POA Shrinky

(From Breyer History Diva, May, 2011)

Meet my lovely little Toad:



At first I thought he had been the victim of a fire or some other sort of household incident, but when I picked him up and got a good whiff of him, I realized he was no accident victim: he was a Shrinky. Possibly the worst Shrinky I’ve ever seen. He’s not just shrunken, discolored, smelly and cracked, he’s lumpy: Lumpy and warty, like a toad!


Hence, his name.

I’ve seen some pretty messed up Shrinkies in my time, but this guy’s right up there with the worst of them. I’ve never seen lumpiness on a Shrinky like that before. Was it a consequence of the plasticizer pooling on the surface of the plastic? Was a "good" batch of plastic mixed in with a "bad" batch, with the lumps representing the unshrunken "good" bits?

I found him in a fairly large (60 piece) collection of contemporary (late 1980s-early 1990s: i.e. The Shrinky Era) pieces, most of them in good or better condition. There were a few other Shrinkies in the herd, but most of them were just smaller, smellier, and a little discolored - nowhere near the same horrifying level of deformity of my little Toad.

Some folks on Blab have speculated that something must have happened to Toad to make him this way, but I’m not so sure of that. It could be that like some people, he "lost" the genetic lottery, and just happened to get made out of a particularly bad batch of plastic, at a time known for that sort of thing.

He’s not oozing or weeping, at least not anymore, though I am hesitant to give him the "taste" test. I already suspect I got a contact high the other day from handling him so much. It’s not like I need to confirm what is already very obvious to my eyes, and nose. (Did I forget to mention that you can smell him a couple rooms away? That boy is pungent!)

Oh yes, he’ll be coming to BreyerFest this year; I’m thinking about setting up a little "kissing booth" for the Toadster and run some sort of fairytale-style promotion. "Kiss the Toad, and get a prize?" Hmm.

(Too bad I already have a great idea for the "Happy Endings" contest, because he’d make a great - and super easy - "Frog Prince" entry. Just set him up next to an unshrunken Rocky, with "Before Kiss" and "After Kiss" signs, and voila!)

POA

(from Breyer History Diva, December, 2011)

 finally found one of my most coveted grails:


It’s the #154 "Bay" Blanket Pony of the Americas, with the factory striped hooves. It’s the version that appears in the Dealer’s Catalog and Collector’s Manual in 1979, the year it was released, as well as on the original version of the box it came in (which I also have, but can’t find at the moment.) Here it is in the Dealer's Catalog:


This is what a more typical Bay POA looks like, with dark gray-brown or black hooves:


You’ll notice that the color appears to be different too - it’s definitely darker and richer in the striped hoof version, with darker splash spotting. However, I haven’t seen enough of these variations to tell if this is an actual characteristic of this particular paint job, or a consequence of the natural variation that occurs over the length of production.

I had’t noticed much variation in the paint job of the Bay POAs before, but I it’s also true that that’s not the first thing I’ve been looking for when I’ve been looking at them. It’s those darn hooves that have transfixed me ever since I saw them on the darn box, ca. 1979. The Bay POA that came in that box - the same non-striped one you see above - was by no means deficient qualitatively, but it wasn’t the one I really wanted. I wanted the one with those cute little striped toes!

After several years of looking, I had become convinced that the striped hoof versions were, like so many other items seen in the catalogs and manuals of the times, preproduction or test pieces that were either long gone, or now beyond my reach. Those striped hooves, I reasoned, must have been deemed a detail that was deemed too fussy, or funny-looking, or too expensive for long-term production.

Then eBay came along, and I started seeing just enough of them to convince me that they may have been a legitimate - albeit very briefly issued - variation. Or possibly used on the original salesman’s sample pieces: I have noticed that salesman’s samples do seem to turn up on eBay with a greater frequency than normal, due to the very nature of the site.

In either case, I realized that my "grail" wasn’t completely unattainable.

POA

(From Breyer History Diva, 2009.)


I attempted to find my photographic evidence of the existence of the elusive SR Black Blanket Pony of the Americas I mentioned in passing on Monday, but it's still lost in my archives somewhere. It's probably for the best, though, since it wouldn't have been terribly impressive: it was dark, out of focus and kinda small. In other words, it was about as convincing as your average photo of Bigfoot.

I do remember what he looked like, more or less: he was painted just like the Bay Blanket POA, except in black. He had a small, splash-spotted hip blanket, and no other markings; I believe he had striped hooves also, but since I can't find That Darn Photograph, I can't be 100% sure of that.


(Just illustrative: nothing special about this particular guy, other than being a particularly nice example of a Bay Blanket POA from my herd. No stripey hooves, extra details or any of that. I'd love a stripey-hoof version, too, but I'm not holding my breath.)

Oh, how I wanted him so – and I still do. He was one of those mysterious late 1970s or early 1980s special runs that drove us all absolutely mad. Small special runs of every variety were popping up all over the country back then – and tantalizing rumors of others – but we often didn't know about them until a lucky collector happened to run across one at a tack shop or in a horse show vendor's booth. And by then, the original run would have been long sold out, usually into the general (nonhobbyist) population.

I still occasionally prowl around the usual web sites, looking for him. Even though he's actually quite easy to distinguish from the regular run POA Pantomime – who had an extensive blanket, blaze, stockings and tan hooves – I still hold out hope that (just maybe) enough collectors won't know about him, or won't notice the differences. I've lucked out before.