I remember when my daughter collected the My Little Pony figurines. Compared to Bratz dolls and some of the other scarily made up and provocatively dressed options for young girls, they were a welcome change.  She outgrew her plastic ponies somewhere around the age of six.

It seems that young girls are not the only MLP devotees. There is a growing fan base of adult men who call themselves “bronies” (bro ponies) who are fans of the cartoon and who collect the ponies.

Each day, out-of-work computer programmer Luke Allen self-medicates by watching animated ponies have magical adventures.

The 32-year-old, who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, loves his daily fix of My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic, and he’s not alone. He’s part of a growing group of “bronies” (“bro ponies”) — men who are fans of a TV show largely intended for a much younger audience.

“First we can’t believe this show is so good, then we can’t believe we’ve become fans for life, then we can’t believe we’re walking down the pink aisle at Toys R Us or asking for the girl’s toy in our Happy Meal,” Allen said in an e-mail to Wired.com. “Then we can’t believe our friends haven’t seen it yet, then we can’t believe they’re becoming bronies too.”

This My Little Pony fan video has more than 160,000 views on YouTube.

Wired Magazine reported that MLP fans are just pumping out MLP content. The online artist collective deviantArt has more than 90,000 pieces of My Little Pony artwork and hundreds more are going up each day (on one random day in May, about 330 pieces were submitted) and the MLP blog Equestria Daily, attracts roughly 175,000 page views per day! That’s certainly nothing to sneeze at.

Maybe I should have held onto my daughter’s collection!