Strawberries

Considering I haven’t been picked for one of the Birds of a Feather Series since the very first one – and sold it at cost to a friend anyway – I am not quite sure how this happened:

Dumb random luck, or did the Universe hear my pitiful tale of woe and compensate me somehow? (Spoiler: it’s the former, not the latter.)

Aside from all the drama from the past couple of weeks (I’m on my third food-related injury this month: it’s nothing but microwaveables for the next several days!) I do really love the Bristol mold, and yes I will definitely be keeping him. 

I just wish there were more readily available examples of him in his “loose mane” look: the 2018 BreyerFest Raffle Model Jackpot,  the 2019 Best Customs prize Leap of Faith, and the 2020 Seattle Soiree Redmond are all essentially unobtainables.

(Why, why do Redmonds have to be so expensive? He’s so darn pretty, urgh!)

Anyway, I have no illusions about completing the Birds of a Feather Series collection like, ever. The only one of the previous releases I’m actively seeking out is the Crane, because I love the Emerson mold, and because of his relatively “plain” paintjob I think he’ll be one of the kinda-sorta affordable ones in the not-too-distant future.

Unlike, say, the Silver Goldfinch. Why is something they made nearly 400 pieces of priced in the $1000 range? (I know it’s a Silver, but get a grip, people!)

One series I have been thinking about completing – or at least leisurely collecting as I find them at reasonable prices – is the Berries Ponies Series. I picked up a very affordable Strawberry at BreyerFest, in fact:

(Coincidentally, I just picked and ate some teeny-tiny Alpine Strawberries from my garden. They were way easier to grow from seed than I imagined, which makes sense because you will need about fifty or so plants to make anything with them.) 

While the Croi Bramble and Bouncer Bilberry aren’t going to happen any time soon, the Juniper, Honeysuckle and Persimmon all seem achievable. I’m in no rush, though. It happens when it happens.

Darned If You Do

I haven’t joined the Premier Club, but I’ve entered into a partnership with a friend to purchase any releases she doesn’t want or need. It’s a win-win situation for the both of us: she won’t have to go through the bother of finding a buyer, and I’ll occasionally get a random surprise model, which is always fun.

The first of these new purchases was Firefly and Hawkeye!

The Foal is just as cute in person as I thought it would be, and the Mare in much nicer than the photos let on. I think it’s the paint job, mostly: it distracts from her lovely silhouette. 

It highlights the one problem I do have with Premier Club releases, and a lot of higher end Breyer releases in general: unnecessarily complex colors and patterns. 

If you don’t put a “fancy” paint job on a higher-end release, hobbyists complain that they’re not getting their money’s worth on it. But then you have other hobbyists complaining that the fancy colors and patterns are either unrealistic, or not breed accurate.

It’s a darned-if-you-do, darned-if-you-don’t situation.

Taking breed standards out of the equation, some molds look better in solid colors, and others in patterned ones. For example, I think the San Domingo looks better spotted, rather than solid (with the one except being the No-Spot Appaloosa Oxydol, maybe because of his uniqueness?) The opposite is the case with molds like the Traditional Man o’ War, whose admittedly odd proportions can look even odder when enhanced with strategically placed whites. 

As much as I want to love him, the 2016 Vintage Club Man o’ War release Storm just doesn’t do much for me. I would have been so much happier with a solid Charcoal, Gloss or Matte Palomino, or even (sigh!) Gloss Dapple Gray or Dapple Black.

(Though if I were offered a Test Color Pinto or Appaloosa Man o’ War, I would take it in a heartbeat, because one does not turn down a Test Color Man o’ War.)

I think that’s why I’m still a little hesitant about Elbe and Spree, the Pinto BreyerFest releases of Firefly and Hawkeye: while I’m sure they’ll be great in person, all I can imagine is how much more I would like them in more common/boring colors – like the original Thoroughbred Mare and Suckling Foal, in plain old (kinda-sorta) Bay and Chestnut.

While I think that would make an ideal future Vintage Club release, I can also see a lot of collectors dismissing them much as they dismissed the recent Barrington – on another Morgen Kilbourn mold, no less. (I thought he turned out fabulous, but I am pretty much a sucker for all of Morgen’s molds.)

(Just a head’s up: I’ll be on more-or-less mandatory overtime through the month of March, so free time will be even harder to come by for me until April-ish. I’m not thrilled that most of my creative life will be on hold until then, but I’m definitely not disliking the paychecks.)

Wyatt and the Premier Club

Aside from the fact that it was October, and kind of miserable weather-wise (there are no "good" days with sleet in them!) the events of the previous 24 hours highlighted the stark contrast between the different parts of my life. And the realization that there’s nothing I can do, right now, to fix the parts that don’t work without also messing up the parts that do.

I guess this is more of a fair warning in case the tone here gets a little more melancholic over the next couple of weeks. I’m dealing with some heavy stuff again, people.

Don’t worry, the model horse stuff is mostly working. Some parts of it are actually way fabulous, but we’ll get to that a little later in the week. First up: let’s talk about the Premier Club.

I haven’t talked too much about the Premier Club, for a couple of different reasons. First, it’s a club all about first releases on brand new molds: there’s not a lot of history there to talk about, yet.

Second, it’s the drama: gosh-almighty, some of the online arguments about the latest Premier Club releases make the goings-on on the NAMSHA-Discussion list look quaint and dignified.

I know I’m going to sound like a total tool for saying this, but Reeves really does care about the quality of the product. They have a problem not dissimilar to mine: the different parts of their company "life" are in conflict, and there’s no good way to disentangle the two without one or the other suffering.

As important as the hobbyist market is, the general retail market will always come first. It has to: that’s where the bigger money is, and where new hobbyists come from.

Brishen might not have been a success in the niche of a niche market that the Premier Club is, but the money that they invested in that mold will pay off for them in the long run in the retail market. Little kids who love horses don’t love them for their anatomical correctness, they’re buying the fantasy of a horse. And like it or not, the more recent Moody molds like Brishen are the epitome of little-kid fantasy horses.

The profits of molds like Brishen end up funding molds like Latigo - the third release in the 2013 Premier Club - and Wyatt, the first release of 2014. And look at him!

(Note: It’s a photo taken from the web site, slightly reformatted to fit here. Copyright and all that Reeves International. The mold was sculpted by Morgen Kilbourn, if you didn’t already know.)

He’s so awesome it’s making ME contemplate signing up for the Premier Club, which is crazy. I still haven’t completely finished the herd culling to accommodate this year’s acquisitions. And next year’s Vintage Club. And some of the just announced 2014 releases, and the new Appaloosa Performance Horses, and…

As big as a hit as he appears he will be, Wyatt is not going to be as profitable a mold as a Brishen, at least in the short term. He’s on a base: bases cost money, and they get lost, warped or broken. The parents of our hypothetical nine year old proto-hobbyists are going to look at a future Regular Run release of Wyatt and find themselves thinking that a Regular Run Brishen might be a more sensible choice - with his thicker legs and lack of a base. (The Wyatt mold strikes me as a fancier kind of thing that Grandma or Santa would bring, anyway.)

Loving Moody molds isn’t going to damage those budding hobbyists later on in life. Most of us grew up in the Hess mold era: frog eyes, sketchy genitals, bowed tendons, and husky-looking Palomino Arabians. We turned out fine, in spite of it all.