Show Time

I spent most of the day geeking out in the DC Fandome today, which – to me – has been the most successful online replication of a convention experience I’ve had this year so far.

(For the fellow nerds in the audience, I will reveal no spoilers. Except for the fact that one of Jim Lee’s favorite characters is Matter-Eater Lad, which both amuses and delights me. LLL!)

The first part (this weekend) was essentially a live stream with some interactivity, some taped content, and a store; the second part on September 12-13, and will featuring multiple worlds/streams and more interactivity, and sounds like it will be close to the kind of experience we were hoping for at BreyerFest this year.

DC is, of course, part of a huge multimedia conglomerate that has the resources to pull something like this off and Reeves is actually kind of a small company with very few full-time employees at their physical location in New Jersey, many of whom already have to wear multiple hats to begin with.

But it will be interesting to see if this particular event has any influence on anyone planning virtual events going forward.

Since I am spending the rest of the weekend catching up on my quilting projects (the sewing machine is back up and running, huzzah!) I’ll just close with another Virtual Photo Show photograph I was especially proud of:

One of the difficulties in photographing vintage Glosses is in trying to convey that glossiness without it distracting from or altering the color of the finish, and I think I managed to do that here. The color is a touch more yellow than he is in real life because of the light sources I used, but I couldn’t color correct the photo any more than I did without it becoming obvious or distorted.  

This model, incidentally, was not my first Charcoal Fighting Stallion. My first one was an earlier and browner version with more body shading, but who was slightly more yellowed and that I attempted to unyellow in my car one day

… and who I forgot about the next day when I went to work and parked in a freshly blacktopped lot. On a hot summer day. 

Don’t do that, kids.

Fortunately for me, my “new guy” showed up at one of my local flea markets a couple weeks later, and I ended up selling my original at BreyerFest to someone very happy to add a Bloated Charcoal Fighter to their collection.

Final Thoughts on the Photo Show

I think I ended up with somewhere around 175 pictures uploaded for the show? I was getting kind of tired and cranky and the end of the process and every time I tried to take a count I got a different number, and then finally decided it didn’t matter because I hit my goal more or less and I needed to focus on putting out other fires.

(Like the Sampler. That I appear to be significantly rewriting again because I can’t help myself.)

A few final observations on the Virtual BreyerFest Open Show, at least until the judging begins/happens (I’ll probably wait until the end of judging before I look at any of the results, just to keep my anxiety and/or personal outrage levels to a minimum.)

First, I was not expecting it to be quite that competitive, especially since the prizes are basically one-tenth the value of actual In-Person BreyerFest Live. This is not necessarily a bad thing: back in the old days of Live Showing (for me, the 1980s), the best we could hope for was usually a trophy and a fancy rosette. The competition was still pretty tough, especially in this part of the country.

(I still have all those rosettes, FWIW.)

So the possibility that others were also doing it purely for the love of the game is kind of heartening. Then again, the lack of reading comprehension skills I’ve witnessed on Breyer’s social media outlets does make me wonder what the expectations are as far as prizes go…

(... and also leaves me wondering what the Kentucky Horse Park is going to do with all those angry BreyerFest fans who will be turning up on Friday anyway.)

My dreams are modest, and small: I am psyched at the possibility of getting a padded envelope of assorted flats!

Second, my photography skills did definitely improve over time, but I still don’t enjoy the process. I have no idea if the exercise will translate into better pictures here either, because most of the time I don’t have the patience for it. I was especially proud of how the picture for my Man of the Hour turned out, though:

It just… perfectly captures what he looks like, why I think he’s special, and why others should love him, too. That’s everything I could hope for in a photo show picture, basically.

I also liked how this sassy little brat’s photo turned out:

I don’t particularly have high hopes for either, but I’ll find out Friday, I guess.

Third, I think this show might be persuading me to take my customizing more seriously, more than the Customs Contest ever could. I know the entrants here are not necessarily representative of the competition in a more normal setting, but I think I could be competitive and successful here, so that’s something I’ll definitely take into consideration when this week’s drama is all over.

Which brings me to my final point. I know it’s something that’s an uncomfortable subject for many in the hobby, so I’ll just put it the most gentle and euphemistic way possible: the show also bolstered my opinion that the upper end of the model horse economy is, in a number of ways, probably unsustainable in the long term.

I am glad that I have the resources that I do to be able to even compete, but I can definitely see why others get discouraged, especially in Collectibility classes. It makes me an all the more enthusiastic proponent of live shows that completely negate the Collectibility factor altogether and just focus on breed assignment and research.

Anyone who has access to a library or the Internet, and some spare time, can do that. And that’s one of the things that drew me in and kept me in the hobby all these years: I’ll probably never be able to afford the upkeep of a real horse, but by golly, with a little hard work and mad research skills I should still be able to show the plastic versions!

(And I’d still get to do tons of research which is, you know, what I am all about.)

A Week, Well-Ended

I just spent almost an entire day in my garden and I feel so much better than I did earlier in the week. (You know, one of those long stories.) The garden, on the other hand, is still a wreck – the weather wasn’t quite cold enough this past Winter to kill off enough things, unfortunately – but I feel like I’ve made good progress.

I am especially pleased with my English Daisies, but alas, I didn’t have a chance to take a picture while the sun was still shining today. Maybe next time.

Well, up and did it: I entered the BreyerFest Open Photo Show: Halter Only, and no Collector’s Classes, because that would feel too much like work. I figured since my prep for BreyerFest is going to be minimal – no sales tagging, packing, shopping for snacks, volunteer stuff et al – I could channel that energy into this possibly-once-in-a-lifetime show.

(Though I am hoping that a photo show of some sort actually does become a component of BreyerFests going forward.)

A potential positive side effect of this show I’m spinning for myself is that even if I don’t win a darn thing, at the end of it all I should at least end up with a nice archive of photos use for future blog posts. 

(Laughs hysterically.)

All of the Glossies in the second round of the Collector’s Club Appreciation Sale are really nice, and I would have been happy with any of them. It also appears that the quantities on all four seem to be more or less the same – in other words, none of them are more rare than the others, except by dint of desire.

I know some of it is dictated by actual quantities on hand, but that’s how I think it should be.

My Collector’s Club Appreciation Model is… Integrity! Yay!

As others have noted, the Gloss Integrities all appear to be the Mare version of the mold as opposed to the standard (for this release) Gelding. I don’t get the impression that the Mare variation is particularly hard to get, it’s just not something that’s in super high demand, so the mold variation doesn’t get noted in listings.

I’d like to get a Matte of the mare version eventually – one of those things I was going to be looking for at BreyerFest this year, sigh – but it’s something that can wait.

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….

Showrights and Stuff

After work on Friday I drove right past the one hobby shop that I knew had the Sahran and Night Mare in stock. I had been feeling off most of the week, but when I realized what I had done, I went right back to bed once I was home. I knew I had to be sick, because the change of seasons wouldn’t be messing with my head that much!

Anyway, here is another photo from the batch of ephemera I recently picked up:

This picture excited me because I own the Sorrel one on the right. It’s not a look-a-like or one of a small batch: it’s the exact same one, because the back of the photo tells me so!

I bought the Pony directly from Linda at BreyerFest in 2012. She already had a pretty fabulous provenance as it was, but having this photo makes it even better, now.

The "NOT FOR SHOWING" written on the back of the photo is in reference to photo showing and showrights, because photo showing was IT back then. If you were lucky you’d make it to one or two live shows in a year - if they even had one in your area - but the average model horse newsletter would have at least a dozen or more photo shows in a month.

The best way to describe showrights would be photo showing by proxy, mostly. You’d buy the rights to show a set of photos  - either as that specific show horse, or as a completely different horse, depending on the seller of the showrights.

Sounds weird, I know, but it made complete sense back then. Hobbyists who didn’t have the time or money to show their models as much as they wanted still managed to get their models out to shows via people who could. Others saw it as a way of showing without having to invest in camera equipment, film processing, or tack and props.

There’d be disputes, naturally, over what kind of showrights were sold, over the ownership of the compensation you might receive from a show, whether the purchaser of the showrights was living up to the agreement, etc. In other words, it could get real messy, real fast.

Photo showing is much less of a thing than it used to be, and cost is less of an issue now with digital cameras and online photo showing. Showrights are not extinct, but a much reduced aspect of the hobby; I’ve met some younger hobbyists who scoff at the notion we ever did such a thing.

But let’s get back to the ephemera.

Because photo showing was a much bigger deal back then, everyone who was in the model horse hobby had a lot of photos, and photo albums. Most were for showing, but some were for reference: we didn’t have a lot of written reference material to go by then, either. Photos were often the only evidence we had that anything existed at all. I was in the hobby for seven years before I ever saw a Decorator in person!

I have no idea how many albums or photos Marney had; I know there are other albums in the possession of others. My most recent batch came from a mostly-retired hobbyist who knew Marney and assisted her family with the dispensation of her estate.

Will there be more to come? Maybe. I have enough to keep me occupied for a while yet, and I understand how hard it is for some people to give up their ephemera. You start sifting through the old fliers, newsletters and photographs, and suddenly a whole afternoon has vanished…

As I mentioned last time, I did digitize one album already, in its entirety. It’s the one I think would be of most interest and value to other hobbyists: it’s primarily Test Colors and Oddities, some of which have since been tracked down and identified. I’ll release this as a CD at some point. (If anyone can give me pointers on how to go about that, it’d be much appreciated.)

What I’ll digitize from the rest, I do not know. The other albums and photos are a mix of everything: photos of bog-standard Original Finish models, Live Show photos, Test Colors, Customs, and (in this most recent pile of stuff) factory photos from ca. 1985/6.

Some of it will be of major interest to hobbyists, and some of it will not: they’ll need more careful editing and curation, at the very least. Like some of my other materials that I’d like to make available to the public, there may be some "showrights" issues that need to be worked out in advance.

It’s getting late, and the weather will be perfect for flea marketing Sunday, so more on this topic next time.

Just Gotta Laugh Sometimes

(Before we begin the festivities here, it has been brought to my attention that the Youth Show prizes are going to be Glossy after all, thus rendering all the commentary about the switch to Semigloss moot. I can only hope that Reeves has been eavesdropping on the various forum discussions about the matter.)

Several days of epic awfulness was capped with me losing my car keys - inside my car. No, no joke. I drove from one job location to another, parked and waited for the supervisor to show up, took the keys out of the ignition, set them down to gather up all my other stuff, and when I got ready to get out of the car, I couldn’t find them.

I had not even opened the door at that point.

Coworkers completed two (two!) epic searches where we essentially tossed the car, but nope, no keys anywhere. Fortunately, I had an emergency key in my wallet, so I was able to get home without having to make a really embarrassing phone call.

But it still made me wonder who or what I could have ticked off in the past week. I’m not one to believe in gypsy curses, but you can make a rough guess at the kind of Google searches I was running last night.

On the plus side, I did get some nice things in the mail today, including a very entertaining batch of old hobby ephemera, a lovely time capsule of my own "golden age" of the hobby, roughly 30 or so years ago. Back when "pix" like this were state-of-the-art for photo showing purposes:

Soup Can Racing!

Still Life with Dead Cow!

Extraterrestrial Performance!

Nope. Not Going There.

And for the history portion of our program today, the kind of epic Culls/Tests/Oddities that we fought epic battles over:

Three Margarita Lunch Day at Breyer Plant!

Lest you are harboring any unkind thoughts, the person who sent this stuff to me is probably looking at all this and laughing right along with you. These photos (except for the Classic Andalusian Mare) aren’t any different, really, than photographs I or anyone else took back then. In fact, as I was doing a quick search through them this afternoon, I kept remarking "Yep, took one just like that, and that, and that…" 

This is photographic evidence of what the hobby looked like. And you know what? Looks like we had a pretty darn good time, in spite of our lack of technical or artistic sophistication.

(Speaking of: for dignity’s sake, I decided to forego all pictures where actual people were shown, because Mullets.)

(You’re welcome.)

2010 Previews and Stuff

It looks like I'll start the year with a truly clean slate: there was honest-to-goodness dusting performed in the office yesterday! I have no idea what got into me; I'll chalk it up to work avoidance and the absence of a cat to vacuum.

The work avoidance issue: dealing with the big black hole that is my research data entry slush pile. I'm always incorporating new data into my files, but not at the same rate that I research it. Then I find some unexpected lead, and off I am again on some other crazy topic. I think I'll probably spend most of my free time in the beginning of the new year dealing with the consequences of that foolishness. (In addition to working on the nascent hobby advocacy movement that seems to be coming into being – finally!)

The new year is almost here, and photos of the 2010 releases are already being floated about, and analyzed to death. I'm not going to be one of those people today: we should all know by now that it's not a good idea to judge a Breyer horse by its stock photo. Especially the new G4 Stablemates; it's pretty clear that a number of those photos are of prototypes, and not to be trusted. The two resin prototypes we had a sneak peek at BreyerFest this year looked just fine and dandy in person, and I suspect that most of the rest will be, too. There might be a clunker or two, but it's nothing worth fretting over until we have them in hand.

I'm glad to see a new Nokota and a new Peruvian, though – now there's a couple of favorite molds that might make me break my vows of model horse austerity. The Treasure Hunt Othellos are very nice – I like the mold a lot, but I'm not sure I like him enough to participate. I may reconsider, depending on the color and quality of the redemption horse. (Gloss Charcoal = YES! Another shade of gray = meh, not so much.)

I have a lot of reservations about the Breast Cancer Benefit horse. Normally I'd be attempting cartwheels at the thought of a mass-market transparent Traditional-scale horse; one of my few, true model horse grails is to track down and possess the Transparent Belgian I once saw in Marney Walerius's basement. I have all of the other transparent, or mostly transparent Breyer releases, except for the unaffordable Connoisseur Tortuga.

Benefit horses of any kind are good; I just wish it could have been targeted towards an orphan cancer that doesn't quite get the same level of funding or media attention.

You know, like pancreatic cancer.

Hell yeah, it's personal. Some of you may know, but others do not: I lost my Dad to pancreatic cancer almost two years ago. PC has a 5% survival rate after five years; we had 28 days, which is not untypical. There hasn't been much research done, because there's no money in it: there are virtually no survivors to campaign for it.

Now that they have the painting template for it, we can hope that maybe the idea will carry through to other causes, in other colors. (PC's color is purple.) And at least with PC, there would be a logical connection of the horse to the cause: Patrick Swayze was an Arabian horse breeder and enthusiast. I think there's even some footage of him competing at the Kentucky Horse Park on YouTube somewhere.

(And intriguingly, the Tempur-Pedic company is also doing a PC fundraising effort with a limited-edition teddy bear: their headquarters just happens to be in Lexington, Kentucky. BreyerFest attendees would much appreciate some comfy mattresses in a nap station in the Covered Arena, dontcha think?)

That Seventies Catalog

Let's talk about that jobber/distributor toy catalog I mentioned last time. It's the Orgill Brothers and Company 1977 Illustrated Toy Catalog, and it's like a window into my childhood toyland: everything from Barbie, to Bicycles and Breyers, and Beyond! (Literally - Space: 1999 action figures!)

Jobber is a slightly antiquated word for a distributor or wholesaler. A middleman. They'll sell dozens of lines from dozens of manufacturers to simplify and streamline the retailer's ordering process – for a price, of course.

Every page of it is full of awesome, but the Breyer pages are going to be our focus, naturally. There's nothing out of the ordinary in terms of the selection – a couple dozen Traditionals, a few Animals, the Classic Racehorse Assortment, Stablemates Assortment, a few Gift Sets. No secret, previously unknowns special runs or oddball items that I can see. (The Donkey and Elephant are present, but that's overstock from the previous year's Election/Bicentennial promotion, and not really a huge surprise.) Just the kind of horses you'd find in your locally-owned hardware store, the market that Orgill primarily caters to.

Yeah, I did buy some of my models at hardware stores back then! Didn't you?

What's nice about a catalog like this is the ability to compare the wholesale prices with the suggested retail prices. Midnight Sun would cost the retailer 4.39, with a suggested retail of 6.59 – a 33% markup. That's about the same markup Orgill was making: per Breyer's own wholesale pricelists, the cost to the distributor for that same Midnight Sun would have been 2.97!

I have no idea what the markup is now: I'm neither a distributor nor a retailer. Even if I was, there would probably be some contractual mumbo-jumbo about the pricing structure that I would bar me from discussing it in a public forum anyway. But we're talking about 30 year old prices on merchandise that's been long discontinued.

For those of you pining for the days of the Six Dollar Traditional, don't forget that this was in 1977 money. As a genuine chronological youngster of that time period, I can assure you, Six Dollars was not a small sum. Saving that kind of money took herculean effort, especially when you're constantly tempted by one dollar Stablemates and 35 cent comic books.

The most fascinating part of this catalog, though, is the photographs: a I mentioned in my previous post, some of them are OLD, and many don't match the product that's being sold. Here's the Running Stallion:

The Alabaster Running Stallion was discontinued, oh, around 1971. The text under the photo notes that it's the Appaloosa you'd be buying. Likewise with with the Indian Pony, shown here in long-gone Buckskin version:

My favorite is the Fighting Stallion; the stock photo used to illustrate the Alabaster is actually that of the Gray Appaloosa, dating back to at least 1961!

We have our share of vintage prototype pics, too, including our old friend Yellow Mount, taunting us yet again:

Several of the newer items – like Lady Phase, the Charolais Bull, and Hobo – have more contemporaneous photos, so Orgill obvious had access to them. So, what was up with the outdated, incorrect stock photos?

The answer is simple: this catalog is pre-digital. It had to be manually pasted up. Every chunk of text and every photograph had to be physically cut and pasted into place. Lines had to be hand-drawn with a technical pen. Mistakes and cut lines had to be touched up with white paint, with a paint brush. If you look closely at the scans, you can still see a few blotches and cut lines.

It's about as much fun as it sounds. I managed to get into graphic design at the very tail end of the “manual” era, so I did get to experience that fun first hand, briefly. (My first semester in art school included a digital prepress class – in Aldus PageMaker! It was my favorite class, by far. I miss doing digital prepress, I really do...)

So the overworked table jockeys who had to put the toy catalog together probably reused old pages, or cut and pasted chunks of old stats into the new pages. Wherever there was a possible discrepancy, they'd paste in a line of text underneath to cover their behinds, just in case.

I'm sure that shortcuts like this probably led to at least a handful of post-production runs on some of the models in question, unless Breyer got lucky and just happened to run across a box or two of old stock hiding in the factory somewhere. No matter how thoroughly the search, there's always a box or two of some old somethings lurking in the warehouse. Look at the kind of stuff that still turns up in the Ninja Pit every year!

Stock Photos and Stock Horses

I did a quick box count last night and realized that I was one-third done with my big “descriptors” project – considerably further along than I had anticipated. It helps that I'm not working, I guess. I have lots of time to occupy, and I might as well do it constructively.

The not-working part is not by choice. And not something I want to talk about right now.

What I do want to talk about is the catalog photography problem. No, not the recent phenomenon of lackluster lighting and color correction, but Breyer's bad habit of reusing and recycling old stock photos.

It was a particularly bad problem in the 1960s and early 1970s, when the product line changed at what now seems like a glacial pace: models and colors were issued not for months or years, but for decades. It made sense for Breyer to get as much use out of the stock photographs they had on file, rather than retake photos of the same models from year to year.

The only problem was that these paint jobs didn't necessarily stay the same over time. Markings changed, or the color or shading may have been tweaked over the years. Sometimes only the prototype of the model was available for the initial photo shoot, and the production model was significantly different. The Yellow Mount was famous for this discrepancy. For years, Breyer used photos of the prototype, which looked little like the actual production model. Here he is again, in the 1975 Collector's Manual:

He was his actual normal self in other PR materials, including the picture box he came in – here illustrated in the 1975 Dealer's Catalog:

Many of us were quite disappointed back in the day when we realized that the model we received only bore a passing resemblance to the one we saw in the catalog – because it was the photo in the catalog that we had formed our hopes and dreams on!

It's a huge problem when it comes to documenting color and mold changes. Most of the photographs in the 1968 Collector's Manual weren't taken from models that were fresh off the line: they were stock photographs that had been sitting around, sometimes for years. They retook a lot of them for the 1969 Manual, but a lot of those same photos were still being used in the 1975 Collector's Manual, even though many paint jobs changed dramatically in that timespan. We have to rely on other sources – contemporary photographs and accounts, and non-catalog promotional materials – to date those changes.

Stock photos are still useful research tools; look at how far it got us with the mystery of the Sorrel Fighting Stallion. It helped establish an earliest possible date: that model in that color had to exist by 1963. Stock photos cannot be used to establish a latest possible date, because as long as the photos exists in some form, somewhere, it may get used. For example, I have a very amusing toy jobber catalog from 1977: some of the photos they use to illustrate then-current Breyer products date back to the 1950s! (And don't necessarily match up to the product advertised!)

I'll have to talk about that wonderful old toy catalog another day – it really is worth its own post.

The stock photo problem doesn't happen as much as it used to, because the turnover is so high that individual releases don't have the opportunity to change over time. The markings or masking might be a bit different, or they might switch the finish from matte to gloss, but the photographs they release are a lot closer to the final production pieces than they used to be. We still hear griping and moaning about the models don't EXACTLY match the photographs, but compared to what we had to deal with in the 1970s, those complaints seem almost comical.