8 Years Away

Let's talk something plain, simple, and beautiful. Stud Spider.

Wait, did I just say Stud Spider????

...Hmm probably not what you think of as beautiful.

But he is.

He's just plain, simple, beautiful.

Isn't he?

I know for a fact that Lady Phase is quite popular and rather adored. Think of it like this; Stud Spider is the equivalent of her in stallion form.

A handsome (or pretty) standing stock mold that is simple, under stated, and elegant.


He's been gone from the Breyer line for 8 years.  8 years, man, 8 years. I discovered this when I was paging through the Identify You Breyer Traditional Section, looking for a Hess mold that has been out of circulation for a very long time. It wasn't hard. The question became rather, what is a long time? 10, 8, or 6 years? What is a long time?

Breyer has a lot of molds to choose from when it comes to creating production runs, now after all. (There's 151 Traditional horse molds alone.) So some molds are going to be... left out of the production line for a spell. There's a generous 50 (ish, give or take) Traditional Production-Type runs (AKA, more than 25 are made). Those are the Collector Club and Vintage Club Special Runs, (new) Regular/Mid-Year-Release models, Breyerfest Special Runs, and the tractor Supply/Mid-States/Brick-and-Mortor Special Runs.

But some molds end up being used twice in one year, which we also must factor in. Even if there's 50 or so Production Runs there's  only going to be around 45 molds in use (roughly). But even so, within five years, every horse mold should be used... once. In six years. This is not the case. This is not Reeves strategy. Some molds are understandably less popular than others (Midnight Sun and the original Black Stallion molds come to mind) but others? I don't know if there's a good explanation for why Stud Spider has been gone from Production-Run-Hood for 8 years. He seems like a great choice for a Vintage Club Model. He's handsome, well built, hasn't seen a lot of different colors... What's the down fall?

Anyway, I love Stud Spider dearly. I will cross my fingers that one of the mid year releases is a flashy Stud Spider.

And also, I think 8 years is a reasonably long period of time, long enough that a mold might-as-well be considered broken if it hasn't appeared as a production run within 8 years. (Remember in the 'old days' when The Sherman Morgan mold was out of production for 8 years? Everyone decided the mold had been wrecked, and/or destroyed. The mold had been damaged, but they had fixed it and given the mold a new tail. It reappeared in 2000 as Carpe Diem.) As for Stud Spider, the same case could apply, with the few micro runs on the mold being made from old warehouse bodies in the mean time.