Boring, But Competent

Another busy day of stuff and things. Some stuff I wanted to get done this week got done, some of it didn’t, so here’s another exciting Special Run from the 1980s to thrill and amaze you while I vegetate in a corner of my office:

Yeah, it’s no Glossy Appaloosa Halla: it’s the 1986 Bay Stud Spider, who was an early gift with purchase model. (Yup, we had them back then, too.) You had to buy $30 worth of stuff from the mail-order company Your Horse Source to get him.

(That translated back then to about three Traditional Adults, or four Traditional Foals or Classic Racehorses.)

He’s pretty standard for a 1980s Special Run: a flat Red Bay, airbrushed markings, a bit of shading on the nostrils, on a competently executed mold doing nothing in particular.

That really is the definition of boring, isn’t it?

To be honest, we weren’t all that excited back then about him either, but our choices were more limited then – fewer existing molds, fewer releases per year, etc. – and he was technically free.

While he’s no Stetson – or even a Smooth Copper – of all the models I’ve bought and subsequently sold over the years, he’s still here. So that’s saying something about the power of boring-but-competent.

(There’s also a story. Most of my models have stories to them, but this one is rather mortifying and probably best left off the Internet. For now.)

Even though they made about a 1000 pieces of him, he’s not all that common to find – partly because he is boring, and also because I suspect the full complement of 1000 pieces might not have been made/sold, either.

Larger piece runs like that were usually reserved for bigger mail-order operations like Sears and JC Penneys, for JAH Subscriber SRs, or as an item that was available to multiple mail-order companies simultaneously. A thousand pieces for a modest mail-order operation out of Wyoming? It might have been a challenge.