My Little Noriker

This week was a rough one, and I was feeling pretty blue by the end of it. So I decided to make a detour to work yesterday and buy myself something blue to cheer myself up, making the assumption that it was going to be the new Patriotic Web Special Washington. 

There were, indeed, several to nice examples to choose from, but something else blue caught my eye instead: the Blue Roan Brabant!

His paint job is very reminiscent of the original #415 Buckshot, right down to the “is he, or isn’t he?” Appaloosa vibe. So much so that I thought Reeves missed an excellent opportunity to label him a Noriker instead. 

The color for Buckshot was never clearly defined: it was sort of a combination/mashup of Blue Roan, Appaloosa and Grulla, and there was so much variation in the model’s modest four-year run that all of those labels fit to one degree or another, often simultaneously. I am not quite sure they even knew back then anyway: his color was (rather unhelpfully!) labeled Grulla (Blue Roan) in the 1985 catalog. 

The color wasn’t unique to Buckshot: it did appear on a Special Run of the original Hess Belgian in 1986. That release originally was going to be a reinterpretation of the Belgian’s original Smoke color – but with a black mane and tail – but due to customer feedback and some miscommunication, he ended up getting painted like Buckshot instead. 

Thus creating, unintentionally, Breyer’s first “Noriker” release, even if he wasn’t officially labeled or sold that way.

The first true Breyer Noriker was 2001’s Fine Porcelain Model Moritz, an untacked adaptation of Kathleen Moody’s Porcelain Household Cavalry Drum Horse from 1999. The untacked version of the mold was finally translated into plastic for the release of the 2007 Holiday Horse Winter Song. 

Although the mold now known as Othello was later released in Appaloosa as the Redemption Model for the 2010 Treasure Hunt, it wouldn’t be until 2020 that we’d get an Appaloosa Noriker that was identified as such: the BreyerFest Special Run Oak, on the Georg mold. 

Alas, my dear little Brabant has a factory scrape on his chest that probably limits his potential show career; I have plenty enough models in the stable more urgently in need of repair.

Blue Freckles

Did I forget to mention that I opened my Canadian Walmart Stablemates Blind Bags? Nothing out of the ordinary – and no surprises, which is no surprise, really:

At least I’ll be able to do some handpicking, and the Red Dun on the G4 Endurance Arabian looks really good on him! I am, naturally, enamored of the Freckle Blue Roan on the Reiner:

Although Test Colors and other examples of questionable provenance have shown up over the years, this is the closest we’ve come to a wide-scale production release of a Black/Blue version of the original Freckle Red Roan color. 

Early attempts at Blue/Black Roan, like the 1989 JAH Special Run Quarter Horse Yearling, featured much sparser freckling on a stark white base color. Which I liked, personally, but it didn’t seem to be as big a hit with anybody else. 

Maybe because they looked more like Fleabitten Grays than actual Roans? The Red Roans of the same era were painted almost identically, part of Reeves’ experimentation with more naturalistic paint jobs. It definitely took Reeves a while to get the hang of Roans, and then they lost the will and/or the knack for the old-fashioned Freckle Roans somewhere along the way, though this fella is definitely an encouraging sign. 

Another encouraging sign: the Blind Bag Stablemates that briefly appeared at some Tractor Supply stores (definitely not ours!) were – like the Unicorn Surprise sets – simply early releases of 2022 merchandise. I am on the fence about buying a case when they’re available: I know it’s my best shot at getting a chase piece, but I’d really rather not add more models to my sales list, even if they’re only Stablemates.

All In

Well, it’s official: in April, I’ll be attending my first live show (Pansies & Ponies) in 15 years. It’s something that I’ve been promising myself to do for a while now, and since I’m now in a place – more or less – that I can do it, I’m doing it.

Putting a show string together is going to be a challenge, though. Collectibility won’t be an issue (of course!) but everything else is essentially shiny, new – and a little bit terrifying, to be honest.

I think this is a good thing. Everyone needs to push the boundaries of their comfort zones once and a while. I think too many people define themselves by what they can’t do – or think they can’t do – and I don’t want to be that kind of person.

I definitely can’t snap my fingers, knit, dunk a basket, or parallel park. But I’ve gone rock climbing, travelled cross-country alone, officiated a wedding, and cosplayed in public. Those all took some measure of bravery, and I survived.

I’ll be fine. A little overwhelmed at first, but fine.

Second, I bought some costuming and crafting supplies for BreyerFest last week – new supplies, not stuff pulled from my already-voluminous stash – so I am now officially all-in on that endeavor, too. Even so, everything that was purchased was on sale, and can/will be used or repurposed for other projects. In other words, those purchases weren’t quite as existentially fraught as hitting the Paypal button on live show entry fees.

The final thing that I thought I’d be all-in for, but I find myself hesitating on – is the release of the Collector’s Club Special Run Out of the Blue:

(Props to their photographer for thinking outside the box for this shot! I love it!)

This release hits all my “marks” – the Bobby Jo mold, a relatively simple and well-executed roan pinto, a reasonable price – but I am hesitating. I haven’t finished my taxes yet, and I am still in the process of figuring out my new monthly budget with the new car et al. And I want to keep my new model purchases to a minimum as long as possible this year, because I still feel like I own just too much danged stuff!

Breyer introduced Red Roans in 1968 – on the Running Stallion first, followed by the Lying Down Foal, Scratching Foal, and Running Mare in successive years – but it wasn’t until the late 1980s that they finally attempted to produce Blue/Black Roans.

(Yes, some Tests and Oddballs existed in between, but are scarce even by Test Color/Oddball standards.)

The earliest examples were more like unusual-looking fleabitten grays, like the #830 Quarter Horse Stallion release of 1990, on the Adios mold, or the 1989 JAH Special Run Quarter Horse Yearling.

Neither one of those releases went over that well, so Reeves moved on to slightly-more-accurate (though still a bit greenish) interpretations with the likes of the JAH Special Five-Gaiter Moon Shadows and Stock Horse Stallion Shane. And so on and and so on, with Out of the Blue being just the latest iteration. A pretty attractive one, I must say.

Collector’s Club Specials tend to stick around a while, so I think I can afford to hesitate.

Repeating Themselves

Well, there’s my first must-have for this year’s BreyerFest, the Store Special Repeat the Beat:

That’s exactly the color I’ve been hoping for on the Bluegrass Bandit mold! It is very similar to another recent roan paint job that I was very fond of, the Classics #931 Bay Roan Quarter Horse:

In its rather short life, the Bluegrass Bandit mold has already made three other appearances as a BreyerFest Special Run model: 2011’s Translucent Under the Sea, 2013’s Store Special Lady C, and 2014’s Store Special Champagne Wishes.

True, it is a bit unusual that a mold that’s only been around since 2008 is now making its third appearance as a Store Special, but Bluegrass Bandit mold has become unusually popular over the past few years; I’ve been trying to add to my tiny (2 piece!) collection, but the prices keep getting in the way.

While it is also true that a Tennessee Walking Horse has little to do with the India theme, I suspect the real horse’s guest appearance at BreyerFest this year may be a not-so-subtle nudge in the effort to get the soring ban finally implemented.

Like the recent Christmas Horse Esprit Bayberry and Roses, Repeat the Beat’s tail lacks a white basecoat; because Samples are usually depicted in these early promotional pictures, it’s too early to tell if this is idiosyncratic to this particular Sample, or a detail that will make it into the final production pieces.

It may see a bit odd, but I do like it, since it adds a hint of translucency to the tail itself. But I’ll be fine with it, either way.

Me and My Luck

Sorry about the little hiatus there – a busy weekend that involved a lot of cleaning, reorganization and housekeeping. My office now looks moderately presentable, or at least navigable.

I also had a minor panic when I received an e-mail about a refund for an item I ordered as a part of that 100-dollars-gets-you-a-free-horse promotion. After about an hour of fretting about it, I managed to determine which of the two boxes in question involved the refund, and opened it. Whew, I still got my freebie!

I had already heard about the vast majority of the freebies being AQHA Horses, and I thought that I’d be moderately safe, since I only had one of the six and it was a rarer one to boot. So I would have been fine with the Bay, the Black, the Grullo, the Palomino or the Sorrel. I pulled it out, and…

... a Roan again, naturally!

So I tried to spin this into a positive: at least I’ll be able to recoup some of my investment, right?

Then the next day Reeves decided to allow people to order Sorrel, Bay, Grullo and Roan directly off the web site, no mysteries involved. While the absence of the Black from the sale may indeed indicate that it is the rarest of the six store-released colors, I think the absence of the Palomino just means that they’ve already shipped all available stock to retailers. It was the rare one before the other rare ones, and it has been available all year.

So now I’ll probably have to hold on to my spare Roan for a while until the market settles. Since I do have most of this week off, I’ll toss pics of him up on my MH$P page on Monday, just in case. (I’d also consider trading him for a Grullo or Palomino.)

All in all, it wasn’t a bad deal; just another case of my funny luck kicking in and making my life a tad more complicated than it needs to be. Basically it is a variation of my Fighting Stallion Problem: finding Woodgrains and Charcoals is easy, but nice plain Matte Alabasters are inexplicably hard.

My other box remains unopened. Whether or not it stays that way until Christmas Eve will depend on how the rest of the week goes.

Oh, and here’s a (spoiler-free) picture I found on Twitter that pretty much sums up my Star Wars experience:

Some APH Tests

It's been one of those days. So here's are some pictures for you to ogle at:

While Test Colors that utilize the original Appaloosa Performance Horse paint job are almost plentiful, Test Colors on the Appaloosa Performance Horse mold itself are not. The reasons why are obvious: the mold is very "old school" Appaloosa and not very flashy. The two vintage photos that I have from Marney's files are both, no surprise, Appaloosas. Here's the other guy:

Although both models appear to be from the mid-1970s - and may possibly even be Preproduction pieces - they utilize a softer, finer speckling technique to their roaning that wasn't used on a production run item until the later 1980s.

At the point these two were made, the only other roans in production were the "Freckle" Red Roans on the Running Stallion, Lying Down and Scratching Foal. So Breyer had the technical capability to make more realistic roans, and chose not to.

Interesting!

There are a few more recent APH Tests floating around, including that fabulous frame overo piece for the BreyerFest auction a little while back, and somewhere, out there, the Test piece they used as a stand-in for the Stud Spider in the 1977 J.C. Penney Christmas Catalog.

Wanna talk about grails? Sigh...

Roany Roys

Chamonix for me? Of course not, silly. Silver Filigrees never take the easy way to this house! Eh, I should be selling more than buying anyway (speaking of, anyone need a Bowland?) As for the latest newest Web SRs - a Running Mare and Foal set in pinto - we'll get to them next time.

As expected, the photograph of the BreyerFest Roy is much better seen on paper than it is via an out of focus cell phone pic: shaded Bay, with lighter-colored feathering, dark gray hooves, a slightly sunbleached mane, tri-colored eyes, and light overspray-style roaning. I think hobbyists will be surprised in a good way - once they look at it for what it is, and not for what they wish it was.  

This is not the first time they’ve put a Roan paint job on Roy, but it is the first time that it could pass for a Roan without qualification.

The first attempt was the first non-Roy release: the #837 Belgian Brabant, introduced in 1991, the year after Roy was discontinued. He’s commonly described as a Dun; like most of the other models in the Catalogs and Manuals at the time, he had no official color description.

According to one internal Reeves document I have ca. 1992 (contemporaneous with his production) he was described as a Bay Roan. That’s how I thought of him back then, when I gave him any thought at all: another not-entirely-successful attempt at more realistic roaning.

A few years later, in 1996, they tried a slightly different style of Roan Roy, this one named Sebastian (#953). Slightly different is being a bit charitable; heck, calling him weird would not be out of bounds. How else would you describe a horse with a blue-gray mane, tail and body, and dark chestnut lower face and legs? As a Chimera, maybe?

Either they had some very interesting reference photos to go by, or there was some miscommunication somewhere - the same level of "the telephone game" that gave us a Buckshot Blue Roan Belgian back when.

(Hey, now there’s another vintage color revival I can get behind!)

Anyway, as for the people making yuck faces over Roy - young or old - just treat him the same way you treated the Glossy Black Goffert this year. There are tons of options to choose from. Sell them cheap-cheap, donate them to charity, hand them off to the passing tourists at the Park, chop ‘em up as bodies (it’s a Eustis sculpt - surely there’s something worth salvaging there), paint them orange and use them as high-concept jack o’ lanterns…

Or better yet - use them to upsell the hobby to others (like my National Model Horse Day idea)!

Roy’s ideally suited for the job. His thick limbs and pleasant demeanor make him an excellent first horse for kids. Lots of nonhobby folks (especially older guys!) love Draft Horses in general, out of fond memories of the family farm, beer hitches in local parades, or draft horse pulls at the fair. That it represents a rare breed (Ardennes) with a fascinating and ancient history would appeal to people interested in either history, or maintaining livestock diversity.

And it’s a BreyerFest Celebration Horse, so he’d make a good advertisement for the event, and the hobby itself.

See? Every model horse can have a value and purpose! Even Roy.

Freckle Roans

Different day, same chaos. Had to spend most of yesterday reassembling the china cabinet. (No fatalities, but lots of stress nonetheless.)

It appears I slightly dissed the old-style "freckle" Red Roans in my previous post on the Buckshot. Didn’t mean to give that impression, as I’m very fond of the color. I think I have every regular run release of it, and most of the special runs. (Yes, including the uber-rare Running Foal and the ultra-desirable G1 Draft Horse.)

Breyer’s original Red Roans were a relatively short-lived phenomenon. The first regular run release of this peculiar color appeared in 1968, on the Running Stallion. It was followed by the Lying Down Foal in 1969, the Scratching Foal in 1970, and the Running Mare in 1971.

The Mare and two Foals were gone by the end of 1973, but the Running Stallion lasted through 1974. He’s relatively "common" for a Breyer of that era; a nice one with attractive roaning will set you back a little bit, but not as much as a Gloss Charcoal. The Lying Down Foal isn’t too difficult to find, either.

The Mare, surprisingly, is the scarcest of the bunch, with just a three-year production run. That may seem like an eternity today, but for a model of that era, it’s a little unusual. It took me a while to find one myself:


I found her - along with the Stallion, the Lying Down Foal, and a few other beauties - at my fabled local flea market several years ago. In fact, they were the very first things I saw as I walked up to the entrance!

All of us who have had some modest flea marketing experience have had a few of these rare and wonderful moments. For an instant you freeze and pretend that you didn’t just see what you’re seeing. You scope out the immediate territory to make sure no one else has zeroed in on your target. Your heart begins to pound, and then you immediately break into your brisk, practiced, pretending-not-to-be-too-interested kind of walk …

(Can you tell I miss the flea market? Darn you infernal groundhog!)

You may notice that this Mare has an unusual feature: a Blue Ribbon Sticker. It’s unusual because Blue Ribbon Stickers were discontinued by the end of 1970, and the Red Roan Mare wasn’t introduced until 1971. It appears to be original, or at least contemporary; the Stallion, the Foal, and a couple other models in that collection had stickers, too.

It’s possible that the Mare may have been released in late 1970, in time for the Holiday shopping season - as I’ve discussed before, a not-uncommon practice. Since Breyer was on the verge of discontinuing the sticker program, it would have made sense to substitute another Running Mare sticker, instead of printing up a fresh batch of correctly numbered ones. Her sticker is actually for the #121 Smoke, who had been discontinued by the end of 1970 anyway.

I have no actual evidence of an early release for the Roan Running Mare, though. The simplest explanation probably is the best one, here: Breyer (or the retailer) was just using up their old sticker stock.

Some Kind of Blue

I love watching shows about hoarders: there’s something fascinating about the psychology of persons insulating themselves from the world with massive amounts of stuff. I have a lot of stuff, too, but it’s all neatly organized and contained, and I don’t have any issues with purging things when I need to.

Part of the appeal of those shows for me is that I’m currently dealing with a semi-hoarding situation at home: not me, but my family members. It’s come to a head this week with a long-delayed home remodeling project that includes the space in which I work, and keep the larger part of my collection.

Everything in those two rooms has to be removed, and much stink is being made about how much "stuff" I have. The fact that the rooms now being used for storage were already packed to the ceiling with everyone else’s stuff is irrelevant: the mess is somehow all my fault.

It wouldn’t be so bad if the progress was so slow. There’s no impetus to get the job done in a timely fashion; the only person whose life is being severely impacted is mine, and apparently that’s completely okay with everyone else involved.

I’m not quite sure what to do with myself. If the next few weeks - or months - of posts have a more somber tone than usual, now you’ll know why. The one small physical domain where I had a small modicum of control is currently not in my control. And I’m not happy about it.

I may be feeling a bit blue, but this Buckshot isn’t:


The Buckshot mold debuted in 1985, the same year I found - and purchased - this intriguing horse from Marney, at her post-Congress garage sale. He’s probably a cull of the original release of Buckshot; he has all the characteristics of a #415 Buckshot, except that his distinctive blue-gray base color missing.

I presume he’s a cull, and not a test color, because of something you can’t see in the photograph, and something I can only describe to you due to my current technical difficulties: he has a blotchy, blobby blue dorsal stripe. It’s not unattractive or unrealistic, but it was enough to send him to reject bin, and from where Marney must have rescued him.

What I can’t answer is whether he was discarded "as-is," or if Marney found him in a less finished state, and completed the job. She did a lot of that; many culls could be made passable with a touch of black paint.

What’s intriguing about this "accidental" test color is that he may have been more influential than many an intentional one. Within a few years, we had a number of Breyer production pieces in this color, including the #830 Quarter Horse Stallion (on the Adios mold) and the 1989 JAH Special Quarter Horse Yearling.

Breyer usually described models with these paint jobs - both the gray/black, and the chestnut version that slightly preceded it - as roans. But depending on the size of the spots, or the scale of the horse, they were also labeled fleabitten grays, or even Appaloosas. It may not seem like a big deal now, but they represented a startling change of pace from the almost comical "big freckle" roans of the early 1970s.

The problem was that they were not really a good representation of any of those colors or coat patterns. I think most collectors realized that this new painting "style" was a transitional step towards more realistic roan, fleabitten gray, and Appaloosa paint jobs. As Breyer’s painting techniques improved, many of these models from the "light roan" era have been dumped into the fickle, saturated aftermarket.

Just Say No. To Mullets.

Technical difficulties today. Sorry about that.

I got all excited the other day – I found another test color splash spot Pony of the Americas! Well, okay, he was in the 1976 Dealers Catalog and Collector's Manual, and I wasn't actually looking for him, per se. I was researching another topic entirely, and I just happened to notice that he wasn't the same pony on the white picture box. That's how research works sometimes: you make discoveries while you're busy looking for something else.

I already knew that the POA in the catalog was a test piece – I just assumed that the one featured in the ephemera was the same one that was on the box. Silly me, making assumptions again. (Alas, he was not the same fellow in my collection, either. So that means there were at least three of them.)

I'm not sure why I have this mild obsession with the POA: I remember when it came out in 1976, and there was just something about it that I really, really took a shine to. I think it was its unique appearance: roached mane, short tail, that leopard appaloosa paint job. The POA was no ordinary, generic pony!

Like everyone else, I finally managed to get a look (via the Internet) at a “live” version of the UK SR Pippin on the newly remodeled POA mold. They “updated” it with a new mane and tail. It wasn't necessary, in my opinion; my first reaction was annoyance. They took away the crew cut and gave him an equine mullet!

I don't like mullets. On horses, or people. (I don't have a preference for crew cuts, but on the right person, it works. If I had a preference, it'd be towards the Byronic. For both men and horses. Let's just leave that discussion ... at that.)

I know “big hair” is back in style, for both horses and people, but I never really struck me as either attractive, or practical. And just like people, some look good in big hair, and some don't. The mane is fine – the mold has a nice enough neck to pull off a short mane. But that tail is weird: it's not an improvement to me.

I'm already predisposed to buy the first two near-simultaneous SR releases of the POA in spite of the less than appealing tail – because of the roany paint jobs on both the UK Pippin, and the not-quite-sure-what-it-is Toby. I love roans! Speckled, freckled, or airbrushed, I'm not fussy. And I'd seriously trample people for a freckle-style black roan – you know, like the old-fashioned red roan paint job with big honking freckles, except in black.

And speaking of trampling people, rumor has it that the Toby is an in-tent BreyerFest store special, like the Porcelain Stablemate from last year. This little nugget of information, however, came in the form of a verbal comment from an unidentified Reeves employee: as I’ve explained before, that’s not the kind of information you can completely rely on.

(I’ve received neither a thumbs-up nor a thumbs-down from the powers-that-be to my attempt to organize the Ninja Pit of Death line last year. The issue has been brought to Reeves's attention, but I’ve heard nothing personally. Yet.)