Showing posts with label Lady Phase. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lady Phase. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 27, 2019

Treasure Hunt Lady Phase

I traded my second woodgrain Brahma But to Allison Pareis for this lovely Lady Phase.
Short Tail Treasure Hunt Lady Phase, #1213, 2006, traded for my woodgrain Brahma Bull, Allison Pareis, 3/16/2019.

Isn't she pretty? We traded at Silver Star Classic, I plopped her on the table in a large Appaloosa class, and she took second place and qualified for NAN!

Her name is Winding Georgia after my Grandma Honeywell.


Sunday, August 27, 2017

New from Teresa Rogers

Recently I did a partial trade with Teresa Rogers for My DW Morgans Lippitt, Forever Amber, and Roughneck, and received these three and $92 in payment.
Sugar, #124, uncommon variation in semigloss bay and eye whites, no USA, 1961-1969, 8/2017, Teresa Rogers, Woodland Hills, CA.
Chalky Spice, #134, $40, 1961-1987, Teresa Rogers, Woodland Hills, CA.
Buckskin Lady Phase, no number, $40, JCP SR 1983-1984, 8,000 made, Teresa Rogers, Woodland Hills, CA.

Sunday, May 6, 2012

Buckskin Lady Phase

(from Breyer History Dealer, November, 2011)



It’s the 1980 Model Horse Congress Buckskin Lady Phase, the one with the pinked nose, B mold mark, and black eartips!

That means I now have examples of all three Buckskin Lady Phases special runs: the 1979 VaLes Solid Buckskin with charcoal/black nose, the 1980 MHC Special Run, and the 1983/84 J.C. Penney’s Buckskin with bald face.

(Yes, I know the JCP one comes in a solid-faced variation. Notice that I prefaced my statement with the phrase "examples of"? )

One of the most infuriating bits of misinformation that gets passed around on the Internet is that of the alleged rarity of the Buckskin Lady Phase. A case could be made for the 1979 or the 1980 ones being especially difficult to acquire, and I wouldn’t argue with that: there were only about 200 made of the 1979 SR, and about 240 made of the 1980.

On the other hand, however, the J.C. Penney version was probably one of the most popular Christmas special runs Breyer ever made: according to Nancy Young’s Breyer Molds & Models, around 8,000 sets were made over the course of its two year run.

Eight thousand pieces is not "rare," neither then nor now.

I can remember a time when Buckskin Lady Phases were so common that customizers resorted to using them as bodies. Lady Phases became unexpectedly hard to find right around the time she was discontinued in 1985. The story goes - as I heard it from Marney, anyway - was that the last batch of Lady Phases made before she was discontinued in 1985 were lost in a fire.

With no fresh bodies available in the store, no new regular runs on the horizon, and several hundred - if not thousands - of Buckskin ones cluttering up hobbyist shelves, what else are you going to do?

(FYI: I don’t believe enough Buckskin Lady Phases were lost to customizing to affect their overall rarity. Enough to skew the perception within the hobby, maybe, but not overall.)

In the intervening years, a lot of hobbyists conflated the 1979 and 1980 special runs with the later J.C. Penney run. You’d think with all the Buckskin Lady Phases floating around that hobbyists would do the math and realize that they weren’t quite as rare as they thought they were.

Alas, many of our fellow hobbyists just aren’t that good at math. And are all too often plagued by the ghosts of wishful thinking.

Even so, the 1979 and 1980 special runs are still genuinely hard to come by. On average, I see about one of the 1979 pieces up for sale or auction per year, if that; the 1980 examples aren’t a whole lot more numerous.

I was lucky enough to get my 1979 one in 1979, straight from the dealer (yeah, I’m THAT old.) I had been shopping around for a 1980 for some time now, but the few that had come up recently had been significantly out of my price range.