Another Oddity: Bay Grazing Foal

Here’s another fun one I shouldn’t have bought, but did anyway:

A Bay Grazing Foal with no front black points. You might recall that I found a similar Mare back in November:

So now I have a matching set of variations! Anyone who has tried to complete families – Family Arabians, Proud Arabians, Stock Horses et al – knows how hard it is to find matching or complementary sets. The opportunity to reunite this pair was one I simply couldn’t pass up.

Variations on the Grazing Foal are a little more common than the Mare; Foal molds in general tend to be in production longer than their respective Stallions and Mares, and sell in greater quantities. More models = more potential variations.

That’s the reasoning behind the recent spate of Foal releases – Traditional, Classics, Stablemates, Camilla the Foalzilla – that are otherwise unattached or unaffiliated to a matching Stallion or Mare. People will buy “orphan” foals without any pressing need for a matching parent.

(I’m old-fashioned in that regard. I bothers me a lot when people ask to buy “just the foal”, especially matching sets that have otherwise managed to stay together for decades.)

While it is easy to chalk up both the Mare and the Foal as random production variations, in the mid-1970s there were Regular Run items that were specifically painted without front black points. Most notably, the early version of the Stablemates G1 Bay Arabian Stallion, especially when he was sold as a mislabeled Citation. From the 1975 Dealer Catalog:

(FYI: Most of them did not look this nice.)

Was there some sort of correlation? It is a safe assumption to make, since the timing lines up: my Grazing Mare and Foal have all the mold marks and stylistic cues of mid- to late-1970s releases.

But again, like the Palomino Ruffians of my last blog post, sometimes variations just happen. I am just happy to finally have a matching Bay Grazing Mare and Foal set that I can live with.