Yep!

Hahaha, yes. I had a poster of the original girls in my room at my dad's for a long time. I also had Mulan shoes and Pocahontas bedsheets but they had not been considered princesses then.

I wasn't alive back then. Not sure when Pocahontas or Mulan joined the lineup but I was too young to remember.

God, that was ages ago... But since I am the oldest person here, yes, I remember that.

My favorite lineup.

@8804- are you sure you're the oldest? you may not be.

I don't understand this question. There were never 6 princesses in the official Disney princess marketing brand. There were always 8. Unless you're asking if we remember before Pocahontas came out, then yes.

I think.

this one :)

@princesslullaby - Woah, really? I simply remember when the lineup just had the first six princesses, without Mulan and Pocahontas. I know they joined a little bit after the Disney Princess franchise started.

I wasn't there when there were six princesses, I was there when there were 8 but I didn't know them.

I remember going to their website and playing the mini games. There was a dress-making game for Sleeping Beauty (Aurora didn't actually appear on it, just the fairies), a jewel game for Jasmine, a "repeat the order of the instruments" for the Seven Dwarfs, etc. It was fun! Ah, nostalgy!

^ Ah, I remember those minigames too! There was also an Ariel dancing-underwater minigame, and in the really early 2000s I remember a Snow White makeup minigame. Ah, good times. :)

@PrincessLullaby: I'm 31, Most people on this club are in their late teens or twenties. If you find someone else in their thirties, let me know. That would be cool. And yes, I'm an overgrown kid. ;)

^ PrueFever is in his 30's, and there is another member who is older, but I forget who it is..

^^Ok. I'm one of the older people. PrueFever befriended me like two weeks ago. We both love Ariel. It figures. Do tell me when you find the other person.

^I might be really off, but I remember Swanpride being the oldest user on the club.

^ That's who it was!

^Yes, indeed, she is! She was going into her teen years when The Little Mermaid was released. She must be in her middle/late thirties, seeing as she is a bit younger than my parents.

^I thought so ;)

@Applesauce- in terms of a legitimate disney princess franchise, it was started in 2000. and it actually included tinkerbell as well.

I wasn't really aware of the concept of the "Official Disney Princess" as we know it today. I knew there were Disney princesses like Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, The Little Mermaid, etc. But they had plenty of non-princess heroines, both children and teenagers, poor and rich, and the Renaissance brought us many more like Esmeralda, Megara, etc.

I didn't start to notice until the Nostalgia Chick made a review talking about the official eight princesses in the lineup (including Mulan, who is NOT A PRINCESS), and how arbitrary and money-based the whole concept now is.

princesslullaby and Tygers_Eye - Wow, cool! I didn't know that there were other princesses and heroines in the lineup at some point. So, were Esmeralda and Megara ever *official* DPs, or how did that work? :)

I remember seeing merchandise of the original 6.
I didn't know who was officially DPs until I looked it up after seeing Mulan for the first time. At that time, there were 8 going on 9 (The Princess and the Frog was announced but not yet released)

ApplesauceDoctr: I think Esmeralda and Tinkerbell were at some point, because they were as heavily marketed and merchandised as the "real princesses."

However, back then, the Disney company didn't really stress the *OFFICIAL* Disney Princess lineup the way they do now. Back then, Disney just had a lot of princesses and pretty adult heroines, whom they often merchandised to little girls. (I personally had a lot of Nala, Pocahontas, Megara, and Esmeralda stuff when I was little because they marketed the female characters individually instead of in groups.)

But then, as Nostalgia Chick points out in her review (link) "In 2001, someone at the Disney company realized that this term [Disney princess] was so ubiquitous that we might as well brand it and sell it. And sell it they did. Sales of Disney consumer products rose from $300 million in 2001 to $3 billion in 2006."

So that's my take. Disney had a lot of princesses when I was a kid, but I don't think the public started getting picky about "These are the OFFICIAL Disney Princesses while those are just animals (Maid Marian and Nala), peasants (Tinker Bell, Esmeralda, Megara), and/or unofficial lower-case Disney princesses (Eilonwy)." I don't think the Official Lineup as we see it became a thing until the early 2000's when Disney started their aggressive Disney Princess product line.

^yup, and it when it started, there were 8.

^ Exactly. When the Official Disney Princess Lineup was invented, there were 8. While we can retroactively look back and say, "There were 6 before," the strict concept of the Official Disney Princess didn't exist yet.

Sure, some princesses were more popular and iconic than others (again, Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora, Ariel, etc. were more recognizable than, say, Maid Marian, Eilonwy and Nala), but then some heroines were more popular and marketable than some princesses too. (Again, Tinker Bell and Esmeralda got a lot of merch in the day; as many as a given official Disney Princess now.)

It wasn't until Disney decided to single out the most popular, marketable, and iconic Princesses and dub them The Official Lineup and shoo out the non-princesses (besides Mulan) and the riff-raff that the term "Princess" became so much more important.

Yep, I do remember. If anything I always remembered those weird pink pastel posters that showcased the six initially. Mulan and Pocahontas came a little afterwards.