When Breyer Met Mego (no, the other Mego)

It was another weird and wonderful day at the flea market, the kind that makes me wish I had a booth at one of the local antique malls so I could justify buying stuff to stock it!

I passed by most of the horses – they were either overpriced, or simply not that interesting – but I did find one interesting bit of Breyer-related ephemera from the same vendor I purchased that photo album from:

Dinah-Mite paper dolls!

Dinah-Mite was Mego’s version of Barbie, whose biggest selling feature was that she was – as you can see from the cover of the book – far more posable and versatile.

She didn’t last long – she was discontinued ca. 1975, in favor of Mego’s better-selling Star Trek, Superhero, and Planet of the Apes lines. But not before she acquired some interesting accessories, including a horse “Golden Pal”, who was a motorized knock-off of our friend the Palomino Family Arabian Stallion:

http://www.megomuseum.com/dinah/v_horse.shtml

And a boyfriend “Don”:

http://www.megomuseum.com/catalog/1974/images/dinahmite2.jpg

Both of these accessories were not originally her own; Golden Pal was originally the Planet of the Apes “Action Stallion” and Don was simply a Mego Superman in civilian clothes. Mego was thrifty (and/or creative) that way.

So why am I going on about this obscure doll from the early 1970s? It’s because the original, elusive, rarely-seen Breyer Rider Doll from the 1976 Breyer Rider Gift Set was… a repurposed Dinah-Mite:

Or at least, the prototypes were.

There are all sorts of stories floating around about why the original Breyer Rider Gift Set never materialized; the original one I heard was that there was a safety or manufacturing issue involved. But if the plan was to just repurpose/reissue Dinah-Mites – and not merely hijack a few for the prototypes – something else might have been going on.

There are enough Mego resources online to solve that riddle, but like so many other things, I haven’t had the time to find out.

Peaches: Daughter of Evil

This picture scared the bejeezus out of me the other day:


Hello, Scary! It’s Peaches, from the #96062 White Diamond and Peaches set, as seen in the 1997 Dapples Dealer Catalog.


Most of the Breyer Rider Dolls are a tad on the creepy and weird side, but Peaches is in a class all by herself, isn’t she? She looks like the love child of an evil circus clown. Every time I look at her picture in that catalog, I keep expecting to see a little plastic dagger in her hand. (She could probably do some serious damage with that pink hairbrush, though.)

Growing up, I never owned any Barbie dolls - or many dolls, period. Mom wasn’t against them, as far as I can remember, I just never had the interest in them. In my pre-Breyer days, I was all about crayons, comic books, and stuff animals. Oh, and cardboard boxes, too. I loved cardboard boxes so much I even "wrote" a book about them at the age of five. (It was mostly pictures - I may have been precocious, but not that precocious.)

No latent interest in dolls + an almost equal disinterest in showing performance = a box full of mostly unopened rider dolls that came with sets I bought primarily for the horse. It’s definitely a weak spot in my repertoire of Breyer trivia.

Anyway, I thought I’d remedy that lack of knowledge over the weekend by doing a little more research on them, until I ran across Peaches and stopped that notion dead in its tracks.