The Mysteries of Shermie Love

I’m not really getting the craze over the Fall Dealer Promo Model Autumn. Part of it is undoubtedly my aversion to the season from which he takes his name: for reasons I will not discuss here, it is not my favorite time of the year.

The Sherman Morgan has never been a huge favorite of mine anyway. I have him in his original release of chestnut, the lovely alabaster JAH SR Pride and Vanity, and the original black, but I haven’t been highly motivated to get the rest of them. The Dapple Gray Tobiano test piece in the 2008 BreyerFest Auction was a beautiful thing, I’ll grant you, but well beyond my price range.


But Autumn is a 2000 piece run: that’s significantly more than your average JAH Special (typically 1500) or BreyerFest Special (500-1500). The color is more appealing (it’s a rare mold that’s not improved with a bit of gloss), the SRP is more reasonable, and the distribution model seems a little more fair than last year’s attempt. Even if we factor in his higher popularity rating and the gloss factor, I still don’t think the prices some dealers and collectors are trying to charge will hold up in the long run.

I wouldn’t be surprised, even, if a few batches of them show up in the Tent next year. Not as many as the Medalist Ponies, but a few cases, at least? Yeah. We’re talking 2000 pieces here. That’s a lot of horses, no matter how you divvy them up.

I’m sure most of the current craze for him is just due to him being the newest, shiniest bauble on the table. Happens every year at BreyerFest: a model’s awesomeness is extolled, crazy-mad prices are charged (and sometimes, received), then the inevitable collapse of both praise and price a few months - or even weeks - later.

There have been a few exceptions to the rule, but there's usually been a mitigating factor. And the possible migitating factor for Shermie is his strangely potent popularity.

I’ve always wondered if all the Shermie love was a consequence of his extended absence from the Breyer line: the mold was taken out of production at the end of 1992, and did not return until 2000, slightly remodeled and with a brand new tail, as the #1105 Carpe Diem.

The story was that the mold was damaged beyond repair. The word "destroyed" is casually bandied about when the discussion turns to damaged or altered molds; Breyer was the first to use that term, in reference to the 1984 JAH Saddlebred Weanling’s pending mold change to the Rocking Horse. I don’t know when the word "destroyed" came up in reference to the Sherman Morgan mold, but any time a mold is put on an extended vacation from production, it inevitably enters the discussion.

I hate that word, because it’s pretty clear that the way the company uses the word is quite different from the way hobbyists do. In hobbyist circles, the word destroyed evokes cataclysmic imagery: tossed from a high-rise and shattered into a million pieces, drop-kicked into the Pacific Ocean, or melted down and recycled into parts for your Subaru. Gone forever and ever, amen and goodbye.

Breyer uses the term its more technical or artistic sense, generally, to describe a mold that is no longer in its original state. Kind of like art prints: an earlier state of an artistic etching is considered "destroyed" when changes are made to it. But it is not gone, only changed. Halla was "destroyed," but the "Bolya" mold lives on. The Saddlebred Weanling was "destroyed" but we had the "Rocking Horse" instead. (Until they restored it, more or less.)

Parts may go missing, or be retooled and remodeled, but molds are rarely discarded or destroyed entirely. (Alborozo being a notable exception.) They’re just too darn expensive and time-consuming to build from scratch: it’s better to keep an unusable mold in storage until it’s possible to repair or salvage it somehow.

His color is beautiful: that’s the only thing that’s keeping me from dismissing him entirely from my want list. But until I get some money and space issues resolved here, I’ll have to opt out of the Shermie Love Fest for now.

Christmas Decorators, Part III; or, What’s the Deal with California?

As many of you are aware, Breyers are not uniformly distributed throughout the country, much less the world. Breyers are easier to find in the Upper Midwest than they are in the Deep South, particularly Florida, both first and second hand. Some of it has to do with regional demand, and some with the socio-economic mix. Suburban, semi-rural and rural areas will have a bigger demand than urban areas, as will areas with concentrations of families with young children, or with more disposable income.

But then, there’s California. Sure, California is big, and has lots of the right kind of consumers, so the fact that Breyers are relatively plentiful there is not unusual. What is unusual is that there’s been an awful lot of …odd Breyer stuff coming out of California. Way more than you’d expect for a market so far away from the original factory in Chicago: the Gray Appaloosa Shetland Pony, In-Between Mares, the Palomino Adios, a higher than normal percentage of Decorators.

So it’s no surprise that there have been reports of Christmas Decorators coming out of California.

It may just be coincidental that one of the few pieces of documentation we have about the regular, run-of-the-mill Blue and Gold Decorators was from a long-time Breyer Representative in California: J.C. Unger and Associates. (How long-term? They’re mentioned as a Sales Rep for Breyer in advertisements from 1953!)

But in addition to being product representatives, Unger also worked in product development and marketed their own toys under the Unger Toys line. If the name sounds familiar to any of you, it’s because they were the ones who developed and unleashed the original Brenda Breyer upon the world. And the infamous Puffy Stickers! What total Breyer nerds didn’t go out of their way to get those crazy Puffy Stickers?


(I have no idea where mine are! Actually, I think I do, but I’m not in the mood for digging, so the pic from the 1980 Dealer Catalog will have to do.)

Is it possible that Unger might have collaborated with Breyer before Brenda? That might explain why all those strange Breyer things keep turning up in California. There might have been some collaborative efforts going on, or test marketing, or maybe they were the go-to people for the dumping of less-than-successful items. Could it be that they had a hand in the creation and marketing of the Decorators too - both the Blue and Gold, and the Christmas?

I have no idea, since I haven’t had the time or the moxie to do any further research about their relationship with Breyer. (They’re still around as Henry Unger and Associates, if anyone else wants to do the leg or phone work.) There’s definitely something more to the story there, though.

If we go with the supposition that the Christmas Decorators were a failed regional product launch or dump, limited to California or other parts of Unger’s territory, then that might explain why the documentation is still lacking. If the catalogs exist, then they’d be regional ones with limited range and low distribution: in others words, might be just as rare - or moreso - than the actual models themselves.

So, that’s all there is to know about the Christmas Decorators, including where my current speculation stands.

Christmas Decorators, Part II

Someone on Blab recently referred to Christmas Decorators as Breyer’s version of Bigfoot. The description is apt: just like Bigfoot, all of the evidence we have for the existence of Christmas Decorators is either circumstantial, or secondhand.

As of today, there are still no confirmed vintage Christmas Decorators in anyone’s possession. There are a few Christmas Decorators in Reeves’s sample room, but these are relatively recent test colors, and definitely NOT vintage. If Reeves has any vintage, pre-1985 models in their possession, they were purchased secondhand. As far as I know, any test colors or samples that did exist in the Breyer factory in Chicago prior to Reeves’s purchase were sold off, in bulk, to either Marney or to the Bentley Sales Company, and I can’t recall anyone finding anything particularly Christmassy back then, either.

(I haven’t been in the factory since 1992, so I have no idea what’s actually there right now.)

As of today, there is also no known paper evidence for the existence of Christmas Decorators. Since then, we’ve filled in most - but not all - of the gaps in our knowledge of the early 1960s Holiday catalog releases, and so far no Green or Red Breyers of any kind have revealed themselves.

Yet, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence: all it takes is one photograph, one document, or one model to move something from the realm of the imaginary. Documentary evidence for many early Breyers is exceedingly sparse; we only have one piece of evidence acknowledging the Buckskin Running Mare and Foal as Regular Runs. The only concrete evidence we have of the existence of the Copenhagen Belgian is a single photograph.

Even though there’s no physical evidence, there’s just too much independent, circumstantial evidence floating around. If all we had was a single witness or account, it’d be much easier to dismiss them as the product of wishful thinking. But my account was independent of Gale’s account, and Gale found another collector with a report independent of her own.

But that’s not the sum of all of the circumstantial evidence, either. There’s a lot more evidence that seems to point to a Christmas Decorator-shaped hole in the Breyer Universe.

First, let’s examine the Christmas part of the story.

Contrary to what many collectors believe, Breyer was making and marketing Special Run Christmas items for mail-order catalogs as early as 1954: that’s when the Palomino Western Pony Grooming Kits debuted in the Sear Wishbook. The Musicbox Prancers arrived a year later; a couple of years after that, so did the French Poodle Sewing Kit.

Sometime in late 1960 or early 1961, Breyer added the Modernistic Buck and Doe to their product line. The story behind the Modernistic Buck and Doe and how Breyer came into their possession is a long and complicated one, and not entirely relevant to the discussion at hand; that’s another post, for another time. What’s important here is that the promotional documentation of the Buck and Doe - the ca. 1961 insert sheet, and the 1963 Dealer Catalog - touts their suitability as decorative items for "Christmas and other special occasions." And they can be found in a few Christmas catalogs, the earliest being the 1961 Alden’s.

So it’s clear that Breyer was at least thinking about expanding into Christmas-themed or Christmas-specific items in that time period. (The time period that, coincidentally, we have very little Breyer-issued ephemera from.) Painting some of their regular run items in decorative, non-horse colors would have been the next logical step.

In my next (and I hope, final) post on the subject, we’ll discuss the Decorator part of the equation.

Christmas Decorators: Part I

It’s that time of year, and the topic of Christmas Decorators is making the rounds again. Since I had a small part in contributing to this most famous of all Breyer Legends, it’s probably a good time for me to give you the full story, summarize all that I know, and give all of you my thoughts on the matter.

Several years ago - I cannot remember the exact date, or the name of the person in question - I was having an extended phone conversation with a hobbyist. Since I am telephone-phobic, picking up the phone to call a near-total stranger would cause me all manner of trauma. So all I can say for sure is that she probably called me about something on a sales list that had been published somewhere. (Once I’m on the phone, I’m okay: it’s the picking up and/or dialing that gives me the dry heaves.)

Since this was well before the Internet, we were all a little lonelier and desperate for model horse talk, and the conversation quickly drifted from whatever model or models we were discussing to other topics of a model horse nature. (This wasn’t the first, or last of those kind of calls, either. We’ve all had our share of them, haven’t we?)

I mentioned something about collecting Breyer reference material, and the hobbyist on the other end of the line mentioned how she ran across a stash of old mail-order catalogs at a garage sale. She had spent some time going through them, looking for Breyers. She said that she saw "Red and Green Smoke" Breyers in one, specifically mentioning the Running Mare.

It wasn’t anything I had seen or heard about before, so I pestered her for more details - the date, the store, anything - but she couldn’t remember any of that. I made a mental note about them, and that was that.

Our knowledge of Breyer History back then was very rudimentary, compared to today. You could ask Breyer, but then as now, they didn’t know much at all. Getting an answer from Marney Walerius was not always an easy or simple task, either. While she was certainly privy to information we can only dream of now, she was not the clearest of writers or thinkers. (Sometimes she’d ramble, and casually drop a detail or bit of information on us in passing that’d have us scratching our heads…)

I don’t recall ever mentioning or asking about Christmas Decorators to either Breyer or Marney; it probably never even occurred to me to ask. I don’t recall there being any discussion about Christmas-themed Decorators back then. If there had been any discussion about them in the newsletters of the time, I had completely missed it. That phone conversation was the first I heard of any Green or Red Breyers even existing; we may or may not have even called them "Christmas Decorators," though we probably made the assumption (Holiday mail-order catalogs + Decorators = Christmas Decorators!)

The facts that no one actually had one or knew much about them were not impediments to belief, though. There were a lot of models that only existed in rumor: they only stopped being a rumor once one showed up - and that happened a lot back then. There were models that existed on paper that didn’t seem to exist, and models that existed that we had no documentation for.

The safest bet was to assume that they were possibly, or even probably real, and hope you’d be the lucky one to be there when one finally shows up.

And for several years, that was pretty much the story.

I didn’t think much about those models until several years later, when I found Nancy Young’s account of Gale Good’s story in Breyer Molds & Models. I had not heard of Gale’s story before. All I could think was that, at last, there was more evidence!

Or was there? More on that, next.

Unicorn Obsessive Disorder

I don’t have a lot of Breyer Unicorns in my collection. They’re just not interesting to me, especially since they’ve turned into little more than big hairy gray horses with strapped-on horns.

A creature borne of the imagination shouldn’t be so boring!

I had a Unicorn phase back in High School. I made a nearly life sized one out of papier-mache in art class, doodled unicorns endlessly in my notebooks, and faithfully bought the first Breyer Unicorn - the #210 Running Stallion - when he came out in 1982, right at the height of my Unicorn Obsessive Disorder. I found him a little lacking in the fantasy department, but I was grateful to have one at all.

The Little Bit Unicorn a few years later was better: Hess at least made an attempt to make him more fantastic, and less horselike. He’s the only Breyer mold so far that was intentionally designed to be a Unicorn. Not only is the horn integral to the mold, but so are cloven hooves, a beard, heavy feathering, and an insanely curly mane and tail.


I had done the research (yes, even back then I was a total history nerd,) and knew there was not a lot of consistency from description to description: some were more goatlike, and others were clearly based on deer or antelope. They were usually white in the tapestries, but the books, bestiaries and manuscripts were not quite as settled on the matter.

At least Breyer seemed to be headed in the right direction: imaginary creatures don’t need to be bound by reality. The Little Bit Unicorn was very horselike, but not quite a horse. I would have preferred the tufted tail mentioned in the medieval mythology, and a mane that wasn’t quite that girly-curly, but I could go with it. A good beginning and all that, right?

Ah, foolish mortals!

Let’s see, what kind of colors have we had on the Little Bit Unicorn since then? Alabaster, alabaster, iridescent white with lavender shading, iridescent white with green shading: notice a theme here? Even the Carousel Unicorn - a creature you’d expect to sport a more fantastical color scheme - got saddled with another white paint job. With a light blue mane and tail, and a solid gold painted horn, but still …white.

(There are a few test color Little Bit Unicorns out there: Marney had a small batch of solid black ones for sale at a Model Horse Congress in 1985. I do remember that they were the last ones to go in the test color sale; we were limited to one test color per person, and most hobbyists snapped up the Traditionals first.)

We still haven’t gotten any new "dedicated" Unicorn molds, either: every one of them since then has just been another repurposed Traditional horse with a tacked-on horn and a white or iridescent white paint job. Sometimes we get lucky and they’ll throw us a curveball - ooh, look, some pastel shading! Here, let’s put a Decoratory mostly-white paint job on the Running Stallion Unicorn Stardust!

Snore. I know it’s a cost saving measure to repurpose the horse molds - and most little girls just assume that Unicorns have always been magical horses with horns anyway, much less check out medieval bestiaries from their local university libraries.

I know I’m not alone in my demand for slightly less conventional fantasy animals. You’d think with the enthusiastic response they received to the Raffle Dragon Horse Merlin that Reeves would be a little more open to making the fantastic look a little more, I dunno, fantastic.

Gussy them up with more Decoratory paint jobs: how about one with one of those ornate Oriental paint jobs, like Jade or Cai Lun? A lot of the new molds come with multiple mane and tail options: how about a tufted tail option, or with actual ribbons or flowers molded in? (And for heaven’s sake, at least bring back the whiskers. Is that too much to ask?)

Heck, I’d settle for the Little Bit Unicorn in the four standard Decorator colors. Who wouldn’t love a little Wedgewood Blue or Gold Charm Unicorn?

Tour de Horse

The worst part of the back attack was not being able to go to the flea market. It wasn’t the potential goodies I probably lost, but the window shopping I really missed. Even if I don’t buy something - there’s actually quite a lot I pass up, for a variety of reasons - I still like to see it "in the wild."

It’s also interesting to observe other people in the market respond to them - what’s the market like when I take myself out of the picture? What I like and what other collectors like are two different things: stepping back helps me judge the general market a little bit better.

Yep, even when I’m shopping, I’m doing research.

Since I’ve regained some of my mobility over the past two days, I’ve gone on a window shopping bender, sort of a "Tour de Horse," to make up for that lost opportunity. Yesterday I had a work assignment that was a little bit out of my usual way, and gave me the chance to stop at a number of toy stores, Targets, and other places with Breyers in them.

The only horselike purchase I was going to allow myself was the one Target Pony Gal SM that I’m still missing: I didn’t find him. All I walked away with yesterday was some deeply discounted school supplies (hey, I WAS almost out of graph paper!) but boy, I was tempted.

I wasn’t so lucky today, but we’ll get there in a minute.

One of the stops was a Big Lots: yep, as reported elsewhere they did have some Wal-Mart leftovers: a couple of the Classic Mustang sets, and the SM Flicka set. The discount on them was surprisingly minimal, at least compared to the Breyer merchandise they clearanced out late last year. That’s where and when I finally managed to pick up those oddball, noncatalog Stablemates Accessory Kits that Target briefly carried. They had some of the SR and RR MiniWhinnies Sets last year, too, but I had already picked those up at regular retail.

I wonder if this means that Big Lots will be a regular clearance venue for Reeves in the future, just like T.J. Maxx and Marshall’s? Interesting that most of the merchandise has been Big Box SRs, too. Hmm.

Some of our local Meijer stores have changed their toy departments around slightly, as I suspected: a slightly bigger selection of Breyers, but no store exclusive or store-first stuff (yet.) But they do carry Schleich now! Good to know.

Today I went to the local TSC, nominally to pick up some spray primer and sandpaper, but mostly to look at the toy selection. They finally had the Breyer stuff up: the Banner, the Bonanza Set, the Waiting For Santa Play Set, Nutcracker Prince, and some odd quasi-SR Stablemates Play Sets. (The horses are mostly re-issued RRs; it’s the combination of accessories with horses that make them SRs, sort of. That and their stock numbers. Another one of those documentation thingies.)

The Bonanza Set came home with me, though it’s still hanging out in the car until I can manage to sneak it into the house without anyone noticing. I almost bought the Waiting for Santa set. The price was decent - $29.99, only a couple bucks more than its premiere price on QVC, but I thought I was pushing it with the Bonanza set, so I left it behind for now.

The Duchess is very nice - she’s that beautiful Dark Bay/Mahogany color that I’ve been really loving lately (most recently seen as one of the Color Crazy Huck Bey releases.) It was the Cochise that sold me though. The Cochise in the JAH promo picture was on the Ginger, and she was the one piece in the set I was ambivalent about. I love black pintos, but for some reason I wasn’t loving her.

On the other hand, I came very close yesterday to buying a really sharp, semi-gloss Warmblood Stallion in the RR Bay-going-Gray, so the mold’s surprise appearance in the Bonanza set was a winner for me.

(I wouldn’t read anything into the Ginger mold’s replacement - maybe they just liked the Warmblood Stallion better.)

Finite vs. Open-Ended Specials

I was home and (mostly) conscious for the QVC show on Thursday to see the "exclusive" Wild Blue and Little Prince Gift Sets. Like the Nutcracker Prince on the previous show, they’re "technical" exclusives. The exclusive part is that they came with hardcover versions of the books, rather than the paperbacks that will be included in the sets the rest of the world will be getting shortly.

Another one of those lovely documentation headaches.

I did like the Wild Blue: I love blue roans, and Duchess is probably my favorite mold in the Classic Black Beauty Family. I’ve always thought that she’d be incredibly fetching little thing, with just a touch of remodeling and the right paint job. Here’s my none-too-great photo of the pretty dapple gray Duchess from the 3347 Trakehner Family Set:


She’s coming out in a couple of new sets this fall that I might have to buy - the 1391 Cloud’s Legacy Set, and the 300311 Bonanza Four-Piece Set, which may or may not be a TSC exclusive. It probably is; it’s just that the page in the current issue of JAH that features them doesn’t make it entirely clear, which may be intentional, if it’s an open-ended special run, and not a finite one.

The defining characteristic of a finite special run is its limited quantity: a certain number is made and distributed, and that’s that. More may turn up later, but they’re almost always leftovers from the original run, which means it either didn’t sell out originally, or a batch of models that had been reserved for a specific event or clientele was not distributed.

Banner is a finite run, as is the Mid-States Red Rock. Connoisseurs, most BreyerFest items, and most JAH specials are finite. Finite specials are often numbered or certificated, but not always.

Open-ended special runs are made in quantities enough to fill orders - and can be reordered, within a certain time limit. Most Christmas items, store-specific items, and mail-order catalog items are open-ended, unless they’re specifically labeled otherwise. The initial batch may sell-out, but they can be reordered, for however long the catalog or program is considered current. For a mail-order catalog like J.C. Penney’s, that can be for up to a year. They may come with certificates, but aren’t usually numbered.

(There's definitely some overlap in the definitions; I'm not quite sure where the recent QVC exclusives would fall.)

That doesn’t necessarily mean that all open-ended special runs are more common than all finite special runs: it all depends on the popularity of molds and colors involved. Only 900 Red Bay Kelsos from the 1992 Sears Wish Book "Drawing with Sam Savitt" Gift Set were sold, and only 547 sets of 1997 State Line Tack Pinto Family (featuring the Classic Black Beauty, Ginger, and Arabian Foal) were distributed. Both were open-ended, as far as I know.

Generally open-ended SRs do sell more; the only time we notice this is after the fact, when some of the more entrepreneurial among us try to sell off our extras, and discover that, oops, so is everyone else.

This is what happened with the TSC Duke from a couple years ago: he was open-ended SR. The initial batch sold well, just like most other TSC Specials, so the stores ordered more - and got more. Unfortunately, they overestimated the demand, and once the season was over, they were stuck with a lot of leftovers. He wasn’t less popular than other TSC Specials - it could be argued that he probably more popular, based on the sheer number that were produced - they just miscalculated and made just a little too many just a little too late in the season.

The two different TSCs I’ve visited in the past week haven’t set out their Holiday Gift stock yet, so I haven’t had to the chance to inspect a set personally to see if they are numbered or not. It doesn’t matter to me (except in a documentary sense) because if I do purchase one, it’ll strictly be because it’s a darn attractive set, and I want it!