RESTYLE ICONS: Good Boy Bad!

It feels like forever since I did one of these! Let's take a look at one of two (or one half of two) characters who never really worked for me.

TT&T Valentine 2024 isn't over yet, but this is a break while the other project is in the works. All the same, we will be strongly riding the consecutive red color train started with Bramble, and this restyle does involve heart imagery, so it's not a massive departure from the seasonal theme!

So. I'm probably in the minority here because these characters are pretty popular, but I could not get on board with Jackson Jekyll and Holt Hyde.

Jackson and Holt as seen in the webisodes. This art matched the dolls better than the box artwork.

The idea was that Jackson was the only human student at MH, enrolled on the technicality that he transforms into Holt Hyde, a rowdy fire-elemental DJ. In the story, it starts that Holt takes over at night while Jackson is about during the day, mirroring the dynamic in Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, where the scientist chooses to drink the transforming elixir to live out his bad side at night, but the transformation trigger for Jackson and Holt shifts to become loud music, which makes their transformation a bit more optional for them. 

Every bit of their execution bothered me, though. Jackson was a really cardboard nerdy-wimp archetype with a horrible color palette, while Holt's design was good on its own merits, but the fire elemental thing had nothing to do with any traditional depictions of the Hyde transformation, and it was distracting to me. Both characters were voiced by a woman when they're definitely old enough for a man to voice them, and they were the only mansters in the cast not to be voiced by a man. That was really distracting. The two were also caught in a love-triangle story with Frankie Stein which felt tiresome. I just had nothing to latch onto. If I was going to get one, it would be Holt because, confusing or not, that color palette is great. But I decided to try at Jackson once I got an idea of a better set of clothes. 

It is very unlikely that Jackson and Holt will make a G3 comeback, since the Jekyll/Hyde monster gimmick was used for a movie-exclusive character, the half-human identity was used for Clawdeen, and G3 Heath Burns has more visual similarities to Holt than G1 Heath, which could make Holt redundant. That means working with G1 is gonna be my only means of making peace with the characters.

The Jackson I ordered was his Picnic Casket date-pack release with Frankie. Jackson's first doll was for the Gloom Beach doll line, meaning his signature release was actually his second doll. Jackson's signature doll also came after Holt's doll. Both Jackson and Holt's first dolls were released on the stupid early boy body with no wrist joints, leaving an uneven situation where Jackson's signature doll had jointed wrists, but Holt's didn't. Holt only had one successive doll as a Justice store exclusive in a swim line, and that doll had proper jointing. I just needed a Jackson with wrist joints for cheap, because his clothes weren't going to be a big part of it. This copy came incomplete (lacking glasses). 

Picnic Casket's hair has never looked good to me in any photos, but I guess this copy's could be worse. It's cut short and has a layer of yellow under black in the front to create the illusion of yellow frosted tips. It's evident from the doll box art and the diary writing that Jackson was envisioned as a fairly cool nerd with a more confident, sarcastic personality, only for the webisodes to turn him into a shy dork without anything fun about him, and the frosted tip hair coloring is the clearest remnant of cool-Jackson I see in the dolls, since it doesn't work with his webisode persona. I wish Jackson had kept the backbone and fun side he was first written with, because I find his animated portrayal very trite. 

As far as color, I guess I can see yellow working for Jackson, if they had used it for a yellow-and-black "danger" connotation as foreshadowing that the shy nerd had a dark side, but that's not the effect I'm seeing. It's just a really ugly color choice the way they did it. 

Despite being a dorky wimp, Jackson might have the most masculine head sculpt of the male student body. His jaw is square and strong and he's very classically handsome. I'm guessing this sculpt might have also been part of his intended characterization as a more rounded and cool nerd. 

As another side of the same coin, Holt shares this face sculpt, but his actual head mold might be different to accommodate his plastic flame-hair attachment. 

Jackson and Holt have a physical plastic eyebrow ring punched into the head, which is a really cool effect that hasn't been seen since (G3 Frankie has their eyebrow ring printed on). Jacksons and Holts have been known to have slight or more noticeable pinch deformation from their rings in the head vinyl, but this one looks alright. 

Jackson's outfit is ugly. Blue and green in these shades are already a risky combo, and they definitely don't work with yellow and grey. Jackson's colors are not appealing. 

One neat thing most Jackson and Holt dolls share is a yin-yang tattoo printed between their shoulderblades. It's a symbolic representation of their nature, and it's a fun thing that stays unchanged between them along with their face sculpt and eyebrow piercing. 

Holt's second doll lacks the tattoo, which is disappointing, though if you wanted a fully-jointed Holt with it, it might be possible to swap the forearms of the two dolls? Then again, the original Holt body would have elastic hips, so there's no winning. He just didn't get a fully-polished release, poor boy.

The entire reason I decided to do this project was because I felt L.O.L. O.M.G. Tough Dude's outfit was begging to be worn by Jackson. 

A red, black, and white outfit with a split-color dress shirt, sweater vest, checked suspenders, and leather jacket all felt perfect for a character who shifts between dorky good-boy and tough bad-boy. The pieces felt like Jackson chic done with a division motif and a color scheme perfect for a teenager torn between good and bad. Red, black, and white is obvious and common, but it's also effective. 

So, the first thing I did was try to dye the yellow in Jackson's hair red. It was easy to isolate this section of hair and dip it by tightening plastic wrap right at the hairline...

...but even after a longer soak, the hair didn't look red enough. I also had to get some dye out of the head, which cleaned some out of the hair too, and that was frustrating. I tried to work with it.

Since the Tough Dude costume pieces seemed best suited toward a Jackson who's a little bit Hyde at the same time, I decided to totally reinterpret the Jekyll/Hyde dynamic as a character who's a bit split at all times, and both sides of his nature are presenting simultaneously. I thought that felt more interesting to me personally, and the idea of someone more subtly in flux felt more realistic for a teenage version of the monster. I didn't want to fully Batman Two-Face his design, but I did decide to make him asymmetrical. I painted over his left iris in red, and added an upward-pointing fang on the left side of his mouth. I shadowed under his left eye and made his left brow bushier, and carved some scars out of the left side of his face to suggest his Hyde side got him into some trouble. I also pierced his ear and put Tough Dude's earring in on that side. 

For glasses, I needed something with lenses, so I just took my second pair of G3 sig Ghoulia glasses and removed the pink paint, creating triangular clear frames, and painted the left lens black to make the Hyde half into sunglasses.

The costume needed a bit of modification. While O.M.G. Guys clothes fit G1 MH boys well, the MH torso is longer, so Jackson needed a different pair of pants in order to cover his waist. I decided to use G3 Clawd's. The ripped texture and claw marks and grey color all worked, and they came up high enough on his torso for the O.M.G. shirt to be tucked in and the waist to be covered. I just cut the suspenders off and glued them into the Clawd pants, and painted red over all of the claw mark designs.

For shoes, I used the loafers Jackson came in, and just wiped off the green paint. I gave him the L.O.L. Surprise Tweens Max Wonder sock without the heart pattern for his left to echo the sweater vest, and a Shadow High Ash sock on his right. 

On the leather jacket, I painted over the text elements with splashes of color, and the "RACING HEART" back slogan got covered over to read "HYDE N SEEK".

I also threw in G3 Refresh Draculaura's hat as an option for more Hyde-style looks.

Here's the result of the first round, before I added the earring.

I was already delighted by the amount of permutation offered by the Tough Dude clothing (suspenders, vest, jacket, shirt, and jacket belt all being optional), and the glasses and hat add even more variability to Jackson!

However, the hair simply wasn't working. So I decided to go for a wig--a Monster High wig. And an excuse to get a highly coveted doll. 

I've wanted the male Gargoyle Create-a-Monster doll for ages ever since I came up with an idea for what to do with him, and I decided to get a relatively cheap listing that came with the wig and vampire shirt and shorts from his two-pack set with the Vampire boy. Unfortunately, like most winged MH dolls on the aftermarket, this copy came wingless, but I then found a copy of his wings separate after.

The CAM line is full of grail dolls for me, but this is one of them checked off!

Don't expect his project immediately or even within the next month, but it'll probably be sooner than later. I might have other priorities coming up.

The wig from this set is side-parted to the wearer's left, which I thought would be ideal for Jackson's dark side. I trimmed down some of the wig cap, and had to paint his scalp black just because the wig doesn't fully cover the machined elements of his head, but despite the awkward wear, it's still an improvement over the rooted style. I think the hair creates the exact right kind of painfully-2000s edgy-dude style on the left. I like working with G1 MH in the fashion context of its heyday and choosing dated fashion elements to match.

I got a good face portrait with split lighting. 

And I got a good pose for him in full Hyde mode, with the coat just around his shoulders and the hat on.

And I got a good shadow picture. The hat was edited into the real shadow that was cast.

In canon, Operetta and Holt had a brief relationship, but I think this Jackson pairs even better with restyled Operetta, if only on a visual level. Being dressed in a rockabilly doll's clothes certainly helps!

And here he is with the other restyled mad-science manster, Invisi Billy. 

I previously did a Jekyll/Hyde custom with a Mystixx base, but I declined to dig Jacqueline out of storage for photos.

I'm happy with the work I did with Jackson. I think the costume is fantastic for him, and I love its layers and variable pieces. While my take on the monster concept kind of invalidates him coexisting with Holt, I'm not saying "never" to Holt, either. He could join my collection, and I could see a minor restyle with him, if only to try non-flame hair for him. I could even see myself doing a more true-to-canon minor restyle of Jackson to cut the green and blue out of his colors...just not anytime super soon. 

For now, I'm happy with this monster boy and his different sides.