Special Effects: Toys "R" Us Special Runs

I've mentioned Toys "R" Us in some capacity in the past two posts, so I figured for the first post in the special run series, why not visit models in my collection that were produced only for Toys "R" Us and couldn't be found anywhere else?

Throughout high school, I saved everything I earned from babysitting and birthday money (and eventually a little from jobs, too) and put it toward Breyer models. Dealers were more prolific in those days. We had two in Erie - Toys "R" Us near the Millcreek Mall, and Hidden Treasures out on West 26th St. Hidden Treasures was probably closer from a mileage standpoint, but we were at the mall much more often, so Toys "R" Us is where I got many of my models in the days before the internet.

Photos for today were taken in my less-than-ideally lit dining room so they're not as pretty as usual. The light fixture has three bulbs which make shadows super weird. That'll have to be my photography space for much of the winter, though, so I'll need to grab some portable lights and see what I can do.

 

This set is #700693, Drinkers of the Wind. A gold sticker on the box proclaimed it a Special Collector Edition (Limited Production). The collectibility bug bit me early, so I didn't hesitate to snatch these up. Turns out they made 18,000 sets, so not quite as "limited" as the box led me to believe, but they're still desirable today. I don't have an exact acquisition date on these, but it was definitely sometime in 1993. My collection was still pretty small then. I remember using one of my shelves for a racing setup with all my running models. My black JCP CAS (featured a few days ago) was always in front as my favorite, with the gray CAS from this set in second, just off his shoulder.

Like the Drinkers of the Wind set, this model, #700993, Bay Fighting Stallion, also had the gold box sticker declaring it a Special Collector Edition. No official production total was ever released to my knowledge, but Nancy Young estimates there were around 6,000 models made. I was obsessed with rearing horses as a kid and picked this guy out right away. He had a few photo shoots in the back yard in his early years, battling with Chaparral, a pinto Hartland Rearing Mustang, and the Fighting Stallion and Semi-Rearing Mustang from the 1993 JCPenney set.

I was not successful in locating said photos, but I'll try to unearth them for a future post. If nothing else, they'll be entertaining.

This model is #700294 from the Spanish Normal Family, a Special Collector Edition from 1994. There were 6,300 sets made. I got this guy in April of this year for free from my dear friend Donna S, after I had commented somewhere that I was looking to fill in a few holes in my Classics congas. At our Are You Kitten Me Live show, Donna handed me a box of four Classics and told me, "Just take them." I offered payment but she refused. She is one of the nicest, most generous hobbyists I know.

From 1995-1999, Toys "R" Us released 11 models or sets of models in the Medallion Series, each of which came with a gold-toned metal medallion on a blue or red ribbon. The only Medallion series model I have is this gal, #700795, from the 1995 Buckaroo and Skeeter set. There were 4,200 sets made. I am not her original owner - I found her (without Skeeter or the medallion) in room sales at the Clarion during BreyerFest 2012.

 

In 1998, Toys "R" Us began releasing models called Showcase Editions. This is #711898, Sundance, a run of 10,000. Mine is numbered 4,299/10,000 on the belly. I've always liked her soft dun color.

This is another Showcase Edition model from the year 2000, #730500, Riley, a run of 10,000. mine is numbered 1,750/10,000 on the belly.

This model was only the third decorator in my collection when it was released in 2001. (We'll get to my love/hate relationship with decos in a future post.) He's #730901, Horse of a Different Color. They never released a quantity on him and he's not numbered. I've always thought he was one of the prettiest Pacers.

Oh look, a Shiny Bay Thing! I love all Shiny Bay Things and this guy was on my want list for an absurdly long time. I finally acquired him in room sales at the Clarion during BreyerFest 2016. He's #730801, Valiant, another Showcase Edition of 10,000 pieces. Mine is numbered 706/10,000 on the belly. Let me tell you how fun it was to try to (a) get a decent photo of the writing with all that dark shading on his belly and (b) also not include a gratuitous shot of his bits.

Fittingly, the latest-issued Toys "R" Us special run in my collection is also the one I acquired most recently. This little dude was part of a set called #740701, Reflections Gift Set. I avidly congaed the G2 Thoroughbred for years and years - but they will fall over if you so much as blink in their direction, so after they dominoed themselves one too many times, I started dispersing the conga. I always thought the color on this guy was lovely, though, so he stayed on my wish list even as I parceled out some of the others. My dear friend Heather B found it for sale back in 2022 and bought it, knowing I was looking for it, and then sold it to me. Then this year, she forgot that she'd already found me one, and bought a second one. She ended up gifting that one to our friend Macie (who writes a lovely blog called Macie's Model Horse Musings here on blogger that you should absolutely follow).

That's it for my Toys "R" Us models. In addition to Cappuccino, who I mentioned in my PAS conga post, the other Toys "R" Us exclusives I'd like to add to the collection someday are the Geronimo & Cochise set from the Medallion Series and the dark dapple gray Cigar to complete the Reflections set.

On a Regular Basis: Morgans

These two could easily have gone into a Sentimental Journey post; both came to me early in my collecting days. But I've never been a big regular run (RR) collector and many of my regular run models will be covered by other categories of posts, so I need to save things for the Regular Run category where I can. 

This mold is the Morgan, mold #48 sculpted by Chris Hess. A close hobby friend of mine adores this mold and has almost every one they've ever produced, including some teeny tiny runs and a couple one-of-a-kind auction models. I've only got these two, but they both mean a lot to me.

First up is #831, Show Stance Morgan, a Breyer regular run from 1990-1991, and he's got a story. I got him from my parents on Christmas morning, 1992, when I was 13. My dad had won a camcorder sometime in 1991 (I think maybe by calling into a radio show?) and recorded pretty much everything my sister and I did throughout our high school years. He recently put a lot of those home videos on a thumb drive and I've been slowly going through them. For all the cringey teen moments on there, there are some gems, and this guy is one of them.

Here's how the sequence of events went that Christmas morning:

• I tore off the wrapping paper (this was back in the day before I started trying not to rip it) and saw what model it was
• I legit squealed
• I said that he was the model I was pining over at our annual Kraynaks trip
• I legit hugged the box
• My dad got me a pair of wire cutters and I freed the model from the box
• As soon as the model was free, I hugged it
• I held it up to my nose and audibly took a huge whiff of New Breyer Smell
• I proceeded to spend the next full five minutes of the video grinning from ear to ear, looking him over, hugging him, petting his back, calling him pretty, and declaring him as one of my new favorites

 As my sister started opening one of her presents, my dad asked me, "What color would you call that?" I - without hesitation, decisively, with all the authority of a 13-year-old kid who loved horses but knew next to nothing about them - said, "Maroon."

So of course that's now his barn name.

 

1992 was without a doubt my favorite Breyer year of the 90s. I liked so many of the new regular run models that year, and even acquired a Dealer Catalog (pictured above, photo courtesy of Identify Your Breyer) somewhere along the way that I looked at constantly. Many of the models released that year would end up on subsequent birthday and Christmas lists.

 

This is #858, Vermont Morgan, who was a regular run from 1992-1993. I'm not sure exactly when he came into my herd - he's not in ay Christmas or birthday videos/photos and he's not in my collection photos from September 1992, so I likely got him between then and his discontinuation at the end of 1993. I probably got him at Toys "R" Us, which is where I got most of my childhood, non-gifted Breyers. Of all the colors they've done on the Morgan, this one has always been my favorite.

As far as Morgans I'd like to add to the collection someday, the list is short - just the 1998 Mid-States special run Stonington and the 1994-1995 regular run Lippitt Pegasus. Both are bays, which I'm sure will surprise no one who knows me. 

Do That Conga: Proud Arabian Stallions

 Bet yinz thought I'd start with Sham, didn't you?

While Sham is my biggest conga and the one I'm most proud of, taking all those photos will be labor-intensive, and I'd like to get a couple months of posts under my belt before tackling that beast.

I also have to hunt down a Niagara, since Breyer decided that a week after spending a small fortune trying to keep my cat alive (in vain) was a great time to use Sham as one of their super-limited event models. Lucky (?) for me, he's a run of 96, which should be much easier to find than the event micro-runs of 40, 48, 52, and 60 pieces.

So while I hunt that guy down, we're starting on the smaller side today with another Arabian conga, the Proud Arabian Stallion (PAS).

This is my OG, my very first PAS - #839, Proud Arabian Stallion, a regular run from 1991-1994. I got him right before Christmas in 1991. My dad was a volunteer firefighter and EMT with our local fire department and they had a Christmas party for their members every year. Kids under a certain age all got a gift, and this is what I opened at that year's event.

I have a second #839 PAS in my herd - my sister's! She briefly joined me in collecting in the early 90s and gifted all her models to me several years later when she lost interest in them. I can tell her PAS from mine easily - hers is a cooler shade of gray with larger dapples and darker knees/hocks.

My next PAS was #933, Sundown, a regular run from 1995-1996. He was a 16th birthday gift from my parents in 1995.

Next up is #1104, Dune, the 2000 Collector's Edition. He's a throwback to the original honey bay Proud Arabian Mare (PAM) and Proud Arabian Foal (PAF) from the late 1950s. I don't have a record of when I purchased him, but I was definitely at IUP at the time. I'm pretty sure I got him on eBay and had him shipped to my dorm.

After Dune, it would be more than twenty years before I added another PAS to the herd. This is #1341, Thee Desperado. This model was part of the Carole Christian collection dispersal and was auctioned on Facebook in March 2022. I had won another model that week, Rags to Riches, and noticed that no one had bid on this guy. When I emailed to arrange payment for Rags, I inquired about getting him also. They were happy to sell him to me for his starting bid.

In the future, I'd love to add the red bay 1983/1984 Sears special run, the 1997 Commemorative Edition Freedom, 1998 Toys "R" Us special run Cappuccino, and the 2010 mid-year chestnut Arabian Horse & Rider set to my conga. The only two unobtainiums on my wish list are Batal, a run of 25 for the 2002 Breyer tour raffle, and Beignet, an extremely limited run of 8 for the Big Easy Bash in 2014, but those will only come live with me if I win the lottery. 

Sentimental Journey: The 1990 JCPenney Christmas Catalog Models

The JCPenney Christmas Catalog was legendary in our house. Every day in the early fall, my sister and I would check the mail when we got home from school in the hope it would be there. On the day it arrived, we'd go through every page and start our Christmas lists. Some years, I made myself wait page by page until we got to the Breyers, letting the anticipation build; other years, I was too impatient and flipped straight to that page before we started our process.

 

These were the sets offered in 1990. I'm not sure if I took notice of the Breyers in that year's catalog before Paula pointed them out to me, but I definitely looked at that catalog page dozens of times before Christmas, hoping they'd all find their way under the tree. And they did - quite a few family members were in on the enabling that year. I got the Little Bits set from my parents, the 3-piece Traditional set from my Aunt Sheri and Uncle Ray, and the 3-piece Classic Arab set from my maternal grandparents, in that order.

Here are my Little Bits - the very first ones I opened Christmas morning. These four - the bay Morgan, white Arabian, gray Thoroughbred, and brown Saddlebred - are still in decent shape, with a couple bumps and bruises from playing with them as a kid. The Morgan and Saddlebred liked to play dominoes, so they have a few more marks than the others.

The other two models from that set, the dapple gray Clydesdale and black leopard appaloosa Quarter Horse Stallion (QHS) are vinegar syndrome victims. You can read more about vinegar syndrome in this fantastic blog post by a fellow hobbyist. 

This poor guy started decomposing first, probably twenty or so years ago. He's spent his entire life on a shelf and endured at least fifteen years of non-climate-controlled, hot and humid summers in my childhood bedroom with nary a hiccup, only to start oozing as soon as my parents put in central air (go figure). He's a hot mess express, cracked in dozens of places and discolored. He was the first one out of the box that Christmas morning - the first Breyer I held that was my own - so I can't bear to throw him away.

The black leopard QHS just started oozing earlier this year. You can see the discoloration near where his legs meet his body and some bubbling on his stifle. He's been occupying my freezer for a couple months to try to slow down the process.

This is the 3-piece Traditional set. They, too, have war wounds from being played with and have started to succumb to the plastic problems of the late 80s and early 90s. The dapple gray Lady Phase and palomino Quarter Horse Gelding (QHG) are both shrinkies. Neither has shown signs of oozing (knock on wood) but they're definitely smaller than their counterparts. Lady Phase tends to yellow, so she gets some spa time in a sunny window here and there, and the QHG has turned an interesting shade of Crayola Sunglow. Rugged Lark seems unscathed so far - he's still normal-sized and not discolored.

I came across a second set of these models at an estate sale a couple years ago, but I'll get to those in a future Fantastic Finds post.

This set has the most sentimental value to me. Arabians have always been my favorite breed, and I stared and stared at that beautiful black Classic Arabian Stallion (CAS, left) every time I looked at that catalog page. My first real horse loves, Black Beauty and Shetan, were both black, and while this guy had more white on him than either of them, he still reminded me of them. He was immediately the "herd stallion" in my mind - he looked confident, like a leader - and he's still the patriarch of my collection to this day. The Classic Arabians would eventually became my first intentional congas. You'll see them down the road in Do That Conga posts.

The little foal started oozing and warping about a month ago, so he's keeping the QHS company in the freezer. I'm holding out hope that my CAS won't someday become a victim, too, but unfortunately you never know with models from that era. They're perfectly fine one day and suddenly they're not.

These dozen models were my first Breyers and even if they all turn into puddles of goo someday, they'll always have a home with me.