Horse Rescue, Wagner Edition

Flocked toys sure take a beating. Knowing this, my mom wouldn't let me play outside with the Wagner animals she gave me when I was a child. They were indoor toys only. Which was OK with me as I had plenty of plastic animals to bury in the sandbox and float in the wading pool.

But still, just playing with these fragile toys caused plenty of damage on its own over time. Flocking rubbed off. White flocking quickly grew terribly dirty. Manes and tails were lost. Flexible legs were bent until the flocking fell off, leaving cracks. Ears disappeared randomly.

And for a kid, removing the horses' tack was an irresistible temptation. After all, the horses had to sleep without tack on, right? And wouldn't the tack go back on as easily as a Barbie doll's clothing? Um, no. No, it did not.

These two little fellows are the foals that came with the FAO Schwarz stable set I received one Christmas. Pointing out that they are playworn is an understatement.

The white foal's mom boasted a particularly lush mane and tail and played the role of Beauty Queen in our stories. But one day, inspired by television commercials about creme rinses, I decided to borrow some pink-tinted product from my mom's cabinet and make my white horse's tail even more glorious. Instead, her tail fell off, and her rump was permanently stained pink on one side. And as years passed, she grew as grubby as her foal.

Poor Beauty Queen! She's a mess, but I did
give her a new, bouffant tail a few years ago.

After I discovered eBay and other online sites, I would occasionally rescue a poor, neglected Wagner horse because even though I know perfectly well they are not alive, I apparently do not know perfectly well that they are not alive. I felt very sorry for them. 

So I am brushing up on my crafting skills to revive these timeworn horses. I have to figure out how to do a better job at flocking. So far my only attempts (using the paint-and-sprinkle-flocking method) have resulted in coverings that feel rough and gritty. I think electrostatic flocking will do the trick as it causes the flocking fibers to stand straight and create a velvety feel, rather than the crushed-glass feeling of fibers lying every which way.

Here are a few of the other sad-sack cases I hope to rehab:

This one at right has lost its tail and most of its mane. 

Replacing manes with new fur can be tricky because the tanned skin it's attached to doesn't always get hidden by the fur. You can even see this on original horses from Wagner, since each one is an individual creation and not factory produced.

There's a lot of such backing plastered on this horse's neck and forehead, all that remains of the original fuzzy mane.

 

This beautiful M.C. Original horse boasts all of its original tack as well as its mane and tail. But it's grubby as all get out. And its ears are missing.

I don't like to remove the tack because it's fragile and never goes back on properly. But I think reflocking is the only way to help this horse regain its looks. (Its off side is even worse.)

This horse is also missing its ears but misplaced its mane and tail as well. And some swine has stolen its saddle!

At first glance, it doesn't look too grubby, so a little cleanup might do the trick, and replacing the mane and tail shouldn't be too hard.

But this horse would only qualify as a pasture pet if you were buying it from a stable because if you take a look at the off side...

....oh no!

Poor pony's had a chunk taken out of its upper leg. (The gray plastic is an innovation that came along later in the production of these animals.) And there's lots of foxing. I recall reading that over time, exposure to sunlight sometimes causes a reaction with the glue, and of course it's most visible on the white animals. *Sigh* a lot of reflocking is in this one's future.

And last but not least is this former Noble White Steed. A total mess flocking-wise, and he lost his mane. I'm thinking he's a good candidate for becoming a dapple gray, once I improve my ability to flock these animals.

This horse is actually my favorite kind of Wagner horse--paper-wrapped wire legs, no tack. 

I think that's probably because I felt such joy when I got a brown horse of this type as a kid--my older brother bought it for me at the Museum of Natural History when he was on a field trip with his third-grade class (he was, and is, a kind and generous big brother!). 

And yes, I still have that horse. He's bandy-legged and a little scraggly, but I'm not going to change a single thing about him.

1967 F.A.O.Schwarz Wish Book Catalog

While doing some office cleaning recently, I came across a 1967 Christmas toy catalog published by F.A.O. Schwarz. This compendium of childhood dreams arrived every year and was pored over (and squabbled over) by my siblings and me. 

At some point, my mother managed to wrestle it from our hands and hide it away. Later, she'd sneak it out and circle items that she planned to order. I don't know how this particular catalog survived.

F.A.O. Schwarz, back in the day, was a quaint, Old World-style toy shop on Fifth Avenue. It sold lots of imported European toys. I only visited it once; I remember climbing an elegant staircase and spotting the Wagner Handwork trio of a Dalmatian and her two pups (and begging for it, a wish not granted that day). We also enjoyed ice cream around the corner at Rumpelmeyer's, a similarly quaint, Old World-style ice cream shop across the street from Central Park's southern edge. 

With these memories fixed in place, I was never fond of F.A.O. Schwarz in its later incarnations, and certainly never found Wagner animals at them. But never mind. Here's what was on offer in 1967.

First up was the Kitten Mobile:

As you can see, my mom marked this for ordering, and I still have this more than 50 years later. The yellow bumpers need to be glued back on, and the kittens' "Sunday best" is not quite as tidy as it once was, but the whole ensemble is still well loved. (Wagner made the cats; F.A.O. Schwarz provided the car.)

The next Wagner item in the catalog is the lovely Stable With Horses--not circled in that catalog, but I did receive it as a gift within the next year or two:

The catalog says that the stable houses "three horses and two ponies," but nobody told us that, so we cast the ponies as foals and paired them up with the matching horses. That left the black horse as the stallion, and that's been the family dynamic ever since. 

(I am sorry to say that, impressed by the fullness and luxuriousness of the white horse's tail, I fell for a TV ad's blandishment about how a product called Tame could make your tresses extra beautiful. Surely, then, that meant the white mare's lovely tail could be made even lovelier? Perhaps it worked on human hair, but it didn't do wonders for a Wagner horse: her tail fell off, and her rump was permanently stained bright pink.)

The inside back cover boasted the Mouse Playground--"six fuzzy little mice...having the time of their young lives on their own fenced-in playground." Mom circled this one, too. Thanks, Mom :)

Most of the little wooden toys are missing bits now, and the fence needs regluing, and somebody colored on the green grass...and a mouse or two has lost a tail...but five decades later they are still gamely playing in their playground.

The toy store devoted its back cover to two wooden structures of their own creation, one of which features Wagner's cute dachshunds. It's the Hound Hotel, billed as "a neat little vacation hideaway for these lucky dogs!" 

Per the copy, "Mr. and  Mrs. R. U. Canine are being greeted at the door by the host of Hound  Hotel, the chef, and his maitre d', Baskerville." Lift the roof, and you'll find Mimi the Maid serving drinks to a guest. 

The car has four bears in it, but they're plush, not flockies, and look similar to Steiff-type bears. Not that they wouldn't be welcome to drop by the Hound Hotel for some gluhwein.

My family was not wealthy--we were a happy suburban middle-class family--so it's not as if we were showered with expensive imported toys. 

But my mom's mother was an Irish immigrant who had grown up in poverty, and though my grandmother enjoyed a better life in the United States with my grandad (also an Irish immigrant, who had a good job driving subway trains in the city), she never relaxed her vigilance regarding money. 

My mother, with her love of dolls and dollhouses and dislike of flashy plastic toys, relished buying fewer toys for us overall but choosing solid, classic toys with lots of scope for imaginative play. I'm so glad she did.

The catalog featured other toys I loved, too--all imports, such as Britains plastic animals and Steiff plush animals. I'll leave you with their beautiful selection of Steiff animals, all at enviable 1967 prices!

Horses with Broken Legs...and Ears, Tails, and More

Oh, my.

If real live horses showed up in the stable with the damage that many old Wagner horses have suffered, well, you know what the verdict would be. (The Gary Larson cartoon in which "Doreen breezes through Chapter 9," equine medicine--because every antidote is "shoot"--comes to mind.)

If Wagner animals were truly originally created as playthings, I guess nobody expected toys to last almost forever unless they were made of metal, stone, or wood. 

An animal made of a composite material such as cardboard and clay, or even of plaster, is inherently prone to being crushed, growing moldy, or even disintegrating if exposed to water. Flocking rubs off or gets filthy. Rabbit-fur manes and tails get "trimmed" by scissor-happy kids. Tack is removed and clumsily put back on. 

And those legs! The wooden ones snap. The plastic ones break at the top and take an entire plaster hindquarter or forequarter with them. The paper-over-wire ones fare much better--they don't break, though they crack the flocking at the top and leave you with some severely bandy-legged ponies. 

But the nice thing about having a thoroughly wrecked Wagner horse is that you then get to have some fun with it by reconditioning it.

For example, Wagner horses typically come in either bay, white, or black (though ponies also come in pinto and palomino). I saw a rare chestnut horse once, on eBay, and now and then there's a palomino; and some very old pre-Wagner-label MC Original horses were produced in dapple gray. 

But if you've ever wanted an Appaloosa, a skewbald, or the like, you were out of luck.

So when you have a Wagner horse in pretty bad shape, you can turn it into the equine of your flocky dreams.

I have a small stable of wonky horses. Some of them are in good enough shape that it'd be rather a shame to totally redefine them; those ones just need a bit of fixing up and perhaps a mane or tail replacement. But others need reflocking--it's usually the formerly pure-white steeds that require this service.

Here's a horse I fixed up this weekend. She limped into the stable with a broken leg, a ratty mane and tail, and a blue saddle so timeworn and dusty that it couldn't be cleaned.

Her flocking was in good shape, though, and it was an unusual beautiful gold color, so I wasn't going to touch that.

I started her fix-up by gluing that wobbly leg. Her legs were plastic ones inset with a peg into a composite body, so a dab of E6000 soon set her right. You can still see the line of breakage, which could be concealed with flocking if I ever get some flocking in the right color.

After the glue dried, I considered her mane and tail. The tail, obviously, needed to go. The mane could've been glued down again, but I didn't have the right color fur scrap to make a complementary tail. She'd originally been bay, but the black of mane and tail had faded over time, and so it had a rusty color to it. A pure black tail would've looked weird with the mane.

So I decided to yank off both the mane and the tail. Check out how lovely the crest of a Wagner horse is, sans mane!

I decided, with that beautiful gold flocking, she'd make a gorgeous palomino, and I had plenty of white fur scraps for that job. A few more dabs of glue, and she was adorned with a billowing white mane and tail.

Then I carefully peeled off the sorry-looking saddle and used it as a template to cut a new one out of blue felt. A little more glue, and ta-da! The bob-tailed nag was now a proud parade horse.

Not too bad. She was an easy fix, however. In addition to her flocking being in fine shape, she had also never suffered the indignity of having her tack removed, and her ears were still in place. In a future post I'll share some of the truly knackered horses who are getting rehabbed.

Happy Year of the Horse, Wagner Style

The Year of the Horse, per the Chinese calendar, starts on January 31, 2014. What better time to take a look at some of Wagner Handwork's depictions of this marvelous creature?

Actually, if you're a horse lover, any given moment is a perfect time to think about/gaze upon/obsess about horses. And perhaps Fritz Wagner himself had a sweet spot for horses. (Indeed, the little brown and white pony depicted in the banner for this blog was chosen because it was his favorite among all his own creations.)

Wagner horses display perhaps the greatest variety in size of all the animals in the collection. There are tiny ponies scarcely an inch tall at one end, and 10-inch-tall horses nearly as big as a traditional Breyer toy horse. In between are standard horses about 2 1/2 inches high, bigger horses that handily step in to be their sires and dams at about 4 inches high, and, rarest of all, some beauties that are about 5 to 6 inches tall.

The horses also range from wild horses free of saddle and bridle to fully tacked-up horses with colorful felt saddles. Usually the tack is white or red, but horses with black tack turn up, too. The black horses are almost always kitted out in white tack, a very striking look. Some horses and ponies were given long reins because they were made to pull wooden carts--small, two- or four-wheeled ones for the ponies, a big blue-and-white wedding carriage for one pair of big white horses.

Colors span the equine rainbow, too. Most common colors are bay, white, and black for the standard-size, 4-inch, and 5-inch horses. The ponies are typically skewbald, chestnut, black, or Palomino. The biggest horses are bay and black.

The company made horses to order for toy sets made by other companies, so maybe that's why you'll sometimes find the odd horse flocked in a different color. The standard bay, for example, is usually a beautiful red-brown with black mane and tail, but I've seen Wagner horses flocked in a dark chocolate brown, too, in both the standard and the large size. Sometimes a Palomino turns up, too.

I once saw on eBay, but failed to win, a chestnut standard-size horse--it had a tan body with a matching, slightly golden mane and tail. To date I don't believe I've ever seen a spotted horse, only ponies. And though Wagner made a big gray horse in its early days, I haven't seen gray as a color among its later abundance of horses.

There are variations in the horses' stances, too. The ponies are always standing firmly foursquare, as if saying, "Nope, not gonna be caught in the paddock today, not falling for that oats-in-the-bucket lure!" The tiny horses, standard horses, and large horses typically do, too. The biggest ones, with plastic bodies under the flocking, have all four feet on the ground in a walking posture.

But sometimes you'll find horses that are posed in more of a running position, a gait achieved only by the Wagner horses that have paper-wrapped wire legs; the wooden-legged horses are always standing still. A few paper/wire-legged little horses are even caught rearing up.

I will put up more pictures of the great variety of Wagner horses in the future.