So Many Wishes

No Persimmon, and not worrying about it. Money’s running a little bit tight right now anyway. (Taxes, dental appointment, BreyerFest tickets, tags for the car….)

The Asian Delegate for BreyerFest has been announced, and it’s a glossy little something on the Make a Wish mold. Her name is Furano:

First, let me toss in my usual boilerplate about my mention of the mold last week and her appearance within the Breyer web-o-sphere this week being a complete coincidence. I’ve been meaning to do a write up about this mold for a while, as a follow up to the Brishen/Laredo piece. I guess that means the time to do so is today!

To continue… the mold is extremely popular now in all its various iterations, especially among newer hobbyists; it makes sense that Reeves would go with her over someone like Weather Girl. Every generation of hobbyists has its Arabian Mare, and for all the hobbyists (young and old) who are now doing their darndest to make this year’s Family Vacation is BreyerFest or nothing, it’s the Make A Wish.

Like the Brishen/Laredo mold, the Make A Wish mold comes with some interesting documentation challenges. With three different neck combos, and three different tails, there are nine different possible mold configurations:

• Neck Up, Swish Tail
• Neck Up, Fan Tail
• Neck Up, Long Tail
• Neck Down with Left Side Mane, Swish Tail
• Neck Down with Left Side Mane, Fan Tail
• Neck Down with Left Side Mane, Long Tail
• Neck Down with Right Side Mane, Swish Tail
• Neck Down with Right Side Mane, Fan Tail
• Neck Down with Right Side Mane, Long Tail

I haven’t quite worked out the categorization of the parts here, so I’m just using basic descriptors for now.

Of the nine (for now) different configurations, only five of them have been used for production pieces so far: all three versions of the Neck Up, and one each of the Neck Down-Left and Neck Down-Right.

Neck Up, Swish Tail: Furano, S Justadream
Neck Up, Fan Tail: Gold Raven, Oasis
Neck Up, Long Tail: Music Row
Neck Down-Left, Swish Tail: Make A Wish, Summer Love
Neck Down-Right, Long Tail: Burnham, OT Sara Moniet RS, Smoke and Mirrors

There was also an Auction Test Piece in 2009 – the year the mold debuted – of the Neck Down-Right, Fan Tail variety, but as far as I know that was a genuine one-off. I don’t have access to the factory or the warehouse (11.5 hour drive, peeps) so I don’t know if they have more of that particular body stashed away somewhere for future use.

(Oh, to nose around that warehouse for a day….)

I’ll definitely consider Furano if and once I get to see one independent of the PR shot; for now my thrifty heart belongs to just Dag Dia and Namid.

By the way, it is so nice to see the tide of opinion turning on Namid after BreyerWest! But more on all that next time.

Summer Love, et al

Totally skipped out on the Summer Love Web Special - in fact, I made it a point to go outside and play with the dog when the official time for ordering came. I just have too many darn bills to justify buying her (or is it him?) I also got the sense that there was going to be a lot of drama associated with it, and I just didn’t want to deal.

What I’ve skimmed on Blab and Haynet only confirms that suspicion. "Blah blah blah too expensive, blah blah blah double shoulder, blah blah blah it’s not glossy, blah blah blah I don’t think it’ll sell out." Why must the ghost of Riley haunt every single discussion of every web-based special from now until forever? (Oh, and when does Matte Finish = Regular Run?)

I haven’t been a total ascetic, though. I have bought a few model horsey things recently. Nothing new, expensive or shiny, just interesting historical pieces, fairly priced. (Don’t worry, you’ll get to see them soon. They have to get here, first!)

For example, I did buy the world’s grungiest clinky today at the flea market today. I had passed him by for the past couple of weeks because, frankly, I didn’t want to touch him. He was sticky. Before:


After a liberal application of soap and water, I discover he's actually gloss gray, not matte palomino!


Most Japan clinkies go straight to the sales stash, but I think I’ll let this guy chill in the china cabinet a little while. I think he deserves it.

Speaking of cleaning, I’ve been doing a little more of that in the office. Part of the motivation is the dog, of course: the fewer things I have to fish out of her mouth, the better.

The other motivation? Those darn hoarding shows, again. Specifically, the episode of Hoarding: Buried Alive that happens to feature a member of the model horse hobby community. I haven’t actually seen it yet: my work schedule and my TV watching schedule haven’t been cooperating lately, and The Learning Channel limits access to their programming online. (No, I’m not going to pay for it online, either.)

I am most worried of what might happen if the rest of my family sees it: as I’ve brought up before, there are some hoarding tendencies in my family, but I’m the one that gets accused of it, again and again. ("See! We knew all of you were crazy!")

Anyone who has been to the house, however, knows otherwise: except for the areas where I actually do work, everything is quite tidy and habitable. Moreso now that Evil has developed a taste for gingham and calico. (She also likes frogs and acorns, but that’s not really an issue inside the house.) If you didn’t wander into the bedroom or office or look in the closets, you’d hardly know I had a collection at all.

Mental health is one of those topics we’re just not allowed to talk about in the model horse community. In some ways, justifiably: the stigma of mental illness is still so huge that even insinuating that there might be something amiss with anyone is taboo. Few of us are trained mental health professionals, and the behaviors we see are reflected through the already skewed prism of the hobby.

But we’ve all seen instances where there was clearly something amiss, above and beyond being in the hobby in the first place. Even if we don’t speak of it online, we do speak of it in person. We might annoy each other from time to time, but I don’t think any of us takes any lasting pleasure in watching a member of our community suffering, or spiraling out of control.

I fully acknowledge that I use the hobby as a coping mechanism: my life is better with it, than without it. It also gives me some sense of power, control and mastery, things I don’t have in the "real world."

It'd probably come as a surprise to most of you, however, that if someone offered me a life free of some of the worse things I’ve had to deal with over the past few years, with the price being me abandoning the hobby altogether, I’d pay it. I have lots of other interests that would fill in the empty spaces left behind.

As long as I could donate the research materials to the research facility of my choice: I couldn’t leave you guys completely high and dry, now.

A more cheerful subject next time, I promise. Maybe I'll throw in a puppy picture or two.

Arabian Crosses

My Anniversary FAS came yesterday – ooh, so pretty! I think he'd look great on this year's gold and burgundy tree (we have a different "theme" every year), but the rest of the family will probably beg to differ:

Don't you think he'd make a fabulous topper? (The tree is actually white with purply lights, not hot pink. We did have a hot pink tree one year, though. Made entirely out of poinsettias. Truth!)

Speaking of palomino quasi-Arabians, I just encountered a Breyer Mini-Me situation here. Not an exact match – not even the same sculptor – but close enough to make you wonder. The G3 Target Palomino Arabian, labeled an “Arabian Cross”:

And of course, the Palomino Make A Wish, also labeled an “Arabian-Cross” (from the May/June 2009 JAH):

Most of my horses are loose, but I do try to keep one example of every version of the Stablemates packaging. I've thought that a history of Stablemates packaging might make a nice display someday, when I'm finally in a situation to have all of the horses out and about. There is no rhyme or reason to who gets to stay in the packaging; it just happened to be the G3 Arabians luck. It sits next to my computer, along with a few other Stablemates in their original packaging.

A few days ago, I was just blankly staring at it, when I remembered the big stink some hobbyists made about the Make A Wish mold when it was making the rounds earlier in the year. Something about the typography on some of the signs made it “obvious” that Reeves had made a “huge” mistake and had initially called it an Arabian, but discovered the mistake at the last minute and tried to fix it in the text, inserting the word “Cross” after it, but of course we weren't fooled!

Thus proving yet again that Reeves is full of equine know-nothings, etc. and so on.

Oh, please. Give it a rest. They've been using the “Cross” term to denote partbreds for a while now – anyone remember the Bay Tobiano Peruvian Cross from the #5971 Stablemates 4-Piece Gift Pack, the Paso Fino Cross from the 2005 Parade of Breeds Set, the Duchess as a Buckskin “Thoroughbred Cross,” the #740 Percheron Cross Roy in Black...

The little dash between Arabian and Cross in the Fest promo material isn't sufficient evidence, in my eyes, of a conspiracy to cover up a mistake. It's just clumsy typography that got carried forward. (And there's lots of inadequate typesetting in your average issue of JAH. I used to do that sort of thing for a living, y'know.)

There are enough actual people at Reeves that know enough about actual horses – and the sturm und drang associated with the Palomino Arabian issue – that I'm sure it wasn't an “oops, we forgot that there weren't no such thing as Palomino Arabians” mistake. It was, at most, just a case of someone just making a run-of-the-mill typo correction rather awkwardly.

Especially since they had released a Palomino "Arabian Cross" Stablemate on the G3 Arabian not that long before.

Oasis and the Multi-Molds

No convenient excuses today: I was just being lazy. I had a longer-than-expected work assignment the other day, and I didn't feel like typing. Then I found a couple of movies in the discount bin at the local Big Lots that just exacerbated the problem. (Me and my fascination with cheesy vampire flicks. Sigh.) But I was actually doing some model horsey research at the Big Lots, so it wasn’t a complete waste of time.

I sent in my entry for the latest Connoisseur drawing Oasis today. My JAH took a little longer than average to arrive at the Ranch, so I witnessed most of fuss and bother from a slightly distant perspective. Was I missing something from the scans? Or was it just the usual carping and moaning? (Too plain! I hated the first tail less! Looks too much like the Bay Missouri Fox Trotter!)

Sure, she’s a little pricey, and she doesn’t have a flashy, ornate paint job that might visually justify the price. But we’re talking about a mold with multiple molding variations: two necks, two tails, two manes (so far.) All three of the known or upcoming releases of this mold differ in both color and shape: it may well be that this particular combination of mold elements may be unique, or rare. So the price justification may come not from the quality of the paint job, but in the mold itself.

Interesting new development, I think.

We’ve had significant changes to molds in the past, but for the most part these were permanent alterations: being able to switch back and forth is something new. (It’s already giving me fits in the documentation department: do I label them by their parts, or give each part combo a label? Grr. Argh.)

Stone paved the way with the ISH and his various mane and tail combos. Emboldened by the success of the ISH, they began to experiment with more drastic and dramatic changes, essentially creating a whole new subcategory of OF models now dubbed "Factory Customs." They’ve improved their processes considerably from their first awkward attempts - leaden lumps of hair being blown in three different directions - but they’re not mass-produced pieces on the same level as an average, regular run Breyer release. Most of the alterations they’ve done have been done post-molding, on a small-scale basis, and are mostly cosmetic.

One of Breyer's earliest experiments with the multiple molding variations was the Classic Shire: we had the head up "Shire A" and the head down "Shire B." We haven’t seen much of the "Shire B" variation, though. All three of his plastic releases have had rather limited distribution: the Bay in the pricey 2405 Delivery Wagon in 2002, the 2007 BreyerFest Contest model Yankee Doodle, and this year’s (now discontinued?) 620 Spotted Shire.

The Spotted Shire’s quick disappearance is being blamed on molding problems. Normally I’m not a big fan of that theory - anytime a mold is taken out of production, even briefly, hobbyists start screaming about molding problems - but there may be some justification in this case. As Reeves’s first serious "multi-mold," he might have some issues that later, more technologically sophisticated ones don’t.

The newer molds have their problems, too: the original, head-down Make A Wish has a funky double shoulder that’s somewhat covered up by her big hairdo. Mane and tail options don’t always "fit" to the body correctly, either technically or aesthetically. I’m sure these mold probably cost more than the average mold, with higher than average maintenance costs.

So far most of the newer "multi-molds" have limited themselves to insertable mane and tail changes; whether we get more molds with more extensive changes will depend on how well the Make A Wish mold performs - both in the factory, and on the shelf.