It’s Toy Time Tuesday!
With…some edcuation time. Here is an example of what can happen to a mold once it is produced. Sometimes it gets stolen, other times it is sold. But, somehow, companies can change the size of the item without changing its proportions. Of course, you might think computers were involved, but these changes happened well before those. So how then, did they do it? It is a mystery.
The largest horse is of course, Barbie’s. Probably Western Star (Had jeans theme accessories), the transparent one is Crystal Moonbeam from She-Ra, and the smallest is an unbranded fantasy horse. It’s very light weigh plastic. There’s quite the size range of them, without changing much. Who was first? Probably Barbie. The SheRa has the mouth modified to be open so it would take the reins, and neck wrinkles added so it would look like it was yelling. The fakie one (top) was the photo before I fixed it, and it later is better looking with nice new color matched hair and fixed paint.
Another example of this is Silkymane (barbie size originally) Lady Lovely Locks’ horse & the “Carriage Fakies” & probably also a mid-size Barbie made from that mold as well. (Not Kelly who is tiny but some other older relative of barbie that had a ‘pony’) It’s interesting to see what has been done for fantasy horse molds over the years…but what is so extremely difficult about creating a new one? That’s also a mystery.Hi! I might be able to answer some of the questions?
First, She-Ra was made by Mattel, the same company as Barbie, and sculpting stuff from scratch remained a big expensive thing well into the computer aided late 1990s, so Mattel reused stuff from one line to another…a lot. A whole lot.
This particular Barbie horse appears to be Star Stepper from 1991. If I’m reading the Wiki page right https://toyhorseid.fandom.com/wiki/Mattel_Barbie_horses then the first horse to use that mold was Dream Horse Prancer in 1983, and the She-Ra horse was released in 1984
So, the size change. There are several pre-computer ways to change the size of a cast item. Most of those ways rely on using casting compounds that shrink evenly as they cure. So, all you need to do is make a cast copy using that shrinking material and the results will be a scaled down copy (and you can then cast that copy if you want it smaller) and then use that smaller version to make the master dies for mass production.
Another way to make the copies smaller–and this is a lot more common in knock offs–is the fact that vinyl will always shrink as it cools after being cast. So, if a company is making an illicit mold by recasting an existing item, and then casting it in vinyl, it will always end up smaller than the original….and…if another company makes an illicit cast off of the smaller one, it will end up smaller again. Details will start disappearing after a few generations of copies, too.
(via cosmomoore)
