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.

Dark Mustang

(from Breyer History Diva, 2010)

There’s nothing overtly special about the next horse, except that he’s gorgeous. Behold my very dark buckskin #87 Rearing Mustang:


I paid a pretty penny for him - more than I thought I would have to pay, anyway - but some models just have to be had, y’know?

Added bonus: he has painted eyewhites, too. (A little hard to see, but trust me, they're there.) That’s a rare feature on early Buckskin Mustangs. It was my primary motivation in buying him; the fact that his color was so dark and rich was just a nice bonus.

Painted eyewhites were not a universal feature of all early Breyer paint jobs. Some models and some colors never had them, and some models rarely came without them, like the Brown Charcoal version of the Mustang. Beyond the Alabaster exceptions (they weren’t necessary!) there doesn’t appear to be much rhyme, reason or rule to early eyewhites.

At first glance, my dark Mustang could probably pass for Bay. There have been rumors of Bay Mustangs floating about for years, presumably based on the fact that the color was a part of Breyer’s limited color repertoire in the early 1960s. Surely they must have at least considered the idea, right?

I don’t doubt that there may be a few authentic, vintage test color bays - either gloss, or matte - out there somewhere. But I highly doubt that there was ever a regular run or special run of them, however brief, as I’ve speculated might be the case with the Gray Appaloosa Shetland Pony. At least with the Shetland Pony, there do appear to be a handful of authentic pieces out there. All of the "bay" Mustangs I’ve seen in person were either later tests or, like this boy, exceptionally dark buckskins.