A Little More About Kit

Reeves released photos of the Sneak Peeks for 2011, and the biggest nonsurprise there is a Giselle and Gilen set. They look quite lovely in Bay - continuing in the whole Running Mare and Foal theme, maybe? (I was secretly hoping for a Black/Dark Gray mare and light/white foal combo, myself.)

I hope their imminent arrival spares a few of the SRs - especially the beautiful Melanges - from the chopping block. (A matching foal for her would be a fine and lovely thing, I think. Aren’t we about due for another Web Special? Hmm.)

I had a serious case of writer’s block yesterday, so I spent the day going through my pile of unprocessed research notes. Not the new stuff I picked up at the main branch of the DPL back in September: most of this pile is old research, some of it dating back to the 1980s. I never had a framework to put it into before, but now that I do - along with the time to do it - I figured I might as well tackle it.

Most of it is secondary or supplemental research, the kind of data I’d find while researching something else for work or school. I’d get bored, or squirrely, or nauseous from the fumes of musty old issues of Gazette des Beaux-Arts, and off I’d go in search of something more interesting (or at least, less aromatic) to read.

One of those more interesting reads was Hal Erickson’s Syndicated Television: The First Forty Years 1947-1987. After looking up all my old favorites - Superman, Star Trek, Mr. Ed - I then proceeded to look up some of the shows I knew Breyers were based on: Lassie, Rin Tin Tin, Fury, and … Kit Carson.

While doing my original blog post on Kit Carson, I was rather curious about the reasons why the show had, despite its popularity, so quickly disappeared from public consciousness. Lots of shows from that era continued on in syndication for decades, accruing new generations of fans. But not Kit Carson: the show seems to have just gradually faded away.

I had initially chalked the lack of enthusiasm about the show to its lack of originality. Erickson goes into a little detail about this:

Filmed at Republic Studios, the 104-episode Kit Carson was for a time syndicated television’s top-rated Western. Today it is largely forgotten. Perhaps this is because Carson was so derivative of most of the other Westerns of its era that one wonders why the producers were never sued.

Ouch!

Actually, the biggest reason why Kit Carson vanished was because its star, Bill Williams, didn’t want anything to do with it anymore. Erickson, again:

Former RKO leading man Bill Williams played Kit Carson; he approached the role as a job of work, with minimal exertion of personality or enthusiasm, and when the series ended, Williams declared publicly that he never wanted anything to do with Kit Carson ever again. Such words were the "kiss of death" to a syndicated western, where continuous personal appearances were ever so important.

As I mentioned before, pursuing a license from might not have been that big of a concern for Breyer. That the show was no longer being promoted nationally may have made it even less of a priority. They had already made their pile of cash from the Davy Crockett mold, and any profit they made from the Kit Carsons, however small it may have been, was theirs free and clear.

Next time we’ll talk about a TV license that worked out well - very well - for Breyer: Fury.

Why Kit Carson?

Because there was a television show, that’s why:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043169/

The Adventures of Kit Carson was a relatively popular program from the earliest days of the Western television boom; over 100 half hour episodes were produced from 1951 through 1955, and ran in syndication for several years afterward. It was popular enough to merit a Coca-Cola sponsorship:

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

Just about the only thing the television show shared in common with the real-life frontiersman Kit Carson was the name. The real-life Kit was a rancher, trapper, soldier, Indian guide, explorer - a veritable 19th century superhero. On television, Kit and his Mexican sidekick "El Toro" spent most of their time like any other "White Hat" Westerners - righting wrongs and fighting crime on the frontier.

It’s quite obvious to me that Breyer’s Kit Carson is based on the character from the television show, and not the historical figure. The Breyer set replicates Kit’s signature look from the show - clean shaven, a fringed buckskin shirt, neckerchief and cowboy hat.

The show did have some merchandise associated with it - comic books, neckerchiefs, possibly a cap gun - a modest line up from a time just before the great Western TV merchandising boom. It doesn’t appear that Breyer actually pursued a licensing agreement with the show, however. The production of new episodes had ended by the end of 1955 anyway, so it could be that they weren’t pursuing any new licensees by that time.

Kit Carson was also just as much a public domain character as Davy Crockett, so maybe they didn’t feel it was necessary to arrange one. The mold had already paid for itself, several times over, and it’s doubtful that a license would have been worth the effort to acquire.

All of the Horse and Rider Sets were discontinued by 1960, at the latest: they’re nowhere to be found in the 1960 Dealer’s Catalog. It’s possible that they could have continued production through 1959, but I don’t have any company catalogs or pricelists from that year to confirm or deny.

By that time it was clear that Breyer was moving more towards a critter-only lineup; it’d be nearly twenty years before they’d bring rider figurines back, in a slightly more kid- and hobbyist-friendly form.

Breyer's Davy Crockett, Part 2

Sorry about the brief hiatus. I was feeling a little bit down the past couple of days, with the crummy weather and all that. Finding out that the rerelease Man o' Wars finally sold out at the WEG didn’t help, either.

(Everything I needed to say about the crazy-stupid prices some of the rereleases have been bringing on eBay, I said on Blab. I said what I felt, and I meant it. It didn’t win me any friends, I’m sure, but so be it.)

So, let’s get back to Davy Crockett.

As I demonstrated in my last post, we’ve finally determined that Breyer’s Davy Crockett was a 1955 release, and was probably a part of the fad spawned by Disney’s Davy Crockett episodes on Disneyland. Now comes the question: what happened after that?

Disney had come up with a couple of new Davy episodes by the fall of 1955, and would re-air all the Davy Crockett episodes for some time to come, but the fad was pretty much over by the end of 1955. Crockett-themed merchandise was still selling - but not at the insane pace it was at the height of the craze, and not enough to justify continued production.

That probably included Breyer’s Davy Crockett, too.

It’s certainly possible that Breyer continued production of the Davy Crockett somewhat into 1956 to fill late Christmas 1955 catalog orders, but by the spring of 1956, the Davy Crockett mold has already been rebranded - repainted, retooled, with a new horse and accessories - as Kit Carson:


So while we can’t determine when Davy was discontinued with absolute certainty, it appears that he was almost exclusively a 1955 release. The Kit Carson set remained in production considerably longer, through at least 1958; he appears in both the Pricelist, and the Dealer’s Catalog from that year.

In spite of the longer production run, the Kit Carson is a harder set to find than the Davy Crockett. It’s not so odd, when you give it more than a moment’s thought: Breyer’s Davy Crockett was released at the height of the fad. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if all of Breyer’s resources, for the summer of 1955, were dedicated exclusively to meeting the demand.

There’s some tangential evidence of that: the 1956 Breyer line. Breyer released not one or two, but at least five new molds in 1956:

• Brahma Bull
• Horned Hereford Bull
• Lassie
• Rin Tin Tin
• Robin Hood

The money to make and market all of these molds had to come from somewhere, and the most obvious source is the windfall from the Davy Crockett.

What about the MasterCrafters Davy Crockett Clocks - where do they fit in? I’m not sure. The theory that they might have engineered another models for mold tradeoff, just like the Western Horse, is still a viable one. It would have been much quicker - and neater - to simply make the necessary arrangements between each other, rather than get the banks involved in the first place.

If that’s the case, then it would mean that the Clocks and the freestanding Davy Crockett figurines could have been released simultaneously, allowing both of them to cash in. And in Breyer’s case, cash in enough to significantly expand the business.

Ah, if only I had more evidence!

We’ll finish up next time, with Kit Carson. (More to him than meets the eye? You bet!)