In The News

My spoiler-free Picard review: it was a very satisfying series finale.

It doesn’t need a signal boost, especially now that it’s over, but the auction to benefit the effort to save the Beebe Ranch from development should at least be noted: 

https://www.breyerhorses.com/blogs/news/benefit-test-run-misty-and-stormy-up-for-auction

Misty and Stormy look so good in Gold Charm Pinto! While I realize this was probably the quickest and easiest way to generate the funds for the Museum of Chincoteague Island’s fundraiser, I am a little bummed that a way couldn’t be found for the less-well-heeled among us to get in on the action via a Special Run of some sort. I have… a lot of Misties, and a few more would not be unwelcome.

Yeah, I know I could just… donate. And I might. But a memento of the effort is always nice.

Reeves also made the announcement that they’d be packaging most of the BreyerFest Special Runs this year in more recyclable packaging, including honeycomb paper. I’ve been using kraft paper as one of my primary packing materials for years, and I have not had any significant problems with it: it’s lightweight, shapeable, easier to store, has multiple other uses (paper-mache!) and it is (of course!) biodegradable. 

I recycle as much bubble wrap and other packaging as I can that enters this house, but a lot of people… do not, as anyone who has either worked in a factory or retail environment can attest.  

(I do my part: 95% of the boxes I use are from work, and I haven’t had to buy craft cardboard for years!)

And many hobbyists seem to forget that most Breyer models in the 1950s and 1960s were packaged quite similarly – or with even less – and were perfectly fine. 

Speaking of the environment, I’ll be planting trees in a park in my hometown on Arbor Day. Arbor Day just coincidentally happens to fall on my birthday this year, so cake may also be a part of the festivities, if any of y’all want to show up to watch me and my coworkers dig holes in the ground. 

And finally, I have some more awkward and ironic news: it appears that (as of this moment) I will not be joining the ranks of volunteers at BreyerFest this year. 

I knew there was a possibility that this would happen, since live showing often (but not always!) eliminates you from contention. And people who volunteer frequently are often given “time off” for no other reason than to give other people a chance to participate.

But it does me a little bereft of things to do at BreyerFest outside of the show, other than selling and socializing. All the workshops are long sold out, and most of the more interesting seminars (to me) are the same day of the show. 

I mean, I do need to sell more stuff, and I have been feeling pretty lonely lately, so more socializing with “my people” doesn’t hurt. But still, it is kind of a downer as I’ve now got to rearrange my plans yet again….

A Little Hope

Just out of curiosity, I did a really quick survey of Elsas for sale (quick because I don’t really have time for shopping: I generally do quick five-minute skims for box lots and Belgians, and that’s about it):

24 on eBay (4 sold), 23 on MH$P. I have no idea on Facebook, because I don’t have an account (and please stop asking, people!) 

It’s an interesting but academic metric, since I was selected for one. 

The current betting line is that the Silver Filigree will be offered shortly after the initial purchase date for Elsa, which is the 15th. Absolutely everyone seems to think it’s Hamilton, but as I explained before, I think he’s replaced Othello and Silver as the mold everybody guesses for everything. 

Not unless they’re going to be offering at least a thousand of them. Which is entirely possible, but I’d like to think they be a little more imaginative with their mold selections when it comes to Winter Decorator Horses. 

I’m going to take a wait and see approach to it, though. Even though I promised myself to keep my purchases to a minimum until the end of the year, somehow all these packages keep showing up on my doorstep, including one with the Bouncer Hope in it:

Hey, it was a part of a half-price offer through Good Morning America, and I threw in some of the Stablemates I didn’t already have (including those goofy Wooden Stables) to get the free shipping. At that price, I couldn’t afford not to buy something!

I was surprised how iridescent the Hope is: her “pinto” markings glow like Mother of Pearl. The box is interesting, too: apparently it was designed to minimize plastic in the packaging?

Although I am usually in favor of more environmentally friendly packaging, speaking as a quilter, the plastic sheeting I salvage from the standard display boxes comes in quite handy for cutting templates. 

Especially for some of the multi-pieced affairs I’ll be mired in early next year. (Imagine a hexagonal quilt with 18 blocks of 55 pieces each. All handpieced, because doing hexi quilts by machine is more trouble than it’s worth!)

I wish I could collect the Bouncer mold more actively, but with the Tom Thumb, all the Gloss Prize models, Bilberry and the Boca, I’ll just have to stick to the handful of semi-affordable ones, which includes…

(looks around the Internet)

… just the Pink Magnum, apparently. Well, so much for even that notion. Maybe there will be something affordable at BreyerFest next year.  

Reasons and Reactions

My first reaction upon reading the latest Test Color Lottery e-mail: we only have ourselves to blame for the price increase.

My second reaction: other than Lafayette and the VIP drawing, I haven’t been able to get much of anything out of my Collector’s Club membership this year, so I totally have the money for it.

And I’ve been wanting to add a few more Brown Sunshines to the family, and the Buckeyes (Matte and Gloss) in particular. I put my entry in, and I’ll see what happens. 

If nothing else, it’s cheaper than what some of the True Blue models are going for. (Shakes head, adds more people to my “naughty” list, moves on.)

In other news, I was happy to see that a recent eBay purchase arrived yesterday – a box lot of vintage Stablemates in their original packaging!

While I’ve never been a “gotta have ‘em all in their original packages” kind of gal, the price was right and it’s not like Reeves has been getting a lot of my money lately, so hey. 

Then I picked up the box and noticed something:

They shipped it in an original Stablemates packing case from 1975?!? 

Needless to say, I was both excited, and confused. 

Excited because early boxes or cases like this are extremely hard to find: they were literally designed to be thrown away. So the box itself is also staying. In fact, it’s probably my favorite part of the purchase.

But I am also confused: if this had been a known option, I would have asked for the box to be wrapped in paper first so I could have received it in better condition. I went through a similar experience very recently with the Traditional Wooden Stable, after all. 

And if I want to be nitpicky, it’s technically it’s not even the correct box: according to what’s printed on it, it supposedly contained an assortment of Foals, and what I bought were not the Foals. I know this because I just happened to be looking at the 1976 Dealer’s Catalog for (undisclosable) reasons:

A second really cool and also pretty cheap acquisition also arrived with the Stablemates, but I’ll get to that next here in a day or two (I had some scheduling issues last week that have since been resolved. I think.)

Early Stablemates Packaging

Just something short today; while setting up the new computer went more smoothly than I anticipated and things – in general – are going pretty swimmingly overall, I still have a ton of stuff to do by the end of the week. 

Plus, you know, I’ll be busy all Thursday night: I’ve already bought my snacks and I am ready to go.

(DCEU Nerd and I make no apologies!)

My Vintage Club mini Gold Secretariat is here but – like a lot of recent purchases that aren’t related to work – he’ll probably remain unopened for the next several weeks. 

In the meantime, I’ll post a picture of a vintage example of the packaging they were trying to emulate:

This is Umar and he actually did pretty well at the BreyerFest Photo Show last year: fourth, I think? Not too surprising: the packaging was near-perfect and it’s the Dapple Gray version of the actual Arabian Stallion mold, not the cosplaying Morgan Stallion that came out the year previous. 

He’s scarcer than his Morgan predecessor, because releases tend to sell best in their first year and then taper off, even if there’s been a significant change in the release itself – whether it’s a change of markings, finish or (in this case) the mold itself. 

The resist dapple paint job was discontinued on the original G1 Stablemates by the end of 1976 because they were kind of a pain in the butt: you could get away with a variety of dapple sizes on a Traditional scale model, but a few out of scale dapples on a Stablemate would have been a no-go.   

One interesting difference between the Vintage Club release and the original is the blow-molded insert: the original has a molded-in texture that the Vintage Club release does not. 

I am assuming there was a logical reason for adding texture to the original inserts. It may have been a way of masking or camouflaging any minor imperfections or irregularities in the plastic. Or perhaps because the stark white insert visually dominates the packaging, a texture was added to jazz it up a bit?

I don’t know, I’m just speculating here. 

Wee Box

Apparently my Lafayette is coming next week? In spite of me ordering in several hours after it went to backorder status? And me being completely fine with it being on backorder?

Guys, honestly, I don’t know what’s going on either. All I do know is that Reeves knows there are problems. 

Whether this baffling situation – with live orders being put on backorder status, backorders moved up to live status, with no rhyme or reason – leads to a resolution, I also don’t know. 

I sure hope so: I had multiple issues with shipping from the warehouse last year, and I am usually one to let most things slide and work themselves out. Most of them were eventually resolved to my satisfaction (i.e. the Glossy Cheesecake) but not all (the sweatshirt that shall not be mentioned ever again). 

I am lucky – and grateful – that I can do most of my Breyer shopping locally, so I only have to deal with this nonsense with club- and web-exclusive merchandise. 

But let’s close on a happier note: here’s a picture of my Glossy Atticus with his wee box:

I like him more than I thought I would. I am so used to seeing the Traditional Clydesdale Stallion mold with his hair braided that any other hairstyle makes him look like an “old school” custom to me, back when we only had a handful of Draft molds to work with and we had to make do. 

(He does make a nice Jutland or Brabant, with a little work.)

I do love this style of box – it reminds me of those tiny Whitman’s Sampler boxes, the kind that come with 4 to 6 pieces of fancy chocolates. The graphic design is very bold and visually appealing, too, very much in the style I would have gone for if I had designed it. The only change I would have made to the design would be to make the corner silhouette reflect who’s in the box.

But also a big YAY for reusable boxes. We haven’t had that for Stablemates since… the 1975 Sears Wishbook Stablemates that will now set you back a car payment, and the silverplated 25th Anniversary Saddlebred, that will set you back a couple of house payments. 

Turkey Day

So this long-lost package greeted me today when I got home:

This is not a frozen turkey: there were four horses in there and fortunately/miraculously none of them appear to have been damaged in any significant way. 

But still, yikes. This is not a good way to start out the week.

In other news that was not news because last week was last week, the 2020 inductees to the Toy Hall of Fame were Baby Nancy, Jenga, and Sidewalk Chalk.

I understand Baby Nancy: the original write up was a little too detailed and well-written for me to not think it was a foregone conclusion. History, and all that.

As far as games go, I thought Yahtzee or Risk had a better chance than Jenga, but Jenga does have an appealing (yet deceptive) simplicity to it. It takes two minutes to explain, if that, and there are no notepads to tally or rulebooks to follow. 

But Sidewalk Chalk? We got beat by craft supplies? Sigh.

Okay, I’ll admit that I kind of got my hopes up just slightly, based solely only the fact that one of the hosts of the morning radio show I usually listen to very briefly mentioned the hobby in passing when discussing the Toy Hall of Fame story a few weeks back, during the voting phase of it. 

Then again, that guy is/was a toy train nerd, has a daughter that is the right age, and the two primary independent toy stores in this area both have extensive selections of both Breyers and Trains.

In other words, it was probably just an exceptional circumstance. 

But still, it’s an optimistic sign that we’re not as peripheral to the public consciousness as some hobbyists believe, and that this campaign was not as quixotic as it originally seemed. Heck, Lisa was outed as a model horse collector on The Simpsons last year: 

https://www.laughingplace.com/w/articles/2020/05/10/tv-recap-the-simpsons-season-31-episode-21-the-hateful-eight-year-olds/

There was a shot of an extensive (20+) model horse collection in her room, and she gave one of horsey friends “a toy horse, with a hat” for her birthday! (Any model horse hobbyist who watched that episode immediately whispered Old Timer.)

I’m kind of curious just how far Reeves is willing to go to continue pursuing it, though, since they obviously saw it as part of their 70th Anniversary marketing strategy. 

Off to bed now; I have a sinus headache that’s not going to get any better staring at a computer screen.

Glamour Shots

So far I’ve uploaded about 100 pictures, which means that I’ve met the bare minimum of entries that will leave me satisfied; another 50 more and I’ll be happy. That goal is entirely within reach as long as I don’t do too much fooling around over the weekend.

Here’s another rejected entry, a glamour shot of my Showcase Collection Grazing Mare. Apparently I have way more rare packaging than I realized, and condition-wise she doesn’t quite make the cut anyway.

And looking over the entries in that particular class, it’s only confirmed my suspicion that - taken as a group, rather than model by model - they are not as rare as other lesser-known packaging experiments, like the 1984 Olympic USET packaging:

I was super tempted when a sealed Halla from that assortment showed up on eBay a few weeks back, but I managed to maintain my cool - and my PayPal balance! I already had a Morganglanz one anyway - opened, of course - which certainly helped with my fortitude.

(Also not one of the ones I entered in that class, by the way, because seriously, it’s a Morganglanz. I love the homely guy, but even I know his limitations. )

Working on my entries for this show has been… and interesting experience, but I’ll be glad when it’s all over. As I said before, I’m shooting for ten placings: anything more than that is gravy.

I don’t know if this will quite count as my “official” attempt at showing at BreyerFest, or another thing entirely, especially since any wins in this show won’t necessarily count against you for the next. (Not counting on that being a concern, though.)

I can also say that I can now see why some people complain about money being a factor. As someone who thought she could compete in some of those classes, I’m just taking a deep breath, taking the best pictures I can, documenting the heck out of things (my thing!), and hoping for the best.

I mean, what else can I do? I don’t have the resources to do otherwise. Part of the reason this blog exists is help and inspire those of you in the same boat.

Besides, I think I’ve set myself for very modest expectations: even ten tenth place finishes would be fine. Weirdly coincidental if that happened to be the case, but fine.

Klaus and Friends

After much consideration, I’ve decided to pass on both the Grab Bags and the Goji Berry Pony, who I had almost completely forgotten I had been picked for in the first place.

Because I only entered once, out of habit.

Don’t get me wrong, he’s adorable – and as some have pointed out, is obviously related to the Exclusive Event Cleveland Bay Chicory somehow – but I just can’t justify him right now.

The Traditional Fjord is also a harder than normal mold to collect – the 2015 Diorama Contest Truffles and WEG Fjord re-release are not just rare numerically, but also in a “never gets puts up for sale, ever” sort of way. I think I’ll just be content with the ones I already have, and any inexpensive ones that happen to wander my way on the secondary market.

Better to open and enjoy what I have right now than seek out more goodies in the meantime, anyway. Like my Stablemates Club Klaus and Vintage Club Misty and Stormy:

(Those tiny boxes never get old!)

It’s been a few weeks and there’s probably not much more that could be said about either release – though I like the Klaus more than most. As you might expect, the crisp edges and lack of halo spots doesn’t bother me much at all, and I’m (also, obviously) one who enjoys a release that’s designed to be an historical recreation of Lipizzaners past:

http://www.appaloosamuseum.com/history-of-the-appaloosa

(Which reminds me to make a mental note to add Carina and Selene to my potential BreyerFest want list.)

As I am kinda behind on what I wanted to accomplish this weekend (quarter-inch elastic is apparently sold out everywhere, putting a crimp on my cosplay plans) that’s all I have for you guys today.

Oh, other than this: for reasons that should be obvious (the color scheme, but also my generalized weirdness), it seemed pretty obvious to me that my Klaus’s name should be Nomi. As in Klaus Nomi:

Rare Enough

Sorry guys – for some strange reason I did a little poking around the family tree just for fun, and now I appear to be knee deep in some serious genealogy research. With all the business I have to catch up on in the next several weeks, it’s not something I thought I needed to do, but here I am doing it anyway…

But I have held you all in suspense long enough with this package that arrived a couple of weeks ago already, so here it is:

A little background information: this all happened the same day that the Starry Skies Stablemates dropped on the Breyer web site. As I said before, I was a bit hesitant to buy more Blind Bag Stablemates, so I wandered over to eBay to clear my head a bit.

Aside from the fact that there were a couple of sweaters on there I was eyeing, I was also poking around on eBay because I had missed several good model horse auctions over the past several weeks previous as a consequence of my still-ongoing scheduling issues.

Perhaps lightning would finally strike for me, right?

Then, it actually happened.

I saw an honest-to-goodness Grail Model.

It had just been listed.

The seller was accepting offers.

So I made an offer.

It definitely wasn’t the price you still may see on eBay, but it was what I thought was (a) reasonable, and (b) within my budget.

I wasn’t expecting to offer to be accepted. Surely others had also seen it, and it’s something that’s on a lot of collector must-have lists. Even if I didn’t get it in the end, I figured I made an honest effort, at least.

An hour later, my offer was accepted.

I didn’t believe she was actually mine until the package arrived about a week later:

Yes, a Showcase Collection #1430 Palomino Grazing Mare!

Showcase Collection packaging (ca. 1970-1972) was one of the few examples of early Breyer packaging I had not acquired yet. Because of its fragility, it has been described as one of the “rarest” types of early packaging, but I don’t necessarily think that’s the case. Dumbbell stickers and the original Touchability Boxes are almost equally fragile, and far more scarce.

What the Showcase Collection packaging has got going for it is desirability: it’s just rare enough that even average collectors can reasonably dream of eventually adding one their own collection. And there are just enough of them turning up on a yearly basis to encourage others to dedicate themselves to actually collecting them as a thing, the same way some of us collect Chalkies, Stablemates, or color variations.

As you know by now, I am more of the former, not the latter. Though if I were lucky enough to find another, I certainly wouldn’t pass him or her by…

Bernadette’s Box

Bernadette arrived – in pretty Wedgewood Blue!

The graphically, her Touchability Box is pretty close to the original, but made of far better materials, which was basically the same corrugated cardboard the original shippers were made of – just reconfigured and with fancier (two-color!) printing!

The original Touchability Boxes only came with the Family Arabians, for a very brief period of time in the late 1960s. They were an experiment in more retail-friendly packaging that went… poorly.

Horses got scuffed, horses got stolen, and they were hard to stack and store on the shelf. It’d be another five years before they’d finally just go with the closed “white boxes” all of us who bought horses in the 1970s knew and loved.

They did an updated version of the Touchability Box in 2009/2010 for the My Favorite Horse Series, a line of older molds – like Buckshot, Sherman Morgan, Quarter Horse Yearling – designed with younger kids in mind.

They experimented with it again on the presumption that touching a Breyer horse will make a kid more likely to want it.

(Well, it certainly does in my case!)

That experiment didn’t last long either – same problems as before, duh – and they went right back to the standard clear plastic boxes shortly thereafter.

The original Touchability Boxes are extremely scarce, and I’m lucky to have the one that I have, that I purchased back in 1998 for the then kinda-scary price of $50.00 – and sight unseen, too!

Technically, Breyer originally referred to this type of packaging as a “Display Carton”; the word “touchability” only appears in the text of the original announcement flier, and in the intervening years that name has stuck.

I would say that in spite of the steep price tag I paid for my Gray Appaloosa FAS over twenty years ago, it was a good investment. I could probably sell it for at least ten times that in less time than it would take me to go to the fridge and grab a drink.

In case your rare packaging radar went off, this is not going to happen. Though when things like this happen, it makes me think twice:

Oh no, not again!

In spite of my shortage of fun money so close to BreyerFest, one does not let a scarce and pretty Old Timer slip by. I’ll just have to extra careful with my trip money this this year, I guess.

(Which I should be doing anyway, but we all know how that goes!)

The Rules of Shipping

There aren’t a lot rules when it comes to packing models for transport or shipping: some people prefer crushed or shredded paper, others go with packing peanuts, and the hobby itself is pretty evenly divided on the issue of mummy-wrapping.

(FYI: I only do it for Breakables and Customs.)

As long as the model in question gets where it needs to go with little to no damage, in a timely fashion, most hobbyists are fine with whatever packaging method gets used.

But there are two hard and fast rules that we all agree on.

The first: when using bubble wrap, you wrap the model with the bubbles facing outward. While I’ve found that it’s more of an issue with Customs and newer Glosses than with the vintage Original Finish pieces I usually deal with, I still do it out of common courtesy and to keep myself in the habit.

The second: no matter how great the temptation, you never, ever ship Stablemates in a bubble mailer. You’d think that was patently obvious: break resistant isn’t the same as unbreakable, especially when you are dealing with thin legs and tiny tapered ears and tails. Right?

Apparently I got lucky – real lucky! – that when my Gwenevere and Blind Bag Magnolia came in their bubble mailer(!) from the Breyer warehouse earlier this week, they arrived unscathed:

That’s my first non-unicornized mini Magnolia! I am especially pleased at the quality of my Gwenevere, too, but I’ll talk more about these models as models another time.

Back to the shipping issue: I don’t have any more insight into the current Reeves warehouse and shipping situation than the rest of you. I’m an eleven and a half hour drive away, folks, and I haven’t physically been to New Jersey since 1992. Whenever we have occasion to communicate, those topics don’t usually come up. As long as whatever I order gets to me undamaged and without extended delays, that’s their business, anyway.

(Though I would absolutely love to spend a day or two poking about the warehouse, just because. That’s a dream vacation right up there with a horseback tour of Iceland, attending San Diego Comicon, or visiting the alleged family castle in Hungary. But I digress...)

While I am absolutely certain that they have received plenty of feedback about this serious violation of the “rules of shipping”, I’ll add my voice to the chorus, for whatever it is worth.

It doesn’t matter if the percentage of undamaged pieces is greater than the damaged pieces, and/or that it might be cheaper to fix the damaged items as they happen rather than go back to more durable packaging you were using before.

Unless you are shipping models where condition is irrelevant (in other words: bodies) you ship Stablemates in sturdy boxes. End of story.

High Anxiety

Got the Silver Filigree Callahan I wanted, yay!

The detailing on the tail ribbon is amazing, and other than a few tiny bits of roughness in the gloss that can be felt, but not seen, I have no complaints about the Callahan itself.

But seriously, Reeves, we need to talk about the box.

I had heard that a higher percentage of boxes for the Callahans were arriving in less-than-optimal condition. While I have had my share of bumped and bruised boxes over the years, I haven’t had all that much to complain about.

But alas, not today. Fortunately my Callahan was fine; nevertheless, the only anxiety I should have felt today in opening the box should have been about what color I was getting, not how many pieces the model might have been broken into.

Do better, guys. 

Anyway…

This is what happens when I skip a day at the flea market:

I stop at the Salvation Army on the way home from work the next day and buy a ton of G3 My Little Ponies. And I don’t even collect them!

The cashier who rang me up gave me some serious side-eye, so I told her “they’ll make great party favors!”

In reality, I bought them for the BreyerFest stash – not that I need any more stuff, necessarily, but I do need the right kind of stuff, and I had a pretty good response the last time I brought some.

I did feel a little bit guilty about buying them, not really knowing that market or collecting that item per se. The tiny bit of research I did today didn’t indicate anything particularly rare in the lot of 19, but I’m not aiming to make a big profit, regardless.

I tend to see stuff like this as a way to bank some trip money ahead of time. Other people start a vacation savings account for their trip: I buy models to sell, even if it’s only a slight profit. Those slight profits tend to give me a better return on my investment than a bank savings account, too.

And it was kind of relaxing to clean them up and sort them out in between doing less pleasant things yesterday; I haven’t had much “grooming time” with the Breyers lately, other that the Memorial Day Weekend Dusting Project that for reasons I will not go into was not relaxing in the least.

Breyer Hat Trick

Just a few notes here before we get to the meat of things today.

First: if your receive a model directly from Reeves that is wrapped in big-bubble bubble wrap, it’s a good indication that the model in question was painted (or in the case of the Koh-i-Noors, repainted) in New Jersey.

I think this fact has been covered here and in other places before, but as it does not yet seem to be common knowledge, it’s still worth noting.

Second: while it is true that the Traditional Black Stallion has not had a lot of Test Colors (he’s just not THAT popular a mold to merit a lot of experimentation) the e-mail for the latest Test Color Purchase Raffle is wrong about another thing: the mold was introduced in 1981, not 1984.

Sham came out in 1984 – and he did come in a remotely similar color as the 1994 West Coast Jamboree model – so maybe that’s where the mistake originated?

I’m not a huge fan of the Black Stallion mold, but the paint job on this Test piece is so beautifully shaded! Chestnuts can be a bit muddy if they are not executed well, but happily that is not the case with this fellow. I’d try to find some way to keep him, if the opportunity arises.  

I was pulling some research data for my BreyerFest paperwork – not going as well as I hoped, but I am still being buffeted by many distractions – and I can’t believe I missed the other significance of two of the Stablemate One-Day releases, the Ruffian and the Man o’ War:

Prior to the announcement of this year’s One-Day Stablemates, the most recent real-life horse who had the honor of completing a Breyer “hat trick” – appearing as a portrait model in all three of the major plastic scales (Traditional, Classic, and Stablemate) – was American Pharoah.

And prior to him? Seabiscuit and War Admiral.

Notice a trend?

Lots of other nonfictional horses have been released multiple times on different molds and in different scales, but having three releases of the same horse in three different scales is actually pretty rare.

That’s because Non-Traditional scale portrait models, outside of racehorses, are scarce in general.

(Fictional ones are a whole other beast.)

Off the top of my head, the only portrait Stablemates I can think of that aren’t racehorses are the Valegro, and most of the BreyerFest 20th Anniversary Stablemates Commemorative set.

Considering how popular the Stablemates scale models have been lately (Stablemates Club, the Spirit releases, Mystery releases et al), you’d think Reeves would push for more Stablemate portrait model releases, but I can also understand the perspective of the horse’s owner: bigger (Traditional) is better!

Teeny Boxes

Yesterday was a wash in many ways, but this cheered me up a little:

I was a wee bit skeptical about the boxes, and figured they’d go with a plastic insert like they’ve done before – beginning with the very first Stablemates releases back in 1975.

But dang it guys, it really is a teeny-tiny replica of the larger boxes – and it is super-duper cute! You do not know (and don’t want to know!) how much I needed a bit of cuteness in my life yesterday.

It’s interesting that these boxes were designed to have bar codes, especially since these are direct-order, club exclusive pieces:

It could be related to their inventory practices, but what it suggests to me is that these boxes might be used for retail packaging later on. (Or BreyerFest?)

They’ve already done something similar before, for the Translucent Pink Ribbon Breast Cancer Awareness Horse on the G2 Morgan mold. However, that was a one-off for a special promotion, while these Stablemates Club boxes are miniaturized versions of the standard/generic packaging used for Traditionals.

They could be used for almost anything.

I know I would definitely be more inclined to buy individual Stablemates in these packages, as opposed to the blister cards they use now. You still don’t get to see the opposite side, and the risk of rubs is still there, but you do get a better overall view of the model unobstructed by the form-fitting plastic blister.

Don’t get me wrong, I also like the little drawstring bags they replaced: in fact, one of my many sewing projects involves coming up with a quick and easy-to-sew pattern to make them for 400 or so Stablemates in my life that don’t already have them.

But now that they’re starting to miniaturize Traditional molds into Stablemates-scale ones (Mini Brishen!) it only makes sense that they’d come with scale boxes, too.

(Speaking of miniaturizing molds, can I put in a request for a wee Family Arabian Stallion? Please? Let’s give some of the vintage molds some love!)

I’ll open up this cute little bugger eventually, but for now I’ll just carry him around from room to room, periodically squealing in delight.

Bear Family Gift Set Box

I’ve been feeling a bit unwell, the weather has been cold and wet, and every time I tune in the news it’s something upsetting: it is little surprise that all I’ve aspired to do for the past few days is hibernate.

Speaking of hibernation… here’s the not-often-seen Black Bear Family Gift Set box. I was working on my inventory earlier today and found myself stopping to admire it:

In 1973, Breyer discontinued the individual members of the Bear, Deer, and Cow Families, and reissued them the following year in Family Gift Sets. Unlike the various Horse Family Gift Sets that were also being issued at the time, the Nonhorse Gift Sets eschewed photographs and aimed for a more graphic look: they were basically very sophisticated, multicolored versions of the illustrated shipper boxes Breyer favored in the 1950s and early 1960s.

The more basic one-color illustrated shipper boxes continued to be used on bulkier items that were still shipped/sold in corrugated boxes (Wildlife and Cattle, mostly) and on some Christmas catalog items, particularly ones sold via the Sears Wishbook.

Most average/normal consumers preferred photographs to illustrations (heathens!), so this packaging experiment didn’t go far or last long. The original Bear Family Gift Set was discontinued in 1976, and the Deer and Cow Families eventually switched to more conventional boxes later in their runs.

This is a shame, because all three of those original boxes – and the Bear Family box, in particular – are really quite beautiful. If I had the time and the gumption, I’d scan them and blow them up to poster size.

More Breyers at Meijers

Head’s up to anyone in the Midwest: Meijer recently got a shipment of the Stablemates American Pharoahs. I heard a rumor and decided to follow up on it on the way home from work today. And there they were, hanging out next to the Schleich display!

I didn’t buy one because I already have a couple – purchased as a part of that “Get a Free Horse!” promotion back in December. But it’s nice to know that Meijer continues to have some sort of business relationship with Reeves.

They’ve had an on-and-off relationship with them since at least the late 1980s, but as far as I know, no official Special Runs or Exclusive items. If you’re really into obscure packaging variations, some of the items sold at Meijer in the early 1990s had their own unique issue numbers assigned to them, like some of the Regular Runs sold through QVC.

Like most of the QVC items, once they are out of the box they are indistinguishable from any other Regular Run. I did find one boxed item in the Ninja Pit years ago – Double Take, I think? – that still had the Meijer labeling on it, which I thought was an obscure-but-kinda-cool thing.

(Not cool enough for me to keep New in Box, though. I saved the label, somewhere …)

Meijer was also among a select group of retailers to carry items that were essentially “Big Box Store” Exclusives, which were not otherwise available online or via smaller chains or independently-owned stores.

The two that come to mine came out in 2008: the #625 Foal Set with the Red Roan Frolicking Foal and Black Pinto Morgan Foal, and the #626 Frolicking QH Stallion in Bay Blanket Appaloosa.

Neither set is super-duper rare, but it’s been a few years so they are a little harder to find than your average Classics releases (the Foals, especially).

I’ll confess that I have a family member who works for Meijer, so I have a somewhat vested interest (Discounts!) in seeing an exclusive item there in the future.

Another Obscure Man o' War Variation

To show you how deep I’m going on my Man o’ War project, this was my previous purchase in the endeavor, sometime later last year:

That’s the 1986 Sears Wishbook release. (He was also very cheap!)

What’s nice about this example is that it can be tied to a specific vendor, and a relatively narrow window of time. And so will be another useful piece for establishing the chronology. As far as I know, the Wishbook release will be identical to the regular run Man o’ War, who was available through 1995.

But you never know, I might find something that distinguishes him. That’s the whole point of this exercise!

These “deep cuts” are not the kind of thing I target on a regular basis: really, you’ll drive yourself mad trying to get every box, and every variation of every box, in additional to all the actual and perceived model variations.

And end up broke, too.

Not only that, I do not have the time or space to start delving deep into every release that needs that kind of treatment (including most items prior to the purchase by Reeves in the mid-1980s).

But I thought it’d be an interesting experiment with a few specific releases I have a certain fondness for, and which already have a long and complicated variation history that need to be sorted out to my satisfaction anyway.

As I mentioned before, I've already gotten most of the expensive ones out the the way, so while this project may end up driving me crazy, it (probably) won’t drive me broke.

Stinky

Here’s that model in question I referred to earlier in the week: he’s a nice, minty, later variation of the #47 Traditional Man o’ War.

One of my ongoing projects currently involves tracking the changes that occurred in some long-running Regular Run items, including the Traditional #47 Man o’ War and #46 Pacer. Both the timing and the price were right, so yay, a new Man o’ War is now in the house!

Most of my Man o’ Wars are either early variations or oddballs; this is good, in a way, because it means the holes I now get to fill in my Man o’ War chronology/timeline are the more common and less expensive pieces. (The only real “rarity” I need is the Presentation Series one. Since the last one I saw for sale ended up in the $700 range, that can wait!)

But tell me if you’ve heard (or experienced) this story before. You get super-excited to get something you want real cheap… until it arrives in a box that’s clearly too small, and reeks of your Grandmother’s ashtray.

Fortunately – and as you can see from the photos – he survived the journey to my doorstep without a scratch. The box and packaging made a quick exit to the recycling bin in the garage, though, and “Manny” has been going through a couple of showers with me since then.

(We all do that, right? Rinse dirty and/or stinky new horses in the shower with us? Please tell me I’m not the only one!)

Stinky models are not an uncommon occurrence for either me or thee. Traditional Breyers are made from a semi-synthetic material that is heat and moisture sensitive: kept in a stinky environment, they’re eventually going to start stinking like it. Only cleaning, fresh air, sunshine and time can remedy that problem.

I grew up in a family of smokers, so I got good at mitigating cigarette smells. The stinkiness of the packaging was the lesser of the two evils here. That could be fixed.

The size of the box, on the other hand, made me nervous as heck. It takes more than soap and water to fix rubs, scratches and breaks.

While I can understand that some people can become inured to the smell of cigarette smoke, the fact that the model is a little too big for the box you’ve chosen should be obvious. My local post office (as I assume most of them in the U.S.) has little handouts and charts to instruct you on sensible packaging procedures.

Some of it is a lack of experience: we ship a lot of stuff to each other on a daily basis, so hobbyists tend to be unusually high-skilled in the art. But I don’t know how many times I’ve been at the local Post Office during the year-end holidays, stuck behind someone holding a box, a gift item, and wearing a confused and desperate look on their face.

The other, of course, is cost: to either save money or to avoid a trip to the store to buy packing supplies, they’ll scrimp and make do with what they have in the house. And these models are virtually unbreakable, right? A plastic bag or a couple pieces of wadded up newspaper should be more than enough!

I got lucky this time, but there are times that I have not. Why it always seems to be the really rare or unusual items that end up losing the shipping lottery, I’ll never figure out.

Cheap is Good, But Free is Even Better!

First, here’s a link to the blog post illuminating the genesis of the Sarah Mink’s Croi Damsha; it’s definitely worth the read, for a number of reasons:

http://mink-studios.blogspot.com/2014/10/full-circle-from-breyercrazy-to.html

There may be a Stallion and Foal to match in the not too distant future. Wouldn’t that be lovely? More about that another time - let’s get back to the history!

I found the thing I was looking for - an early design for the original Stablemates packaging. The scan has been tweaked a bit to improve legibility, because the acetate was a bit yellowed and covered with bits of crusted stickum:

It’s not quite what I remembered - I thought it was more specific about the offer, but it isn't. I don’t have the reverse, so I don’t know what they had planned, if anything.

But goodness - if there had been a "Buy [this many] Stablemates, get a [special?] Stablemates Free!" offer, I would have been all over that like my brother was with the original Kenner Boba Fett action figure.

Worse, maybe, if it had involved some super-scarce exclusive one and not just some random Stablemate from the warehouse. Though an ordinary Regular Run Stablemate would have been good, too, as long I could have specified which one.

Back in those dark pre-Internet days, that would have been almost as powerful a draw as something rare and exclusive.

If your local stores didn’t get certain items or colors, you didn’t have a lot of recourse. I remember that the Stablemate Foals were especially hard to get around here - only one local store (a Circus World!) got some in, but they were long gone by the time we visited again.

The Stablemate assortment at the Kmart across the street didn’t have any either - either they sold quickly, or didn’t get them in the first place. My parents had to physically drag me away from that display because I wouldn't leave until I found them.

I did, eventually - they were one of the first things I bought from The Bentley Sales Company, shortly after "discovering" the hobby a few years later. I bought the Chestnut ones, along with the Dapple Gray Saddlebred and Chestnut Morgan Stallion, off one of their Discontinued Sales Lists.

I would have gladly sent in several proofs-of-purchase for any one of them.

Again, I have a hard time imagining a BOGO-style offer would be feasible in the here and now, due to cost. The closest thing we have now are the Stablemates that come with the Vintage and Premier Club memberships, and with the Exclusive Events.

It’d be nice if they could extend it to a program that doesn’t involve massive outlays of cash, though. Because again, part of the appeal of Stablemates is that they’re cheap. And free is the best kind of cheap!

The Thing Inside

Looks like everyone else in the hobby did their math, too: the BreyerFest Bear set is sold out now. Everything else is still available, though I’m a bit surprised the Misty and the Adios still are. That Adios is a mighty handsome piece; I’ll definitely consider one once I get the sales-versus-storage issue sorted out here.

It’s hard to believe, but back when the plastic boxes debuted in the mid-1980s, most hobbyists thought they were a good idea. At last, no more mysteries over what you were buying! No sliding around in the box = fewer condition issues! Handpicking was at last a possibility!

I was a little…skeptical. Strapping a horse with zip ties to a bright yellow backer board? We were just swapping one set of condition issues for another. It was the stability of the boxes themselves worried me the most: they seemed kind of flimsy from the get-go, and even under the best conditions I doubted they’d have the same durability (or usefulness!) as the chipboard boxes that preceded them. I feared this sort of thing was in their future:

That Mesteno is so getting liberated after I post this!

The dealer I bought him from at the flea market was very apologetic about the box's condition, but I told him it wasn’t that big a deal. As far as value goes, these plastic boxes are so common and ubiquitous that most of the time, it simply doesn’t matter.

There are a few rereleases - like the Toys R Us Bay Fighting Stallion - where the box may be significant, but most of the time, it just isn’t.  And I think that’s a good thing, something I wish more toy and collectible segments would emulate. The box is not the thing. The thing inside is the thing.

Well, most of the time. Though with the prices the early 1970s Showcase boxes are bringing, I doubt I’ll even have to worry about it.