Glamour Shots

So far I’ve uploaded about 100 pictures, which means that I’ve met the bare minimum of entries that will leave me satisfied; another 50 more and I’ll be happy. That goal is entirely within reach as long as I don’t do too much fooling around over the weekend.

Here’s another rejected entry, a glamour shot of my Showcase Collection Grazing Mare. Apparently I have way more rare packaging than I realized, and condition-wise she doesn’t quite make the cut anyway.

And looking over the entries in that particular class, it’s only confirmed my suspicion that - taken as a group, rather than model by model - they are not as rare as other lesser-known packaging experiments, like the 1984 Olympic USET packaging:

I was super tempted when a sealed Halla from that assortment showed up on eBay a few weeks back, but I managed to maintain my cool - and my PayPal balance! I already had a Morganglanz one anyway - opened, of course - which certainly helped with my fortitude.

(Also not one of the ones I entered in that class, by the way, because seriously, it’s a Morganglanz. I love the homely guy, but even I know his limitations. )

Working on my entries for this show has been… and interesting experience, but I’ll be glad when it’s all over. As I said before, I’m shooting for ten placings: anything more than that is gravy.

I don’t know if this will quite count as my “official” attempt at showing at BreyerFest, or another thing entirely, especially since any wins in this show won’t necessarily count against you for the next. (Not counting on that being a concern, though.)

I can also say that I can now see why some people complain about money being a factor. As someone who thought she could compete in some of those classes, I’m just taking a deep breath, taking the best pictures I can, documenting the heck out of things (my thing!), and hoping for the best.

I mean, what else can I do? I don’t have the resources to do otherwise. Part of the reason this blog exists is help and inspire those of you in the same boat.

Besides, I think I’ve set myself for very modest expectations: even ten tenth place finishes would be fine. Weirdly coincidental if that happened to be the case, but fine.

Reinterpretations

A little over a month to BreyerFest, and I don’t even have my sales list done yet. (About the only thing going remotely well is my diorama entry, for some strange reason.)

Sigh.

I am guessing that there is not going to be much sleep for me between now and then?

One of the pieces I have managed to pull is my 1995 QVC Gem Twist. I have a lot of Jumping Horses as it is – including one Test and a Sample Kiowa – and I’d like to make room for a State Line Tack Jumpin’ Jupiter, because I think it’s just flat out the prettiest Jumping Horse release ever.

The QVC Gem Twist wasn’t technically a rerelease or reissue of the original Gem Twist – the former USET team member and Olympic medalist was still available in his original color and mold #495 – but a reinterpretation, I guess?

I found it very strange.

In 2002, they did another QVC “reinterpretation” – this time of the #718 General Lee’s Traveller. Instead of using the original Traditional Man o’ War mold, they used the San Domingo:

In this case, it made some sense to use a different mold, since he had been discontinued for a while (since 1999) and they also reissued the Traditional Man o’ War for QVC that year, too – as Man o’ War. Two releases on the same mold in the same year probably wouldn’t have flown with QVC.

Normally I’m not a fan of San Domingo in solid colors, and I had been having a hard time finding an acceptable Man o’ War Traveler to add to the herd – most of them either had weird trimming flaws or paint goobers – but I went ahead and bought this Traveler anyway.

And it turns out, I not only really liked him, he’s probably one of my favorite San Domingo releases ever, of the ones I can afford.

(The ones I love that I can’t afford? The 1997 Volunteer Model Moccasin, the BreyerFest 1999 Raffle Ransom. Or those Dealer Catalog Tests for the Stock Horse Stallion that EVERYBODY wants….)

Desi, The Rare Gem Twist

I really like the Open Show Reserve Prize this year, the Gem Twist Desi in Dark Bay Appaloosa:

While there are some scarcer-than-average Gem Twist releases – the Dark Dapple Gray 2002 QVC release, and the 2006 USET Special Run Exclusive Authentic come to mind – there aren’t a lot of rarities. Until the addition of Desi, the mold was a relatively easy one to collect.

It’s a moderately popular mold that I thought might have been a good candidate for the BreyerFest Surprise model this year, since there is hardly anything “colorful” in this model’s production past. Lots of room to experiment!

There has been only one other production run in Appaloosa (the #726 Gray Appaloosa Sport Horse in 1998-1999), and one in Pinto (the flashy #1705 Pinto Sport Horse 2013 Mid-Year release). The closest thing we’ve gotten to a Decorator was the very pearly Petsmart Special Run of Snowman, from 2005.

(My personal favorite!)

There has been a fair smattering of Test Colors, though.

The only other thing worth noting today – aside from the mold’s obvious USET connections, as a portrait of the legendary show jumper Gem Twist – is that when it debuted in 1993 it was the first Kathleen Moody mold designed for injection molded plastic. Kathleen’s earlier molds for Breyer included pieces in the Porcelain Evolution of the Horse Series, starting with the Icelandic Pony in 1992.

It’s hard to believe that Kathleen’s been doing molds for Breyer for 25 years now! And me so old I can remember when she was a mere mortal, like the rest of us.

USET Contest

Back in 1980, Breyer ran a subscription contest for Just About Horses, with different prize levels resulting in different awards. For fifty subscriptions, you got a Test Color!

In retrospect, it seems like a pretty fabulous deal: subscriptions to JAH at the time were a mere dollar. So you could have gotten your own personally designed Test Color for a mere fifty bucks! And at least one person did:

But of course, this was 1980: the average retail price of a Traditional Breyer Horse, according to a Bentley Sales Company flier dated May 1980, was $6.99. (FYI: for Classics, it was $4.99, and Stablemates it was $1.79. I know, I know…)

I didn’t enter this contest since most of my friends who were into live horses or Breyers at the time already had subscriptions, and my friends or relatives who weren’t wouldn’t have appreciated me asking.

Five years later, I managed to make it to Model Horse Congress for the first time, and acquired my first Test Colors. While I didn’t get to design them, they did cost me considerably less than fifty dollars. (Several of them combined, even. Again, I know…)

I have acquired many more Test Colors since then – so many that I’ve even had the luxury to sell a few – so the appeal of this kind of prize is no longer as strong as it used to be.

While I have had some ideas translated or incorporated into Breyer releases over the years, I’ve never had a Test Color designed by me for me. I simply can’t afford the “Design a Test” auction at BreyerFest, and the other opportunities have never really panned out.

But yesterday I got that e-mail from Breyer about the fundraising contest for the United States Equestrian Team Foundation - “to increase awareness of equestrian sports” – with the top fundraiser getting a “a custom Breyer® model” and “a framed Rio Olympic poster signed by the entire 2016 U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Equestrian Team.”

(That “custom Breyer model” being, of course, a self-designed Test Color under another name.)

This time around, I’ll go for it. The cause itself is a worthy one, and it doesn’t involve me annoying my family or coworkers into getting a subscription for a magazine they wouldn’t ready anyway. Even if I don’t “win” this contest (unlikely anyway), it’s still a win for USET.

All this means in the short-term (until the end of the contest in early June) is that I’ll have a link off to the side, and have a few more posts focusing on past and present Breyer USET releases in the interim. I’ve written about Breyer USET models a lot in the past – most recently during my trip to attend the Chasing the Chesapeake event back in October – and it shouldn’t surprise anyone that I have even more to say about the subject.

What was funny was that while I was reading through that e-mail I was fixated on the illustration of the prizes:

The picture that they so helpfully labeled “sample model” is actually one of those Sample Valegros that I am slightly obsessed about! I’d be just as happy with one of those as with any Test Color I could design, though I wouldn’t turn down a Test Color, if the opportunity arose.

It’s also worth noting – and most likely, a coincidence – that that first Breyer contest with a Test Color prize took place the same year that Breyer’s USET Gift Set debuted.

My Jet Run

With the Event now just a week away, it seemed like a good time to dig out my original Jet Run, so I did:

He was in storage for a while, so I had forgotten just how nice mine was – dark, pretty, with no significant flaws! Almost live show quality, if I were considering it (maybe next year).

Jet Runs tend to be a little bit lighter than mine, sometimes drifting into Olive Bay or even Buckskin territory, though I wouldn’t necessarily call the darker ones rarer or more desirable than any other variation. Jet Run – and his cohorts Might Tango and Keen – are rather lightly collected molds, even for Classics.

They don’t command much attention or money, unless they are exceptional or special in some way. I happen to think mine is, but he’s not going anywhere, so the point is moot.

Mine has a B mold mark, which I had also forgotten about. It makes sense that he has one: I did get the set for Christmas in 1981, during the “Propionate” era ca. 1979-1983. (When Breyer briefly switched from Cellulose Acetate to the Cellulose Acetate Propionate, with mixed results.)

The USET Set came out in late 1980, so examples with the mark are easily identifiable as earlier pieces.

If I recall correctly the other two members of my set are also pretty good, especially the Keen; manufacturing quality in the early 1980s could be a bit iffy – the contents of every box truly were a “surprise” – so I lucked out with my set.

On His Way

How is it Thursday already? Stupid cold is just messing with me now. It’s not super-serious - just enough of a bug to make me tired, cranky and a little hoarse. It's nothing a little soup and sleep can’t fix. On the plus side, everyone at work has been giving me tons of personal space, except for a new person who may not understand the concept. (But will, soon enough!)

It appears that the Traditional Totilases will be stateside soon - here’s a video of Stephanie Macejko at a British trade fair earlier this week with a sample in hand:

http://www.horsejunkiesunited.com/?p=52309

I don’t know what the holdup was; I get the impression there might have been some sort of legal hangup somewhere, but since I have been feeling a bit addle-pated this week, it might just be the soup talking. (Campbell’s Chicken Won Ton today. Hey now, don’t judge: I needed comfort food.)

This is not the first time this sort of thing has happened. It was, in fact, a fairly common occurrence in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Take this example from the 1980 Dealer Catalog:

We didn’t actually start seeing the Classics USET Gift Set until the Fall of that year. The molds were so not ready that Spring that they had to use stand-ins for them for the 1980 Christmas/Holiday Catalog photo shoot: a Chestnut Kelso for Keen, a Bay Swaps for Jet Run, and a Dapple Gray Ruffian for Might Tango. This is what gave rise to the "Dapple Gray Classics Ruffian Special Run" rumors that ran rampant through the 1980s.

(From the 1980 Sears Wishbook. Montgomery Wards had the complete set with the Ruffian, but my copy of that is even worse than this one.)

I don’t know what the problem was with the USET Gift Set, either - whether it was legal, technical, or chronological. I think it was (mostly) chronological: Chris Hess was really cranking out the molds back then. In addition to Jet Run, Might Tango and Keen, other new molds that premiered in 1980 included the Hanoverian, Morganglanz, the 4-piece Classic Black Beauty Family, and (possibly) the Sea Star.

(I’ve speculated before - based on the dating on the original box, and some odd mold marks - that the release Sea Star might have been delayed for up to a year.)

Here’s the little seen clip art of the USET Set, probably drawn up when the catalogs and other ephemera were being assembled in late 1979. Little seen because, well, obviously: