A Game of Wanting

I put in my lone entry for the True Blue Exclusive Event; as I’ve said before, I’m not optimistic, especially since so many hobbyists are treating it like a Lotto drawing. 

The Traditional for the event – Bondi – is a Light Dapple Gray on the Valegro mold, and it appears to be Chalky as well as Glossy. He’s beautiful and I want him, but that’s not up for me to decide.

I won’t go to the secondary for this one either because the math doesn’t work out for me. It’s a pretty simple equation, really:

Gloss + Chalky + Valegro + Exclusive Event Model = Unaffordable.

The next Premier Club release is a new Fjord Mare named Astrid, and I also love her. I think I’ll be okay waiting for a more plentiful Regular Run or Special Run, though. I don’t want to get too attached to her, because I had my dreams dashed with the previous Fjord release Henry when they made him the 2015 BreyerFest Diorama Prize Truffle.

(Oddly, I wasn’t as upset with the 18-piece WEG 2010 reissue; maybe because I knew I never had a shot at that one?)

The Spring Decorator release is a Flag-themed Translucent Esprit name Old Glory. I actually like him more than most of the previous patriotic horses – no kinda weird bloody red points, yay! – but I’ll probably take a pass on him, too. Too much stuff, not enough room, others love him more than I do, all that jazz. I think I’ll like him more in person, but we’ll cross that bridge if and when we come to it.

And finally, there’s this pretty little girl:

Sigh. You know how long I’ve been wanting a black or gray variation of the Appaloosa Performance Horse color? On anything? A very long time. Knowing that this Test Color is going to be out there, and probably not at my house ever, is discomforting.  

Half Measures

The weather finally turned gray and dreary, so I went out to the local Salvation Army Store and bought several cuts of vintage Hawaiian fabric from the 1970s. About 15 yards total?

They are colorful and vibrant and full of possibilities, but at the moment I have no idea what I am going to do with any of it, other than reserving at least one piece of it as a future live show tablecover.

(And if they ever have a Hawaiian or South Seas-inspired BreyerFest, I am all set!)

It was also a bit of a consolation prize, since I missed some fabulous high-end Mid-Century Modern furniture in the same store literally by minutes. There’s actually quite a bit to be found in the Metro Detroit area, but this was (a) an entire matched suite and (b) at Salvation Army prices.

Sigh. Anyway. Back to horse stuff.

Here’s another item from the collection I recently purchased that included that fabulous Buckskin Indian Pony: a partially Chalky #62 Saddlebred Weanling!

It’s difficult to capture in the photograph, but in person you can definitely see that the plastic is only Chalky in spots, with no rhyme or reason for the location of said spots. Her blaze, for instance, is half-Chalky, half-not!

Because high-quality translucent white Cellulose Acetate was in short supply in the early- to mid-1970s, it wouldn’t surprise me if Breyer initially tried to salvage some of their culls contaminated with bits of colored regrind with this technique. 

Tried, and then quickly abandoned, because I could imagine how much of a pain in the butt that would be for painters to do these random touch-ups. It’s much easier to just give them all a thick, solid basecoat – whether it was molded out of solid green plastic, or just flecked with regrind – and call it a day. 

When I bought this collection, I didn’t think of it as anything more than a really nice lot of models in really nice condition, and I was happy with that. But the more I look into it, the more I wonder.  

One thing I do know for certain is that I am definitely not going to go down the rabbit hole of Saddlebred Weanling variations. Different socks, different blazes, different shades of Chestnut – been there, done that! I’ll stick to Traditional Man o’ Wars and #48 Black Morgans, thanks.

1984 JAH ASBW

My schedule is going to get extremely weird over the next few days - I might be disappearing for four or five days next week - thus explaining all the multiple quick postings here this week.

Since I’ve been on a Saddlebred kick lately, let’s talk about my original Holy Grail model: the 1984 Just About Horses Saddlebred Weanling. I say original, because I’ve long since acquired the rude little beast that vexed me so:

The ASBW was the very first JAH Special, and as you nay have expected, the execution didn’t go quite as well as intended. You think Reeves messes up the sale and distribution of special run models now? Ladies, gentlemen, hobbyists of all persuasions: nothing beat the magnitude of messed-up-ness of the first JAH Special.

Most of us hobbyists back then were at the whim of the postal service when it came to getting our notification about Special Runs and such, and if your JAH happened to be late, no horse for you. And since most of us received our news in monthly allotments via our model horse newsletters of choice, we wouldn’t have necessarily known they were late until much later. Several weeks, if not months later.

The other big problem?  The order form itself: believe it or not, it wasn’t limited to one per customer or one per address. You could order as many as you wanted to - and allegedly, some people did.

So those of us who received our Just About Horses late (three weeks, as I discovered in my case) probably shouldn’t have been surprised when we received our money back a few weeks after that, with a letter informing us of the incredibly quick sellout.

I was not a happy camper.

It was the first instance of me writing a very angry letter to Peter Stone. I remember sitting at my portable typewriter, banging at the keys so hard I probably broke a couple of nails. (Pre-computer, dearies. Might have even been pre-electric. Yes, I am old.) Some cussing may have been involved; honestly, I can’t remember, because I didn’t bother to make a carbon copy of my angry missive.

Shortly afterward, the prices on the JAH ASBW went through the roof: within a few years, they were fetching anywhere from $250 to $400 - in late 1980s money! For a model with a 1000 piece run!

Yeah, I wasn’t going to buy it for that kind of money. That was crazy. So I didn’t.

I waited. And waited. And waited. Until the prices finally hit my comfort zone on eBay, somewhere in the $100 range.

The best part of waiting is that the model I finally got came with an… interesting pedigree. For confidentiality’s sake I can’t give away all the details about the transaction, except to say that there might be some actual significance to his serial number, which happens to be #0002.

The auction didn't mention any of those details when I bid on her. It was just that both the time and the price were right on that particular piece, and I got lucky.

The Mysteries of Shermie Love

I’m not really getting the craze over the Fall Dealer Promo Model Autumn. Part of it is undoubtedly my aversion to the season from which he takes his name: for reasons I will not discuss here, it is not my favorite time of the year.

The Sherman Morgan has never been a huge favorite of mine anyway. I have him in his original release of chestnut, the lovely alabaster JAH SR Pride and Vanity, and the original black, but I haven’t been highly motivated to get the rest of them. The Dapple Gray Tobiano test piece in the 2008 BreyerFest Auction was a beautiful thing, I’ll grant you, but well beyond my price range.


But Autumn is a 2000 piece run: that’s significantly more than your average JAH Special (typically 1500) or BreyerFest Special (500-1500). The color is more appealing (it’s a rare mold that’s not improved with a bit of gloss), the SRP is more reasonable, and the distribution model seems a little more fair than last year’s attempt. Even if we factor in his higher popularity rating and the gloss factor, I still don’t think the prices some dealers and collectors are trying to charge will hold up in the long run.

I wouldn’t be surprised, even, if a few batches of them show up in the Tent next year. Not as many as the Medalist Ponies, but a few cases, at least? Yeah. We’re talking 2000 pieces here. That’s a lot of horses, no matter how you divvy them up.

I’m sure most of the current craze for him is just due to him being the newest, shiniest bauble on the table. Happens every year at BreyerFest: a model’s awesomeness is extolled, crazy-mad prices are charged (and sometimes, received), then the inevitable collapse of both praise and price a few months - or even weeks - later.

There have been a few exceptions to the rule, but there's usually been a mitigating factor. And the possible migitating factor for Shermie is his strangely potent popularity.

I’ve always wondered if all the Shermie love was a consequence of his extended absence from the Breyer line: the mold was taken out of production at the end of 1992, and did not return until 2000, slightly remodeled and with a brand new tail, as the #1105 Carpe Diem.

The story was that the mold was damaged beyond repair. The word "destroyed" is casually bandied about when the discussion turns to damaged or altered molds; Breyer was the first to use that term, in reference to the 1984 JAH Saddlebred Weanling’s pending mold change to the Rocking Horse. I don’t know when the word "destroyed" came up in reference to the Sherman Morgan mold, but any time a mold is put on an extended vacation from production, it inevitably enters the discussion.

I hate that word, because it’s pretty clear that the way the company uses the word is quite different from the way hobbyists do. In hobbyist circles, the word destroyed evokes cataclysmic imagery: tossed from a high-rise and shattered into a million pieces, drop-kicked into the Pacific Ocean, or melted down and recycled into parts for your Subaru. Gone forever and ever, amen and goodbye.

Breyer uses the term its more technical or artistic sense, generally, to describe a mold that is no longer in its original state. Kind of like art prints: an earlier state of an artistic etching is considered "destroyed" when changes are made to it. But it is not gone, only changed. Halla was "destroyed," but the "Bolya" mold lives on. The Saddlebred Weanling was "destroyed" but we had the "Rocking Horse" instead. (Until they restored it, more or less.)

Parts may go missing, or be retooled and remodeled, but molds are rarely discarded or destroyed entirely. (Alborozo being a notable exception.) They’re just too darn expensive and time-consuming to build from scratch: it’s better to keep an unusable mold in storage until it’s possible to repair or salvage it somehow.

His color is beautiful: that’s the only thing that’s keeping me from dismissing him entirely from my want list. But until I get some money and space issues resolved here, I’ll have to opt out of the Shermie Love Fest for now.

Seeing Stars

Sorry about that. My life suffered a temporary overdose of drama.

I had to deal with a death in the family, a divorce, major surgery, a grand opening, and a rescue puppy. (Not in that particular order, either of importance or happenstance.) The normal state of my existence is already at barely organized chaos: mix in all of the above, and it shouldn't be any surprise that the past couple of days have ended with me collapsing into the nearest available comfy chair.

And falling asleep.

This kind of simultaneously occurring weirdness happens to me from time to time, which probably explains my general avoidance of soap operas and reality shows. They all pale in comparison to what I have to deal with on a daily basis. I won't go into further details, except to say that I consider my hobby activities to be among my more “mundane” aspects of my life. And a very welcome one, at that.

I'll make up for it right quick. I have some unexpected free time this week.

I did manage to wake up in time Sunday morning to have a reasonably good day at the flea market – something I sorely needed. Neither my work schedule nor the weather had been especially cooperative in the past month, and before that, I had an unpleasant … incident with another collector that had mildly soured me on the whole experience. (No grabby hands while someone else is perusing the box of horses! Bad flea market etiquette, ladies, bad! Grr.)

While cleaning up some of the newest acquisitions for BreyerFest, I ran across another one of those “how could I have not seen that before” observations. Take a look at these two handsome boys: a nice, if run-of-the-mill Appaloosa Gelding, and a darker than average El Pastor. Notice something peculiar?


Yep, same star, used on completely different molds. For comparison, here's the star on the Chalky El Pastor I also happened to pick up Sunday morning (yes, ladies, he'll also be on the saleslist):


Almost all Breyer models show some variation in their masking, and several Breyers from the 1970s and 1980s are notable for their facial marking variations: the original releases of both the Yearling and the Saddlebred Weanling are actually quite notorious for it. (At least four known for the Yearling, and about …. a kajillion for the Weanling.) But I hadn't thought they actually reused painting masks on completely different molds. I always thought they were uniquely designed for each mold.

On Traditionals, anyway. Now, I had known for quite some time that Breyer had reused some of the star and blaze masks on the Classic molds, particularly the Racehorses, but I chalked that up to (a) mold confusion among the painters at the factory, and (b) the fact that the molds share enough similarities in size, shape and style that any minor inconsistencies in the fit could be compensated for. It never occurred to me that Breyer considered the facial masks on the Traditionals interchangeable as well.

But I just happened to have these guys standing next to each other in the bath assembly line, and there was the evidence, staring me right in the face.

It makes sense, though: those small masks could be easily lost or damaged, and it's cheaper to reuse what you have on hand than create another one. Faces are also relatively “flat:” issues of fit and overspray would be relatively minor. (Though minimizing overspray back then wasn't high on Breyer's list of priorities, either.)

This is one of those backburner research projects I'll have to get back to at another time (cf. “chaos,” above). I'll still have to work out attributions and chronologies: in layman's English, which masks originally belonged to which mold, and when they were used.

Programming Note: Since I am dreadfully behind on my BreyerFest preparations, a lot upcoming posts may be BreyerFest related, in whole or in part.

And re: the puppy. He's not here yet. If and when he finally shows up on our doorstep, y'all will be the first to know.