RESTYLE ICONS: Petrifying!

Deuce Gorgon was a really great character concept. A gorgon for the most prominent male character, or for a male character at all, is a respectably unusual choice, and it's pretty awesome that they managed to make that work for all three generations of the brand so far! Heck yeah! 

Gorgons have always been my favorite Greek monsters. Deuce himself, though, was a little disappointing as a character. He became progressively stupider and more stereotypical in the mold of an uninteresting bro-jock, and his character wasn't always super pleasant to begin with. I don't like the Deuce depicted in the signature diary that came with him...but I did soften to him in the webisodes due to his developing friendship with Operetta (a dynamic I really latched onto) and his sad past having petrified his pet dragon, who he visits on the anniversary each year, hoping it'll wear off someday. There were nuggets of good in his character before they got wiped away with idiot jock characterization. The other issue I had with Deuce was that his dolls' body type felt glaringly inaccurate to the MH media until G2, since the standard boy body was so skinny and Deuce was portrayed as more bulky in the media. His fashion got some great pieces with flashier formal looks, though, and after being disappointed with the fundamentals of the G3 Deuce doll's presence and character design, I decided to circle back to G1 Deuce. I had originally been intrigued by G3 Deuce's green skin, new vibe, and Halloween colors, but in person, I found his face a bit too cartoonish and youthful, and I fell out of love with the style of his snakes, particularly since they were so tight to his head they forced his shades out of alignment. I'd probably love a G3 Deuce with an upright snake-hawk, but that's something I can only hope and wait for Mattel to do.

[While writing, I planned an expansion exploring Gil and Clawd as well, but those two dolls ran into some hiccups and by the time I got Clawd, I'd been writing this post for more than a month, and I couldn't deal with that, so I'm splitting it back up and moving the writing I've done on them to another draft so this can be just a Deuce post and get dang posted already. I'll keep brainstorming with Gil and Clawd to see if I get them tied up. They're smaller projects, so I think they'd be able to share a post. Joining this post on Deuce, though, they'd create a nightmare to scroll through.]

One thing I've felt about Deuce is that his name is a little try-hard and weird. Technically, it just means "two", and is obviously derived from the second syllable of his mom's name, but "deuce" is often used in slang under the bathroom context of a "number two", and while I can accept it as a slightly stupid tough nickname derived from Medusa, I can't at all imagine the lady selecting it as her son's birth name as it seems is the case. It feels like another hallmark of the 2000s coolness and posturing influencing the characters. I don't know if he'd still be named Deuce today if he was only created for G3!

However, I have seen fans interpreting Deuce as being short for the Greek name Deucalion, which is brilliant. Even if that was never on the minds of the MH team, I'm definitely adopting that as headcanon because it makes perfect sense and resolves the ridiculousness of Deuce being his real name. 

Deuce's fashion sense mixed tough jock with elements of flashy fashion and snaky patterning. I didn't find his fashion sense super lacking (maybe a crumb of emphasis on Ancient Greece would have been nice), but I did think of one thing--it's Operetta who has the dice motif, but I really think it should have been Deuce. With his name meaning "two" and him having snake eyes, paired dice rolled to ones would have been a brilliant visual symbol. Mansters Deuce at least could have squeezed it in, since he's tabletop gaming!

Two editions I knew I needed were a Scaris Deuce for the most typical G1 hair and face, and my favorite Deuce outfit piece (the hoodie) which I'd never gotten before, and a G2 Deuce, whose only doll was the Dance the Fright Away edition. The G2 boy body used only by Deuce and Clawd's lone G2 releases was a bulkier sculpt suiting the canonical designs of the characters better, but the G2 face for Deuce was unacceptable. Back in my original collection, I'd performed a head swap of Boo York onto Dance the Fright Away to upgrade G1 Deuce's body type, and it had worked great. For a G1 Deuce this time, I found a really great listing of a complete Scaris Deuce who also included his Scream Uniform casketball fashion-pack stock, which was a huge bonus. I also bit the bullet on a listing of Mansters Deuce with his red-lensed aviator shades. I really loved the design of those glasses, and, just like Operetta uniquely required multiple mask options in her fashion assortment, Deuce needed a varied sunglasses selection because they keep his powers from harming people and are a staple of his looks. The red shades weren't being offered alone, the other clothing of the doll was good to have in the project pool, and the body and head might serve a custom project.

Here's the three Deuces I got-- as a group, they represent the Look, the Shades, and the Bod of the one I want to make!

Tres Deuces.
Left to right-- G1 Scaris with original stock wearing Deuce's Scream Uniform fashion pack, G1 Mansters in original stock, and G2 Dance the Fright Away missing mask/shades piece and plastic bowtie.

G1/G2 Deuce was the only one of the three gorgon doll characters in the brand to be depicted with a human skintone, and while that could be seen as a little basic, it's also a little novel, especially since so very few MH dolls have human colors. It's also welcome how varied the G1 gorgon monster portrayal was, with Deuce reflecting more fine-art depictions of beautiful gorgons who just had the snake hair making them weird, the CAM Gorgon going full serpent, and Viperine falling between Deuce and the CAM gorgon by being fully snaky, but with half-human hair and albino coloration derived from both snake and human albinism. G3 Deuce goes a bit more classically monstrous by making his body coloration about identical to the CAM Gorgon, which I think doubly removes his uniqueness by not only repeating the look of an earlier doll, but also taking away his uniquely more human style.

While I'd love to see a more mythic gorgon who's not only a mix of human and snake, the snakes are the most famous feature and seeing any work depict Gorgons with wings or tusks is very unlikely.

Here's the three faces compared-- Scaris, Mansters, and Dance the Fright Away. Each is different but one is obviously the worst. 

Scaris Deuce reflects his most "standard" look. While all three Deuces are White, his Scaris doll has slightly darker, more tanned-looking skin that I think suits a cool-dude Greek monster really well. Mansters Deuce is notably paler and a little pinker. Mansters Deuce has higher-printed eyes that look a little askew and they lengthen his face. I can accept his face on its own, but next to Scaris it looks really weird. DtfA Deuce's face is hideous and the only MH face I've ever truly hated. He has overly dark and overpainted lips and huge eyes that make his head look way larger next to Scaris and give him a pouty and entirely mentally vacant look. I don't understand what the intention was, but this was not how to push his face into the G2 style. It slips right out of believable or appealingly stylized to make a pretty ugly, creepy visual. G2 Deuce remains the absolute worst MH faceup in my book. I still cannot see it being attractive and appropriate in any context. It had to go in my old collection, and it has to go now. I'll be repeating the body-swap I did then to upgrade a G1 Deuce. Good riddance to the G2 face.

Deuce's snake hair is oddly minimal, only appearing down the middle of his head in a mohawk shape. I'd have to assume this is just his natural pattern locked in for life, since you can't really cut snake hair, right? I don't know if that'd be self-mutilation, animal abuse, or both, but it'd certainly be physically and mentally traumatizing. I have to ponder more about how gorgon genetics work, especially since the most famous myth of Medusa has her being a gorgon by curse, not by birth. How does a gorgon's hair pattern get selected? Viperine's hair is half human! Did something just tell Deuce's DNA that he was set to be a really cool dude? Or was his attitude and demeanor decided for him by his hair, leading him to adopt the personality to do it justice? And wait, how is the combed style composed of longer snakes???

I think too much.

Anyway, these Deuce dolls demonstrate the two styles of hair the snakes came in--standing upright in a more classic mohawk, as seen on more of his dolls, and combed into a rightward side swoop, a formal style that debuted on his Dawn of the Dance doll (his second in G1), and was later used for his Boo York doll and his G2 doll--all three dressed up for dance events. On the dolls, G3 Deuce's hair imitates this latter style, but his snakes are fewer, bulkier, and longer. I'd really like to see a G3 Deuce doll with snakes standing up; that might improve my impression of the doll design. 

This is actually my first time owning a G1 Deuce with the vertical snake-hawk!

G1 Deuce had a gradient spray on his snakes going from darker green to lime as well as a gradient from dark green (the base color) to lighter green on the snake-hawk itself. The lime gradient isn't applied the same way each time across G1 Deuce's editions. G2 Deuce has a simplified paint job with the same gradient on the snakes, but no lime on the "shaved" portion. G3 Deuce's snakes are one color and unpainted. They're a bluer medium green than seen on G1/G2's snakes. 

I was a little torn about which Deuce head to pop onto the buff body, but the snake paint helps solve that. Scaris Deuce has pretty pristine snakes, while the gradient on Mansters' snakes is chipped. And even though Mansters' face works okay for me, I think Scaris looks cleaner and represents his most signature look.

The hair is two pieces of vinyl securely glued onto Deuce's base head so it fits the form. His head itself has cutouts for the scale cap and snake row to slot into, meaning he'd probably to need be wigged in custom projects since most sculpting products aren't able to stick to the vinyl and permanently fill the cutouts. G3 Deuce is similar, but his scale cap features props and cutouts for the snakes themselves, meaning it is not possible to cut the snakes apart and re-bend them with hot water. Not only did I not succeed in keeping a new shape for them, but lifting them revealed the unsightly cutouts and props between the snakes and scales. A new pair of sculpts would be needed for G3 Deuce to look different hair-wise.

The G3 scale cap and snakes disassembled. I found the snakes can't be re-bent, but even if they could, it would expose the function-first sculpting.

Both G1 Deuces have small black rings in their upper left ears. His piercing is not replicated in the G2 or G2 dolls. 

G1 Deuce's body is the standard manster shaping, but he has unique painted detail with diamond green scales down his left shoulder. I think these are probably meant to be a tattoo design since they're implausibly large and his cousin Viperine's scales are quite a lot smaller in both printed and sculpted form. 

The body shaping was also my biggest issue, since Deuce was always depicted as a broad-shouldered jock but had the very notably skinny shape of all the G1 boys and it didn't seem to fit very well. Here's a comparison of G1 and G2's bodies. 

The G2 boy doll body, which was used literally twice only, is notably bulkier around the chest, with larger shoulders, and like most teenage boy dolls, features defined pecs and abs. The waist of the G2 body is still comparable to the G1, making the shape fairly triangular, and the lower legs and feet appear to be exactly the same molds. The G2 body sculpt is physically smaller than both the Ever After High boys and the G3 boy body. Manny Taur and Finnegan Wake had body sculpts that were exceptions, and each is bulkier in its own way than any of the standard G1, G2, or G3 boy sculpts.

And here's a comparison with a G3 Deuce body, now dismantled when I thought it could make a good custom (something I'm now unsure of). The G3 body is thicker around and below the waist, but shorter than G1 and G2 and has smaller feet.

While the G2 body shape is correct for Deuce and Clawd, the two beneficiaries, I don't know how to feel about buff boy bodies seemingly becoming the new standard post-G1. I do think the G1 boy body was fairly ghastly in its execution and that it was unsuited for a few characters, but there was something nice about a boy body for a teen doll brand not even being toned. It defies an unrealistic beauty standard held up by dolls and action figures where male characters, even adolescents, are overwhelmingly depicted as chiseled tanks. I think there should be a happy medium neutral frame that's untoned without being uncomfortably ghoulish, and that the boy dolls should have wider variety in shapes like the ghouls (and the one NB femme) are getting in G3. Have some buff dudes, have some tall dudes, have heavier dudes, have skinny and short dudes! I've found MH's larger proportion of male characters and their level of appeal to be exceptional for doll franchises, but some things have still held them back. They've never received all-over unique body sculpts, they're always being paired romantically (and with one of the ghouls), and their body-type diversity is an exception or a cost-cutting measure (Gil probably only kept his G1 body in his G2 release because it wouldn't have been worth it to redo it). There's time for G3 to give us male/masc body diversity with its dolls, and I think it'd be right for them to do that. I guess we'll have to see how Heath turns out, since he's the next debuting doll manster rumored in the imminent pipeline. I don't have high hopes for a new body, but he may prove me wrong.

Anyway, the G2 body is pretty good. Stretchier G1 tops will fit on the torso okay, so I felt okay about proceeding with a body swap for my base Deuce. 

G2 Deuce's scale design is less appealingly done, featuring no gradient. It's the biggest downgrade I'll have to accept with the new body. 

Here's the Deuce I assembled. Scaris head on the G2 body. 

ReDeuced to one. There might never be deuce Deuces!

The first thing that made sense to try was redressing Deuce in the stock of every premade Deuce outfit I had now. 

Here he is in the full Scaris stock. 

I really like the Scaris shades, which seem almost blindfold-esque, as if in a translation of ancient Greek eye coverings to modern shades. I also really like the sleeveless hoodie, though it'd have been nice if the hood was large enough to cover his head...though it'd probably need a cutout through the top for his snakes and it would end up only looking like a hood from the very front. It's slightly tricky to put this on the G2 body because it all has to squeeze through the loop of the hood so it falls behind him, but if you put one arm through for the squeeze, then you can pull it up easily over the second. 

Deuce is no stranger to tastelessly loud patterns, and the shorts may be a bit much here paired with the hoodie. Also, they don't fit. 

Even a plumber would be embarrassed. 

One of the popular doll review channels I watched on YouTube back then was hosted by a mother and child who had coined the term "Deuce's Booty Issues" to refer to the phenomenon of doll pants pulling down or splitting open at the closure when you bent their legs to sit them down after encountering the problem with Deuce dolls. This is Deuce, and these are booty issues...but issues so bad he can't even stand with his pants closed! It's a shame because the shorts have their visual use, but this body just won't accommodate them. 

It's interesting to me that Scaris Deuce's loafers have the same snake graphic as Mansters Deuce's tank. That sounds like something to try matching up. 

Next is the Scream Uniform look.

The jersey tank is really unusual since it pulls up the body and fastens around the arms at the top of the shoulders, rather than opening down the back like every other doll tank I've seen. 

There's a clear reason for this, though--the back of the tank is printed with Deuce's name and number to make it more detailed and realistic, and decoration on both sides like this would not have worked visually for a tank that split down the back.

While it would have been easy and maybe practical for Mattel to leave the name and diamond patterns out of this outfit so it could be a generic fashion pack and other mansters could use it as an athletic uniform, I really appreciate that they chose to personalize it and make it exclusive to Deuce. 

I struggled to get his socked feet into his shoes all the way...and didn't succeed for this photoshoot. I think more careful socking would help make this work better, but his ankles aren't the tightest and I didn't want to break the feet in straining for this quick try-on. One foot had already popped out, but the pegs are apparently designed to be removable akin to the hands and forearms, so it wasn't a case of breakage.

I also figured out that I could tuck one of Deuce's shoulder straps into the tank so the shape became more toga-esque to personalize the uniform even more and add a Greek flair to his look.

Kinda wish Mattel had cut the jersey like this officially!

While I'm not an athlete or sports fan myself, I'm rather fond of this uniform. It's one of the costumes that's so distinctive to the aesthetic of the animated webisodes (it's a case where it feels like the dolls being based on the cartoon rather than vice-versa) and it makes me nostalgic. 

Next is Deuce in the Mansters stock.

I do think the skeleton-snake tank is a great piece to build an outfit around, but I don't think these pants are it. Or that they ever genuinely could be. They're right on the edge of "designer" and "completely styleless". They're pretty authentic to a lot of high-school dudes' attire (I've seen a lot of lazy flannel PJ pants from my peers at that time) but they're not stylish. His shoes are pretty basic, too. I love the shades. Red/green contrast is great for Deuce.

Here he is in the G2 stock, keeping the Mansters glasses as the closest equivalent to the red masquerade-stick shades the G2 doll originally came with. 

I'm frustrated by this outfit because of how cheap the shirt is, and because I can't even tell if it's meant to be. This could be a printed tuxedo shirt for Deuce, but it also just feels like the designers and factory were skimping us. This'd be a beautiful luxury/designer piece for Deuce if this were a three-dimensional ensemble, but it's just bleh. I might try to upgrade this by gluing fabric pieces over the printed areas where it'd be 3D, but I don't trust I'd have the precision to pull it off. I could also consider cutting the "undershirt" portion out and replacing it with a proper second layer. But what a waste as it is. I love the idea of Deuce having luxury clothing, since Versace uses the Medusa head for a logo--maybe his mom gets a deal with the company in exchange for her likeness!

The pants are really nice and flexible and very applicable, and I do like the boots. 

Then I tried Deuce in the G3 signature stock. The shoes of G3 Deuce are too small outright to fit the G1/G2 feet, so he can't wear those. I also had to cut the ankles of the pants open to slide the pant legs over his feet...but they were too tight even around the G3 feet so it's not a problem exclusive to this model.

Here's just the base outfit. 

I think G3 Deuce's purple works quite well on G1 Deuce...though this outfit gives me strong nightclub vibes. Maybe that's Deuce's 2000s cool-dude energy seeping in.

Here's the full G3 outfit.

I really love G3 Deuce's jacket. It's such a good piece. 

Now I started playing around with other combinations. I thought the Scaris look worked well with the long G2 pants and bracelet.

This fixes the Deuce's Booty Issues (while he stands, at least) and rounds out the costume more.

The jacket works with it too.

Then I tried the Scaris hoodie with the Mansters pants and the jacket...it's creating that ugly-luxury-tracksuit vibe.

Then I pulled in Shadow High Heather Grayson's white snakeskin pants (I've been waiting to use them for this!) and they allowed me to create a very striking monochromatic outfit.

I also tried my Mego green Frankenstein coat, which works more like a button-up shirt for Deuce. When the velcro closure on the right flap is tucked inward, it works as a shirt over a tank:

And it works really well as a confident fashion-model shirt on its own and closed.

Layering the jacket over this shirt and switching the shades made for a bulky, layered fashion-model look I could see in a print ad:

I also found a nice look to show off the matching snake loafers and tank. It required the Scaris shorts, so it's not completely functional, but from the front, this is nice!

Just keep your butt to the wall, Deuce.

This was the ultimate Deuce look I pulled together--red shades, G3 jacket, Mansters tank, G2 pants, boots, and bracelet, and Scaris bag with the G3 phone and scale wax as accessories. The scale wax tin and the phone both fit inside the bag neatly. The G3 bottle is also in the pool.

I like the scale wax and Medusa-head bottle a lot!

I think this look feels really unified and includes all of the highlights of Deuce's palette and vibe. It's tough, stylish, and interesting and has the best of all three generations' Deuces in multiple aspects.

Since I don't have a G1 Cleo, Deuce decided to fang out with his beastie Operetta.

She thought his shades looked great...and proved to be the only monster he'd ever meet to be brave enough to steal them! 

"My, ain't these just the darlingest little shades you ever did see-"
"AGHK- Operetta, are you stupid!?!?"

"Give me your faaaacee- Gotcha!"
"Good aim. And watch it, mister. I'm not stupid. I'm tough."

They both are.

I love them as friends.

These are my favorite looks:

Here's Deuce with everything in his final pool.

He's the most geared-up RESTYLE ICON yet. His list is:

* Base doll (G2 body with Scaris head)

* Scaris shades

* Mansters shades

* Scream Uniform shades

* G3 signature shades

* Scaris hoodie vest

* Scaris shorts

* Scaris loafers

* Scream Uniform jersey

* Scream Uniform shorts

* Scream Uniform socks

* Scream Uniform sneakers

* Mansters tank top

* Mansters long pants

* Mansters sneakers

* G3 signature jacket

* G3 signature tank top

* G3 signature long pants

* G2 bracelet

* G2 snake boots

* Mego green Frankenstein coat (shared with the Frankenstein figure)

* Shadow High Heather Grayson snakeskin pants (spare copy just for him)

* Scaris bag

* Scream Uniform casketball

* G3 signature water bottle, phone, and scale wax tin

I had a lot of fun working with Deuce, as you can probably tell. He was the closest I ever came to making a RESTYLE ICON in my original collection, and he became the most fruitful case in my newer one! I've always seen a lot of potential in him as a character despite official media making him both unlikeably nasty and stupid. I think I brought out a lot of fun with this huge pool of clothing pieces, taking the best of all three generations.

Dude. Totally venomous.