Peaches: Daughter of Evil

This picture scared the bejeezus out of me the other day:


Hello, Scary! It’s Peaches, from the #96062 White Diamond and Peaches set, as seen in the 1997 Dapples Dealer Catalog.


Most of the Breyer Rider Dolls are a tad on the creepy and weird side, but Peaches is in a class all by herself, isn’t she? She looks like the love child of an evil circus clown. Every time I look at her picture in that catalog, I keep expecting to see a little plastic dagger in her hand. (She could probably do some serious damage with that pink hairbrush, though.)

Growing up, I never owned any Barbie dolls - or many dolls, period. Mom wasn’t against them, as far as I can remember, I just never had the interest in them. In my pre-Breyer days, I was all about crayons, comic books, and stuff animals. Oh, and cardboard boxes, too. I loved cardboard boxes so much I even "wrote" a book about them at the age of five. (It was mostly pictures - I may have been precocious, but not that precocious.)

No latent interest in dolls + an almost equal disinterest in showing performance = a box full of mostly unopened rider dolls that came with sets I bought primarily for the horse. It’s definitely a weak spot in my repertoire of Breyer trivia.

Anyway, I thought I’d remedy that lack of knowledge over the weekend by doing a little more research on them, until I ran across Peaches and stopped that notion dead in its tracks.

Sweetness

I went against my better judgment and bought a couple of things online this week. That’s what I get for doing research on the Internet - you start playing around with obscure keywords searches, and the next thing you know there are invoices in your inbox.

So I decided to take a break from research yesterday and get stuff ready to sell - taking photos, writing descriptions, pulling out packing materials, and all that. I already managed to list a bunch of stuff on MH$P today - nothing spectacular, but decently priced. (And as an extra incentive - it's all postage paid!)

It probably wasn’t a good idea to list it today, with everyone freaking out about the Breeders Cup and Zenyatta, but at least it’s done and out there. Anything that doesn’t sell there is going to get dumped onto eBay eventually, along with all my other bric-a-brac. If I’m really motivated, I might even get an Etsy shop going and finally put some of those spare quilts of mine online.

I see that Reeves is having a warehouse sale of its own coming up. A little too far away for me to cash in on, but a nice gesture for anyone in the area, I suppose. I do like how they put that little disclaimer on the bottom about the absence of extra-special stuff. I’m sure a lot of folks who go to the sale will conveniently ignore that last sentence anyway, and get miffed when they don’t find it.

They’ve got one Black Friday sale and it ain’t in November, folks.

I think, at most, they’ll have some leftover Holiday stuff and maybe a little bit of WEG merchandise. The rest of it will just be recently discontinued merchandise and overstock - all the fun stuff that usually ends up at Tuesday Morning or T.J. Maxx.

Here’s another thing I found while poking around the Internet the other day, in the middle of my research on the Dapples/Ponies line: another Little Debbie Snack Cake Special!

https://www.littledebbiestore.com/www/products/100.31

I don’t normally collect the Dapples/Ponies items, but if I happen to end up with a dash of extra cash somehow, I just might spring for a Swiss Roll. The previous two sets in the series - Ginger and Oatmeal Crème - were cute, but the customized saddle pad with the blue gingham trim on the Swiss Roll sets off my squee-meter.


I think it’s because I’ve been experimenting with gingham in some of my recent quilts. Gingham’s not the easiest material to work with, because the checked patterning tends to overpower most conventional designs. I’ve managed to come up with a few satisfying solutions to the "gingham problem," so a Swiss Roll might be a nice little tribute to my artistic triumphs.

Has fewer calories, too.

Pony Gals, Dapples, Luno and the Cartoon Network

Apparently more Pony Gals merchandise has shown up at Target, mostly Classics scale sets not unlike the previous Target SR Play Sets we've seen for a while now. The packaging suggests that there's going to be a full Pony Gals line including Classics, Stablemates, Little Bits and Mini Whinnies scale models (all helpfully color-coded!) It's also interesting to note that the Pony Gals stable I mentioned previously is also shown on the packaging, now with a 700-series SR number.

(First of all, yay on the potential return of the Little Bits/Paddock Pals molds, who had recently been demoted to kit horse status. Poor little guys get no love or respect!)

The question still remains: why? Is this an early launch of a new line, or a Big Box store exclusive? Is it just for Target, or will Kmart, Meijer and TSC also get in on the Pony Gals action?

I'm wondering if Reeves is trying to create a “brand” to market and license, a la The Saddle Club, but with licensing fees flowing coming in, and not going out. Could a TV show or cartoon be far behind?

I say this because several years ago I was one of the few people who actually saw the TV commercial for the Dapples line … on the Cartoon Network. I caught the tail end of one commercial while channel surfing; I ended up watching a couple more hours of cartoons to catch it again. (Yes, I am that obsessive.) I still remember the jingle. And I swear I am not making this up. For one thing, I think I could have come up with something better than this:

Dapples, Dapples, so much to do!
Dapples, Dapples, I love you!

Since it's been suggested that the Pony Gals line was created, in part, to replace the Dapples/Ponies line, and there was an attempt to market Dapples on Cartoon Network, a logical (but admittedly tenuous) assumption would be that the Pony Gals might be heading in the same general direction.

Believe it or not, someone did actually make a cartoon series that featured a model horse as the lead character. The series was called Luno, the Flying Horse, and it was produced by Terrytoons in the early 1960s. A boy named Timmy would command his model horse to take him places, with the magic incantation:

Oh winged horse of marble white,
take me on a magic flight!

Here's a link to prove to you I am not crazy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6NJpc9BMuY

Yeah, I know, it's not exactly Academy Award material. These cartoons were made at the tail end of the theatrical market for cartoons by a company known industry-wide for its cheapness; some of them went directly to TV. I got lucky and found a couple of collections of Luno cartoons on VHS sometime in the 1980s. I have no idea where to find them now, except on YouTube.

(BTW Reeves, just to let you know: if you do plan on making a pitch to the Cartoon Network in the near future, please note that they're moving away from actual cartoons. No, I don't get it either.)