Wednesday, January 13, 2016

A More Polished Secretariat

So tired today; work is in its busy season, and sleep has been in short supply. I’m grateful for the overtime, but what I wouldn’t give to be able to sleep in one day this week ...

(Sunday. Maybe.)

I did take a quick opportunity to do a little decompressing after a particularly rough day earlier in the week, at an undisclosed location on the way home that had some Breyers in it. I was mulling over the recently discontinued #1440 Let’s Go Racing Set – the one with the Black Secretariat. I collect the mold, and the notion of buying a Breyer play set appealed to my inner nine year old.

Then I noticed something: the Secretariat mold has been “polished”, just like the Traditional #54 Trakehner mold!

It actually looked good on him, though as a member of that mold’s slender fanbase, I’m a little wistful about alterations being made to Chris Hess’s last official Breyer mold.

I don’t know when the polishing occurred; I traded for an NPOD sample of one that still had that slightly rough-hewn look, and the promotional photos and video all show that version as well:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBgP2EPRfG0

I hadn’t noticed the change before because it wasn’t something I had been looking to get until recently, now that it’s been discontinued and some of the remaining warehouse stock has been shipped to Tuesday Mornings and the like.

Plus I had the Sample, and Burmese the solid Black Export Special Run of one of Queen Elizabeth’s favorite horses. Black Secretariats are not in short supply here.

It’ll probably be a while before I actually pick up the polished mold version – it’s time, not money, that’s not on my side.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the heads-up; hopefully the local TM has one of the old ones, or that the "polishing" isn't as severe as on the Trakehner. That's not from nostalgia, as much as that the "polished" version of the Trakehner reminds me too much of photos I've seen of models that are heat-bloated just enough to have a subtle loss of detail/definition. :-/

Anonymous said...

Is this the same kind of "polishing" that the John Henry and Sherman Morgan molds got?