Spirit Stablemates

Since I’ve been on a bit of a Stablemates kick, here is the full lineup of Spirit Stablemates I got in my Customer Appreciation order back in December:

I don’t know why I got the impression that I’d get the entire set (save the chase piece because yeah, right) when I bought an entire box of Series 2 Spirit Stablemates. If I had done my due diligence with my research I would have known that. (In my defense, the past few months have been crazier than usual.)

So now I have an extra half-dozen Stablemates added to my sales list. C’est la vie. 

The one bright spot in this deal is that I now – finally! – have an honest-to-goodness non-Unicorn Deco-fied Breyer Perlino with the addition of the Equuleus, on the Chrome mold:

I know, technically, that Equuleus is the name of a somewhat obscure constellation, but every time I see it, its peculiar spelling makes me think of all the awkward attempts at clever names I blessed my models with when I first entered the hobby, a couple lifetimes ago.

(Many of whom have been since been renamed. At least in public!)

Consequently the name is also a good reminder – as if the painted eyebrows were not enough! – of the target audience for the animated show, which was not too dissimilar to me when I first got started in the hobby mumble-mumble years ago as a tween.

Though as a horse-crazy kid in the 1970s, my path into the hobby was more influenced by The Black Stallion books, Horse Racing, and the Equestrian events of the 1976 Montreal Olympics than by TV shows or movies.

(I was fortunate in that being across the river from Canada, we could watch Canadian coverage of the Olympics, which included way more Equestrian events!)

My path into Breyer obsession was not unusual. In fact, if you look back at the kinds of models Breyer released in the 1970s and early 1980s – the Classic and Stablemate Racehorses, the Classic USET Set, Halla and all the Black Stallion-themed items – I can see now that I was very much their target demographic!  

This is why I can’t get too worked up about the idiosyncracies of the Spirit releases – or any other releases that are obviously not designed specifically for me. They are tailoring their products to future potential lifetime customers.