Suggestions, Boxed

More drama at work, sheesh. So glad the schedule is rather light for the next two weeks, I'm hoping it’ll all blow over in the meantime.

The next Vintage Club release clue is a picture of a foot with a footpad on it, which looks like the hind leg of the Fighting Stallion. It’s black, which rules out the Performance Horse color (rats!) but not my original guess of Buckskin.

(Wouldn’t that be freaky if I got it right on the first try? Why can’t I get that lucky on an actual cash money lottery?)

Other vintage colors that came with black legs include the Black Blanket Appaloosa on the #127 Running Stallion, or even the Black Splash Spot Appaloosa that appeared on the #115 Western Prancing Horse, an old favorite of mine:


None of these choices "match up" exactly with the reference photo that appears to be solid black. Older Buckskins came with points that were more grayish or charcoal, rather than black, and frequently came with unpainted/buckskin shins. The earlier Running Stallions came with gray hooves. The Western Prancers were glossy, and sometimes had gray points, rather than black.

The hoofpads aren’t technically the right color, either, so I’m probably just fussing over nothing. The Palomino/Brown Pinto of the Dandy wasn’t an exact match with the Palomino/Brown Pintos of yore, and I was totally okay with that.

Close enough is good enough, most of the time. Just as long as they don’t start messing with the colors too much - like glossing Red Roans or Wedgewood Blues, or putting pink hooves on Honey Bays. Those aren’t "tweaks" or adaptations - in my opinion, those are completely different, nonvintage colors. (And if you start putting those nonvintage colors on nonvintage molds - that’d be downright heretical!)

There are tons of fascinating vintage color and mold combinations that could be utilized, without having to resort to making up new ones. These are just the first few that flew off the top of my head:

• Gloss, Red-eyed Albino Stretched Morgan, with muscle shading
• Gloss Wild Dapple Gray Five-Gaiter, with silver and gold ribbons
• Gloss Gray Appaloosa Western Horse, with Black snap saddle
• Matte Five-Gaiter Sorrel Mustang
• Matte Indian Pony-style airbrushed Brown Pinto on the Running Mare and Foal
• Gloss Honey Palomino Balking Mule
• The Appaloosa Performance Horse colorway, on anything

I haven’t gotten around to tossing my ideas into the Breyer web site forums yet because I haven’t really had the time or patience to deal with them. There’s nothing much there to mention, anyway. They’re awkwardly implemented, slow to load, and there’s not a whole lot of the kind of "interactivity" there that gives a good forum its vitality.

http://www.breyerhorses.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=2133

The biggest liability there (so far) is that it is rather lightly populated by hobbyists either with very narrow agendas, or without a whole lot of imagination. This I would attribute, partly, to the fact that they were soft launched via the Facebook page, and I haven’t exactly been impressed by the level of discussion on any Facebook pages I’ve seen, much less Breyer’s.

I’m hoping that Reeves gets a little more aggressive in its promotion of their forums via media other than Facebook, because I really do not think that the comments and suggestions expressed there so far are in any way representative of the true imaginative vigor of the hobby as a whole.