More Anniversaries

When I made my offhanded crack about Robocop the other day, I had no idea there were people out there that actually wanted to build a Robocop statue in Detroit. Must have been something in the ether.

And silly, too - the Robocop movies weren’t even filmed in Detroit. Like a lot of movies and TV about Detroit, unfortunately. (They once shot a TV movie about Motown Records in Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh?!)

It’s something that’s changed for the better recently, thank goodness. If anything changes the country’s attitude about the city, it’ll be in seeing the area as it actually is - good, bad and ugly - rather than the lazy, cartoon caricature that the media falls back on. Trust me, we know all too well how bad things can be around here. Rubbing our faces in it is not helpful.

There are a couple of horse-related Detroit topics I’ll get around to, one of these days, but in the meantime I’ll kick that soapbox back into the corner.

When I was going over some of the documentation the other day for the post on the Western Prancing Horse, it got me to thinking about some of the other early Breyer releases. This year - 2011 - represents the Golden Anniversary of at least three molds: the Five-Gaiter, the Mustang, and the Fighting Stallion.

The Modernistic Buck and Doe also premiered in 1961, but as it’s likely that those molds were purchased by Breyer secondhand, it doesn’t seem quite right to put it in the same "graduating class" as the Gaiter, Mustang, and Fighter. There are a few hints that the Fighter might have debuted prior to 1961, too, but since he appears in that same batch of pages we now assume to be the 1961 catalog insert sheets, we’ll just go with that date for now.


I wonder if Reeves has anything planned for this special occasion? The problem here is that all three (or five) of the molds have already appeared in metallic gold paint jobs - as Decorators. You can’t simply go the "pinto" route the way they did with the Family Arabian Stallion, either, since the Fighting Stallion has come in not one, but two different Golden Charm Pinto paint jobs - the 1998 Volunteer Special, and The Ginger Horse Special Run Atlas.

Mixing it up might work: do pintos for the Gaiter and the Mustang, but an appaloosa for the Fighter. A semi-leopard Florentine with gold splash spots would be killer! I might break out the credit card for that.

If they do go web-based with this concept they better (a) up the piece counts and (b) post them when they say they’re going to post them, and not a minute or three earlier. It’d be great if they could somehow create a filter to weed out the people who really were buying them for their own collections (or a friend), but we’re still a few decades away from computer algorithms that sophisticated.