User blog comment:Nyxity/You Could Have Done Better Mattel/@comment-53539-20160720143400

reboots happen and little can be done... Though I agree with the notion that 5 years was too soon for a reboot as others have said. Half a decade is not long enough...

I think with MLP, the issue was the first generations took off and became super popular, but not enough was done. I recall one or two ponies having clear personalities, but most did not and the show was a two commercial. By the end, it became all about name dropping and not much focus on the characters, though some like Spike got more then they deserved and the ponies at times also became background characters. If not for the stories, I think the show would have flopped. The stories were often dark or daring compared to many girls showed that both followed and were around to the time.

They tried to reboot the franchise several ties but continuing to treat little girls as... Well... Little girls, so lots of pink and sparkles.

Monster high had a smaller target market, its appeal is to a limited audience which there isn't a majority following compared to the general market for girls. I'm guessing the reboot was to change demographic and appeal to a wider audience because there was more money involved. Further more, 5 years may seem small, but the franchise is aimed at young girls. Girls tend to give up dolls when they hit their teens, so after 5 years, the girls who first got into MH have passed onto the next stage of their life.

If anything, they've looked at the trends and are trying to reboot to match... I thin they were doing fine.

The other issue is, a reboot often comes as an attempt to cheapen a franchise and clean up its assets, by refocusing on a less selection of characters. Each year a license comes up for renewal, so characters they do not want anymore are lost by simply not renewing them. Even in MLP, a lot of the characters MLP once had were not renewed for use in toys in modern MLP:FiM. Applejack being the only one from gen.1 because they wanted ties back to the original series, along with Spike. This meant older generation fans were likely to take notice.

The rest were either new characters (providing fresh licenses and new concepts) or characters that were renewed as new ones from gen. 3 because the license was still fresh enough like Rarity and Pinkie Pie or Rainbow Dash. Also it brought in gen. 3 fans by reusing the names who still were into that sort of thing.

As much as it saddens me to see this franchise rebooted... As comic book fan I often find just as you get into something, the fatcats up top reboot the entire universe just to appeal to the current generation of kids, even if the universe was only 8 years old (I'm strring at you Threeboot Legion of Super heroes! You were still worst overall then Reboot Legion, especially towards the end).

Plus... A series or franchise can go into rot, leading to repeat of ideas. Rebooting means you can try new things or rewrite the same story and get away with it... So sometimes is either a new approach to the same concept, or just a lay way of avoiding having to make up new things. :-/