New Addition to the Adios Conga

  I have two major focuses in my collection - circus horses and vintage Breyers. My favorite molds (Semi-Rearing Mustang, 5 Gaiter, Indian Pony) are significant congas while others are more modest.

My Adios conga is one of the most modest of them all with just eleven pieces.

But now we are twelve. 

Brandywine, 9/2020,  #702002, Aug/Dec 2002 Fall Show Special, $15, Julia Platt, MS.

Brandywine was a 2002 Fall Show Special (in fact, he was the last Show Special that Breyer made) and only produced for six months. I saw him listed on an auction site for just $15, bid, and won him.

He is much nicer in hand than I thought he would be, especially considering the amount of time that has passed since he was made as well as the types of paint jobs Breyer was doing in the early 2000s. This guy has nice detail work and no rubs that I can find.

I think I will name him Even Dozen to reflect that he's my twelfth Adios.

Cherry Creek Fonzie Merit

I have had this boy on my Amazon wish list for a year but none of my kids have bought him for me. So, when I saw him today at the Muncie Swap Meet for only $20 (Amazon has him for $40), I jumped!

(Photo from Identify Your Breyer)

Cherry Creek Fonzie Merit, #1758, 2016 - current, $20, Pat Reed.

Amigo - Vintage Collectors Club

Amigo arrived yesterday! He is #3 in the 2014 Vintage Collectors Club. (I have not regretted joining this club! Such gorgeous vintage pieces!)

 Amigo, #712104, Vintage Collector Club #3 for 2014, $135, 6/2014.

 There is a lot of depth and undertones to his coat - he a glossy charcoal with eyewhites.

And he came in a vintage box with some literature about the history of the mold and the real horse, Adios, who was born in Carmel, indiana in 1940.

Adios

(from Breyer History Diva, 2009)

I like Adios; I can’t recall how many I have, but it’s definitely more than a couple. Let’s see, I have an original bay Adios with a Blue Ribbon Sticker, a beautiful Mesa, Hollywood Gold, that strangely appealing 1990 Black Roan, the highly underrated Like A Diamond … no Yellow Mount, yet, but that’s because I’m being inexplicably picky. I’ve had a lot of Yellow Mounts, but none of them have been the right Yellow Mount, y’know? I have the same problem with the Palomino Western Prancing Horse.

I will never own the original Palomino, and the Buckskin? You don’t want to know my history with the Buckskin Adios. It will lead to crankiness. And the possible throwing of sharp, pointy things.

Outside of his original release, most of his releases have been of the stock horse variety, in spite of the fact that he doesn’t look too particularly "stock horsy." He looks like what he was originally meant to be: a mature Standardbred stud. (As for who came first - the Breyer, or the Boehm - I’ll be deferring that topic, yet again, for another time.)

The mold manages to carry off just about any color really well, though, so I don’t have a problem with any of the more exotic colors they put on him. (Who doesn’t love that gorgeous Brandywine?) And that dappled dilute dun? Holy milkshakes, Batman! I think I have a new favorite color for my Collector’s Choice submissions.

In case you were wondering: why yes, I do have a picture of the real Adios in his salad (or would that be alfalfa?) days: here he is as a 2 year old, in an uncredited photo from the cover of the June 16, 1943 issue ofThe Harness Horse:


Yet another gift to my archive from the local flea market.

Boehm Adios

(from Breyer History Diva, 2009)

 do want to discuss something I did find at the flea market this past Sunday, that I briefly mentioned in the comments of the last post: a biography of Edward Marshall Boehm.

No joke. I seriously thought I was being punked at first. (The book in question is Edward Marshall Boehm: 1913 - 1969, by Frank J. Cosentino, published in 1970 by The Lakeside Press.) I picked it up, flipped through it, found the pics of Adios, and then started looking for cameras or familiar faces in the crowd to jump out at me and yell "Psych!" Nope, just my crazy flea market mojo at work again.

Here’s one of those pictures: the Boehms presenting the first Adios to the Millers on October 14, 1968 (sorry about the moire pattern - the scanner is being temperamental):


I will take the hint that the universe is giving me and finally cover the Boehm Adios issue.

Simply stated: there really isn’t one. I think Nancy Young rather conclusively proved that the Breyer Adios and the Boehm Adios were sculpted concurrently; and their similarities are mostly a result of the source materials both Boehm and Hess relied on. (Hess adapted the small bronze trophy Adios based on the original, life-sized sculpture by James Slick; Boehm probably used the same photographic references Slick used to create the original bronze.)

But here we go with the perception thing again: until Nancy did her research, the belief was that Breyer copied the Boehm. The fact that a large number of early releases were copies from other manufacturers - most notably Boehm - reinforced the notion. The notion has been dispelled largely through Nancy’s thorough research, but it still crops up from time to time (whenever someone runs across a Boehm Adios, basically.)

But the idea also tends to get a boost from the "Breyer can do nothing right" crowd. You know these folks - they’re usually the first folks to post their opinion of anything Breyer, and it’s always negative. There’s not actually a lot of them out there, but they’re persistent and omnipresent, and the sheer volume of their comments masks the fact that it’s actually a rather small pool of crankypusses repeating the same complaints over and over and over again.

(There's the perception issue, again!)

Canon among this crowd is that if Breyer did something right, well, they had nothing to do with it in the first place. They got lucky, it was an accident, other collectors have unsophisticated artistic tastes, etc.

So naturally, the assumption of the "Debbie Downer" crowd is that any success the Adios mold has had in the model horse marketplace is almost entirely because it’s a copy of something else. Something superior.

In a sense that’s true: the Breyer Adios is a copy of the Trophy-scale Adios, which in turn is an adaptation of a much larger work. But it wasn’t the Boehm. They just happen to look similar because they both ultimately came from the same source material.

Just because it’s more limited, and done in a more expensive medium doesn’t change that fact. I certainly wouldn’t reject a Boehm Adios out of hand if one were to show up at the flea market, but if I had to choose between it and a beautiful, minty Presentation Adios, I’m nabbing the Presentation Adios, hands down. Not just for sentimental reasons, but because I also think it’s a better sculpture.

Black Adios

(Breyer History Diva, 2009.)

There is no such thing as a Black Adios Special Run. What you see here is also not a Black Adios: it’s a Mesa, in the extremely handsome and rarely used "Mahogany" paint job. (Few models would not be improved by it!) It’s probably the closest I’ll ever get to a Black Adios, and I’m okay with that:


I see the Black Adios on a lot of want lists as a valid item. Nancy Young listed it as such in her reference bible. And there are just enough of them out there that some folks may actually find one, lending credence to the idea of it being a special run. But what they’re buying isn’t really a special run.

A Special Run item has to have a few things going for it to qualify as a one. One characteristic is consistency: all of the models have to be the same, or nearly the same: one batch might have better shading than another, or slightly different markings, but the variability is relatively narrow.

The second characteristic is limitation: it is either available only for a limited time, in a limited quantity, or only through a specific dealer or venue.

The third characteristic is acknowledgment: it has to be advertised or distinguished from a regular run item.

Not every special run item shares every characteristic, but they do meet at least two of them. "Acknowledgement" probably the most controversial: a lot of early special runs - especially the XMAS catalog items, and the Woodgrain Ranchcraft Lamps - were never advertised as such, but that’s mostly because the term really didn’t exist back then.

"Acknowledgement" mainly applies to later items that are very similar or identical to regular run releases, but were specifically advertised as specials. The most obvious item would be the Toys R Us Bay Fighting Stallion - virtually identical to the regular run release, but sold a special run.

(There’s another subcategory of this kind of special I call Post-Production Specials, which are regular run items rereleased after their original discontinuation, but I’ll leave that esoteric concept for another time.)

The Black Adioses only really meet one of the criteria, and it’s only because of the person who was involved in their creation: Marney. The Adios model was a particular favorite of hers, and the black paint job was an extremely easy one to render. Any Adios cull with reasonably clean seams could quickly, and easily, be transformed into a Black Adios.

Markings on these Adioses varied widely - some had leg markings, facial markings, gray hooves, tan hooves, black hooves - whatever Marney’s mood and the condition of the body allowed.

They were made over a period of years; she didn’t have a stockpile of Black Adioses waiting for shipment or orders to come in. They were made whenever she had access, opportunity, and potential customers. Some were reputedly available as a gift at the end of factory tours. 

So they were not limited by time or quantity. There was no real consistency in markings or finish. They were not really advertised as special runs, though Marney was never really consistent with that terminology one way or another either. They were available almost exclusively through Marney, but that’s because she was probably the one making them on an ad hoc basis.

So what do we call them? How do we classify them? It’s a good question I really have no answer for: he’s a unique case. The Black Adios is the Black Adios.