I haven’t joined the Premier Club, but I’ve entered into a partnership with a friend to purchase any releases she doesn’t want or need. It’s a win-win situation for the both of us: she won’t have to go through the bother of finding a buyer, and I’ll occasionally get a random surprise model, which is always fun.
The first of these new purchases was Firefly and Hawkeye!
The Foal is just as cute in person as I thought it would be, and the Mare in much nicer than the photos let on. I think it’s the paint job, mostly: it distracts from her lovely silhouette.
It highlights the one problem I do have with Premier Club releases, and a lot of higher end Breyer releases in general: unnecessarily complex colors and patterns.
If you don’t put a “fancy” paint job on a higher-end release, hobbyists complain that they’re not getting their money’s worth on it. But then you have other hobbyists complaining that the fancy colors and patterns are either unrealistic, or not breed accurate.
It’s a darned-if-you-do, darned-if-you-don’t situation.
Taking breed standards out of the equation, some molds look better in solid colors, and others in patterned ones. For example, I think the San Domingo looks better spotted, rather than solid (with the one except being the No-Spot Appaloosa Oxydol, maybe because of his uniqueness?) The opposite is the case with molds like the Traditional Man o’ War, whose admittedly odd proportions can look even odder when enhanced with strategically placed whites.
As much as I want to love him, the 2016 Vintage Club Man o’ War release Storm just doesn’t do much for me. I would have been so much happier with a solid Charcoal, Gloss or Matte Palomino, or even (sigh!) Gloss Dapple Gray or Dapple Black.
(Though if I were offered a Test Color Pinto or Appaloosa Man o’ War, I would take it in a heartbeat, because one does not turn down a Test Color Man o’ War.)
I think that’s why I’m still a little hesitant about Elbe and Spree, the Pinto BreyerFest releases of Firefly and Hawkeye: while I’m sure they’ll be great in person, all I can imagine is how much more I would like them in more common/boring colors – like the original Thoroughbred Mare and Suckling Foal, in plain old (kinda-sorta) Bay and Chestnut.
While I think that would make an ideal future Vintage Club release, I can also see a lot of collectors dismissing them much as they dismissed the recent Barrington – on another Morgen Kilbourn mold, no less. (I thought he turned out fabulous, but I am pretty much a sucker for all of Morgen’s molds.)
(Just a head’s up: I’ll be on more-or-less mandatory overtime through the month of March, so free time will be even harder to come by for me until April-ish. I’m not thrilled that most of my creative life will be on hold until then, but I’m definitely not disliking the paychecks.)
5 comments:
I agree wholeheartedly with all points. Some molds definitely look nicer in solid colors and vice versa. Bristol is a very nice mold but the VC chestnut version wasn't an ideal choice to me. Breyer's chestnuts nowadays aren't the same as the vintage ones they tend to be too warm/orange. My chestnut Cantering Welsh Pony is a nice golden shade of chestnut. I would rather have seen the VC Bristol in the bay or seal brown the other colors the CWP came in.
Breyer excels at bays dark and light and that would have been stunning.
Midas is a fantastic chestnut, and Redmond is too. But yeah they can be hit and miss with chestnut and palomino.
Although I can complain as much as the next disappointed collector, I always remind myself that the strength of this hobby depends as much on our differences as our agreement. If we all liked the exact same things, we'd all be black hole collectors, with a much smaller secondary market and certainly no fun arrangements to share a club account - something I have also enjoyed. It's hard to judge from print how passionate a complaint actually is, but usually it's just part of this fun game, which involves picking and choosing and above all, the wonderful anticipation. Sometimes I do have to remind myself that you can't win them all, else you'd have noplace to put them!
The SM Club horses have had some of the same problem. It's been really bad with facial white on a few of them, where the location of the white made the heads look really wonky. One of the new molds (Mirado, maybe?) had a wide blaze that made the muzzle look like a narrow little crocodile head. And the white makes any mold detail that is there practically impossible to see, so a little shading makes them look soooo much better.
I didn't join the premier club again because the paint jobs and flaws on these supposedly top notch models were so atrocious. I'll just wait for the regular runs. They were actually better.
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