A Blue Ribbon Elephant

I remember getting a new Breyer as a child and peeling off the blue ribbon sticker that used to come with Breyer's early pieces. I'd play with those blue ribbons just as much as I played with the models they accompanied. And now all those blue ribbons are gone. I did not save a single one.

Once in a while I purchase a vintage piece just because it still has its blue ribbon sticker, so when this elephant was listed on an online sales site, I snagged it. 

Along with having its sticker, the price was good and the piece was in great shape.

But when I actually had the elephant in hand and could take a good look at it, I could tell right away that it was different from my other elephants.

It was a grayer color, but then color variations among Breyer are very normal. Was it a chalky? The paint did not feel thick, but just in case, I shone a flashlight through it. The light was blocked. Excitedly, I shone the light through the other two elephants, just to compare, and it shone through as expected.

So, the elephant blocked light like a chalky would, but it did not have the thick base coat of paint under its grey coloring. I then flipped it on its side to check its feet.

There was my answer - the feet were a solid grey color - the elephant had been made with grey plastic. This happened during the oil crisis of the early 1970s when Breyer had difficulty getting the right materials to manufacture models.

You can see the difference between its feet and my other two elephants. (They have drain board patterns on their feet which is also pretty cool.) And if you look at its tusks, you can see that they are unpainted grey plastic while the other two have white tusks.

Super thrilled to have gotten the double bonus of a blue ribbon sticker and grey plastic to add to my vintage collection!

HR Circus Animals

Lynn Lindgren, a seller on MH$P, frequently has Hagen Renakers for sale at a good price, and often she will come down in price. This time, she even threw in a free piece.

 HR Head Down Elephant, 1987 - 1989, $9, Lynn Lindgren, 8/2013.

HR Seated Elephant, 1987 - ?, free (has chip on trunk), Lynn Lindgren, 8/2013

HR Standing Elephant, 1987 - 1997, $9, Lynn Lindgren.

HR Camel Mama with Fez, 1956, 1968, $18, Lynn Lindgren, 8/2013.

HR Camel Baby with Fez, 1956, 1968, $14, Lynn Lindgren, 8/2013.

Breyer Elephant

Tuesday as I was driving to Sarah's I stopped at the Galesburg Antique Mall and found this elephant for $12. I suspect he may be a chalky.

 He certainly has nice shading.

 I compared him to the one I'd gotten years ago (at Gordyville?)  I am pretty sure the Gordyville one is a chalky but I am not sure about the new one.

He has the drainboard pattern on his feet, too.

Battleship Grey Elephant

(From Breyer History Diva,  September, 2011)


A Battleship Gray Elephant. Good condition, just a couple of small rubs and a small crack on its side, pretty typical of a piece from that era (early 1960s.) I don’t know what it is about this mold, but it’s prone to little cracks and splits in the oddest places. Is it all the bumps, cracks and wrinkles built into the mold that contribute to the problem?

That would make sense, except that there are several other contemporaneous molds with rough finishes that don’t have the same problem. You don’t see it in the Donkey, or the two rough-coated Bulls. The Poodles do tend to get weird little mold flow lines or "squiggles" on their sides that sometimes turns into a crack over time, but that’s not quite the same thing, I believe.

Mold flow lines - which I might have explained before, but I’ll cover here again - are created when the leading edge of hot plastic cools in a mold during the molding process, creating a little wrinkle on the molded surface. It’s not a crack, but it does create a slight weakness in the plastic that could become a crack under the right set of circumstances.

The "right set of circumstances" that leads to cracking include rough play and handling, and storage in an uncontrolled environment (extreme changes in heat and humidity). Neither situation is likely to happen in my house, or in any of yours most likely. To put it plainly, you really shouldn’t be too concerned about finding mold flow lines on your vintage pieces. The odds of them becoming a structural problem are very, very slim.

The problem with the Poodle stems from his weight: he weighs nearly a pound! (For comparison’s sake, the Brahma Bull weighs a mere 12 ounces on average - almost a quarter pound less.) When you’re injecting that much hot plastic into a mold, you’re going to have the kind of cooling issues that lead to mold flow lines.

I strongly suspect that the Elephant’s issues stem from too little of the material, rather than the too much. If there’s not enough plastic to compensate for day-to-day changes in heat and humidity, it’s more likely that the plastic will simply split at its thinnest points, whether there are mold flow lines present or not.

I haven’t been brave enough to cut open a spare Elephant to prove my theory, though. I haven’t run across that many body-quality Elephants, either. Plus, body box Elephants are already a tough sell; cutting them in half wouldn't improve the odds.

I already have one of these fellas, so on the saleslist it goes. He shouldn’t be too expensive, when I finally put him up for sale. Battleship Grays are a bit unusual, but not particularly rare.

Elephant

(from Breyer History Diva, 2009)

Every model has a story. I'm not just talking about my personal history with the model, or its provenance. It's that I'm finding I could, quite realistically, come up with an interesting and detail-rich history post about each and every model. Here's a good example:

It's an early variation of the Breyer Elephant, in battleship gray. There are two different versions of this variation: one is molded in solid, opaque gray plastic, and the other (like this one) is painted in opaque gray paint. They can be hard to tell apart at first glance; the easiest way is to flip them over and check for paint puddling on his feet. Dating these fellows is rather hard: it's assumed that they were manufactured in the 1950s, but photographic evidence for the battleship gray variation is found the 1963 Dealer's Catalog.

(I'll discuss the problem of dating by catalog photos later this week.)

I found this fellow in a rather large collection of Elephant figurines that included several Breyer Elephants. When I spotted the collection at the flea market, from a distance, I made a silent prayer to whatever deity watches over the flea market that there would be at least one of the really rare Breyer Elephants in the herd (Pink, Blue, Woodgrain?)

Alas, they were all the same shade of gray, save this one. This guy was the only Elephant worth keeping. The rest of them went straight to the saleslist, where they made me a modest profit that was probably wasted on some other crazy flea market purchase, like my giant bucket of sequins or that five pounds of vintage Czech rhinestones. (They were still in their original packaging!)

Did you notice the sticker? Of course you did! It's a gold foil sticker indicating this fellow was a souvenir of the Will Rogers Turnpike in Oklahoma. Breyers with souvenir stickers or decals aren't uncommon; I see them turn up on eBay or the local dirt malls from time to time. They're not factory issue, so they don't necessarily add anything to the value of a model unless the place or date has a certain significance to it.

This one does.

A few weeks after I purchased the elephant collection, I found an old stash of travel brochures from the late 1950s. I don't go out of my way to collect them, per se, but if I find any that interest me on an artistic or topical level, I'll snap them up. They're cheap and fun, and provide an intriguing window into the previous owner's notions of suitable family vacationing.

And every once and a while, you find a genuine little treasure. In this box, I found a brochure announcing the opening of the Will Rogers Turnpike, in 1957! (I'd scan this little curiosity and share, but I can't find it at the moment - the boxes of horses are getting in the way.)

Highway and turnpike openings in the late 1950s and early 1960s were kind of a big deal, so the fact that the state of Oklahoma thought it was worth celebrating is not all that unusual. I just think it's neat that I found two separate Turnpike souvenirs in the same season, at the same flea market in Michigan, and from two different vendors!

I have no evidence one way or another if the Elephant was a souvenir sold specific to its opening, or was just a gift shoppe item that was available for some time afterwards. The paint job is a pretty early one, so I'd like to think that it was – or at least from the time when the road was still new and exciting, and not just a strip of pavement that took you from Point A to Point B.

Should the Elephant ever have to make that journey to Point B, the brochure is coming with him.

Rare to Common Ratios

(Breyer History Diva, 2010.)


While it may seem that this is a new phenomenon, there are vintage molds that have disproportionate rare-to-common ratios. The Elephant is the most famous of these: how many of you out there have the Blue, the Pink, the Woodgrain and the one with the Howdah?

The piece runs on those Elephants is unknown, but undoubtedly very small: the Blue, Pink and Howdah Elephants only appeared in the ca. 1958 PR materials, and the Woodgrain not at all. But just how small? A few hundred - or a couple thousand?

It may seem absurd to think that rarities like those Elephants could have been made in the thousands, until you factor in Time and Space. They were released in a Time before the hobby was truly organized, much less catered to. And the Space they were released into was not just the hobby, but the world.

A 1500-piece SR may seem "large," especially if it’s distributed exclusively within the hobby. Distribute it to the world though, and it seems vanishingly small. Even if you limited to just the United States, that’d still average out to only 30 pieces per state. (Good for hobbyists in small or low-density states like New Hampshire or Wyoming, not so good for ones in big or high-density states like California or New York.)

The actual number of Pink-Blue-Woodgrain-Howdah Elephants in the hobby proper is hard to gauge, but I doubt it exceeds more than a couple dozen of each. Yet I feel I have a greater chance of acquiring those Elephants than I do the Esprits. The possibility of getting lucky is very real. It’s already happened once: I found a Howdah Elephant on a very slow day on eBay a few years ago.

Yellowing Plastic

(Breyer History Diva, 2009.)

Last week there was a discussion about the heavily yellowed Old Timer on eBay. Of course it’s heavily, and quite obviously yellowed - the fact that it was yellowed to the point of looking like a chestnut did not change the fact that it was, and still is, an Alabaster.

It’s also another case where a little knowledge leads to a lot of trouble: in this case, it’s the existence of at least one genuine chestnut Old Timer. A picture of one was published in the July/August 1985 issue of Model Horse Gazette, in an article about test colors and special runs by Jill Rademacher (now Guitterez). Even though the pic is in black and white, it does seem to bear some similarity to the heavily yellowed fellow in the eBay auction:


At first glance, a black and white picture in a defunct, 24 year-old hobby magazine may seem like a rather obscure reference to cite. But it’s not: many hobbyists are packrats of the highest order, especially when it comes to old magazines, newsletters and other reference materials. 

I’ve seen hobbyists use more obscure, and much less reliable sources to base their buying decisions on. So while the $75 final selling price was disappointing, it was not unexpected. It just takes two hobbyists to bid something up, and there were certainly more than two hobbyists watching that auction.

What complicated the argument over the Rearing Stallion is the fact that Breyer did - and still does - use colored plastic as a deliberate decorative technique. For a brief time in the 1970s, Breyer used unpainted light gray plastic as a base for some of its gray and black painted models, such as the Donkey, Elephant, and the Spanish Fighting Bull (and less successfully on a few non-gray, non-black models, too!)

As far as I can tell, yellow plastic was not one of those deliberate techniques. Not in the 1970s and 1980s, anyway.

What causes yellowing in Breyer horses is actually quite a complex subject - worthy of it’s own post, easily. To keep it short and simple for today, I’ll just state that it is not unusual for a model to yellow out evenly over its entire exposed surface. It’d be far more unusual, and suspicious, to have a model that was unevenly yellowed.

Woodgrains - Rare

(Breyer Diva History, 2009.)

All Woodgrains are not created equal: all are scarce, but some are more scarce than others. And defining what is rare, and what is common, isn’t as simple as you might think.

Here’s a good example: the apparent popularity and longevity of the Ranchcraft Woodgrain Running Mare and Foal Lamp may have skewed our perception of the original Mare and Foal’s rarity. The original, prelamp Woodgrain Running Mare and Foal were made for a relatively brief period of time: from 1962 through 1965, a year or so less than much more desirable pieces such as the Rearing Mustang or Five-Gaiter.

An awfully high percentage of Woodgrain Running Mares and Foal I’ve seen for sale are former lamp pieces: their drill holes and semi-gloss finishes are usually a dead giveaway. True, regular run pre-lamp Woodgrain Running Mares and Foals are fairly scarce, and surprisingly don’t command the kind of prices that that kind of rarity usually brings.

Part of it is the sex appeal: the placid, sweet Running Mare and Foal don’t elicit the same visceral response the wild and studly Mustang does. The fan club for these pieces just isn’t that large. They’re not so rare - like the original regular run Buckskins - that their very elusiveness creates demand, either. They’re not the kind of things a "high spot" collector would seek out.

And the model horse market, at this moment and in this economy, seems to be driven primarily by a small coterie of "high spot" collectors. "High spot" is a term I’ve borrowed from the world of book collecting; it refers to collectors who specialize exclusively on rare, expensive and historically significant pieces, as opposed to collectors who seek to build a more well-rounded or representative collection.

True "high spot" Woodgrains would be items like the Old Mold Mare and Foal, Elephant, and Fury - items so rare and so scarce that virtually no documentation exists for them. The Old Mold Mare and Foal, Elephant, and Fury all easily fetch four-digit figures - and except for the Old Mold Mare’s cameo in the 1960 Montgomery Wards Christmas Catalog, there is a total absence of evidence for their existence, other than, you know, their actual existence.



The Old Mold Mare and Foal were regular run items, albeit extremely short-term ones, made in one or two batches before the mold switchover ca. 1959-60. (Until recently, it was speculated that the Woodgrain Old Mold Foal didn’t even exist, but we know better, now.) Others, such as the Buffalo and Polled Hereford Bull, appear to be special run exclusives for Dunning Industries’ Ranchcraft Lamp line.

But for pieces such as the Elephant and the Fury, I have no idea. My guess would be that they were extremely short-term regular runs, a la the Buckskin Running Mare and Foal, but that’s pure speculation on my part. Until more evidence surfaces, that’s all we have at this point.