Sunday, October 7, 2012

Sometimes, I Have No Clue

I was going to get so much done this weekend, then WHAM - hello, migraine. And not some crawl-in-the-basement-and-sleep-for-three-hours one, either. This sucker lingered.

On top of that, the Vita was sick, too, so at one point during my extended weekend I was outside, nauseous, shambling around in the rain, waiting for her to lose her lunch as well.

So, instead of getting caught up, I am now even further behind. No long, lovingly researched post for you!

Instead, here’s a picture of some oddity I picked up at Model Horse Congress back in 1985 or 1986:


I think he’s a cull, but I’m not entirely sure. (His condition is a little rougher than the photo lets on.) Breyer had stopped using the pinto mask on the Western Horse about 10 years earlier, and it would be a few more before they’d pull it out again for the Chestnut Pinto Just About Horses Special in 1990. So he might actually have been a test for … something else? I knew he wasn’t that old, because his color was not dissimilar to the acidic yellow palominos Breyer was cranking out at the time. 

The reins are obviously not original, but I can’t recall if the saddle was. I honestly can’t remember. That was when I was just starting to hit the flea markets pretty seriously, and Western Horses and Ponies were still fairly plentiful, if not in the best condition. Sometimes I’d buy something just to salvage the reins or saddle from it.

(People were a little less particular about the bodies they were willing to customize back then, too. Partly out of necessity, partly out of youthful exuberance.)

I’m also almost certain that the eyes and hooves were touched up later, too, but I never bothered to "fix" them because I couldn’t be 100 percent sure that they weren’t. Plus, I just couldn’t bear the thought of having an unfinished model standing on my shelves.

I’ve since gotten over that sentiment. This weird old boy's been grandfathered in, though. Sometimes it's best to leave some mysteries to be. 

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