Furious

Such an aggravating day! Not a single darn thing went right. I just had to throw out a sewing project that absolutely refused to cooperate. It was one of those easy, "one day" projects, according to the magazine I took it from - ha!

I hate wasting all that time and fabric, but sometimes you’ve just got to cut your losses and move on, y’know?

Speaking of vexations, let’s get back to Fury. Here’s a not very good photograph of a variation you don’t see too often: no socks!


There are lots and lots of variations on the original Fury, but that's not today's topic. Today's topic is much more fundamental: when was he released?

Breyer was pretty good about developing and marketing products of the licenses they did acquire in the 1950s. Lassie, Rin Tin Tin and Circus Boy all came out in a timely manner, not long after the shows debuted. But not Fury: even thought the show debuted in October 1955, I haven’t been able to find any documentation for the Fury model prior to 1958.

The Prancer mold was up and running for the Davy Crockett set by mid-1955, so the Fury model could have been good-to-go for the Christmas 1955 season, but no mail order catalogs from that year have shown one. He’s nowhere to be found in the multitude of 1956 articles and press releases, either. I wouldn’t rule out 1957 - there’s still plenty of digging to do there - but I don’t see him any of the 1957 materials I have at the moment.

It seems odd that Breyer wouldn’t have release a Fury until 1958 - nearly two and a half years after the show went on the air. Did someone else have the license for a model, and fail to make good on it? Was there a legal issue that had to be hammered out? Or was the licensing program for the show just a little slow on the draw?

The research I’ve done on non-Breyer Fury merchandise so far seems to hint that licensing for the show didn’t get fully underway until about … 1958. There were a few bits and pieces before then, but 1958 seems to have been the year they decided to go all out with books, comics, puzzles and the like - all the usual dime store novelties boomer kids dropped their cash on.

So that last possibility might be closest to the truth. 1958 might be the Fury’s true release date - unless further evidence proves otherwise.

Even though the merchandising might have gotten off to a late start, it wasn’t short-lived. Fury merchandise continued to be produced well after the show stopped production in 1960, in part because NBC kept the show on - renamed Brave Stallion - as a part of their Saturday Morning children’s programming until 1966. The same year - not coincidentally - that Breyer finally discontinued the Fury for good.