Native Divers

I have a lot of stuff I need to get done over the long weekend – mostly, but not entirely model horse related – so my Internet time will be even lighter than usual through Tuesday.

Look who I found while digging through some of my storage boxes this week, looking for something else – my Matte and Gloss #921 Native Divers!

I bought these two at a local Toys R Us back in 1995 – right after they were released. That particular store was actually a little bit out of my way, but I made it a point to visit whenever I was in that part of town because it had a reputation for getting oddities.

Both the Gloss and the Matte were sitting on the shelf together; since I had no idea which one was the “official” version (I didn’t have a catalog on me, and I couldn’t recall hearing about any variations) I eventually surrendered and got both. Just to be safe.

The Gloss is much more obvious in person, though it is more in the thin/wet style that sits on the edge of Semi-Gloss, rather than the thick/deep style we’re more accustomed to now – and way back when. The Gloss one also seems to be a darker black than the Matte, who looks almost like a dark charcoal gray in comparison.

They’re not particularly flashy or eyecatching – as you can see, they don’t even have much in the way of shading or detail – but even though I’ve sold off a big chunk of my Phar Laps, these two guys are still here.

Just sentimental favorites, I guess.

The Newer Guy

My preliminary inventory says that I came home with money, or at the very least broke even (if I factor in the other expenses – i.e. the car issue). This is another thing to be thankful for, right?

To clarify, I didn’t get the Marshall; other models wandered into the room or into my line of sight, and took priority. Like this guy, down front: the “Matte” Walking Horned Hereford I’d been looking for, at last!

If you were to see him by himself, you might define him as Semi-Gloss, but set him next to a true vintage Gloss – here, a real oldie straight out of the late 1950s/early 1960s – and the difference in the “soft” highlights of the Matte and the “hard” highlights of the Gloss is more obvious.

(Sorry for the weird lighting effects – still working out the kinks with the new camera. But the yellowing on the newer guy is genuine.)

I was very surprised to find him in the Black Horse Ranch Rehoming Sale room, late Friday night, I think? For a variety of reasons I wasn’t able to get into the room any earlier – aside from the scheduling conflicts, I am not a part of the Facebook scene, at all, and the first rounds were given over exclusively to the Facebook participants.

(Not something I’m a fan of, hobby-wise – the last thing on Earth the hobby needs is to wall itself off in gated communities on the Internet – but that’s a separate topic.)

But anyway, in spite of it all, I still managed to glean this treasure from the chaff. That’s sort of my thing, really: pulling that one thing out of a room or collection that nobody else notices.

The Matte Walking Horned Hereford is a genuine rarity, especially when you consider the entirety of the mold’s run before it. From ca. 1956 through the majority of the 1970s – twenty plus years – he came in Gloss, with only the very tail end of the run coming in Matte/Semi-Gloss.

Exactly how long, I’m not sure; the Nonhorse molds were slow but steady sellers, and actual production could well have ceased a few years prior to 1981.

He's another example of how Glossy isn't always all that. Though I doubt that Reeves will ever put the switcheroo on the BreyerFest Surprise Special Runs and make the Mattes variations the scarcer ones.

Matte Finishes seemed to be a thing for me this year, but I’ll elaborate on that later in the week.

Love my Lucys

I don’t get quite as excited about variations on more modern releases as I do about older releases. Part of it is my bias towards older models, but some of this variation-parsing also strikes me as an effort by some to either justify collecting multiples of certain releases, or to make their models even more special than someone else’s.

Which I am okay and (sometimes) totally on board with this impulse as a collector. As a historian, though, I see it as another shortcut to madness.

By necessity, I have to stick to more notable (or noticeable) variations, rather than document the entire spectrum. If something appears to be especially attractive or unusual compared to the norm, I'll make note of it, but generally those kinds of variations are of such specialized interest that the likelihood of an average enthusiast noticing it is very low.

(I tend to exit out of most conversations, for instance, that involve the phrase "semi-gloss variation". Mostly because everyone’s definition is so different, and so nebulous, that it’s as meaningless as the word "RARE" in an eBay listing. But I digress.)

The modern impulse to seek even the subtlest variations also stems from the fact that there’s a lot less variation than there used to be in Breyer models, too. Newer releases are more consistent - to the point that I’ve had a few hobbyists tell me with an absolutely straight face that all Breyers are painted completely by machines now - but it's more a matter of bland sameness thumbing a ride with consistency.

There’s still some minor variation built into the more modern masking techniques. When you think about it, there has to be: it’s a relatively thin and fragile adhesive masking material that’s being placed on an irregular and three-dimensional surface.

Most of these variations are minor - a slightly different cut edge, or a spot or marking placed a little higher or lower than it’s supposed to be. But sometimes…well, take a look a the speckled behinds of my two Lucys and see why even I took notice of this:

I was going to keep both of them because Gloss and Matte, duh, but that their butt spots are so different is a nice plus. Their stickers are on opposite shoulders too, but that's just a post-production thing. I don't usually note sticker placement at all, unless it's in some really weird spot like the middle of a forehead or stuck to a model's private parts.

(Regarding the latter: I see it all the time, and it never fails to be amuse me.)

Semigloss

Just a head’s up: I am not a happy camper today. Aside from having to deal with the kind of people who make one think wistfully of giant meteors hitting the Earth, the computer just crashed and blowed up my latest post before I had a chance to even save it.

(Long story. I blame the dog.)

Anyway, I just came back from being outside: the flowers are blooming, and there’s a nest of baby Robins in the garden. I had a good hair day, and I found a bunch of good chocolate on clearance at the store this morning. I saw some not-outrageously-priced Breyers at the Antique Mall today, and one of them was a Chalky!

Dang. Happy thoughts not working like I hoped. Oh well, moving on. If you catch a whiff of anything iffy, it's me, not you.

One somewhat positive development, it appears that this year’s BreyerFest Youth Show prizes are going to be Semigloss, rather than Gloss, whatever that means. (More on that in a minute.)

This is a good thing, because all those Gloss Prize models were doing was ramping up the intensity level on a show that should be, essentially, a fun learning experience.

Cheating’s been going on a while, but it looks like last year finally drove Reeves to do something a little more meaningful than including even sterner warnings about unsportsmanlike behavior in the show packet.

It’s funny, I was just looking over some ephemera I acquired recently and it included a bunch of show results from the early 1980s. We had show prizes back then, too, but they tended to be relegated to raffles, silent auctions, and door prizes. It was more about the ribbons, the rosettes and the prestige. My Bay Trakehner won a Reserve Grand at Model Horse Congress in the Senior Division back then. All I got was a big rosette, but that was a HUGE deal to me!

Cheating went on back then, too. Get a bunch of horse-crazy young ladies in a room competing for who has the best/prettiest horses, and there’s going to be drama. And felt tip markers. And people with X-acto blades who aren’t happy about your minty-mint Buckskin Indian Pony with the blue ribbon sticker keeps beating their horses, and is going to do something about that.

Aside from the lack of prize models, one other difference back then was that there was another division, composed of non-adult Novices who were no longer Novices, but didn’t feel they were ready to compete with the adults yet. The "Junior" division was never big, numerically, mostly because people aged out of it. (Novices, on the other hand, could be any age.) Moving on towards the Senior/Open divisions was considered a "step up" in terms of prestige, too.

Switching to slightly less impressive prizes for the Youth Show will, I hope, revive the notion that "stepping up" is a good thing, especially among those Youth showers who are more like the Junior showers of yesteryear. That it requires a little "financial" encouragement isn’t necessarily a bad thing, either, as long as it achieves the desired effect.

Anyway, back to the "Semigloss" thing: no one’s quite sure, yet, what Reeves’s definition of that word is going to be. Heck, even in the hobby we can’t agree on what "Semigloss" means: I’ve seen it used to describe models that were very slightly satiny, to models whose Gloss wasn’t quite as thick as the old-fashioned 1960s "dip glossed" models. It’s an extremely variable - and relative - term.

I tend to fall into the "relativity" camp: in other words, how different is it from the standard/contemporary finishes? Many early Matte-finished models from the 1960s appear to be Semigloss compared to the Matte-finished of today, but are quite obviously Matte compared to the other releases of the time.

While it's a bit of a sticking point for me, who likes simple and neat definitions for things, the point is moot if you’re a variation collector. All that matters there is (a) do you like it? and (b) do you like it enough to buy it? As someone who has just a few too many horses in the barn right now, the variation has to be really distinctive and/or really special to come through my front door.

I just can’t ever see myself being one of those one-mold-only collectors, where going hog wild over ever shade and variant could be a legitimate collection focus. I love the Traditional Man o’ War. But I love the old Trakehner, too. And the Pacer. And the G1 Stablemates. And the Western Prancing Horse, and - you get the idea.

UPDATE 6/5: Well, the baby birds fell out of the nest today...and there was nothing we could do to save them. I will now spend the rest of the day in the basement waiting for the meteor and eating chocolate until I am sick.

Nobody Expects the Family Arabians

Ah, so it is the Mustang after all: "Over 25 years for one color".

That’d be Buckskin, from 1961-1986. The Running Mare came in Bay from 1962-1987, but there’s some controversy over her start date, ranging from 1961 to 1963. I’m pretty sure it’s actually 1962, but that’s not something that’s become "common knowledge" yet, the way the start date on the Mustang is.

The FAS also came in Palomino for 25 years - from ca. 1961/2-1987, but that included a switch from Gloss to Matte, so I’m not sure if that counts. (Note: The Family Arabians were released in Charcoal and Palomino some time after the Bay, Alabaster, Gray Appaloosas and Woodgrains - possibly as late as 1962.)

I’d have no problem at all with an Appaloosa Performance Horse-style Mustang. None at all!

In other news, the flea market continues to be very good to me. Every year I think I’m not going to be able to find enough stuff to sell for BreyerFest, but somehow I always manage to. I’m even contemplating leaving a few things behind. Either that, or manage to find those missing hours in my day and actually get some stuff posted on MH$P.

Now the matter of the model that got me thinking:

An Alabaster Family Arabian Foal? Yeah, really.

First, he’s a true Semi-Gloss: he’s neither Gloss nor Matte. You can’t even describe it as the "High Satin" seen on some of the earliest Matte Finishes, most famously on the Bay Running Mare. You see this little baby in person, and you’d be hard pressed to call it anything other than Semi-Gloss.

It’s true that Breyer was very inconsistent with its Gloss Finish on their early Alabaster Family Arabians. Sometimes they were bright, thick and shiny, and other times they weren’t. There was a reason for this: they seem to have been designated as the " low budget" item of the 1960s. You’re not going to watch the quality control quite as closely with the lower budget items than with the higher ones.

The pricelists, up through 1968, always listed them at a significantly lower price than all of the other available colors. From a ca. 1966/7 pricelist:

The sticker, and all of the models that the Foal came with, dates him to the 1966-1967 era. Around this same time, the Family Arabians transitioned from Gloss to Matte - exactly when is a mystery, though. A price list dated November 1968 makes note of the "attractive matte finish new for these items", but that doesn’t necessarily help us that much, other than give us a latest possible start date.

You’ll also note the Foal’s heavily grayed muzzle. What’s unusual about it - aside from the amount of gray - is that it’s gray at all.

You see, most Gloss Alabaster Foals (and Mares, for that matter) came with pinked muzzles and gray nostrils. (Family Arabian Stallions are no help in the matter, most of them came with gray muzzles from the start.) It’s the Matte Alabasters that tend to have the gray muzzles. (Just a little splotch of it between the nostrils, usually.)

I spent years trying - in vain - to find Matte Finish Alabaster Family Arabians with pink muzzles, on the assumption that the switch to Matte Finish occurred before the switch to grayed muzzles.

Looks like I was looking at the problem all backwards!

Unless she’s something else altogether.

As stated above, the Foal was found in a group of models that date to ca. 1966-1967. Aside from some dust, dirt, and a little wear and tear on some of their stickers, they were in excellent to immaculate condition. The lot also came from a Chicago suburb, which as any astute hobbyist knows, is usually a big flashing red light: WARNING, FORMER BREYER EMPLOYEE COLLECTION AHEAD.

Throw in a piece in the lot that’s just a little more peculiar than average, and then you’ll know why I think that might be the case here, as well.