Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Dating Discrepancies

Weather Girls are going to come in gloss, too? Oy. The online discussion of it all has gotten almost as insufferable as it has for the Sunshine Celebration. Nothing - and I mean, absolutely, literally nothing - can live up to that kind of hype. I'm just afraid that any kind of flaw, however minor, will be greeted by a similarly stupid overreaction.

It's not going to be pretty. (On the plus side, that means we won't have to deal with conseqences of them as glossed live show prizes. Good grief, that would have been awful.)

The research trip didn't quite pan out the way I hoped, either. I covered quite a bit of ground -from 1957 through 1960, more or less - and I found ... almost nothing!

I found lots of Hartland data, and some secondary information that might become useful later on, but I only one bit of Breyer information from the 1957 through 1960 time period surfaced: the announcement of the release of the Black and White Poodles. From the January, 1958 issue of Toys & Novelties.

(Sorry, no scan today - blogging from the road, no access to the scanner! Next time, I promise.)

Longtime readers will recognize the problem with that: the Poodles had already been featured in a couple of Christmas catalogs and an ad in the June, 1957 issue of Western Horseman. You could kinda-sorta explain the mail-order catalog thing: there have been a number of instances of items appearing in the Christmas catalogs in the months before their official catalog release (Stud Spider and Legionario III, most notably.)

But the Poodle was clearly not a holiday pre-release: the Western Horseman ad suggests that some retailers already had it in stock by mid-1957, at least. So, what's up with the obvious discrepancy?

There could be any number of explanations for it.

The magazine could have just happened to select the Poodle's writeup from a backstock of older press releases. Or maybe the Poodles had not quite been ready for release in time for the 1957 Toy Fair, and Breyer wanted to feature it in their 1958 display. (But why the Poodle, and not the Clydesdale or Old Mold Mare and Foal, who were also new for 1958?)

So what does it mean to my research? Nothing: I'm sticking with the 1957 release date. To heck with the "official" announcement: if it was available to consumers by June of 1957, it's a 1957 release.

It'll probably be several more months before I execute another research excursion. It's a "time and money" thing, not a "disappointment over what I found" thing. Sometimes you find stuff, and sometimes you don't. All it means is that there's just that much less ground to cover next time.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ah, but have you heard the NEW angst? There's another uber-limited Esprit coming out. 200 pieces! Bay! Equine Affair! Omfg! (Okay, so I'm paraphrasing a bit.) But seriously, is Esprit or is Esprit not becoming this year's Silver/Fox Valley Oliver? As someone else said, I pity anyone trying to conga this mold.

ANDREA said...

Oh yes, I've heard.

There's no other (polite) word for what's going on with that mold other than "ridiculous."

More later, when my thoughts are more coherent. (Me and my bed need to get reacquainted.)

Julie said...

I'm trying to ignore the hoopla as well. Don't get me wrong I like the Weather Girls models [?] and I will participate in the hunt. But yeah the online griping has gotten old, down right unbearable. The way I see it, I'm going to buy what I like. that simple. :)