Conquering Kaiju

Well, that was an interesting experience! More on the live show I attended Saturday when I’ve had time to both mentally and physically unpack; I’ve spent most of the rest of my weekend recovering by eating stinky cheeses and catching up on my TV and YouTube videos.

(If you haven’t been watching the Curiosity, Inc. series on The Potter’s House… well, you should!)

The briefest rundown: I only missed one class, I picked up a few NAN cards, didn’t win the Weston, but did win a Reserve Division Champ, Division Champ, and this guy won the biggest rosette:

In celebration, let us all sing along to is his namesake’s theme song, with the correct pronunciation of his name! (Yes, I am ridiculously pumped about Godzilla: King of Monsters!)

I also stopped by a Tuesday Morning on my way home from the show and bought a couple of things. Alas, the only example they had of the Pinto Roemer set I was hoping for had more smudges and overspray than I was comfortable with.

I did pick up a cheap Zena – seriously, she was only 19.99! – and a very matte and well-shaded Traditional American Pharoah who happened to be on clearance. Whether or not I keep either will depend on a bunch of things, like the quality of my flea market season, how much time I can devote to selling between now and BreyerFest, and whether or not I can find shelf space for either one of them.

I really want to keep the Zena, since I am very fond of the Shagya-Arabian mold in general, but even without her horn that girl is longer than a vintage land yacht!

And also, I have a considerable amount of model horse-related business to conduct over the next couple of months that may put a crimp on my free time, too. Some of which (cues the boilerplate) I am not at liberty to discuss.

Last week’s events aside, I am already finding myself making some difficult decisions about my free time. (The last Mares in Black podcast is apparently three hours long? I love you guys, but seriously: I ain’t got time for that!)

As far as other live shows and get togethers, that is something that I will have to give some serious consideration. Just not for the next few weeks, though, everybody.

Sentimental Favorites

You guys are making me so jealous of all your crazy awesome finds lately. Poor little me couldn’t even find the time to make it to my local town-wide garage sale today.

Though I did recently go on a road trip for work with a coworker and discovered that he also enjoys horse racing and going to estate sales. He’s somewhat familiar with Breyers and Hartlands, and asked for some reference materials on Hagen-Renakers. So perhaps some nice finds will be winding their way to my house soon.

Let’s get back to the Classics Racehorse discussion.

Since I tend to think that most modern collectibles are a dicey proposition for investing in the first place - with some rare exceptions - I try to avoid telling people to buy certain items for investment purposes. Hobbyists and collectors are exceedingly fickle, and what’s hot and pricey today could literally be almost worthless tomorrow.

Most Classics are not that valuable. There’s some residual value in most of the Hagen-Renaker Classics - like the Arabian and Quarter Horse Families - as customizing fodder, but outside of Test Colors and Chalkies, most of the value is sentimental.

Even when the piece runs are rather limited and/or hard to come by - like the Bay Andalusian Mare, the German Special Runs, or some of the BreyerFest SRs - the prices remain rather modest. Of the more modern pieces, the only exception here is probably the Classics Shire, particularly the head-down "B" version: there have been only a limited number of releases, none of them easy to acquire even when new.

But when it comes to the Classics Racehorses - the original releases on the original 5 (then 6, with Ruffian) molds - I think there is some genuine potential there. Especially pieces like this - a Silky Sullivan with a Dumbbell sticker.

(Though to be completely honest, anything with a dumbbell is a sound investment. Mine certainly would be, if I harbored any thoughts of selling him. And no, I don’t.)

In the case of the Classics Racehorses, it’s not just a Breyer: it’s also a portrait of a famous racehorse on a mold that has not been and probably won’t be in production again for some time. Throw in additional goodies like boxes and tags, and voila - the closest thing you’ll have to a sure bet, monetarily.

Not Decorator or Rare Woodgrain money, but not everything can be.

What’s nice about some of the earlier Classics Racehorses, too, is that can be identified by their lack of mold marks. I don’t know why that was; perhaps there some legal quibbling over the terms of the lease with Hagen-Renaker, or a technical difficulty, or they were in such a hurry to get them to market that they simply forgot. The Proud Arabian Foal, various members of the Classics Family sets, and some of the Stablemates were also mold-mark-free.

Regardless, the absence of the mold marks can be a boon to us at the flea market and garage sale level. No mold marks = can’t be identified as a Breyer = cheaper prices (usually, and only if box-free, naturally).

I know Reeves has been putting some thought into trying to make the Classics more collectible again; my only thoughts in this regard is that if they want to go the celebrity race-and-sport-horse route, Classics may be the place to go back to.  

The Leavings

That’s very nice of Reeves to offer leftover Connoisseurs to Premier Club members; I would have loved a Pandora or a Swirling Sky, but with BreyerFest right around the corner, I wouldn’t have been able to even if I was a member of that club.

A few less things for the Ninja Pit, I guess. As for what I actually think is going to be in there this year, I am not even going to speculate. Not that I don’t have some interesting ideas on the subject, but I don’t want to stir the pot anymore than that silly "When are you getting in line for the NPOD?" thread on Blab already has.

I know, it’s mostly talk, but still. Nothing against amateurs or noobs - we all were, once - but if you don’t know what you’re doing, or what to look for, your odds of finding something "good" are utterly random, regardless of your position in line.

Naturally, right after I posted how everything was going so swimmingly, everything came crashing down. The computer lost its mind, the printer jammed up so badly that I had to disassemble it, I discovered that a component of one of the costumes I was thinking about doesn’t fit, and the power went out for most of a day. Oh, and a groundhog ate all of our tomato plants (which is somehow my fault, because everything is my fault.)

I’ve managed to recover from the bulk of the catastrophes; on the costume front I will probably go with one of the other ideas I have if I can’t take the weight off in time. And the universe gave me a small token for my trouble: a Beswick Beatrix Potter "Cousin Ribby"!

At a Salvation Army - in a less ritzy neighborhood than I usually frequent, no less. Not sure if I’m keeping her or not; it’s been a while since I picked up a Beswick of any kind, but it’s not a horse, and I will be needing some serious cash after BreyerFest to pay for all the things I need to pay for.

Other than the SRs, and the NPOD, I’m hoping to hold on to most of the money I manage to make this year. There are a few things I’m still eyeing (like a really nice Yellow Mount!) but if I buy anything, it’ll be the usual reference materials and stray oddities.

Among the things I’ll be selling this year - besides the usual assortment of flea market finds and book sale leavings - will be these Allen F. Brewer Jr. prints I picked up a few weeks ago at my local flea market. If you haven’t already seen them, here they are:

(In order; Kauai King, Man o' War, Round Table, Your Host, Swaps, Silky Sullivan. Your Host was Kelso's sire, sort of the Barbaro of the 1950s.)

They’re not all in the bestest shape, but they’re (mostly) signed, and (to put it bluntly) they had to be rescued. I wanted to keep a couple of them - like the Man o’ War and the Silky Sullivan (for research purposes, right?) but I’ll probably have to let them all go, because of the money. I don’t have a lot of wall space to spare, either.

Cutting it short today; lots of odds and ends to deal with.

Terrang

Alas, this weekend’s trip to the flea market did not improve my mood. In spite of the nice weather and lack of competing local events, most of the regulars didn’t show up. And those that did were the crazy ones - not "will show up in a snowstorm" crazy, but "I bury my money in a coffee can in the backyard" crazy. Not a single Breyer, Hartland or H-R in sight, either. Bah!

On the positive side, I did manage to score some interesting new research materials, and track down a couple of new leads. I hope to have a little spare time next week to work on them; the rest of the family wants to take a field trip down to the library where some of material is located, coincidentally. (Not so odd: the main branch of the Detroit Public Library is pretty awesome, actually, and right across the street from the Detroit Institute of Arts. Which is one of the greatest public art museums in the world, people. Totally worth the trip, even if you’re not interested in model horses.)

In the meantime, here’s another little dip into the deeper end of my archives. It’s a real-life photo of the racehorse Terrang. I’ve published it before in my Sampler a couple years back, but it’s worth reprinting here. You don’t see photos of the actual horse very often - I haven’t found any other, but it’s been a while since I went looking.


This photo (credited to Allen F. Brewer, Jr.) is from the book American Race Horses 1957, published by the American Thoroughbred Breeders Association. This book is chock full of all sorts of Thoroughbredy goodness: you’ve got Gallant Man, Round Table, Bold Ruler - and look, Silky Sullivan as a two year old!


(Photo credit also to Allen F. Brewer, Jr. The caption reads "Already his was a come-from-behind style.")

Terrang’s half-brother Swaps makes an appearance, too, in the lengthy entry on Iron Liege, whose famous Sports Illustrated birth photo is the frontispiece. When Sports Illustrated was launched, one of their publicity stunts was to follow the career of a foal for three years, up to the Kentucky Derby. (Boy, did they get lucky!)

Three of the five Love Thoroughbreds in one book - it’s no surprise that this book has become a treasured part of my archives. (It’s also special because it was Dad who happened to spot it in a pile of books at the flea market. He was a big horseracing fan back in the 1950s, when he was a kid.)

Terrang’s not so well known today, at least on the level of a Man o’ War, Swaps or even Kelso. That’s too bad, because Terrang had a very respectable career as a handicapper and stud. I won’t go into the finer details of all that; his Wikipedia page is a decent place to start:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrang

The 1950s were truly one of the great golden ages of the sport, and over time many very good horses have lost some of space in the spotlight to the great ones. Thank goodness Hagen-Renaker - and later, Breyer - saw fit to bring him back a little of his lost glory.

The Sticker You Don't Know

Any Breyer collector worth their salt should know about the Breyer stickers: the gold foil "Tenite" sticker seen most often on early Woodgrains, and the blue ribbon sticker (both large and small) that appeared on most Breyer models from ca. 1966 through 1970. But there’s a third vintage sticker that most of you wouldn’t know about, because there’s only two pieces of evidence for it: a sheet of stickers in the Breyer archives, and this handsome boy:


The fonts, motifs and color choices of this dumbbell-style sticker indicates that it’s from the "brown box" era of Breyer packaging, dating from ca. 1979 to ca. 1982, and which replaced the white picture box that ruled the roost from ca. 1973 through 1978. (It is, in fact, dated 1980 on one side.)


I had no idea these sticker existed either, prior to my visit to the Breyer factory many moons ago. As I’ve said before, what reference materials they do have prior to 1985 are minimal. Most of it I had already seen, or had copies of via various hobby sources (most of them tracing back to Marney’s original copies!) Some of the newer stuff was interesting, but nothing was overly impressive - I had heard Marney describe the sorry state of Breyer’s recordkeeping before, so while it was a little sad to see firsthand, it was not unexpected.

There were still a few interesting things in the binders, though. A sheet of dumbbell stickers stood out: now THAT was something I hadn’t seen before! As an aficionado of stickered models, I was intrigued; since I had not seen - or even heard - of a Breyer model sporting this type of sticker. I just assumed it was either an experiment or aborted marketing attempt, but made a mental note nonetheless.

A couple of years later, I found the Silky Sullivan on a well-known hobbyist’s saleslist, and I just couldn’t pass him up. I mean, really - how could I not buy him?

I have no idea what the extent of this particular marketing program was. It may have truly been an experiment that was just tested in a few markets, or a few stores - in this case, the price tag on the sticker indicates he was sold at Woolworth’s. (His price? $4.97)

From the amount of information about the model on the sticker - name, number, brief biography - I am assuming that this was an test to sell Breyer models without boxes. Was this another try at "touchability?" Or just a way of eliminating the cost of packaging altogether? This cost-saving attempt was probably thwarted by the rough and tumble world of retail: a couple weeks of less-than-gentle handling by customers and employees probably rendered most of these sticker recipients into body box fodder quickly.

I haven’t seen or heard of another example crop up anywhere, though it probably shouldn’t be surprising since this isn’t the kind of sticker that (please forgive the inevitable pun) sticks around. Dumbbell stickers are designed to be torn off quickly and easily, and any models that wore these stickers probably didn’t wear them long once they left the store. Except for the collector or hobbyist who had the foresight to save this fellow.