Liver Chestnut Scratching Foal Oddity

On the left is your standard, garden-variety #169 Liver Chestnut Scratching Foal, a relatively scarce vintage model who was only in production from 1970 through 1971. This release used to be hard to come by, but then the Internet and eBay happened, so not as much anymore.

They still sell for decent price – especially ones with good shading and detail, or with original boxes and stickers – but the big money in the Scratching Foal game is with either Test Colors or some of the scarcer Fun Foal variations like the Black, Dark Gray, or Blue Roan.

But who is the Foal on the right? I’m not sure! It’s either a Test Color that just happens to be very similar to the Liver Chestnut, or it’s a Liver Chestnut with a factory overhaul, and lots of extra dark shading and added black points.

There were a lot of Special Runs in the 1980s that were basically just updates of previous Regular Runs; the first ones that come to mind are two of the Montgomery Ward Christmas SRs: the Dapple Gray Shire from 1982-1983, and the Alabaster Old Timer from 1983.

There were subtle differences that distinguished those SRs from their Regular Run antecedents: the newer Shires tended to have fewer and more random dapples, and the newer Old Timers didn’t have the heavy gray body shading that the original #200 was known for.

So this subtly different Liver Chestnut Scratching Foal could have been a Test for a similar Special Run that didn’t happen.

The other theory is that – like some other Oddities that have popped up in recent years (the Palomino Family Arabian Mares with black points, et al) – it might have been something that a painter enhanced at the factory, either as a gift or for their own amusement.

There’s also the possibility that it was a Cull that Marney or one of her cohorts salvaged at the Chicago factory: it came out of a collection in Illinois within a reasonable driving distance of Chicago, with other oddities that obviously came straight from the factory. And touching up salvageable Culls with a bit of black paint was very much a Marney thing!

One this is certain, though: it’s not a Test Color for the original release of the Scratching Foal. The earliest Scratching Foals – including my Liver Chestnut one, above left – don’t have a USA mold mark, but my new dark and lovely one does.

Test Colors on the Scratching Foal are a bit hard to come by; the closest I came before was a Cull that I purchased off eBay from the family of a former Breyer contractor, also in the Chicago area.

The funniest thing about this situation was that I was making a few additions and changes to my BreyerFest want list, and the Scratching Foal was one of the molds I wanted to focus on this year!