Small Fortunes

I think everything is okay, so far? I’ll save the panicking for Friday afternoon, I think. 

The only thing I’m slightly worried about right now is the breed documentation. I don’t have a lot of it to do, but I tend to go overboard when researching that stuff because I don’t feel comfortable writing about a topic unless I know way more than I need to know about it. 

(This gets me in trouble because I end up sounding like I know more than I actually do, sometimes. Mostly at work, but also life in general. But I digress...)

It doesn’t look like I’ll be able to bring much – if anything – to sell, mostly because of time restraints. None of that stuff is tagged or priced anyway, and I want to prioritize tagging and packing the showstring. (Everyone is tagged: I just need to dust, touch up, pack and load.)

This is also a reason why BreyerFest Live has rarely been an option for me. Aside from the space issues, one or the other has to take priority, and sales almost always do. I have a standing reservation at the hotel, aka The Model Horse Mall, so I might as well take advantage of it! 

And while nothing is guaranteed at the Live Show, I can always make at least a little bit of money at the hotel. Coming home with less than I started is always a perk, too! This is a really big concern and source of stress right now, hence the hesitation.

Anyway, I made a quick supply run to Dollar Tree earlier in the week (tags, snacks, glue sticks, painkillers), and I found some new horses! Most of them are about what you would expect from dollar store horses, but there’s one  that’s… not bad at all, especially for something that is only a hair larger than Mini Whinnies scale!

A couple small tweaks and I would not be embarrassed at all to show him. I’m tempted to do it, except for whole “no time to finish the projects at hand” part. Heck, I barely had time to shower today...

I have said this before, but if Dollar Tree or any of the other discount chain stores somehow manage to cobble together a small assortment of decent-looking horses for cheap, they could make a small fortune from the model horse community, alone. 

Going to Show?

So this happened:

I’m not sure how I managed to get lucky enough to snag the rest of the Series 3 Mini Whinnies – minus the chase piece, because yeah right – with minimal manhandling at the one Walmart that never seems to have nothing ever, but I’ll take it. I now want to built a tiny little wooden stable or something to display them all in, but that’ll definitely have to wait.

I am also several lesser degrees of stressed than I was earlier in the week. Packages are on their way, issues are being resolved, all that jazz. Wasn’t a big fan of the snow yesterday, but that’s Michigan weather for you. I won’t have time to plant anything outside until next weekend, regardless.

Anyway, I just wanted to let you all know that I’m seriously considering entering the Virtual BreyerFest Photo Show. Even though the prizes are basic (just Regular Runs and BreyerFest SRs), I haven’t photo shown in years, and photography is not my strongest suit.

On the plus side, there will be flats and rosettes, prizes (if I win anything!) will be mailed for free, and any Champs from this show won’t be disqualified from future shows. Plus I’d get a voucher for $25 off a future $100+ purchase on the web site. I know that last thing is not an incentive for many, but as someone who makes her purchases tactically and loves a good coupon, it’s definitely one for me!

Doing this means I could also say that I got to show at BreyerFest (sort of!) all without having to physically endanger some of my lovelies.

Incidentally, this is not the first time that Breyer has hosted a big photo show – they did one in 1981! From the Vol. VIII, Number Two issue of Just About Horses:

I entered and got creamed, of course. Back then the idea of getting Regular Run models as prizes was actually kind of a big deal, so a lot of people entered, including several Big Name Hobbyists. Little old me who had only been showing for a year or two with photos taken with an Instamatic camera really didn’t have a shot.

Everyone who entered eventually got at least a Stablemates for their efforts, I think? I remember getting an unsolicited Bay Stablemates Saddlebred in the mail not long after, and I just assumed it was a participation/attagirl/door prize type of gift.

My camera is better as are my photography skills (marginally). And as I discovered at live show I participated in last year I definitely have some models that could be competitive today. So I have not yet dismissed this notion.

I still have a few more days to decide. In the meantime, other projects await….

Retail Therapy: Pandemic Edition

I have at least three packages lost in the mail; the weather turned February-level cold so all the plants I had hoped to plant this week are still in the house (and all over the house); a fun box of bodies arrived nearly two weeks ago and are also scattered all over the house, and I haven’t gotten more than four hours of sleep any night in so long I can’t even remember now.

Not gonna lie folks: I am exhausted and not up for any nonsense for the duration. No griping, no conspiracy theories, no whining about whatever part of virtual BreyerFest you find unfair, no nothing. Take it elsewhere, I ain’t having it.

So in order to cope with all this, I have apparently engaged in an unseemly amount of retail therapy this week.

First, I did manage to score one of those BreyerFest One-Day Stablemates 4-pack. I was worried that I’d miss them entirely because I had a million errands to run that day, but fortunately there were still some to be had when I finally got home. So yay, me!

Second: Walmart Stablemates!

I was in the store for a completely different reason (emergency gardening supplies, see above) but I figured as long as I was in the store I’d swing by the Toy department and see if there was anything new.

I was hoping for the Unicorns, but I saw a complete set of these guys dangling from a peg hook, so I tossed them in my cart and went my merry way. The Paint Horse is my favorite – a Black Pinto Driving Horse, yay! – but the paint job on the Vanner is really beautiful in person.

They had a box of the Series 3 Mini Whinnies and grabbed a handful of them, too. Considering the circumstances we live in at the moment, groping them to get a complete set seemed inappropriate. So I consider myself fortunate that I only had one duplicate, and the teeny Hambletonian of my dreams:

In less stressful times, perhaps, I can complete this set. I stopped trying to get all the Mini Whinnies a while ago – too much to track and find, too little time or energy to do it – but I think I may make an exception with these guys.

(Or at least until they make some of these molds in Stablemates scale.)

Oh, and did I forget to mention that I broke down and ordered the two little Classic Brabants earlier in the week, because at this point, why the heck not?

I’m also hearing rumors that the Appreciation Glossies – Round Two are starting to ship. I don’t really care who it is, I just really need a shiny pony now.

Fairytale Friends

I am still on the fence about this “Fairytale Friends Club”, aka the Fantasy Stablemates Club.

While I definitely wanted to focus more on Stablemates for now as I sort out some of my storage issues, dealing with a third set of shipping schedules – as I mentioned before – might be just a bit too much for me, on top of all the other things I am juggling right now.

It’s also pretty clear that the club is designed with a specific audience in mind, and I am a little bit older than that particular audience. Which is absolutely fine! If everyone in the hobby took a deep breath and acknowledged that fact from time to time, the Model Horse Internet would be a far less stressful place.

Complicating the situation is the fact that each release is comprised of a Stablemates and a Mini Whinnies model, with the Mini Whinnies (and some of the Stablemates, if the blurred out background on some of the promo photos isn’t fibbing) being on either entirely new, or newly shrunken molds.

We’ve been getting new Stablemates for a while now, and at least one new mold a year via the Stablemates Club. But it’s been ten years since the last “new” Mini Whinnies mold – a Lipizzan performing a Capriole – was introduced. Or more correctly, was reintroduced, as the entire series was originally designed by Candace Liddy for Creata ten years prior.

New Mini Whinnies are an unexpected development, and confirmation that the blind bag Mini Whinnies assortments are selling well enough to merit a backdoor extension of the line, through a club. (If only the Paddock Pals/Little Bits could manage the same!)

But I was also thinking about scaling back on my Mini Whinnies collection: truth be told, I haven’t bought any in recent years other than the BreyerFest Showcase Arena Deluxe Playset I found in the NPOD a couple of years ago. And I am not sure I want to play catch up: other than the BreyerFest set having a prominent spot in my office, I haven’t been able to display any of them properly. Not with a Stablemates-gobbling hellhound roaming the premises!

Simply selling the Mini Whinnies off and keeping the Stablemates is not an option for me: splitting up sets is one of my personal model horse pet peeves.

Well, I guess it’s good that I have over a month to make this decision, anyway.

Little Surprises

I am absolutely, positively not giving any thought to this year’s surprise model – dubbed the “Dark Horse Surprise”. My speculating powers will take a rest on this one. For me, it will be the complete surprise it ought to be.

I will give my yearly caveats, though: it’s not gonna be a Lady Phase, Weather Girl, Othello, or Silver. They were already used in Treasure Hunts and Gambler’s Choices, folks. Move along.

Speaking of surprises, I almost completely forgot that I bought some of those Pocket Box surprise thingies late last year during a shopping binge. They’re still here, and still unopened:

(There is no Cat one because they weren’t available yet when I bought them last Fall.)

I was reminded because one of my local Meijer stores also had some Yowies in their Easter clearance. They were half price, and having heard about how cute the figurines were, I thought I might as well add a few to my discount Easter basket. (Along with a bunch of Cadbury Caramel Eggs: No matter how many times I talk to my local “rep”, I always get shorted!)

Even though I’ve participated in a few of those videos (long story), I still don’t quite get the whole YouTube “unboxing” thing. I understand why opening boxes and packages is a thrill – that’s most of the reason I buy unsorted box lots on eBay and Craigslist – but it’s something I’d rather do or watch in person, not from afar.

Since I now find myself with a tiny little window of extra time here (and April is being April, sigh) I’m going to do a little unboxing post of my own. First, the Mini Whinnies Surprise:

Blue Roan Draft Horse Prince! I love roans, and was hoping for a Draft Horse, so this one’s a win-win. And now, the Pocket Box critters:

The Dogs: Alano Espanol (Spanish Bulldog) and Shar-Pei. I was kind of hoping for the Fox Terrier (naturally) but these are cute enough.

The Animals: Fox and Squirrel. The Squirrel is nice, but the Fox looks like a Corgi puppy wearing dog booties.

The Aquarium: Manta Ray and Barracuda. I like these a lot. Props to the packaging designer for making the matchbox look like a mini aquarium!

And finally, the Yowies:

Western Lowland Gorilla, Chimpanzee, and something called a Gnash. The figurines are very high quality, though I could have done without the cartoon creature.

(The chocolate is largely uneaten because I am well beyond my daily quota; I had heard reports that the chocolate was not-so-great, but I didn’t find the bits I sampled to be particularly awful.)

Will I be buying more of these surprise packages in the future? Eh, maybe.

I do want to get one of the Pocket Box Cats for my archives. That was one of my reasons for buying these bags in the first place.

The Aquarium ones are really well done and look like the critters they are meant to be, so if I ever have to order one or two to round out an online order, they’d be the ones I’d go with. They’ll fit right in with my aquarium furniture collection too, whenever I get around to setting it up properly.

If there are any Yowies left when the Easter clearance hits 75 or 90 percent, I might pick up a few more of those. At that price, I will be able to resell any duplicates at BreyerFest out of my Dollar Table section.

But the rest? I wouldn’t turn them down if they turned up in a gift basket or grab bag, but I’m not going to put any active effort into getting more. The local flea markets and thrift stores do a more-than-adequate job of providing me with little – and sometimes, not so little – surprises life needs.

The Most Meta BreyerFest Item Ever

Here’s the other “grail”:

The BreyerFest Showcase Arena Deluxe Playset – perhaps the most “meta” Breyer product ever – especially when one buys it at BreyerFest itself!

The irony of finding it is that I’ve been thinking of selling off most of my Mini Whinnies collection. Partly because I haven’t had a chance to keep up on the newer releases but also because, to be honest, Mini Whinnies have been selling really well on eBay and I could really use that money.

But this BreyerFest Set is staying, regardless. It’s silly, self-referential, and it makes me smile every time I see it.

And here’s the kicker: you’ll never believe where I got it!

Saturday afternoon in the NPOD. For reals. 

My schedule didn’t allow for any trips inside the store until then. I was hesitant at first to even go in, because there was still a line to get into the darn store. I figured everything that was worth getting was already gone at that point, including the Store Specials.

I had about 30-45 minutes to kill, so I figured it couldn’t hurt to look, correct?

Well, imagine my surprise when I just happened to wander in while they were actually putting out new goodies! So that part was truly no lie, this year at least.

I also managed to pick up a Bandit and Kohana Cougar and Wolf set, a 2002 QVC Gloss Bay Sherman Morgan/Justin Morgan, the two Store Specials, and a pretty Semi-Gloss example of the Classic Man o’ War Anniversary Reissue.

Not a bad haul for an impulsive late Saturday afternoon shopping spree.

Filling in the Holes

So it looks like the CollectA line will be operating under an arrangement similar to the Pocket Box animals: certain items (horses, pets, farm animals) are being repackaged/rebranded and sold as Breyer product, with the originating company maintaining the noncompeting lines and items independently.

Both of these moves were done, obviously, to plug holes in the Breyer brand – expanding their offerings in the Micro Mini scale with the Pocket Box items, and making an entrée into the vinyl toy animal market currently dominated by Schleich. 

Like the Pocket Box critters, it’s still a little too early form me to determine how I will handle them. There’s a potential for multiple releases with the CollectA items that’s not available with the Pocket Box items, so I expect I’ll end up treating the CollectA pieces more like standard Breyers, and the Pocket Box pieces more like accessories.  

One thing that’s been largely forgotten in all this is that this is not the first time Reeves has adapted or adopted competing items as their own. In 1986, they gave us the #9900 Breyer Riding Stable set, aka the Pine Lodge Riding School, a play set composed of Britains:

It was a fairly popular item, too, running through 1989 in the Collector’s Manuals/Dealer Catalogs, and available through 1992 in the Sears Wishbook; I still find (usually) incomplete sets around here from time to time. 

It does feel a little weird/wrong to find a Breyer box with Britains in it, though.

There’s nothing wrong with any of these products per se – some of the CollectA horse molds are actually great, and I might be buying some of the Pocket Box Aquarium items, too. But it’ll be a while yet before I can “buy” them as Breyer products.

Micro Managing

I love Mini Whinnies to death, but they're aggravating little buggers from an historical standpoint. It's amazing that these little, teeny-tiny creatures could cause me so much grief.

My first issue: thirty-two “new” molds were dropped on us all of a sudden, none of them with short, punchy, or easy to remember names. It's nice that the mold numbers are a part of the molds themselves, but those numbers are indescribably tiny and not exactly visible while in the packaging or on the printed page. It's going to time before I can look at any given set and rattle off their respective mold numbers.

To keep them all straight in the meantime, I ended up drawing all 32 molds and created a numbered chart. In Adobe Illustrator. Yeah, really. Since they were so small, I simply dropped them on my flatbed, scanned them at an insanely high resolution, and used these scans to create line art that I dropped in my respective word processing files. Voila! Problem solved – and 32 new pieces of clip art to my Breyer art library.

(I have quite a bit of Breyer art, come to think of it. Probably because I'm a lousy photographer and I am especially proficient at creating vector art. Sigh. I miss being paid to do that sort of thing, you know. Does it show?)

My second issue: Reeves has started issuing quasi-SR Mini Whinnies sets to retailers such as Wal-Mart and Kmart. These special run sets are basically just regular run sets in slightly different packaging and/or with pieces taken out, presumably to meet these discount retailers' desired price point. They are special runs: they have been issued special run sequence numbers (aka “acknowledgment”) and do vary, technically, as a set from the regular run sets (more or less.) I doubt anyone except extreme completists and the micro-obsessed are even going to bother searching them out, but the historian in me insists on keeping track of them anyway.

(I even keep track of assortment numbers, for heaven's sake.)


The third issue is: what do I do about their previous lives as the product of unrelated company? Not the history – of course, I'll want to include that, at least briefly, in whatever kind of book I do write. It's where they came from: noting that is no different than noting the previous history of the Modernistic Buck and Doe. (More on that topic, coming soon!)

It's the actual Creata versions of the models I'm mentally wrestling with: do I incorporate these previous, non-Breyer predecessors into the written history somehow, ignore them, or just keep that information entirely separate?

Right now I'm leaning towards incorporating the Creata releases of the Mini Whinnies molds into a web site appendix of really obscure Breyer data - sort of like this blog, but better indexed, and with more lists. A central location where we could archive essential data such as BreyerFest auction lists and notable variations: information diehard collectors are looking for, but which would be impractical to incorporate into a mass-market book.

As much as y'all would love to have a multi-volume Breyer History, there comes a point where you just have to stop and draw a line somewhere. The Mini Whinnies are really pushing up against that line, mighty hard.