Cheap Horses

Crankiness warning activated: this week has been messy, complicated and exhausting. I no longer have the patience or energy to engage with people who have the luxury of being angry all the time about everything – whether it’s about work, life or horses. 

I finally made it to a Tractor Supply this week and saw the Indian Pony Sayan. She is very pretty, but I am still not motivated to get her. I wouldn’t mind getting the Stablemates, but the store I visited didn’t have them, and I have a suspicion that I’m not going to see any of them any time soon.

My work schedule might be changing, again, so I literally have no idea when I’ll get back.

I did make it to a few Five Below stores this week to investigate the latest Breyer Mystery: these new Classics-scale “Paddock Pal” Horses and Unicorns. I haven’t found the horses yet, but I did buy the four Unicorns. My favorite is “Cherry”:

When I first saw them on eBay earlier in the week, I made the erroneous assumption that they were possibly Reeves’s entrée into the 1:6 Scale market: they looked a lot like the vintage Marx Horses preferred by military miniaturists, both in terms of style and materials. The box was also very similar to the “Touchability”boxes used on the Breyer-branded Plush Aurora releases, some of which can now be found in the toy departments of some Meijer superstores. 

(Meijer is a slightly more upscale, Midwestern equivalent to Walmart that very occasionally carries Breyers. But none currently: the plushes are distributed by Aurora.)

Some of the initial speculation about the origins of these models was… interesting, to put it politely. When it was discovered that they appeared to be a Five Below exclusive, my first thought was: Oh, so this is how Reeves is trying to break into the “Discount Store” market.

One of the few bright spots in the retail market has been the rise of Discount Stores like Dollar Tree, Dollar General, and my personal local favorite, Debby’s Dollar. 

A lot of name brands have been tailoring products for the Discount Store market, and I was just wondering when – or if! – Reeves was going to tap into that market. Reeves had dumped some of the Walmart Stablemates at Five Below before – and some of the more recent Blind Bags are also showing up there again. 

As for the criticisms about the materials, the quality, or the fact that they’re even in discount stores at all, I find most of them moot. These are intended as an inexpensive, entry-level product. For most non-hobbyist consumers – we’re talking parents, grandparents and younger children – a plastic horse is a plastic horse. 

They’re a significant step up from the usual equines available at this price point, and are therefore more attractive product for a child who may potentially outgrow their horse phase. And for those that do not, the brand recognition is built-in. 

I find them interesting. There are several Five Belows in my area, but I do not know if I will go out of my way to find the horses: as I mentioned before, my time is currently at a premium. 

(FYI: I still think they need to do 1:6 Scale horses.)

Bernadette’s Box

Bernadette arrived – in pretty Wedgewood Blue!

The graphically, her Touchability Box is pretty close to the original, but made of far better materials, which was basically the same corrugated cardboard the original shippers were made of – just reconfigured and with fancier (two-color!) printing!

The original Touchability Boxes only came with the Family Arabians, for a very brief period of time in the late 1960s. They were an experiment in more retail-friendly packaging that went… poorly.

Horses got scuffed, horses got stolen, and they were hard to stack and store on the shelf. It’d be another five years before they’d finally just go with the closed “white boxes” all of us who bought horses in the 1970s knew and loved.

They did an updated version of the Touchability Box in 2009/2010 for the My Favorite Horse Series, a line of older molds – like Buckshot, Sherman Morgan, Quarter Horse Yearling – designed with younger kids in mind.

They experimented with it again on the presumption that touching a Breyer horse will make a kid more likely to want it.

(Well, it certainly does in my case!)

That experiment didn’t last long either – same problems as before, duh – and they went right back to the standard clear plastic boxes shortly thereafter.

The original Touchability Boxes are extremely scarce, and I’m lucky to have the one that I have, that I purchased back in 1998 for the then kinda-scary price of $50.00 – and sight unseen, too!

Technically, Breyer originally referred to this type of packaging as a “Display Carton”; the word “touchability” only appears in the text of the original announcement flier, and in the intervening years that name has stuck.

I would say that in spite of the steep price tag I paid for my Gray Appaloosa FAS over twenty years ago, it was a good investment. I could probably sell it for at least ten times that in less time than it would take me to go to the fridge and grab a drink.

In case your rare packaging radar went off, this is not going to happen. Though when things like this happen, it makes me think twice:

Oh no, not again!

In spite of my shortage of fun money so close to BreyerFest, one does not let a scarce and pretty Old Timer slip by. I’ll just have to extra careful with my trip money this this year, I guess.

(Which I should be doing anyway, but we all know how that goes!)