Wow. I can't believe I never bought this set.

@MCLegoboy said:
"^ I can't believe it's a set about equestrian sport that's not girlified with some form of doll."
Mini-dolls didn’t exist in ‘97.

This is a really cool set. I like all of it. I never knew of its existence.

@MCLegoboy:
7635 is even less girly than this. I actually bought that set for parts. This one still has a significant portion of the set devoted to pink flowers.

Nice little set with great content.

Nothing bad to say about this set. In fact, it is everything what Lego doesn't do anymore and that's why I love the set even more.

I feel like that cat is really freaking the horse out.

Hopefully we will see a big wave of farm sets in City soon with 1-2 of them being focused on horses there is a proud history of similar sets:

6359
6379
6355
6405
6419
6404
6418
6417
7635

@Jack_Sassy said:
"Nothing bad to say about this set. In fact, it is everything what Lego doesn't do anymore and that's why I love the set even more."

What exactly 'lego doesn't do anymore' that is in this set? Horse, minifig, flowers, colours, small sets- all of this is present today in abundance.

@Roebuck said:
"Hopefully we will see a big wave of farm sets in City soon with 1-2 of them being focused on horses there is a proud history of similar sets:"

Hopefully the amazon series Clarkson's Farm also put some more general interest into more LEGO sets with sheep/farm equipment.

I hope LEGO will make a smaller tractor tyre profile as well, would work great for a new Combine harvester and such.

@thor96 said:
" @Jack_Sassy said:
"Nothing bad to say about this set. In fact, it is everything what Lego doesn't do anymore and that's why I love the set even more."

What exactly 'lego doesn't do anymore' that is in this set? Horse, minifig, flowers, colours, small sets- all of this is present today in abundance."

Saddles, animals and the fact that it's a small set with animals in general. It's not a rant, just a quick thought.

I think I wanted this set, but decided to get 6404 instead. Maybe because I thought 6404 was more rare, or because the colt was more rare than the cat.

All I can think of to say is that I miss the tiny box-sets like this that were around the £3 - £5 mark. I was too young to be familiar with the concept of the 'impulse buy' when they existed, but I often think when I'm out nowadays that I'd love to pick up just a quick, cheap little Lego thing like this, just for fun and nostalgia... and find that my only options are CMFs or else £10 or more.

These little boxes for less than a fiver were perfect, to me.

I have this same horse from 6013; other than a spider, it must have been the first minifigure-scale animal I got, which was cool.

No talk about that medium Green 2x12 plate? I haven't checked it but i think that one is rare. Also i want to add, that contrary to popular belief, Paradisa was originally marketed as a fully standalone theme, rather than a sub-theme of Town.

@LegoDavid:
This gets a little messy. They also claimed they did focus groups that preferred the bleys over the greys, but I don’t remember anyone besides a few military builders who were happy with the shift.

In the US (their biggest market), Friends, Disney Princess, and Dots are generally found in the pink aisles with Barbie, while the LEGO aisles are often sandwiches between the pink stuff and the boys toys. In stores where the entire LEGO lineup shares a single aisle, Friends and DP are still packaged in pink-heavy packaging. Girls grow up seeing that most of the toys they want are separated out and clad in pink, so many of them won’t even walk down a toy aisle that doesn’t have pink packaging, and won’t look at most of the product in any shared aisle.

That right there is the biggest difference. No attempt to capture the girls market has ever been marketed as girls toys in the US before (a lot of it was never even sold in the US). So that’s the big draw for young girls. For AFOLs, the vast majority of comments I saw when Friends was introduced were split between, “hate it,” and, “love the colors, but hate the minidolls.”

I have yet to see any solid proof that Friends wouldn’t have succeeded if they’d done everything exactly the same, but swapping minidolls out in favor of minifigs. To the contrary, girls still clamor after the female CMFs, which shows that it’s not the minifigs themselves that turn girls away from minifig-based themes. And if that’s not true, then it’s hard to justify claiming that the minidoll was the driving force behind the success of Friends and DP. In the latter case, the brand alone is so successful that you could probably sell toilet paper with the characters’ faces on each sheet, and girls would want to hang it in their rooms like crepe paper streamers.

@anthony_davies:
I’m pretty sure horses get used to the resident barn cat(s). It’s the mice the cat takes care of that are going to freak them out more, especially when they poke their heads out of the horses’ food.

@AustinPowers:
Hey, minidolls have their uses. Did you know that the heads attach with a bar connection! This means you can fake having them mounted on spears, but it’s also the same connection used for Scooby-Doo’s head, and the minifig baby heads. You know, so you can have mutant aliens that clearly need to be destroyed with prodigious amounts of fire.

@Roebuck:
I looked through that entire list and don’t see any real “farm” sets. All I see are “rich people who own stables and breed competition horses” sets.

@ThatBionicleGuy said:
"These little boxes for less than a fiver were perfect, to me.

I have this same horse from 6013 ; other than a spider, it must have been the first minifigure-scale animal I got, which was cool."

I got the same horse from 6056 : Dragon Wagon , just shows how widespread and long term those original horses were, and then to think LEGO only made 1 black horse in the new style back in 2013.

And then I also got 2 other horses from very small sets like : 6008 : Royal King and 6709 : Tribal Chief , the 80s and 90s had a lot of those smaller Horse sets.

@Atuin said:
"Also i want to add, that contrary to popular belief, Paradisa was originally marketed as a fully standalone theme, rather than a sub-theme of Town. "

I'm pretty sure most people consider it a separate theme, its just Brickset and Bricklink categorizing it as a Town subtheme.

@Norikins said:
" @Atuin said:
"Also i want to add, that contrary to popular belief, Paradisa was originally marketed as a fully standalone theme, rather than a sub-theme of Town. "

I'm pretty sure most people consider it a separate theme, its just Brickset and Bricklink categorizing it as a Town subtheme."

Agreed, most things weren't even called Town back then, catalogs even had town seperated by things like Boat, Airport, Space, Police , and sometimes, boats that float were on a seperate page or half page.

But Paradisa and Res-Q , Spaceport, Divers and such definately were considered their own theme even in the late 90s.

Trains had their own pages as well.

Paradisa...would always be my favorite theme of all time.

@PurpleDave said:
"I have yet to see any solid proof that Friends wouldn’t have succeeded if they’d done everything exactly the same, but swapping minidolls out in favor of minifigs. To the contrary, girls still clamor after the female CMFs, which shows that it’s not the minifigs themselves that turn girls away from minifig-based themes."

Wouldn't have succeeded at all is unknown, but less popular than it was seems likely. In a 2012 interview with Friends' senior designers, Fenella Charity and Rosario Costa, they were asked if they had considered using minifigures. They replied:

'Actually we started with designing models with the existing minifigures, but when we tested with girls, they kept telling us that they were not appealing to them. And we also realised how important figures are for girls play. When girls play they project themselves onto figures they are playing with, making the figure beautiful and feminine means it is easier for the girls to relate to.'

Now it could be that the testing was wrong and had LEGO gone ahead with minifigures instead of minidolls, Friends would have sold just as well. But I suspect that by the time of Friends' development, LEGO had a pretty good idea how to test concepts and what the impact of ignoring those test results would be on sales. Would Friends have failed had LEGO gone with minifigures? That's uncertain. What seems clear is it would have been less successful.

@Zander said:
" Would Friends have failed had LEGO gone with minifigures? That's uncertain. What seems clear is it would have been less successful. "

I think Friends next year could be interesting to see what direction they'll go, for it's 10th anniversary (11th year since 2012)

While Elves and Superhero Girls or LEGO Movie2 minidoll sets currently aren't around, I think the amount of Friends and Disney sets doesn't sign a decline at all, and the big frozen castle coming up even is the first large-scale minidoll set.

I'm not as much bothered about minidolls myself, rather the fact that it brought different style horses and animals , and secondary being incompatible with swapping minidoll parts with minifig parts (except headgear)

@TeriXeri said:
"I'm not as much bothered about minidolls myself, rather the fact that it brought different style horses and animals , and secondary being incompatible with swapping minidoll parts with minifig parts (except headgear)
"
Completely agree. I have no particular interest in minidolls. From LEGO’s commercial perspective, they make perfect sense. But from my POV as a System collector they are a little unfortunate. I can’t help but suspect that if LEGO had persevered with minifigures for both gender segments, we might have had more minifigure parts or the same ones sooner. How cool would Elves have been if it had been yellowy minifigures instead of fleshy minidolls?

@Zander:
The two big questions are how they conducted the focus groups, and where they conducted the focus groups. Germans will tell you that most of what is produced today doesn’t hold much appeal in their market, while most of the product line does really well in the US. If the cous groups were held in Germany, the company could be in really bad shape now because they’d be getting information that is largely only pertinent to a single dwindling market, and missing out on all the themes that hold wider appeal anywhere but Germany. And it’s not hard to present leading questions that are keyed to yield the specific results you’re looking for, at which point the results are really based on the opinions of the person(s) who compiles the list of questions, and are worth even less than what you’d get by just picking the wrong market for your focus groups.