Going Wild

In honour of the History Channel's launching of a new show about wild horses (The Wild Ones, premiering January 20th in Canada), I decided to spend a little bit of time in my blog today talking about the wild ones in my collection.

Next to the Shetland ponies I'm obsessed by, wild horses in general and mustangs in particular have always been favourites of mine.  That being said, they're kind of under-represented in my collection -- I'm not quite sure why.  A long time ago I sold off my Breyer Classic Mustang Family (the one based on the Maureen Love sculptures).  I don't think I've ever owned the Traditional Semi-Rearing Mustang, and although some people might count his companion, the Fighting Stallion, as a mustang, I've only ever had one Fighting Stallion (since sold) and he didn't seem particularly mustang-like to me.

Of course, when you're talking mustangs you could just be talking about feral horses of absolutely any breed.  Fortunately the trend these days has been towards preserving mustangs with historic backgrounds -- like the Spanish mustangs promoted by Bob Brislawn, the Mesteño herd of Kiger mustangs illustated by Rowland Cheney, and the Pryor Mountain families captured by filmmaker Ginger Kathrens.

This reminds me that Breyer has also come through with support of these herds.  Bob Scriver's "Buckshot" was based on one of Brislawn's favourite horses, Cheney was invited to translate his 2D sketches into the 3D classic-size Mesteño series for Breyer, and Kathrens' beloved "Cloud" and his family have all been portrayed by a wide variety of molds over the years.

Additionally, Breyer frequently pays tribute to feral horses rehabilitated through the work of the U.S. federal Bureau of Land Management  (BLM)-- all you have to do is look for one of the distinctive BLM freeze brands on your model to see if your horse is one of those.

So Breyer has given us a lot of mustangs, but I think the ones I actually like best are the Stablemates.  Not all of them were originally molded to be mustangs, but several of them fit the mold quite nicely.

One of several "Rivet"s in my collection.

One of my very favourites of the newer molds is "Rivet," originally released in 2013 as a Breyerfest single day ticket special.  Aside from the decorator releases, most of the colours Rivet has come out in would make good mustangs.  Although Breyer has, in fact, released Rivet as a mustang once or twice, for the most part he's just been a generic plastic horse doing a sort of non-specific movement.  He might be humping his back as a prelude to a buck, about to burst into a wild gallop, or simply descending into a river or dry ditch.  But to me he's a lovely little mustang full of 'tude, no matter what it is that he's doing.

H-R Specialty piece which I've named "Wild Horse Annie" (the mare) and "Mustang Bill" (the foal)

Next to Breyers, I suppose the larger part of my mustang herd comes from Hagen-Renaker (H-R).  Besides a reissue "Butch" (or classic mustang foal), I have a couple of mustang specialties and miniatures from H-R.  None of them show particularly well, as sculptor Maureen Love tended to emphasize the wild and wooly mustang as opposed to the conformationally correct, but I'm quite taken with them all the same.

Speaking of wild and wooly, I suppose I should mention "Stormwatch" here.  Surprisingly, it's not one of my favourite molds, and while I wouldn't turn down a bargain basement clinky "Stormwatch," the resin just isn't my thing.  I know I'm in a minority opinion here, but the thing that bothers me most about "Stormwatch" is the thing that others love about him -- his wind-whipped mane and tail.  For some reason, all that hair looks too gossamer-fine to me.  I'd rather see him all tangled and matted with burrs and breaks, instead of looking like he'd just stepped out of the bath.  But that's just the way I see it and not the way that thousands of "Stormwatch" fans do.  Now, to give him his credit -- the rest of the sculpture is everything I'd want in a mustang.  And in the end, his having a bad hair day has probably saved me a few hundred bucks.

I do have two Peter Stone mustangs in my collection.  I like the original mold by Candace Liddy very much, even if I haven't always liked the factory-customized ones.  My two are both on the original mold, but I only would have added one of them to my collection had it not been that my first Stone Mustang was a mistake.  It's a long story that probably deserves its own blog post, but suffice it to say that Stone somehow managed to mangle my mustang order in such a way that I could not possibly hold it against them.  Lesson learned, there.

Fortunately for me, the various model horse manufacturers never seem to tire of launching new mustangs on their unsuspecting fans -- consider Breyer's new "American Dream (2019),"  and Stone's Pebbles (2016) and Chips (2008) rearing mustangs, all launched comparatively recently.  It's a development in the model horse world that I'd like to see go on and on and on and on.

Because wild things, I think I love you.