Featured Breyerfest - 2004

 Hello and welcome to another edition of Featured Breyerfest! This year we're covering Breyerfest 2004, so let's get started! 

Notable events from 2004:

• I graduated from high school! 
• The 2004 Summer Olympics take place in Athens, Greece; the USA wins the most gold medals 
• The world population increases to 6.545 billion people
• Shrek 2 is the highest-grossing film of the year

And in Kentucky, Breyerfest 2004 happened! 

Dates: July 30-Aug. 1, 2004
Theme: Fiesta Equina
Celebration Horse: Nobel II 
Number of Celebration Models produced: 4,500
Attendance: 6,000 tickets sold according to JAH

Here's the first 2004 page from the commemorative program:

The theme for 2004 was Fiesta Equina, a celebration of all things Spanish. The Celebration Horse was Nobel II, a beautiful Andalusian stallion who apparently is a founding sire in the Spanish-Norman breed registry. I couldn't find much else about him, but I did find an obituary for one of his owners, Tracy, who died in 2023 (RIP).  Raffle models for 2004 were El Corazon on the Spirit mold and Fiero on the Fighting Stallion. It appears that early bird models made their debut this year! The early bird models were (as you can probably guess) models that were raffled off amongst people who purchased their Breyerfest tickets before a certain date. For the first few years the early bird models were OOAK pieces, but eventually they became a run of 3. The volunteer model for 2004 was a chestnut Legionario. And the single-day Stablemates made their debut in 2004 as well! The number of single-day Stablemates has slowly increased since then, and there were five colors in 2009, but they've settled at four for the past many years. Maybe they'll go to five at some point? 

The keychains went away again, but the porcelain special run stayed, as did the porcelain Stablemate. Other special runs included Paloma, the palomino pinto Marabella; El Viajero, the dun Foundation Stallion; Descaro, the bay roan Semi-Rearing Mustang; Cobrizo, the bay Peruvian Paso; and Magnifico, the beautiful spotted Spanish Fighting Bull. There was also a porcelain Hidalgo Stablemate model who appears to have been the first Store Special, aka the first Breyerfest model that was sold in the store that you didn't need a ticket to buy (since the advent of the numbered special run tickets, anyway). 

Ooh! Shock of shocks, there's a third page for 2004 in the commemorative program! There was a third page for 2003 as well, but I missed that last week. Oh well. 

Guest horses for 2004 included TJ, one of the horses who played Hidalgo in the movie (he would later return for Breyerfest 2014) and Rowdy Yates, as well as previous guests Cupid and Arrow, though the real Nobel II and Savannah Dial were unable to attend due to an outbreak of western equine encephalitis. 

Here's the first page of the JAH recap for 2004:

Here's page 2:

And here's page 3:

Now, let's take a look at some auction models:

This unicorn Friesian is so cute! I love his purple/blue tones (and there might be a little pink in there too?). Where does he live now? I want more photos of him. 

I picked this one because we never see test cows! Fun color, too. Maybe we'll get another one someday? 

This one is fun because he's Inconspicuous's color! Who doesn't love seeing models in other models' colorways? He's super cool. I wish we had more photos of this one so we could get better views of the saddle. The lighting must not have been very good when the photo was taken. 

And lastly, I picked this one because she's like a pastel dream! I want other models in this color. She looks like she was painted with chalk or something. 

That's it for this week, but check back next week for Breyerfest 2005!