These have been a hectic few days for Funtasia Daily, with three other articles within the span of a few days, some of them deemed holy grails to those who have followed the Filly franchise for a year or two, or possibly longer than that. There were even multiple positive things that didn’t make the cut for those articles, due to their conciseness, so our writer of the day will place them here in a roundup instead, after the break!
Filly Funtasia have been a regular at media expos in the southern French city of Cannes in the past three years. No, this does not include the famed film festival, but it does includes MIPCOM and MIPTV. The latter is held during mid-April, and BRB Internacional debuted the April 2014 trailer there last year. Now they’re back.
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| Few other horse fans have had official mentions that their horses are a lifestyle brand. |
Catalog entries in MIPTV’s database show multiple entries for Filly Funtasia. The most recently updated one has the note “Screening genre: Animation”. Since that indicates that they’ll actually screen something of some sort, we could begin to get our hopes up for a possible new trailer. Yay. Actually accessing the information that the catalog entries link to could prove difficult, as creating the needed account requires you to be registered for the MIPTV expo, which you can do for the spectacular price of $1,280. Seeing as this is quite the demand for an unknown amount of info, we can just as well wait for the trailers, which are released in regular intervals and are a fireproof way to get at least half a minute of new info.
The expo starts exactly one month from now, on the 13th of April, and lasts for four days. Last year, the third Filly Funtasia promo was made public to the world the day after the expo ended, so hopefully we may get yet another promo around that time!
About two weeks ago, the first proof of Zack being shown in person as a Filly Stars character was on a surprise bag display box, and while the picture of it left no doubt that it was Zack, it was still in a very low resolution. Now there are pictures of the cover of a Filly Stars sticker album, for a sticker set that is soon to be released. Several earlier Filly sets have had sticker sets, such as Butterfly and Witchy, but the main thing of interest about this one, is that it shows Zack in his Filly Stars form and in a perfectly visible resolution.
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| Zodia and Zack: A great Zodiac. |
Just look at him. He have flowing, well-styled hair, even if it's a bit boyband-reminiscent, and his horseshoes and horn are the most blue of colors.
So there he is, the Zack toy character that we’ve been searching after for a year!
The 2015 version of Filly Mermaids has been announced. For a Filly brand that started in 2012, the Filly Mermaids have had summertime releases of toys and magazines for four years straight, which is longer than most other Filly brands can claim to have lasted.
The new version, is the Glitter Golden Edition.
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| Who needs engines, petrol or highways, when you have tortoises? |
The main difference between this version and 2014's Glitter Edition, is that the returning characters have replaced their pink, pearl-holding crowns, with more typical golden crowns with Swarovski crystals. Back in 2012 and 2013, the 11 characters from the first Mermaids version's main set, were brought over to the Pearl Edition, in which the only change made to those eleven, was that their original golden crowns were replaced with pink crowns with pearls. So now the Mermaid crowns have returned to their origin.
It will have 16 characters according to a character map brochure, but none of the 16 on the brochure are identifiable at the time of writing. One blindbag set with two Fillys also claim that there's only 10 Mermaids in it. The difference in the two claims seem pretty large.
March is very seldom considered a summer month in Germany or other parts of northern Europe, so you will have to wait some months for the new edition to reach the store aisles.
In last Tuesday’s article about the Italian channel K2 picking up Filly Funtasia, one of the article’s cited links is a BRB Internacional news article. In it was a number of unusual spellings, such as “Witches” and “Battiwiggs”, and in the midst of all this was a mention of “the Magician Wranglum”. It has been known for a while that BRB’s Spanish material about Filly Funtasia, writes the Wizard of the Dark Mirror’s name as Mago Wranglum, so it’s rather easy to dismiss it as a translation error, though no one could ever figure out if the word Wranglum actually meant something. After all, the article does refer to the Royal Academy of Magic, which is perhaps the fourth name they’ve used for the Academy in about 18 months. But…
If one looks closely, the word Wranglum is written in italics, making it say “the Magician Wranglum and his companion Battiwiggs”. Due to the many ways that italics work, this could also be dismissed as merely someone who thought that Wranglum was a non-English word and wanted to emphasise that fact. But it could also indicate that Wranglum is his name and that being a magician is simply his profession title!
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| Battiwigs having a disco dodgeball night, unaware of the mysteries of the mirror in front of him... |
Naturally, research on it had to be done. The word Wranglum is trademarked by Home Focus Development Limited, including for toy and video game purposes, as can be seen at Trademarkia. For those who happen to have found out about it before, Home Focus Development Limited has also been shortened down to HFDL, and serves mainly as Dracco’s intellectual property section, having even placed their copyright sign on the Filly Funtasia trailers.
Wranglum in itself does not mean anything, but the word “wrangler” is a perfectly good English word. Wiktionary lists a number of meanings that could in fact prove relevant to him and the show, such as “A cowboy who takes care of saddle horses” as well as “An animal handler or trainer” In addition, a website for the Oxford Dictionary lists the meaning “A person engaging in a lengthy and complicated dispute”, which is oddly apt for the scene in the first promo in which Battiwigs has to shush on a Mirror Wizard who really want Battiwigs to listen to him.
That leaves us with the remaining part of his name, “glum”. This one has a bit less certain meaning, but overall, it means to give off a sour expression, feeling glum, or coming off as having a bad temper. Sounds decently accurate to what we’ve seen of him so far. With both name parts combined, the resulting word is pretty accurate to the character, it's a horse pun, and it's a name that means something in English but which isn’t obvious at first sight or to those with English as a second language.
With all these details stacking up on each other, it become more than a little tempting to declare that the mirror’s name is in fact Wranglum. It makes perfect sense and little sense at the same time, depending on what you believe to be either spelling errors or the real deal, but if it is for real, then it’ll be that much easier to refer to Wranglum with one word, instead of with five or six.
And for some upbeat news, the same BRB article does make some notes on the Filly fanbase, including:
“(...) tiny velvet collectible Fillys that have Swarovski Elements Crystals, has millions of fans internationally who even started creating their own user generated content with hundreds of thousands of online views and multimillion magazines were sold in Germany and many more countries.”It does leave you wondering whether there was intended to be a comma between “content” and “with”, or if the sentence is in fact correctly written. But these official statements that there are millions who like Filly, and that they note that we actually have begun to make such user-generated content as YouTube videos, art drawings, fanfiction, toy reviews, and probably content in many other art mediums, and with quite more than a few online views, then all of this does make a strong Filly fan like me more than a little happy.
Credits are where credits are due:
• Skundi for several new details and for a lot of feedback.
• Club Filly for discovering the sticker album and the Glitter Golden Edition.
• The Miles for the tip about the sticker album.
• Greyfeather for breakthroughs regarding the meaning and copyrighting of Wranglum.
