It’s interesting that of the four releases this mold has had since its introduction in 2013, three of them have been very limited (for a Stablemate) items: the BreyerFest 2013 Rivet, the Vintage Club Riptide, and now the BreyerFest 2015 Bahia.
It’s no wonder, then, that its Regular Run Roan “Mustang” release we finally got at the end of last year can still be a bit of a tough customer to find! This mold is like a mini-Esprit, in terms of his early availability. (And yes, the WEG Reiner is another. Sigh.)
The Sao Paolo model is also interesting. It’s not unprecedented that we would get brand new Stablemates molds for BreyerFest – Rivet was a part of a quartet of new molds in 2013, after all – but I was thrown a bit with the randomness of one new mold among the older.
Molds like Sao Paolo – and some of the upcoming Stablemates Club releases – do present an interesting (or troubling) classification problem.
We used to be able to classify Stablemates releases by “generations” – a group of molds released within a certain timeframe. The “First Generation” or G1 molds consisted of all the Hagen-Renaker releases introduced in 1975 and 1976. The G2s were the first set of new molds, released ca. 1998, and so on.
This terminology carried over from the My Little Pony community, and our hobby has adopted it without much complaint or to-do. Because it worked.
But now that we’re in a new age, where – like Traditional and Classic molds – random new Stablemates molds are going to show up whenever, the classification by generations breaks down. Either we’ll have to start arbitrarily defining new generations, or just give up on classifying later releases altogether.
I prefer the latter to the former. Primarily because general consensuses in the hobby are hard to come by – go ask a half-dozen hobbyists to define what “vintage” means, chronologically, and boggle at the answers.
We can still keep the older classification system for the older Stablemates molds (no reason to abandon it, really) but as far as the newer and more randomly distributed molds, I see no reason to classify them any differently than any other scale’s mold releases, now.
3 comments:
Love seeing new Stablemates. Sadly I gave up collecting them after Breyer started putting out so many limited runs at prices I couldn't afford. After the big Anniversary set I stepped away from the hobby. I still look and see now and again what new ones come up. I still have my 500+ collection I need to put up on eBay someday so someone else can appreciate them.
Agree on dropping classifications for later molds. Once we hit the "new release every year" it's hard to say where one gen ends and the next begins.
Sao Paolo is actually on the Esperanza mold from the Spirit porcelain set from the early 2000's. It's still very random!
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