Burmese

So much for my grand plans for the week: my body completely crashed and burned on me Thursday morning after work, and I’m still not anywhere near functional. 

I mean, I knew it was coming – there’s no way I was going to party that hard without consequences! – but I was kind of hoping to put it off until the weekend, when I could afford the time.

In lieu of Worldcon bits and pieces today, I suppose it’s appropriate to say a little something to mark the passing of the world’s most famous hobbyist this week. 

I won’t bore you, again, about the time I met Queen Elizabeth’s lady-in-waiting at BreyerFest; you can use The Google Machine if you want to re-read it. I do want to say a little bit, though, about the first Breyer Special Run created specifically to honor one of her horses, Burmese:

You don’t see or hear much about this 1990 German Export Special Run nowadays because it’s a rather boring and unremarkable thing: a solid, unshaded Black paint job on a Traditional Secretariat, a mold few people love or collect. 

Only 500 pieces were made – which was pretty typical for a special run of that era – and for a brief moment after they were released there was a market for them. There weren’t a lot of special runs getting made around that time, and this one was initially available only through European dealers, which made it a hot commodity among U.S. collectors for a while.

You don’t see many of them for sale today. Some of it can be chalked up to the passage of time: it was released over 30 years ago, and there have only been a million or two special runs released since then. 

Burmese was also a product of its time: as a consequence of its shift in production from Chicago to New Jersey, they lost a lot of the talented employees that made Breyer what it was. Reeves was primarily a distributor, not a manufacturer, and they could ill-afford those losses.

While many of the models that were released during this time were (and are) beloved by the collectors who discovered the hobby during that era, those of us who came before (and after) are a little more sanguine about them. 

Everything and everybody goes through a rough patch or two in their lives, and if the models Reeves released during this time period were the worst of theirs, I think weathered it well.

(Let us not speak of Shrinkies.)

Will Burmese see a renaissance of interest now, in light of Her Majesty’s passing? Perhaps. Mine is not going anywhere: I am rather fond of the Secretariat mold for a variety of sentimental reasons, and I am not the kind of person who sees my collection purely in monetary terms.