Kaibab

I was not expecting the latest America the Beautiful release Kaibab to be the lightning rod that he is. Personally, I love mine:

The Stretched Morgan mold is one that’s experienced huge swings in popularity over the course of its 50+ production career. He’s been derided as being too typey, not typey enough, old-fashioned, awkwardly posed, obviously suffering from laminitis, and bombarded with the standard conformational nitpicking every Breyer mold ever has been subjected to.

Yet he still retains his fans – like me – and many Stretched Morgan releases and variations are among the most desirable and highly sought after Breyers of any kind. The Woodgrain? The BreyerFest 2000 Raffle Model Showboat? The multitudes of variations of the original #48 Black?

(Have you seen the prices on some of those Black variations lately? Yikes!)

Sure, the price for Kaibab was a bit high, but that I attribute to the popularity of the series and the complexity of the paint jobs they’ve been attempting on the Web Specials: in many cases they are approaching Connoisseur-level quality.

There are some real-horse world biases in play with Kaibab, too: in the past few years, especially, nonstandard colors on breed-specific molds have been getting a lot of pushback.

That is something I find rather weird. Part of Reeves marketing program is selling the notion of model horses as a fantasy wish-fulfillment of horse ownership. Even the most technically accurate horse figurine is still a fantasy construct.

Are some of them bad ideas, artistically? Maybe. But an Appaloosa or Tobiano Pinto Morgan sitting on your shelf isn’t likely to spawn any real-life horses. They have no “bad” genes to propagate.

Anyway, again: with retail or in-hobby purchases, it is always safest to buy what you love, not what you think you can sell later. Buying something at retail to resell later has rarely worked out well for me. (You would think I would have learned by now, but for some reason I keep trying...)

I was secretly hoping that there’d be a Morgan release for BreyerFest, since one of the most famous race horses of the early 19th century was Black Hawk, sired by Sherman Morgan himself, and memorialized in folk art ranging from quilts to weathervanes.

I think a Glossy Dappled Black on the Kennebec Count mold would be great, but I know most of the hobby would beg to differ.