Seeing Things

Here is Glacier, with his older and more conventionally handsome cousin:

There’s no VIN, and the detail put into the painting finishwork makes it pretty obvious that the Glaciers were U.S. made. I especially like the subtlety of the eyes: dark brown with a large iris and black eyeliner. They give him a dark and mysterious look, like he’s seen things.

I had been toying with the idea of using him as trade bait, but I think he’s staying. He’s got stories to tell me, man.

Some hobbyists were a little overly concerned about the sample in the promotional picture having what looked like a bent leg. I knew that wasn’t going to be the case with the actual production pieces because experience has been telling us, over and over, that you really can’t go by the photographs Reeves sends out to the world.

You wouldn’t think it would bear repeating at this point, but it does. I’ve noticed that even Reeves is starting to put "actual production may vary from prototype shown" in the fine print of some of their offers now. It’s something that should have been in the fine print since forever, but I’m accepting the improvement as an improvement, and moving on.

Though I think it would be awesome if they did do raffles/drawings for some of the actual prototypes, in addition to the semi-regular raffles/drawings for everything else. Aside from being really cool models to have, in general, they already come with a ready-made and easily acquired provenance you can use to trump the local live show competition. (The model in your documentation? That’s mine.)

It would reduce my chances of acquiring more prototypes in the future, but as I slowly go through another slight herd reduction, I have to accept the reality of not being able to have them all, anyway.

As for the echoing refrains of "Why can’t all Breyer models be of this quality level?" It’s not primarily a matter of old techniques vs. new, or U.S. manufacturing vs. China: it’s a scalability issue. Quality is much easier to control when you’re dealing with 40- or 50-piece runs, and not runs in the hundreds or thousands.

I think that’s the number one issue with the Premier Club. A Connoisseur-quality club with an unlimited membership cap sounds good at first, until you realize Reeves had a hard enough time with quality control with the original 350-piece runs on the Connoisseurs.

Quality control on the Vintage Club has been somewhat better, but the piece count is lower - 500 vs. 750+ for the Premier Club - and the paint jobs are less complex, and therefore harder to mess up. There are still some Vintage Club issues, particularly the lack of fidelity to the original paint jobs, caused partly (and ironically) by better quality control: the "imitation" overspray on Running Mare and Foal Salt and Pepper being the most amusing example of that.

There’s no way to completely eliminate flaws and errors in anything that’s mass-produced, even in relatively small runs. Things can get better - they can always get better - but perfection? Rarer than a Wedgewood Blue Antelope.

Bubbles

Hobby resolutions: focus on collecting/upgrading the dogs, upgrading my pre-Reeves Proud Arabians, and completing the Roemer collection; finish sorting and archiving the latest ephemera acquisitions; and finally, doing a 5 percent herd reduction for space reasons.

That last item might not sound like much, but that will cull about 100 pieces from the collection, mostly Traditionals and Classics. (No Stablemates! I can hide those anywhere.)

I got home late from work yesterday, and I’ve spent most of my day off sorting through my giant box of unfinished sewing projects (another resolution), so the Glacier who arrived yesterday will not get his glorious unveiling until Monday at the earliest.

Though I’m a little scared to even open him up, at this point. Not out of possible disappointment - that's an uncomfortably narrow box he's in - but because of the prices realized by a couple of them on eBay this week.

I’ll be up front with y’all and confess that I come from a working class background: my family thinks splurging on an occasional Big Gulp and a bag of Doritos is wanton excess. Investing more than $250 on any model makes me uneasy, even if I know it is worth more - or will be in the future.

And I’ve also spent a lot of time at flea markets, yard sales, estate sales and antique shops, and I’ve seen the fallout of collectible "investment" bubbles everywhere, new and old.

The current prices for Glacier are part of a bubble. That bubble will pop soon, if it hasn’t already, but it will leave us with a legacy of Glaciers listed at hyperinflated prices for a while.

The 1984 Just About Horses Saddlebred Weanling was like that for a long time. Because of the flawed way they were distributed (by mail, and not limited to one per person), it created a lot of frustrated demand. The prices at one point reached the $200-350 level - and that was in the late 1980s and early 1990s!

I went without one for years (decades, actually) until the prices finally dropped to the $100 level, which seemed more reasonable and fair for a Special Run model with a 1000 piece run and some historical significance.

Prices will come down, eventually, because they have to. The hobby does not have enough hobbyists at that income or intensity level to sustain them.  The handful of buyers who can afford them don't want them or already have them, and the buyers who do want them can't afford them - or justify the purchase financially.

It might take a while; we've all seen certain models on eBay and MH$P that have been there for years. (In some of my more annoyed moments, I find myself gesticulating at the screen and yelling "Just cut the darn price and let it go, already!")

Glaciers will never be "cheap" - he was a 40 piece Special Run, in a popular Decorator color, on a mold with very few releases - but they’ll become affordable. Or at least, not unimaginably unattainable. (Still waiting for that moment on Marshall, probably in vain. Alas!)

Glacier

I had checked first thing in the morning for the Reeves "Christmas Surprise" and noticed it was the usual free shipping and discount blady-blah-blah-whatever they had offered before. Since the hobby, in general, had not been overly thrilled with a similar gift last year, it made me wonder if there was still a "surprise" forthcoming.

In the afternoon - after dinner, but before the food coma set in - I thought I’d check it out again, and well hey, guess what shows up:

A 40-piece Special Run Wedgewood Blue Pronghorn Antelope? Didn't see that coming. (What I thought might be coming? Either the Elk, or the Boxer.)

Okey dokey, then. They have (had?) a few other lesser surprises - leftover Kashmirs, for instance - but Glacier definitely met my qualifications for "the kind of surprise I was looking for".

What’s most interesting about the Pronghorn Antelope is his horns are not molded separately - as is the case with most of the horned Traditionals - but are integral to the mold. (The Rocky Mountain Goat is another contemporaneous example with integrated horns.)

We’ve had two previous releases on the Pronghorn Antelope mold: the original release #310 that ran from 1971 through 1976, and the #389, running from 1997 through 2005. There haven’t been a lot of releases on the Pronghorn Antelope because, well, there’s not a lot you can do with a Pronghorn Antelope.

The earlier ones are lighter, have a more "airbrushy" paint quality, and the horns tend to be light gray, veering into charcoal. The later ones are darker, are clearly masked, and have black horns and facial markings. The belly and neck markings are somewhat different, too, with the earlier pieces having a variable number of stripes on his neck, while the newer ones always have three.

Glacier’s markings and shading more closely resemble the original #310 releases, which also tended to have very high belly white.

Other than one well-known Alabaster Test Color, there aren’t a lot of known Tests, Oddities or Variations of the Pronghorns, outside of the normal amount of variation that occurs during production. The later Antelope was produced during the bi-eye era, so some may have that feature, but that’s about it.

Neither one of the earlier Antelopes is particularly difficult to find at a reasonable price, though I doubt that will be the case with Glacier: I’ve already seen three for sale. (I was kind of hoping that people would wait until the day after Christmas before they started doing that.)

For the record, though, I prefer Reeves selling these low-piece-run "weirdities" in straight up sales like this, rather than as purchase raffles like the larger-run Web Specials. It doesn’t eliminate speculators, but it does seem to cut down on the initial rush.