Appaloosa Yearlings

I’ve never been much of a Black Friday enthusiast; aside from the horses, there’s never been anything I needed so badly that I was willing to stand in line for hours in the rain or cold. There are a few things I intend on picking up today, but there is nothing I need to stand in a line for.

I briefly considered making a Toys R Us run to pick up the half-priced Stablemates set, but then I remembered the mistake I made a couple weeks ago. I had a half an hour to kill before work, the TRU was right across the street, and I thought what the heck, I’ll go check out the Breyer selection.

Not realizing it was the same night as their "Midnight Madness" sale.

That sort of thing happens to me all the time. It’s like I have an internal flash mob GPS. (Have you ever asked yourself "How on Earth did I end up in the middle of a Jesse Jackson rally?" I have.)

With absolutely no segue whatsoever, I present to you my Appaloosa Yearling chorus line:


(You’ll just have to pretend that the Palomino Western Pony is my Chalky Yearling, who for reasons unknown even to me is apparently detained somewhere else for the duration.)

I hardly ever find Liver Chestnut Yearlings, and Palomino ones aren’t super common in these parts, either. But at any given time, I always have at least one Appaloosa Yearling either on my saleslist, or in my body box. If I manage to sell one, the Universe manages to put in an automatic restock order.

That’s how come I have about a half dozen in my collection. You get that many passing through, and you’re bound to find variations. Big blankets, small blankets, different blazes, differently colored spots? Yup, gotta keep 'em.

There’s only one I consciously sought out - the two sock variation. She was a tough one: it took me a while to find her, and she’s not minty mint. It’s definitely an earlier variation, but it’s not one seen in any catalogs or other contemporaneous PR materials: all of the pictures of her from 1971 onward show her with those solid, Sandy Bay legs.


The Appaloosa Yearling is the only Breyer model to come in this peculiar shade of bay-that’s-not-bay. I can’t even recall seeing any vintage test colors that might have sported it. The closest match is the #154 Bay Blanket POA, whose color tends to be much warmer and more orangey.

The fact that the color is peculiar to the Appaloosa Yearling makes me wonder if they were modeling it after a specific, real-life horse. I haven’t found any evidence of that, but it’s another one of those notions I keep in the back of my mind as I mine old horse magazines for other precious nuggets of Breyer info.