Sweetish

I spent an inordinate amount of time last night looking for an affordable wooden box or frame to finish my Joseph Cornell-inspired BreyerFest box. Then it finally dawned on me: they were assemblages of found objects, just haunt the local thrift stores until you find one that works. Duh.

In my defense, yesterday was not a good day.

Regarding the Just About Horses situation: yes, I am aware. (It’s complicated.)

As far as the popularity of the Gloss Bravour goes, I am not going to judge it by what the loudest voices on the Internet have to say. Some of the most popular and best-selling Breyer releases aren’t necessarily the ones that make hardcore hobbyists swoon, and current prices for items previously considered undesirable are also not to be taken lightly.

Things aren’t cool or collectable, until they are. And vice versa.

But just to throw this out there into the Universe: I do have a Sarong and/or a Peregrine available to anyone willing to trade for a Gloss Bravour. Or – let me dream big, here – a Brigadeiros.

And in regards to Gloss Bravours being given out for “services rendered”: they’ve been doing that with Gloss Celebration Models for years. It has absolutely nothing to do with mold popularity or desirability. They just did it to compensate some folks at BreyerFest one year, and kept rolling with it. End of story.

(FWIW, I have never gotten one that way. Probably never will.)

In other Morganglanz news, here’s another recent acquisition: the 1996 JC Penney Christmas Special Run Swedish Warmblood:

I just think he’s neat: a light, pretty Palomino with tri-colored eyes, which were not a common feature back in 1996, and primarily used for “premium quality” releases like the El Pastor Precipitado Sin Par in 1987 and Breezing Dixie in 1988. The release may have been kind of a trial-run of the infamous bi-colored eyes seen on most Regular Run releases in early 1997. 

Infamous because they were kind of creepy, not very realistic, and also not terribly well-executed. Most of that was due to scale: quality control for a single, otherwise simple Special Run is a vastly different undertaking compared to quality control on virtually every Traditional model in your product line.

And not well-received: unsurprisingly, they were quickly discontinued. Bi-eyed variations aren’t sought after today, except by mold completists. 

Another interesting feature of this release is the fact that they gave it a such an unusual breed designation for the time: Swedish Warmblood! It was obscure enough at the time that it was rather hilariously misnamed on the box as Sweetish Warmblood. 

I kind of wonder origins of this release; I always assumed that the color idea came first, then they did some research to find a breed where that was possible. When Swedish Warmbloods came up, they ran with it.

Personally, I think the mold looks more like a Silesian to me; if I ever decide to show my Gris Gris in something other than Collectibility, that’s what I’m going with.