Raspberries

Boy, I picked the wrong week to give up caffeine. 

(Long story short: I’ve become entirely too dependent on Diet Mountain Dew to get me through the day, and I’m trying to figure out what my migraine triggers are anyway. If anything I write in the next couple of weeks comes across as crankier than usual, that’s why.)

First: Yes, I saw those images and No, I am not going to talk about them until it’s legal and appropriate to do so. Trust me, I have opinions. 

Second, I won’t keep you in suspense:

Raspberry it is! Not my first choice – that was Clear, obviously – but she really does look like one of those Brach’s Filled Raspberries, and I find myself resisting the urge to lick her. 

(The Raspberry-flavored Kit Kats I picked up at Kroger earlier this week are not a bad substitute.)

I’ll probably wait a while on acquiring the Teal and the Clear, because I am both cheap and patient. Since almost everybody want the Clear, it looks like I’ll have to be extraordinarily patient with that one.

Now, about the Coal. 

I kind of suspected that they were up to something when they didn’t show the Coal in the original offer. Either they were going to do something different with the color, or with the mold. 

And this year, they decided to go with the mold.

Seeing hobbyists react like they received an actual lump of anthracite when the Coal was revealed to be the Galiceno Pony kind of annoyed me (to put it politely). 

Are hobbyists so unaware of history that they’ve completely forgotten about the existence of the 2017 Early Bird Raffle Horse Sokkar? Sokkar was the reason why I rated the Icelandic Horse as an “outside possibility” in the first place. 

I like the Galiceno Pony mold and I would have been thrilled with a Coal, but since getting randomly drawn for this sort of thing never happens to me, the possibility never enters into my buying equations. 

I buy things because I like what they are presented to me as, not what they might possibly be. Life is full of disappointments, and I have no desire to add to the list. 

(And with my luck, if I did get a Coal, I probably would have fainted at the sight of it, hit my head on the nearest piece of furniture, and spend the rest of my day in the ER.)

Buying a Coal secondhand is unlikely: all I’ve got to play with is the $600 stimulus check, and (checks recently completed Coal sales) that’s obviously not going to cut it. I suppose I could throw in a couple of my CC Glossies, but then it starts looking like actual work, and I already have plenty of that, thank you....

And that’s fine. The world’s on fire again, my tinnitus is driving me crazy, so not getting a shiney black pony that nobody wants anyway is the least of my worries.

Forgettable

I can’t believe I forgot about the Llanarth True Briton model in my discussion of potential BreyerFest Pony specials. Again! What is it about that mold that sinks it down my own personal memory hole?

(Yeah, I also forgot about the Cantering Welsh Pony and Newsworthy, but the forgetfulness doesn’t sting as much with them, somehow.)

Another pony that seems to inspire forgetfulness is the Galiceno Pony. Here she is in her original release of Bay:


It’s easy to see why she’s overlooked: like a lot of Breyer molds from the late 1970s, she’s a little on the bland and generic side (Stud Spider, anyone?) The mold itself is competently done, with a rather nicely sculpted head, but it’s definitely not one that inspires collector passion.

The mold has come in a small, but not displeasing assortment of colors over the years. In addition to the Bay, there have been two shades of Dun - a lighter shade as the 743 Criollo Pony, and a more metallic one for the BreyerFest 2004 Maracas Contest Prize - and a masked Black Leopard Appaloosa, as the portrait model for the POA Foundation Sire Black Hand. (Very well done, in my opinion.)

Then there was Freckle Doll, another one of Reeves’ more inexplicable pinto paint jobs:


I know I wasn’t the only one who opened the box, flipped her around, and then proceeded to yell out loud "That’s it - one big white splotch? Are you serious?"

I like to imagine that the Powers-That-Be must have forgotten that the mold already came in Bay, rubberstamped it for production, only realizing a day or two later the magnitude of the mistake. Which some brilliant quick thinker "solved" with a bit of acetone and a cotton ball.

I have absolutely nothing to back me up on this hypothesis, other than the wealth of other crazy-but-true stories I’ve heard that would make it seem not-implausible, at least.

The one advantage to the mold’s generic nature is that you can dress it up any way you want, and turn it into almost anything you need. So it’s not out of the realm of possibility that the Galiceno could turn up as a BreyerFest special this year. I think she’d be rather fetching in some shade of gray, dappled or otherwise.