimsical with a lovely voice actress reading out the stories and music playing in the background.

I wanted to get my hands on as many of these as possible. I did in fact buy many cassette tapes, but a bulk of them have unfortunately gotten lost in the mail... Just my rotten luck. However, for the tapes that I was able to get my hands on, I wanted to do something special. I used my cassette recorder to capture the audio from these cassette tapes and convert them into a digital format for preservations sake. I also tried my hand at implementing my limited audio editing knowledge to try and clean up the audio a little (erasing the loud BUZZ of the cassette just to make the voices a little clearer). I have decided to put all of the audio recordings into a Google Drive for anyone to listen to or download. There is both the original audio files and the edited versions I made, labeled in the file name. I plan to update this drive and article with any and all pony cassettes I get my hands on in the future! I know that many of these tapes are already on Youtube, but I wanted to still upload the ones I had for fun. No credit is needed for using or sharing these files! (Though shout outs are appreciated if you feel compelled to :) )

Ember's dream is the first cassette tape that I have gotten my hands on, sold with lovely baby Ember. You can read about Ember here. You will notice that Ember's name is mispelled as "Amber" on the cassette label: This is actually an error that was corrected with later releases of the toy! The tape is this adorable yellow and blue color... bright and childlike. The tape itself contains a story about the Rainbow Ponies and Baby Ember. The rainbow ponies get invited to a special party that Ember is not allowed to go to. Ember has a dream with a bad premonition that the party is a set up by a bad man wanting to cut off their hair and turn it into wigs to sell in... NEW YORK CITY (the dramatic piano sting that plays in the tape actually made me laugh really hard, good on ya MLP cassette tape). The rainbow ponies are kinda dicks about going anyways. Then Ember talks to an angel, learns she was correct, and the now bald rainbow ponies have to apologize to her. Silly little story :)