Vintage Club Mini Misty and Stormy

Here I thought I was being so clever and prepared today, writing up a post late last night; I log on this afternoon to do some edits and assemble my links and images, and the Vintage Club Stablemates Bonus bombshell drops on us:

Well okay, mostly for you guys. It’s more the timing of it that caught me off guard.

Anyway, what I especially like about this set is how it rather slyly references the second Misty release, the Hagen-Renaker Performing Misty. I’d show you mine, but I don’t have one, because… well, you don’t need to know that story.

The Vintage Club Stablemates release also comes with a super-neat tiny shipper box very similar to the original individual G1 Sears Wishbook releases of the mid 1970s – packaging that was tough to come by and ultra-expensive well before the Stablemates market became so crazy. 

Judging from the reaction I’ve skimmed (however briefly) on the Internet, it’s a bit of an understatement to say that the Mini Misty and Stormy set is going over fairly well.

I am pleased.

In other news… I’ll probably be skipping the Collector’s Club Lucien: I took into consideration that there was a good chance he’d drop today – but I bought my Stablemates Club Priscilla yesterday, regardless.

While I certainly could use a few more Valegros in my life, and I find the pinto pattern on him quite appealing, I am a bit tapped out after my recent spending sprees. Heck, there are still horses that have not escaped the back seat of my car yet.

I am not all that into Buckskin Pintos, either. Everyone has their color/pattern preferences and biases, and when it comes to Buckskins, I prefer mine minimally marked.

I may regret it later, but I could say that about almost any release, really.

I will now go back to the rest of my regularly scheduled evening, which involved me trying to solve a particularly vexing quilt design problem. (Almost got it, I think!)

Blue is the New Silver Filigree

It’s a good thing I decided against participating in NaNoWriMo this year: the words just haven’t been coming for me, not this month and especially not today.

I’ll just have to muddle through today the best I can…

Another thing not coming for me: Benasque. That doesn’t come as a surprise: the more popular something becomes, the less likely I’ll be picked for it. Blue has become the new Silver Filigree.

Since the prices have become more incomprehensible on the secondary more quickly than I anticipated, and I consider the Wait List a wholly imaginary construct in my universe, that’s the end of that.

It wouldn’t be so bothersome if the current “gold rush” with the Scottsdale Stampede Special Runs wasn’t also happening. (Just where are all these people getting all that money? Better question: can I have some?)

I just hate to be reminded about how big a factor money has become in the hobby. I am lucky that I have alternate means of getting an affordable fix, but so many of my fellow hobbyists do not.

I have not been in much of a horse-buying mood anyway – a couple of the items in the Collector’s Club Black Friday Preview were moderately tempting (I still don’t have a Triton. Hmm.) and the new Holiday Mare and Foal Set Wish and Wonder is very cute – and Chalky! – but I’m in more of a mood to sell or purge, not buy.

A few obligatory historical notes: Misty has come in Gray before, and the original #20 release does come in an extremely rare and desirable Chalky variation. Outside of Test Colors, little Stormy has almost always been some sort of Pinto; I have not seen or heard of any Chalkies of the original #19 release, but the mold was not released until 1977, a couple years beyond the Chalky Era (ca. 1973-1975).

Outside of some Club stuff, the only horse-related things I’ve bought in the past couple of weeks were a few vintage horse books for my (still-depleted) stash from a Salvation Army store a few days ago.

Oh, I’m still in the habit of window shopping: I had a few half-hearted attempts to suss out some goodies from Walmart (but left empty-handed), the Clydesdale Mare Alba has reappeared on the shelves of the local Tractor Supply Store and continues to tempt me, and I’ve spotted a few intriguing variations on eBay.

(I’m looking at Dogs, again. Just missed a Matte Black Poodle again, grrr!)

On the plus side of all of this, my bank accounts will be well-rested when all the December promotions finally drop.

All I’m really asking for this year is that I’ll actually get to see the Holiday Animal Special Run before it sells out. Not necessarily buy it, but to see it: sometimes having the ability to purchase something is more important than actually purchasing it.

(But if it’s a Dog mold, I’m definitely buying it.)

Bay + Pinto

The latest Vintage Club pictures are out, of the Gloss Bay Pinto Misty and Stormy, Coral and Reef:

Here’s an interesting little fact: prior to the early 1980s, all Breyer pintos were either Black, or some form of Chestnut ("Brown", Sorrel, Red Dun, Palomino, or actual Chestnut).

The company that brought us Decorators, Smoke, Charcoal, freckly Red Roans and multitudes of odd Appaloosas didn’t get around to producing a Bay Pinto production model until 1982, with the introduction of the Regular Run #230 Overo Pinto Stock Horse Mare.

Later in that same year we received a few more in the form of Christmas/Holiday Special Runs - the Thoroughbred Mare and Suckling Foal, and the "True Bay" Clydesdale Family (who were technically cropouts).

An argument could be made that the #88 Overo Pinto release of the Stud Spider mold, in 1979, could be considered earlier; in the 1960s, Breyer used the same "Five-Gaiter Sorrel" color interchangeably on some of its nominally "Bay" releases.

Even if we accept that line of reasoning - which I don’t, on the premise that Breyer seemed to have finally figured out what "Bay" was by then - that still only gets us to 1979. The only Bay Pintos that existed prior were the famous Gloss Bay Pinto Western Prancing Horses, made for a small group of hobbyists in the early 1960s, and some Test Colors.

Strange, isn’t it? Especially since it is not an uncommon color scheme in the real-horse world, unlike some of the more obscure or trendy that we get so worked up about today. It’s Bay plus Pinto: Breyer had the know-how and the technology to pull that off by the late 1950s.

I wonder what the thinking behind it was that led to this absence? Pintos were not all that common back then, since it necessitated creating elaborate, expensive and delicate metal masks specific to the mold. But did it really never occur to them to airbrush points and maybe a little black to the mane and tail?

Did they not think that consumers would be interested? Was it related to the fact that they had had such a hard time distinguishing between Chestnut and Bay, initially? Or was it as simply them being clueless, and not realizing they hadn’t done it before?

I don't know. I tend to fall into the "they were clueless" camp. It’s as good an explanation as any for many of the brand’s "Huh?" moments, then and now. And the correct one, more often than not.

Airbrushed Stormy?

Something short today: I had some scheduling conflicts over the weekend, again.

I see that another airbrushed Misty was confirmed; I spotted it in a group lot on eBay last week and suspected it was so, but the dental issue put a kibosh on me bidding on it. (The final price wasn’t too bad, actually, but still out of my budget range.)

I misspoke slightly when the topic was brought up again on Blab; these airbrushed Mistys (Misties?) could be any one of a number of things. If they’re test colors, then a quantity of 5 to 7 pieces would be a reasonable and logical assumption: that’s what a typical test run of that era ran. They could also be salesman’s samples made prior to production and prior to the creation of the painting mask: unfortunately, I have no idea how many salesman’s samples were made on average back then.

The third possibility is that they were early production pieces made prior to the creation of the painting mask. This is what happened with Jasper, the Market Hog, and the early Diamondot Buccaneers.

The "early production piece" idea seems unlikely, though, when you consider how complex Misty’s pattern is: this isn’t just one big, smooth spot or random dabs of black paint! Hand-airbrushing a pinto pattern of Misty’s complexity seems really, really unlikely in a high production environment. A few dozen pieces, maybe, but a couple hundred - or thousands? I don’t think so!

So whatever her origins might be, she's going to be rare, regardless.

Now, what about Stormy? Did she come in an airbrushed version? She did on her original white box from 1977:


And in the 1977 Dealer’s Catalog, too (obviously the same photo, uncropped):

The Stormy seen in the group shot in the Collector’s Manual appears to be the same piece, but it’s a little too small for me to be 100 percent sure.

That means there has to be at least one hand-airbrushed Stormy out there. I haven’t seen any "in the wild," though. The one I got for Christmas back in 1977 isn’t, and neither is the one that came in the box I scanned, above.

I wouldn’t rule out the possibility of a few being out there; there was a Stormy on eBay a couple of years ago that looked like it might have been, but the bidding got a little too hot and heavy for me to find out first hand. Now that I’m prowling eBay seriously again (just for research purposes, naturally) maybe I’ll spot another.