He’s So Fine

He’s not in my hot hands just yet, but he’s been paid for and shipped, so I think it’s safe to share my latest acquisition:

Isn’t he beautiful? I mean, I love my original #32 Gray Appaloosa with the superfine speckling, and I had vowed to avoid the sinking deathtrap of variations this vintage release has to offer, because I don’t have room enough or money enough to deal with it. 

So while I would often take a look at them for research purposes, or just admire them for aesthetic reasons, I never had the desire to purchase any of them.  

But when I saw him on eBay early Wednesday morning, I just had to have him. For Heaven’s sake, he’s so fine he even has eyepinking, something you only occasionally see on early examples of this mold!

(The last time I found a Fighter with eyepinking I was pretty much obligated to sell him to someone at cost, but that’s a story I’d rather not revisit.)

I am also pleased with his similarity to early promotional photographs of the Appaloosa Fighter, like this one from a ca. 1961 Red Bird Sales flier:

He doesn’t have the black mane and tail that’s even harder to find than the eyepinking, but that’s a very minor complaint. To be honest, I haven’t even seen an Appaloosa Fighter with a genuinely black mane and tail in person. I’m not sure they were ever a legitimate production variation to begin with, and I’m willing to chalk the few that do show up as just random Oddities, Tests, Samples, or examples with darker-than-average gray manes and tails. 

I paid more than I normally would for this guy, which did stress me out a little bit because you know I’m all about getting the deals. But for the moment, I have more money than time to devote to hobby pursuits, so I’ve been trying to persuade myself that I shouldn’t feel guilty for spending what’s really just a little bit extra. 

He is Vintage, awesome, and almost completely different from my existing Appaloosa Fighter. A little bit of guilt is better than the regret of not getting him at all, right? 

Unless I happen to find another distinctive and/or attractive variation in immaculate condition for cheap, I don’t foresee my #32 Appaloosa Fighting Stallion collection getting any bigger, though.  

(Yes, I am aware of the changes announced for this year’s Special Run lines, and I have opinions I will express next time. The complicating factor here is that a lot of you are probably not going to like what I have to say.)

Starlight

It’s been one of those weeks, folks (possibly ending with snow, ugh), so my Vintage Club Claude will remain unopened until Saturday afternoon. I want – no, need – to live with the possibility that he might be the Matte for a couple days more.

(And in case you didn’t already get the news, they clarified on the web site that the correct piece count on the Matte Claudes is 30, not 25.)

Since we’re on the topic, it looks like they’re keeping their word this year on the Vintage Club reveals, more or less:

It’s a nice mix of molds, and the colors… well, you’ll have to wait and see. (You should know the drill by now. All I can say at this point is: You will like. I promise.)

Unless they decide to pull the rest of the color reveals if the club sells out early, as it did last year. This appears to be a distinct possibility, based on everyone’s reaction to Starlight.

And I totally get it: Starlight is probably my favorite VC release for next year (aside from the Stablemate Bonus). You know that the Shagya Arabian is already one of my favorite newer molds, and it appears that Reeves is finally figuring out the more subtle nuances of the vintage Gloss Gray Appaloosa – namely the different shades of gray, and true “splash spot” randomness – and what I found missing in their first interpretation of the color in the 2012 VC release Harlequin.

Aside from the vintage Dapple Grays – both the Glosses of the 1960s and the Mattes of the 1970s and beyond – Gloss Gray Appaloosa is perhaps one of the most variable of all vintage paint jobs.

Big spots, little spots, streaky spots, belly stripes, pale gray to nearly charcoal body color: it’ll be interesting to see if this variability is incorporated Starlight’s production run, intentionally or otherwise.

Appaloosa Drafters

Yes, I am aware of the new shrunkified Traditionals and Classics in the latest (Series 3) MiniWhinnies now available at Walmart. And I am trying very hard to not think about them, since (a) I bought too much last week as it is and (b), I do not have time for this nonsense right now.

She’s not a new mold and she’s being released in a quasi-Decorator color (Matte Gray Appaloosa) that’s never been wildly popular among collectors, but I don’t care, Priscilla is my favorite Stablemates Club release this year (so far):

Like Matte Charcoal, Matte Gray Appaloosa doesn’t get a lot of love in the hobby – which is a shame, because when it’s well-executed – as it is here – it can be a very attractive color.

I can remember a time when Draft Horses with Appaloosa marking were an exotic and somewhat daring thing in both the “real” and model horse world. Norikers were one of the first “obscure, but cool” real-horse breeds that one learned about in the hobby back then – primarily as a way to justify some of your customizing choices!

However, the first Original Finish Appaloosa-flavored Draft Horse didn’t appear until 1986 – and it was almost completely by accident:

The Belgian was originally designed to come in a somewhat more mundane shade of gray – a variation of Smoke, actually –as seen in the original Your Horse Source flier:

(Beligans? LOL!)

But apparently that color was not well-received when it was shopped around to mail-order retailers, who requested something “more like Buckshot”.

Buckshot was the hot new item in 1985, mostly because of its fairly complex paint job (for the time). Initially they tried selling it as a Grulla AND a Blue Roan, but somehow forgot to mention the Appaloosa part:

Anyway, long story short, we ended up with… an Appaloosa Belgian! He was something of a thing back then, but he’s not so hard to find now – I just took a quick lookie-loo on eBay and found three, all well under a hundred bucks.

Stablemates, Stablemates Everywhere...

FYI: since I received an unexpected – but nonetheless, very welcome – bit of extra Christmas money, Hawthorn is coming home, after all. Yay!

In other news… Reeves is really going all-in on Stablemates next year, huh? And Unicorns. And Unicorn Stablemates….

First, I continue to be impressed by the offerings for the 2019 Stablemates Club. The Gambler’s Choice was revealed to be the Highland Pony – and all four colors are awesome:

Glossy Perlino Blanket Appaloosa sounds like something created by a Random-Special-Run Generator app, and I’m 100 percent in favor of it. (The Stablemate itself, and an App. If someone out there has the potential to do it, make it so!)

I don’t know exactly what’s going on with the Decorator blue-purple-gold snowflake one, but I am intrigued. Was it just a happy painting accident, or based on something – a gemstone, I presume? Curious to know what they call it, too.

My favorite of all the reveals so far has to be the G3 Belgian Priscilla, in Matte Gray Appaloosa with a teal tail ribbon:

Like Charcoal, Gray Appaloosa is another Vintage color that transitioned to Matte only on the Family Arabians. Unlike Charcoal, Matte Gray Appaloosa has shown up since the Family Arabians, most notably the 1980s Hess Stock Horse molds.

Matte finishes have been a part of Breyer’s repertoire since ca. 1960, and many Vintage Matte-finished models are considerably scarcer than their Glossy counterparts – like one of my current obsessions/grails, a Matte Black Large Poodle.

But with the All-Glossy, All-The-Time crowd being as vocal as it is, I don’t see Matte Gray Appaloosa making a huge comeback, either as an independent release or even in the Vintage Club.

This is a shame, because I think a lot of molds – new and old – could really rock the look. (I need a Western Prancing Horse in this color, stat.)

Being the Vintage advocate that I am, it genuinely makes me feel out-of-sorts with my fellow hobbyists, and also makes me feel like I’ve failed as a Vintage Breyer advocate. (*sniff*)

Glossy is great, but seriously, not everything is improved by it. Period.

(And don’t even get me started on the “everything needs a basecoat” crowd!)

The Spotty Halla

Like everyone else, I am completely smitten with the Live Auction Appaloosa Halla:

The auction piece was created on one of the handful of pre-Bolya Halla bodies Reeves still had in the warehouse. Halla, in this form, is essentially extinct: the way the mold was altered means it isn’t coming back to its original form.

It’s theoretically possible to recreate Halla by doing a 3-D scan of an original – either the original sculpt if it is out there somewhere, or of an earlier plastic one.

Possible, but not likely: although the real-life Halla is still considered a legend in Germany, and the Hess mold is a dead-on portrait of her, a new Halla would have be an entirely new mold.

Newer collectors prefer newer molds, and the money that it takes to develop a new mold is probably a better long-term investment than re-creating an old mold that had only a modest fan base to begin with.

Speaking of Appaloosas, here’s a picture of my “Old Mold” Appaloosa Stallion, which is basically the Family Arabian Stallion without the full mold stamp: some have a fragmentary copyright horseshoe, some have none. This one has a fragmentary mold mark:

Since the Family Arabian Foal had enough mold changes over the years that we can almost date them to the year, I thought I’d try to do the same with the Family Arabian Stallion.

I gave up, eventually. There are definitely lots of subtle changes beyond the mold mark, and his boy parts definitely got reworked in the 1970s and beyond, but they weren’t enough to create a year-by-year timeline.

You could more accurately date the Stallions by their paintjobs. You don’t need to see a picture of the mold mark area to know this guy is early: the hip blanket and finely speckled spots already tell you that. It’s the same coloring/patterning you see on the Old Mold Mare and Foals, and can be seen in early examples of the Family Mare and Foal, too.

I’m not sure exactly when it switched over to the splashier and more irregular spots and the white belly stripe, other than it happened pretty early. This speckled variation isn’t necessarily rare – most Family Arabians of any type and stripe just aren’t – but it’s definitely the scarcer of the two Gloss Gray Appaloosa variations.

The fragility of the gray paint does make it difficult to find them in good or better condition. Other than a factory smudge, this guy is near-perfect, which is why this handsome fella one of my favorites among my Family Arabians.

Cinza and Company

Taking it easy today; the travails of January are over, and a certain financial issue I’ve been grappling with all this month is about to be resolved. I celebrated by buying myself a (very cheap!) horse, but he’s part of an ongoing research project so you probably won’t be seeing or hearing about him for a while.

(Nothing particularly rare, just nerdish. You ought to know me by now.)

So let us discuss the Raffle Model Cinza, on the Valegro mold:

I was expecting a Valegro release for this year’s BreyerFest, but I thought it’d be something a little more conservative – solid-colored, and possibly Glossy. But a Grulla Blanket Appaloosa? Nice!

Although it is labeled a “grullo blanket Appaloosa”, I tend to think of this color (and all its recent permutations) as the updated version of Breyer’s vintage “Gray Appaloosa” paintjob. Another of which is coming soon on the Stablemates Club release Primrose:

There has been a great deal of speculation about the origins of the Breyer color Charcoal; my working theory is that it was likely based on photo references of a Silver Dapple or Sooty Palomino horse that was captioned as a “Charcoal Palomino”.

But what about the “Gray Appaloosa” concept? Where did it come from?

The first Gray Appaloosas appeared in 1959 – on the Old Mold Stallion, Mare and Foal – and variations of the paint job later appeared on the Fighting Stallion and Mustang. It appeared at least a year, or maybe two, before Charcoal was introduced.

My guess would be that, not unlike the Charcoal, it was based on a photo of either a Blue Roan or Grulla Blanket Appaloosa that was labeled “Gray Appaloosa”. Because then, as now, most people tend to focus on phenotype (what something looks like) than genotype (what something is genetically).

It was probably via Western Horseman magazine: Breyer seemed to get a lot of its ideas from Western Horseman back then, and even used it as one of their primary promotional outlets in the years before the introduction of Just About Horses.

Although it has never had the same allure as the Charcoal, it continued to pop up over the years, most notably on the Stock Horse Family in the 1980s (Special Runs on the Stallion, Mare and Action Foal; and as a Regular Run on the Standing Foal) and most recently in a few Vintage Club releases. My personal favorite, though, continues to be the 1984 Appaloosa Performance Horse SR from JC Penney:

Murphy

Whew. Glad those Grab Bags are gone; the one with the Night Mare (Glow-in-the-Dark Goffert) and the Woodgrain Clock Saddlebred was becoming unbearably tempting, as was the miniscule potential of a Silver Charm Sherman Morgan. But now that the offer is off the table, I have the Vintage Club Murphy to contend with:

There are a couple of minor mistakes in the offer e-mail, though both are obscure enough to give Reeves a pass on them. Can my fellow history mavens spot them in the opening sentence?

The Cleveland Bay mold, sculpted by Karen Gerhardt, debuted in 2006 while the beautiful vintage glossy dapple grey color was inspired by the Running Mare and Foal released in 1963.

The second mistake first: we don’t actually know if the Running Mare and Foal were released in 1963. Undated Red Bird Sales pages that feature the Buckskin Running Mare and Foal - and a subsequent notice of their discontinuation - suggest that they may have been released earlier, since the Buckskins do not appear on any dated ephemera from 1963.

It’s possible that they might have been late 1962 releases - released in time for holiday shopping - and discontinued prior to their formal release in 1963. This theory would explain their incredible rarity. The scarcity of ephemera from 1959-1962 prevents us (again) from knowing for sure.

It is been becoming clear that in the pre-Modern Era, Breyer released models when the mold was ready, and didn’t stick to strictly defined release dates. If the mold was ready for production, it was put into production, and subsequently issued an updated sales list, letter or PR about it. Such was the case with the Davy Crockett Horse and Rider Set, which was announced in the August 1955 issue of Toys & Novelties magazine.

In fact, Breyer frequently got themselves in trouble in the 1970s and 1980s when they did promise models by a certain date and didn’t deliver. The Classic USET horses were a prime example of this: they were supposed to be an early or mid-1980 release that didn’t actually materialize until September of that year. Because the molds weren’t ready in time, Test Colors stood in for the actual models in the Christmas catalogs, and much confusion and pouting ensued.

(I still want a Dapple Gray Classics Ruffian, dagnabit!)

The first mistake is a little more obvious: Murphy’s color isn’t merely "Glossy Dapple Gray", it’s "Dark Dapple Gray".

It was very rarely truly "dark"; the primary distinguishing feature of Dark Dapple Gray is that the dapples are exclusively situated on the hindquarters. It’s a fairly rare vintage color; other than the Special Run releases of the Running Mare and Foal in the early 1980s, I’m having a hard time recalling any other releases. There are a few variations - like the "Gray Appaloosa" version #85 Foundation Stallion/Azteca, and some of the Black-pointed Dapple Gray Proud Arabian Foals - that come close, but aren’t quite.

Hobbyists and nonhobbyists unfamiliar with the nomenclature often refer to it as "Gray Appaloosa", which drives me crazy, because that term refers to something else entirely.

Though both the Running Mare and Foal and the Cleveland Bay would look good in that color, as well.

Gray Vs. Gray

Today’s pet peeve. This is Gray Appaloosa:

This is Dark Dapple Gray:

Whatever you want to call the color in your live show documentation, pedigree assignments or the privacy of your own home is your own business; model horses have no genotypes.  (Note: the pic skews a bit yellow - scanning references photos here, because the basement is still being painted.)

However, the term "Gray Appaloosa" has a very specific meaning in the model horse world, especially the subsection of it that we are all obsessed with here: Vintage Breyer models.

It’s Gray, with black or dark gray points, and a splash-spotted blanket, usually (but not always) located over the hindquarters. For a period of time in the 1960s, they painted the white blanket around the belly instead of the butt, but still kept the spots there. When they made the switch to Matte Finishes, the spots and the blanket matched up again.

We’re not entirely sure why they started painting them that way; some speculation is that it was originally a mistake, but then it became intentional, or something like that. It’s a separate topic I’ll get around to someday.

But anyway. If you are ever in the possession of a Dark Dapple Gray model - the only two true Vintage ones being the Running Mare and Foal - refer to them as such. If you call them Gray Appaloosa, collectors of a certain stripe (like me) are going to think Gray Appaloosa, not Dark Dapple Gray.

Yes, they have spots on the butt too - sort of. But for whatever crazy reason Breyer decided to call that color "Dark Dapple Gray" - to distinguish it from all of the other versions of Dapple Gray. Some of which are just as distinct and identifiable variations of Dapple Gray too, but never merited a special name. It's another one of those (probably) unsolvable Breyer mysteries.

If any true vintage Gray Appaloosa Running Mares and Foals do show up - Matte or Gloss - it would not be pretty. (Except to the seller, maybe.) 

There’s plenty enough confusion in the model horse world over color as it is, and we don’t need to add to it, even if we don't really mean to. Just do a little research, and call it what it was called when it was issued.

If there’s any potential for accidental misidentification (like a words-only saleslist, or verbally) just add a few qualifiers to your description. The #36 Racehorse is a good example: it was referred to as a "Bay" in the original Breyer documentation, even though it’s really Chestnut. Use air quotes, or call it Chestnut/Bay, or Bay/Chestnut. (Or perennial eBay favorite: Brown!)

(Hmm. A true Honey Bay Racehorse would be nice.)

First antique show of the season tomorrow, yay! It's an outdoor one, so I hope it doesn't rain. Time for bed!

Harlequin

Well, at least I was somewhere in the ballpark: the fourth Vintage Club release is a Proud Arabian Stallion in Gloss Gray Appaloosa, named Harlequin.

Not exactly what I was expecting, but still cool. And it does look like they absolutely nailed the color this time, with darker gray (not black) legs, and black hooves. The smaller, finer spotting the earliest Gray Appaloosas were known for is also present, a nicely observed point. I don’t have either of the Old Molds (ha!) but I do have a Fighting Stallion of the same vintage with those same sort of spots:

Isn’t he neat? Most Gray Appaloosa Fighters have bigger, sparser and more random spotting patterns, so when of my roommates at an earlier BreyerFest pulled him out of her sales stash, I just had to snag him. He was a little bit pricey (back when) but I thought then - and still do - that he was worth the splurge.

(BTW, it was one of my better roommate years - even if we did break a chair and wasted a lot of toothpaste. And the gossip that year! Good times!)

You see a lot of variation on that release’s paint job, but the fine speckling is definitely on the scarcer side. It’s not something you even see in any of the earliest Breyer ephemera, either, including the 1961 insert pages.

They did get one little detail on Harlequin wrong, though: he has eyewhites, and most Gray Appaloosas back then didn’t. They do show up from time to time - I’ve seen a couple of the Appaloosa Mustangs sporting ‘em - but it’s very unusual, and the prices I’ve seen on those pieces tend to reflect that.

(You know, Reeves, you could solve most of this little issues if you just put me on retainer. A conference call once a month and a test color or two a year? That’d work for me.)

But man, what is it with all of the snarky, backhanded dumping on the Salt and Pepper sets that’s cropping up in the online commentary all of a sudden? The reaction to the set was mostly positive when it came out, aside from the silly argument over color, but now the grouchiness is starting to dominate. Weird.

Must be the change of seasons; everyone at work was on the cranky side, too, even the usually more even-tempered folks. (Me? Too tired to muster up rage about anything. I am so looking forward to my day off on Saturday!)