Bandit and Kohana

Funny how the flea market season ends, and things only seem to get busier around here!

I found two more of the lightly dappled Hwins at another store in the same chain I bought my original Hwin in; I left them there because, alas, I’ve been cruising eBay quite a bit over the past couple of weeks to do “research”, and the fun money fund is a little depleted.

I might take a trip to the third easily accessible one tomorrow to confirm my hunch that this chain struck gold again, getting a higher-than-normal average of the lightly dappled variations in their shipments.

On Thursday I’ll swing by another store I know has some leftover Markuses, just because I’ll be in the neighborhood and I want to look.

And sometime this week I might be picking up a few pieces off Craigslist.

Since I’m feeling a bit under the weather today, here’s another picture of another BreyerFest find this year – the Bandit and Kohana set from 2002:

They were in a box that was literally dumped in front of me in the Ninja Pit Saturday afternoon – though not intentionally or for me specifically. I think.

(Reeves has more recent pictures of me than my friends or family do, so I have a not-completely-paranoid suspicion that everyone there already knows who I am and what I look like.)

It may come as a bit of a surprise, considering how popular those two molds are today (especially the Wolf!) but the Bandit and Kohana set didn’t sell all that well when it was released as a BreyerFest Special Run back in 2002.

The Special Run lineup was pretty star-studded that year – including two Porcelain Stablemates, a Glossy Buffalo, and a Silver – so they sort of got lost in the shuffle.

It did not help that the Companion Animal line had only been introduced in 1999. While we were certainly thrilled to have a line of true Traditional-scaled animals back then, it was probably a bit too soon to throw a BreyerFest Special Run set at us in 2002.

This year, one of the briskest selling items at BreyerFest was the Store Special Dally and Spanky Set, featuring a Companion Animal Jack Russell Terrier. It had the same number of pieces (750) but sold out by shortly before they tossed the long leftover Bandit and Kohanas on the table – in the empty spot where the Dally and Spanky Sets used to be, in fact!

I thought that was pretty funny. How the times change...

The Libra Duchess

One of the pieces from the Grab Bag that I am definitely keeping is the Zodiac Series Libra, on the Duchess mold:

I think I received an especially well shaded one, and the pink undertones (not visible in any of the promotional pictures that I can recall) are both a nice aesthetic touch and a subtle nod to the nature of the sign itself – balancing out a cool color with a warm one, and a “masculine” color with a “feminine” one.

I’m also keeping her because I was reviewing my collecting goals for the coming year, and I had just about settled on it being the Duchess mold.

I loved her pinto release in the Gato y Mancha set at BreyerFest this year, which in turn spurred my unsuccessful (so far) attempt to acquire the infamous Wildlife Adventure set with the Pink Camo blanket and Baby Gorilla.

http://www.identifyyourbreyer.com/images/720601set.jpg

The Duchess mold should be just challenging enough to keep me interested and motivated, without taking up too much of either my shelf space or money.  

The only possible frustration I’m seeing is that outside of one release (the #663 Buckskin “Thoroughbred Cross”, ca. 2006-2008) the Duchess mold has almost always been packaged as a part of a set. With the exception of things like the Zodiac Series pieces (that I will probably end up with a complete set of anyway, over time) I’m the kind of person who prefers to keep sets as sets.

Generally that wouldn’t be too much of a problem, except that some of the sets Duchess came in (especially those from the Walmart Mustangs Series) also came with popular and very desirable bits like the Wolf or some of the more modern Classics Foal molds.

My initial searches turned up a lot of sad, stray and stranded Duchesses, and that makes me only want her more.