Sunday, February 19, 2012

Joey in the Box

Who doesn’t love a box with their name on it? Especially when it’s a gift?


Here he is, mostly out of his box. (You’ll have to cut me some slack; I just opened the box a few minutes ago.)


According to the sticker on the outside of the shipping box, his release number is 712073; the number on the box itself is 1489, which is the release number for the Regular Run release of Joey, on the Man o’ War model.

Why the discrepancy? The box is (what I’m assuming will be) the standard one for the Regular Run release of the Joey, on Man o’ War. Unlike previous boxes, it’s not a generic box with stickers and labels added: everything is printed on it directly.

As I haven’t examined the packaging for any of this year’s new releases in detail, I don’t know if this is a new thing, or specific to this release. The past few years of BreyerFest releases weren’t generic either, so I’m going to assume that it’s a new thing.

If that’s the case, I hope it doesn’t spur a new trend towards box saving. I kind of like that the hobby has a more lax attitude about boxes than others do. It helped, I think, that prior to the early 1970s, there weren’t a whole lot of boxes worth saving. Horse/Rider sets, the licensed properties, and some of the illustrated shippers have some visual appeal, but the plain old corrugated shipper boxes everything else came in? Not so pretty on the shelf.

Plus, we show them. You can get away with showing MIB items in Collector’s Class entries, and maybe in halter, if you’re willing to push that envelope. Performance is out of the question, though, unless you’re other hobby is building ships in bottles.

I probably have a few more boxed items than the average hobbyist, mainly for research purposes. If I were more of a shower than a historian/collector, the vast majority of those items would be box-free, also.

I’m actually a little bit on the fence about deboxing my Gloss Joey completely. I do "need" one representative sample of this packaging, and I am unsure if I’ll be getting any other items this year that would come in the new standard packaging. And he’s not a mold and/or finish one normally shows much outside of collectibility anyway, so…

2 comments:

NaConi said...

Glad to see you are keeping yours! I'm tired of all the ones on evilBay gong for $500+++

If you're lucky enough to win one of 100 models, why not enjoy the horse?

SubaruWolf said...

Congrats on the Joey!

And about the boxing, I got one of the Brookside Pink Magnum models and was pleased to see that his bio card on the back of the box was not a separate piece of cardboard nor was it a sticker that had been stuck in place. Also, his identification info on the front of the box was printed on and not a sticker as well. I hope they stay with this, it's nice.