In The Background

I found this at the local Salvation Army yesterday, on my way home from work:

I received this exact kit for Christmas way back when. I remember because I made a few “improvements” to the rather sorry design of the horse, making him look a bit more like the Family Arabian Stallion. I could do that because I had lots of leftover yarn from other latch hook kits I had received as gifts.

I got a lot of latch hook kits as a kid.

For the holidays, I’d hand all the relatives heavily annotated Breyer catalogs, but that rarely resulted in actual Breyer horses. Oh, they’d catch the hint about horses, but since I was the “artistic” kid, that meant… horse-themed craft kits.

Let’s face it: the horse world is confusing to people on the outside, whether it’s in “real-life” or in model-horse form. Unless you had another horse-crazy relative who understood, most of them figured it was Mom and Dad’s job to sort the Breyer stuff out. It was just easier to get you that craft kit they found at Kmart.

There was also never a reason for your other relatives to learn the ins-and-outs of the Breyer world, either: in spite of – or maybe even as a consequence of – being nearly ubiquitous, Breyers were always considered part of the background, much like the Japan clinkies you can just see on the box of this latch hook kit.

Breyer has never achieved the same cultural status or significance of Barbie, or Hot Wheels, or Legos. (Remember Jessie’s song from Toy Story 2? With the model horses that weren’t Breyer-shaped but were clearly meant to be Breyers? So close, yet so far... ) They never really achieved “fad” status, either, outside of the early successes of the Western Horse and the Davy Crockett set.

In fact, it was their relative lack of licensing success that probably saved them. Hartland found themselves scrambling in the 1960s as television Westerns faded from popularity, but Breyer continued to do what it had been doing all along: providing generic, license-free figurines for horse-crazy set.

Even that wouldn’t have been enough to carry them through: Breyer considered ditching the whole “Breyer Animal Creations” line in the late 1960s, but rumblings from the nascent hobby community persuaded them elsewise.

Through the 1970s, Breyers still had a solid, though peripheral, place in the toy industry, in spite of their best efforts to break through. In publishing terms, they were midlist items: they sold consistently, sometimes well, but they were never the bestsellers the industry or the country would talk about.

One of the numerous reasons why Breyer was sold to Reeves International back in the early 1980s was because of this issue: they wanted to develop the brand to achieve a bigger and more public presence in the toy and collectible market.

One of the ways to achieve that was to create Breyer merchandise that was not strictly models. We are not talking just about accessories like tack, props and stables, but “fun” and more ephemeral things. Breyer did have some products along those lines in the 1970s and early 1980s, like the Puffy Fun Stickers and the Coloring and Activity books:

http://www.identifyyourbreyer.com/images/8100.JPG

And in more recent years we’ve seen a lot more of these types of items both on the web site, and at BreyerFest: pajama pants, tote bags, notebooks and license plate frames, anyone?

But there was never been a coherent or coordinated plan to it all.

This is why I’ve been sort of puzzled by the negative reactions to the hiring of the two DreamWorks executives, and to some of the products they’ve “soft launched” on the web site. I am especially fond of this fabulous tote bag:

http://www.breyerhorses.com/vintage-breyer-tote

This kind of branding is nothing new: it has been a goal for a very long time. All they’ve done now is hire professionals they’ve worked with before, with real-world expertise.

Ironic t-shirts at Hot Topic? Breyer-themed pillows and comforters at Target? A “Stablemates” cartoon? Latch-hook kits with a more faithful rendition of the Family Arabian Stallion?

Those are the kinds of things I think we will be seeing in the near future, as they try to develop Breyer into a brand that doesn’t just acquire licenses, but becomes a license worth acquiring by others.

In effect, they’re trying to create non-horse Breyer things a younger me would have appreciated as gifts from well-meaning friends and relatives, in addition to the horses themselves.

In short, the horses themselves are not going anywhere: they are the core of the brand. We are just getting more Breyer-branded stuff.

Profitable Pork Selection

I like to tell folks that the greatest influence on my social life was probably the mid-day lineup of a local independent television station Channel 50 (it's now our local CW affiliate.) What was in that lineup? Mr. Ed, The Adventures of Superman, and Bill Kennedy's At the Movies.

From Mr. Ed came the love of horses, and from Superman came the comic book fixation. Those two obsessions should be obvious to any long time readers here. But the movies?

Bill Kennedy was practically an institution around here – a B-movie actor and announcer who hosted his own show in the Detroit market for decades. He made me and many of my friends and family into diehard movie buffs. I even worked at a movie theatre for three years. (My family thought the free movies were the best job benefit ever.) In case you haven't noticed, an awful lot of my blog post titles have been puns or plays on the titles of movies.

I'm not real particular about the kinds of movies I see: I have silents, shorts, educational and industrial films in my video collection. One movie that I've been dying to see still eludes me, though: it's called Profitable Pork Selection.

Sound familiar? It's the movie starring Jasper, the Market Hog!


It was produced Department of Animal Sciences at Purdue University, in conjunction with the American Cyanamid Company, who purchased Jasper and donated him to Purdue after he was named “Grand Champion Barrow” of the 1969 International Livestock Exhibition in Chicago.

Purdue either doesn't have a copy of in their archives, or has misplaced it. (This is not an uncommon occurrence with educational and industrial films, alas.) I've searched high and low for a copy of this film on various online archives devoted to these kinds of films, also with no results. It's possible that American Cyanamid may have a copy lying around somewhere, but I haven't had the time – or the nerve – to pursue any leads there so far. (Ironically, their headquarters are also now in Wayne, New Jersey!)

I have been able to find the person responsible for engineering Jasper's fame, however: her name was Helen M. Maddock. Here's a brief biography of Ms. Maddock, culled from the Iowa State University web site, where there is a scholarship in Animal Science named after her:

American Cyanamid Company hired Helen in 1953, and she worked for that company until her retirement in 1986. [...] Her tasks revolved around the use of antibiotics with livestock, particularly hogs, as she fulfilled the various roles of technical writer, advertising manager, product manager, and program manager. While with Cyanamid, Helen contributed to the defense of antibiotic use at Congressional and FDA hearings. She also was responsible for using Jasper, the 1969 International Grand Champion barrow, to promote the ideal market hog via slides, a movie, a booklet, and a model. (This advertising effort was so successful that not only do her nieces and nephews all recognize Jasper when they see his sturdy plastic model, so do her grandnieces and grandnephews!) Helen's professional activities were admired by her peers throughout her thirty-eight years in the American Society of Animal Science (ASAS) and culminated with her selection as an Honorary Fellow of the ASAS in 1987.

Neat, eh?

By the way, the Jasper in the photograph above is another little treasure from my collection: he was signed by Jasper's breeder Jack Rodibaugh, and purchased from Jack's sister, Mary Margaret Fox. How's that for an impeccable pedigree?