Wednesday, November 20, 2013

This is Not About Lady Phase

The car is back today, and running great. I spent most of the rest of the day running all the errands I couldn’t for the previous five. I had access to the truck, but some of the places I regularly go are a little dodgy, and an old station wagon with 150,000 miles on it is much less likely to be messed with than a shiny red truck with less than 25,000 miles on the odometer.

(Fear not for my safety - I’ve lived in the Metro Detroit area my entire life. I know what I’m doing!)

Just the other day I was moving a few things around, and I was struck by the need to look at the mold marks on my Lady Phases. I was aware the copyright horseshoe/mold mark changed a while ago, but like a lot of those molds, I hadn’t been keeping track of exactly when those changes occurred on the Lady Phase.

I think it was relatively early; unfortunately, I packed away most of my more recent (post-2004) Lady Phases during the latest inventory. The oldest recent one I have out right now is a 2009 BreyerFest Sprinkles, and she has the newest mold mark. So before then, at least.

So why am I nattering about this? Well, I took a peek at my Mother Lode Lady Phase, and guess what? She has an older mold mark.

What that means is that Reeves (probably) wasn’t exaggerating when they said that they found them in the warehouse somewhere. They really are old stock - or were painted on old unpainted stock. (Leftover bodies from Hope N Glory?)

This may or may not be news to you. I tend to gloss over discussions of the Lady Phase mold online because the conversations tend to go hyperbolic quickly, and sometimes involve conspiracy theories, and I’m not a big fan of those. So if the mold mark thing is not news to you, that’s why.

I kind of wish more hobbyists approached things that way: not that of willful ignorance, but a studious distancing from group opinion and/or peer pressure. If everyone looks at something the same way, from the same angle or perspective, I do not think it is truly being seen or evaluated properly.

What everyone is looking at, essentially, is an image. As Rene Magritte pointed out in his famous painting The Treachery of Images (i.e: the "Ceci n’est pas une pipe" picture): a painting is a painting of an object, not the object itself.

I know, a little deep. It’s just my Art History degree showing. (It does that sometimes.) Still, something worth thinking about, the next time one gets into a discussion about anything Breyer-related. Especially mold- or sculptor-bashing threads. Remember: every mold is someone's favorite. Even Lady Roxana or Khemosabi.

Something a little less philosophic next time. Maybe something on one of my recently acquired grails. (Another one this week, quite unexpectedly!)

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