Look Who's Talking: A Puppet Monster Custom Project!

When a Cedar Wood doll is part of a package you ordered for a clothing piece, you have to do something with the doll left over!

If you've read enough of my posts, you'll get an idea of just how long this particular idea has been stagnating--I got the base doll as part of an order for my original character Dendrea Barker in March last year! It was the Spring Unsprung edition of Cedar, and the cheapest option to get her tree dress was to get an incomplete doll wearing it. 

Spring Unsprung Cedar as she arrived.

Cedar is the daughter of Pinocchio in the Ever After High franchise, and identifies with the Rebel faction of students who don't believe they have to repeat their parents' fairy-tale stories. The Royal students are the group who want to or think they should. (EAH tackled pretty big themes of tradition and independence, and perhaps even conservatism vs. restructuring the system.) Cedar is a Rebel because she lives with the outright inability to tell lies after a spell from the Blue Fairy to make her honest and kind, and she wants to break from the story restricting her and gain agency over her speech, which is pretty poignant. Pinocchio was my favorite story as a child, and I had a collection of Pinocchio toys, but Cedar's doll designs never quite hit the mark for me personally and I didn't seek any of them out in the end. But Cedar was such a cool doll on an objective level. She was the only Ever After High doll to have an all-over detailed textured body where every sculpt was designed for her. This level of lavish detail and unique body parts was pretty common in--and something of a signature for-- Monster High, but EAH featured many more human characters and generally seemed very reluctant to customize the doll bodies or even depict anthropomorphic characters. No EAH character had wings that attached to their bodies instead of their outfit, or real animal ears, for one. Even facial sculpts were mostly the same until later in the brand. But then again, the brand had much more lavish glittery princessy costumes, and fancy antique-themed paint work on the vinyl costume parts, so the budget was clearly focused more on the clothing. 

Like many MH dolls, Cedar's head is far less textured than her body, but it can make sense if you view it as having been sanded-down more to make the face the most realistic and pretty part of her body, and they did a good job fading the texture off the edges of her face so it's not just a smooth head on a textured body. While her facial features aren't different, Cedar still got one of the coveted unique head sculpts in the early days of EAH where nobody got those!

Cedar's entire body is covered in a textured woodgrain, and her limbs feature molding to simulate peg joints of a puppet, akin to the way Monster High's robots simulate screws.

Monster High G2 character Treesa Thornwillow has a similar woodgrained body concept, but her sculpts are more tree-like since that's what she is, and as such, feature branches, critters, and no puppet joints. Her head is smooth, but not grained on all of the edges--just at the hairline, seemingly to imitate baby hairs.

Cedar was too good of a doll sculpt to waste, so I wondered if this puppet could sidle over sideways into Monster High instead as another classic toy monster--the possessive ventriloquist dummy!

Dummies are a pretty uniquely psychological horror toy-monster, since they operate on an unsettling reversal of their already-unsettling purpose--as creepy puppets controlled to speak by a performer, horror dummies often flip the script to make it seem as if they are in charge of the person. Sometimes dummies aren't even explictly supernatural, like in the film Magic, and sometimes they are and torment an audience and the owner by making it seem like all of their heinous speech and actions are the fault of the performer. Other times, the dummy is explicitly a mundane product of a mental disorder and is a manifestation of an alternate personality or repressed urges, like with Batman villain Arnold Wesker, known as the Ventriloquist, and his gun-toting dummy Scarface. The two most famous scary dummies in pop culture are probably Slappy from the children's horror Goosebumps book series and media franchise, and Billy the Puppet, the mouthpiece of the Jigsaw Killer in the Saw franchise. Slappy is awoken and put to sleep by an incantation and abuses an improbably large group of wannabe-ventriloquist children...seriously, what kid aspired to ventriloquy? Billy's not supernatural and is just a remote-controlled puppet to creep out Jigsaw's victims. (I'd love to see Billy adapted in the Skullector line. That feels like a no-brainer.)

Here's the profile for this character. I wanted to get in references to the eeriness of dummies and make her someone who struggles to be trusted because of it, but I decided not to push her into genuinely sinister territory. Her name derives from Charlie McCarthy, the famous dummy of ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, and her last name is also meant to invoke vocalizations with the "call". 

Chatterine "Chattie" McCall

Monster Parentage: Ventriloquist dummies

Killer Style: I try to dress like a real classy doll--ready to perform in the best of vaudeville!
Freaky Flaw: I got a few problems with my speech and pronunciation, and I know it ain't my fault, but it can make me feel like such a dummy all the same.
Favorite Activity: Impressions. I can sound just like others and even toss the sound to come right from them!
Biggest Pet Peeve: People pulling my string to shut me up. Respect my right to speak.
Favorite School Subject: Psychology. Nobody seems to want me to take it, though...
Least Favorite School Subject: Debate club. Every time I try to throw my voice in, people say I'm trying to speak over them or put words in their mouth. 
Favorite Food: Tomatoes and lettuce...which is a shame because the crowd never tosses 'em at me!
Pet: I don't have one. I get a little uncomfortable hearing people talk about how their pets are in charge of them.
Best Friends: Gooliope Jellington, Twyla Boogeyman

Some of my work with Chattie happened soon after getting her, so this is all stuff that was done ages ago. I cut her hair and removed the roots, since I wanted different hair for her, and I repainted the face a bit. I tried changing the eye color to green and made the brows more caricatured, as well as adding cutesy dummy freckles on her cheeks, widening her lips and making them red, and adding lines to suggest the classic puppet jaw. 

This doll can tip her head pretty far to the side, which is excellent for a floppy creepy dummy. 

Cedar had an SDCC edition with an actually moving cut puppet jaw...but that doll, depicting a nightmare of Cedar's future, also included a pointy nose from lying and donkey's ears, so even if it was feasible to obtain, the head sculpt wouldn't have been viable for this idea. 

My initial plan for Chattie's hair was to order a wig from FnFdollstudio on Etsy again, choosing a dark red color. However, when the wig arrived, I was disappointed. It's the same floaty fiber that doesn't interact or stick together like real hair, the rooting and cap were a little wonky, and the hair couldn't be cut into something appealing. It just ended up looking like a darker Chucky mop.

To dress her, I tried the costume of an Eddie Munster figure imitating the Mego style, and the fit and look was okay, but the brown color felt wrong. I failed to dye it black (not knowing how due worked properly then), so I decided not to go there. Here's a test with those pieces I didn't use, before my failed attempts to modify them.

This is a good look, but it's not very Monster High, and wrecking the wig forced my hand and made me consider something else. The shirt is the best part here, feeling oversized in a way that's perfect for a dummy.

I eventually realized the Inner Monster tornado hair would be a good sculpt for Chattie since it's a plastic wig that would suit a dummy well and I felt strongly that a ponytail would work for her. I got this piece maybe halfway between this first work on Chattie and the completion just now. She fell firmly onto the back burner so I wasn't quick about sourcing the things she needed. I didn't get pictures of it at this time, but the wig is translucent purple with a rotating ponytail, and the ponytail piece is a very heavy piece of solid vinyl, such that it turns with gravity and makes the head move with gravity as well. I was also concerned about it not being opaque. I had wondered about changing its color, but paint on plastic was something I was growing wary of in terms of sustaining the look. 

I also found a good source for a suit to give her that would be better and more fun than the plan I had--Monster Ball Clawdeen. This doll is part of an upcoming project, but Chattie happened to be finished first! I got Monster Ball Clawdeen primarily for Chattie's benefit, though her top was vital for the Clawdeen project. 

I kept the Munster shirt but swapped the jacket and pants for the Monster Ball parts to do a quick test. I really liked how the purple of the wig worked with the red-violet of the suit, so I decided I might go against dummy convention and give Chattie a very purple color scheme. That's quite Monster High, and I figured it would still look fine and read well with the right changes.

To make the suit work, I unstitched and removed the athletic stripes on the sides to make the piece more formal, and painted the strip at the top of the trousers black to cover the leopard print. I also painted the gold crescent buttons over with black to give her jacket dot buttons. To make the shirt stay tucked into the pants, I glued on a piece of yarn to serve as a strap under her torso that would prevent the shirt from being pulled out of the trousers. 

With her face, I changed things to make her feel creepier and more aligned with the new palette idea. I made her lips dark brown to match her bow, and repainted her eyes over with aqua and tiny dot pupils to make her eyes look glassy and piercing like any freaky doll's should. I didn't need to balance the color with anything, and the look was perfect. I also re-repainted her brows to match the final hair, and painted dark purple inside the wig to make it more opaque. I don't care if any of that paint rubs off on her head, because no one will see it. To prevent her hair from spinning on its own or throwing her head off-balance, I added some superglue in the ponytail and her neck cavity to give them more friction. 

Then, I decided to go all-out for that last touch and add a pull-string in her back to make her feel more like a puppet. I grabbed the microphone from Shadow High Harley Limestone, which has a string attached to a plastic piece that plugs into her amp. I cut the end off and glued the string in to create a piece to plug into her back.

I then cut the mic off and tied a metal ring to it. 

Then, I bored a hole into her back to put the plug into to have a system so the thing would be removable.

I cut holes in her shirt and jacket and sealed the edges so the string could come out the back.

The last thing was to cover her feet. I put some white Rainbow High socks on her, and looked for shoes. I wanted something like Mary Janes, and landed on the shoes Popart Draculaura came in--they even have speech bubbles on the toes!

I then dyed the shoes black once the proper black dye for synthetics came in. 

Dressing this doll has a more complex order of operations--the shirt and the socks have to go on before the pants to make sure they're tucked in right!

Here's the whole doll!

I had so much fun posing her in limp, floppy shapes. Her eyes really get you even when she looks completely inert!

Here she is standing. 

And she can pose in a more jerky, awkward way for more puppet physicality.

Since she's a toy OC with a back insert, she ended up quite similar to Tinny Tinkerpins!

They've got each other's backs.

I really like how her colors came out, and I'm absolutely haunted by her eyes. She's so striking, and I really think she perfectly matches the tone of that horrible scary doll in the corner of your room!

I've worked with characters who have offered me multiple aesthetics in photoshoots, but this ghoul slammed straight into horror without question. She's maybe the creepiest MH OC I've made all because of that gaze. But I think she's also quite fun and looks really polished now. To think I was ready to give up on her after so long not feeling where the idea was going! 

I suppose Chattie could also be on hand in the rare occasions where I need an Ever After High body model. She'd be mildly annoying to undress and her textured body could be distracting, but also, how often will I find myself needing an EAH model? 

Well, that's miss Chatterine McCall. Finally, finally crossed off the list, and in a really effective way, too. I'm glad she turned out so well! 

Keep on talking, Chattie.