Living Dead Dolls Roundup 1

While LDD special topics will continue to receive their own posts, there are several LDDs I'm going to try to collect over time that aren't connected to each other and/or don't warrant a full standalone post, so I'm going to be doing roundups to update on more miscellaneous acquisitions. The way I see it, LDD is special enough for me to document every doll I get on the blog here, but not enough for every doll to take up a post for itself. These dolls can be complete releases, or even, perhaps, incomplete miscellaneous Living Dead Dolls I decided to adopt just because they had something I liked that didn't require the whole package. So here's my first roundup. 

I would say this post is pretty safe as LDD goes. There's some scary (gore-free) imagery with the first doll, but nothing I would call truly distressing.

Sneaking to the Slime: Hush

Hush is such a compelling Living Dead Doll to me because she's a mix of honestly freaky, mildly repulsive, and gosh-darned adorable. Hush comes from Series 6, whose theme is "The Number of the Beast". As such, there's an irregular total of six dolls in the series, and each comes with a pet animal, leaving a number of beasts within the cast of the series, and 6 dolls and 6 animals in series 6! The pet theme is the only link between the characters, though--they're not otherwise conceptually related and don't coexist in one setting the way other series like 23, 31, 33, and 34 do. 

Series 6 is honestly one of those series I wouldn't say no to a single doll from, and I could seriously see myself collecting all of them--it's the only "variety" series where I can say that. The other two series I can consider completing (23, which is already underway, and 31) have thematically-unified casts. Fortunately, as things stand right now, Series 6 promises to be easy to collect. All of the dolls are on the lower end of the aftermarket prices. All the more for me to enjoy!

I never would have thought it would be Hush as my first doll in the series, but I'd recently become obsessed with her, and was always at least a little captivated. I firmly rank Hush as one of the all-time creepiest Living Dead Dolls ever made...and also find her very endearing.

Hush's story is that she's a little girl who snuck down into the sewers at night and befriended and fed the rats who lived there, only to slip and fall to her death down in the drains during one of her visits, whereupon she became rat food herself. I find her design to perfectly capture the disgusting environment she found herself in without being truly revolting and intolerable, as well as having some of the weird stupid innocence a girl would need to possess to end up in that situation. Hush had been on my mind for a time, and popped up as a pretty low offering for LDD in mint condition, so I said yes. 

I got Hush before S3 Lottie, so this was the second-oldest LDD packaging I had seen at the time of getting her, after S1 Sadie.

Here's the coffin unwrapped. The wrap is just like the Series 1 Sadie box, with rattly sheet plastic.

The Series 6 coffin is black with handles on the side like Series 8, and has the pink tissue that was the "default" for several early series. 

The chipboard displays a color photo closeup of Hush's eyes styled as a jagged cutout, along with her poem. Through a typo, the rat Shriek's name is not capitalized, though the name being a verb means it's very easy not to realize a mistake was made.

Her poem reads:

Shy little Hush

and her pet rat Shriek

Dwelling in the sewer,

These two are sure to reek.

Here's a metrical rewrite attempt.

Look at little Hush and her pet rat Shriek

Sewer-dwelling pals, they are freaks who reek

The back of the box under the opaque lid feels like an in-between stage for the ones I've shown. It's less cluttered than Series 1, and has the slogan featured in Series 8, but it has yellow text and the illustration from the inner lid which were seen on the Series 1 back.

"Creepy Doll" is inappropriately capitalized like in Series 8.

I found myself having an easier time with Hush's package, since I knew the chipboard was taped inside now and got that off easily. After that, the backdrop and tissue slid out with ease and I was able to undo the ties. There's an extra twist tie in the Series 6 dolls' boxes for the requisite pet, and Shriek was rested on a small plastic tray under the tie and over Hush's legs.

However, putting the coffin back together was trickier. The tissue adhesive to the backdrop hadn't held, so I had to try to tuck it in after the backdrop was in, and it wasn't so smooth. While I love the look and feel of the classic packaging with the tissue, I'm starting to feel more and more that the switch to plastic trays is more user-friendly and appealing. It seems like it can be hit or miss whether the tissue in a coffin is orderly and properly secured or not. Age definitely decreases the odds of a tidy tissue, though. S1 Sadie's was pretty shredded in the unboxing process.

Here's the doll unboxed.

Hush's death certificate has the graphical style of many series, and it's the same look as all LDD death certificates I've come across so far. She died on December 20, 1971. The most likely thematic reason for this death date is that Roy Disney died that day--he was the co-founder of the Disney empire and the brother of the famous man with the Mouse. I'm surprised they picked Roy and not Walt for the date, though. It wouldn't have been a massive distance from Roy--Walt was December 15, 1966.

Hush must have lived somewhere warm to have not died of hypothermia before she could become rodent feed. Sneaking out late in just a nightie during December would be unthinkable in many areas. Going on the Disney allusion, though, California or Florida could make sense as her location.

Her poem reads:

Shy little Hush thought rats were so pretty

So it was her good fortune she lived by the city

It was easy to sneak into the sewer each night

To offer her pets a cheesy delight

But one silly slip landed Hush on her head

It was right there she drowned and the rats were well fed.

Interesting that both poems start with the exact same phrase. Here's a rewrite attempt.

Quiet sweet Hush felt that rats were so pretty

It was good fortune she lived by the city

Easy she snuck down each night to the sewer

Offering cheese to the sweet mischief-doers

One night, she fell on her head in the slurry

Rats swarmed, and they were well fed in a scurry

Here's the doll. What a horrible little presence.

Hush's hair is long and black and with a center parting, falling out of her face in a big mop. One really interesting thing they did with her was to make her hair out of very thin rooted yarn rather than typical fake hair fiber, lending it a really messy, matted, freaky appearance that well conveys the soggy and filthy look of a girl who fell in the sewer. It can expose some bald spots because yarn hair functionally has to be rooted/laid thinner to feel proportionate in volume, but for such a thoroughly bedraggled girl as Hush, bald spots aren't that bad. Yarn hair can only be finger-combed to tidy it up, but tidiness is not the intention here. 

I really enjoy yarn hair because it can be so easily arranged and combed and positioned for effect in ways fiber hair can't do unaided, so Hush's hair can hang pretty much as wide or narrow, or as in front of out out of her face as you want. It's all harrowing and horrible and always looks its worst (read:best)!

As if she needed to look any scarier!

And here's Hush's hair at its most orderly.

I find her to look best in her awful way when her hair is all swept out of her face and asymmetrical but it's really fun to play with.

Yarn specifically like this was later used for Series 30's Lucy, the freak show geek. Geeks, in the original context of carnivals, were also a filthy sort and agreed to bite the heads off small animals for entertainment, so it suited her too. While Hush's Resurrection doll is respectable in her own right, I think she has far less character, and one aspect of that includes using a typical smooth hair fiber and having a tidier hairstyle.

Official LDD photo of Resurrection Hush.

Thin yarn like this might have been the superior option to give to Faith for a wet-hair look, since wet hair is creepiest when scraggly. Faith's glossy hair would have been good in theory when new, but it was so thin on my copy, and a little damaged. And it might have been too tidy for a drowned doll, shiny or not.

With thin yarn on Faith, I could have created hair arrangements like this...

...without actual water. Of course, the double-edged sword is that yarn hair would be absorbent, unlike realistic hair fiber, meaning taking pictures of a Faith made that way in muddy water would probably be inadvisable for maintaining the doll--and photos of her hair dunked in water would look less realistic than they do with standard doll hair. Hush's hair looks more convincing dry than it would wet, while Faith's hair doesn't look so creepy when it's dry.

It's debatable whether Faith should have had hair like Hush, but the choice to give her realistic hair can't be explained by Faith being released before a doll debuted this yarn hair. Hush was two series before Faith.

Other characters with yarn hair are Macumba (the only Black doll, using it for a Black hair texture), Captain Bonney (meant to look pirate-braided), Misery (likely done for a wild silhouette), Agrat-Bat-Mahlat (likely meant to look messy or wild), Daisy Slae (either for a wild look or to depict white-girl hippie dreadlocks). Rotten Sam and Sandy and Series 6 fellow Calico all use yarn hair as literal yarn due to their rag-doll imagery. Sam and Sandy are parodies of Raggedy Ann and Andy, and Calico is a Frankenmonster with a patchwork theme, fairly similar to Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas. Hush and Lucy are the only LDDs with really thin yarn hair.  

Yarn yarn yarn yarn. I'm spinning quite a yarn about yarn here. Might as well direct you to my first exploits with yarn hair making over Treesa Thornwillow while I'm at it.

Hush's face paint is haunting, with very bold dark grey veining all over that looks like deathly decay or toxin effects, but also makes her look like an old doll with a cracked or crazed finish. 

I love LDDs which can be read as horrifyingly warped antiques, and Hush works in that category for me. She has fairly standard LDD eyes, with two rings of grey shading her irises, and an intense inflamed pink airbrushed shading surrounds them, presumably to make her look ill. Hush's eyes are outlined in grey rather than black, and her bold veins still have an airbrushing element to them, softening her in some nice disquieting ways so she doesn't look like an all-out cartoon. Her face is extremely stark and shocking, but it's graceful enough to be a genuinely gorgeous paint job. It's mesmerizing and I keep coming back to stare at it. Hush's body color is a very very pale pink. Her lips are black. 

Hush's expression is fairly vague but she looks slightly scared or unhappy, like someone without a lot of foresight or perspective who made a dumb mistake. Despite her really scary-looking veins and nasty appearance, I also find Hush to be very sweet. However, two lines connected to her veins fall pretty exactly into the LDD brow shape used on dolls like Lottie, which allows her to be read as more intense and wicked, so it's kind of up to you whether she has brows or not. Here's me outlining the spot where I'm seeing eyebrows to illustrate it to you. I'd struggle to believe these aren't meant to be eyebrows.

Schrödinger's eyebrows.

I prefer her viewing her as looking more startled and sad, though, so I like that the brows fade out at a distance.

I love the contrast of her hair and skin. In low lighting, she looks especially pale and ghostly, and the eye shading seems to get redder.

The vein detail continues all across Hush's body, and her nails are painted black. I really love the LDDs that are thoroughly painted, and Series 6 includes another one with Calico and her full-body patchwork design. She and Hush have more in common than I realized!

Official LDD portrait of Calico.
(Like I said, I could see myself owning all of the Series 6 dolls.)

Hush's costume is one piece--a nightdress, implying she's snuck out of the house at night to visit her hideaway. Hush is barefoot to match this vibe. Her feet are not molded very evenly, so she's the least steady on her feet of the LDDs I have so far. Barefoot Faith stands a bit better than Hush does.

The dress has ribbon straps tied in bows, though I will not endeavor to see if they untie, and has a tiered construction. The greyish color has some darker stains, and it seems clear that the dress is overall designed to look like it had started out white or cream in color. The back of the dress velcros, but the way it's sewn, the hook and loop strips cross over in an X or V instead of lining up parallel.

This dress feels really lovely. Clearly, by Series 6, LDD had already begun to deliver on really great doll clothing.

I think Hush's color scheme is so beautifully done. The grey in her eyes and dress are a perfect match for the pink and stark black, and she overall evokes classic pale little monster/ghost girls with black hair while not feeling derivative. She feels grounded and stylized to me in just the right blend, and is extremely interesting and arresting to me for a doll with design features that aren't unique in horror history.

Because she's from Series 6, Hush is on the older swivel body. Hush's vinyl has some strange spots of grime and discoloration, so, while she's textually meant to be filthy, I will try to wash her down to just the designed repulsiveness. 

Hush's animal companion is naturally a rat, who's named Shriek. The two make a pair of names that sounds like someone trying to quiet a scream--Hush and Shriek! The Series 6 animals are static figurines which are quite large next to the dolls, and done in a very caricatured style. Shriek has red eyes, a brown mohawk, and a snarl that only a lethally naive girl like Hush could possibly love. 

He's made of a relatively soft vinyl with a hole in the bottom, like a rubber duck but not as squishy. I don't think all of the pets were made like this, but it was viable for this guy. The creases on the head have some dark washing to make his definition pop more. 

The two Series 6 dolls who were redesigned in Resurrection series XI did not have pets, but they referenced their original pets in their variant dolls' costumes. Dottie Rose's variant had a poodle skirt printed with her specific poodle Hun, and Hush was dressed and made up in a full-on rat suit with a fluffy hooded, tailed onesie, and painted whiskers and teeth! 

Official LDD photo.

Then, to take photos of Hush, I grabbed whatever I could find to construct a sewer. I decided I could fake one with my garden path, using the patio edge as the walk and the dirt, flooded, as the sludge. I grabbed some things to construct some walls around her. For extra dressing, I thought an unclaimed foot from a failed doll project was an appropriate thing to find down in the drains.

I also really liked an edit that created toxic green lighting.

The grass kind of harms the effect, but I think I did okay.

Hush also looked really good near the basement boiler with all the pipes. 

And this time, the toxic green really bounces off her sickly pink.

Hush's colors aren't too bright, but she really works in this hypersaturated setup!

And lastly, a pair of photos staging the moments after her death.

It's strange to call such a freaky little thing a beautiful doll, but that's what Hush is. Her visual design is magnetic, arresting, and lush in all its sick little ways, perfectly capturing an exaggerated, creepy horror look with some real care and skill. Hush has incredible paint work, her dress is really nicely made, and her crazy yarn hair is such a wonderful asset. She's my filthy little sewer baby and I love her. I think she's a real standout in the brand.

Ding, Dong, the Witch is Undead: The Lost in Oz (Emerald City Variants) Walpurgis as the Wicked Witch of the West

I'd been interested in the Oz Walpurgis doll for a while, both because she felt like the most classical spooky witch in the line (I prefer the Halloween icon, despite its problems, to arcane paganism) but also because she looked good. I wasn't hugely enchanted by her, so she was a low-priority item...and then I saw a loose incomplete listing of her variant doll, with its greener color palette, for pretty cheap and I had to jump on it. The colors looked gorgeous, and it didn't matter that she didn't have her glasses or that she was the variant edition. The Witch is green regardless, so the variant/normal differences make no difference to me for this one character, and she looked great--probably even better than the main edition!

Walpurgis, the Living Dead Dolls original character, was an exclusive doll outside of series and released in Germany. She's based on pagan witchcraft and her name references the tradition of Walpurgisnacht, a Christian holiday on the eve of May Day celebrating a saint who fought against witchcraft. Walpurgis feels very much like she could be an extra character from the witchcraft-themed Series 26. Most of those witches are classically pagan-themed and named after holidays as well. The series has an odd doll out with Holle Katrina, a Halloweeny goth witch based on a contest winner. Walpurgis would have easily fit in Holle Katrina's spot to make a more cohesive series, though her goat mask would be redundant next to Samhain's. (The other odd-doll-out in Series 26 was Lamenta, completing a trio of dolls that had started in Series 21--more on her in this very post!)

It's appealing to call Walpurgis "Val" for short, but it's a little confusing in this particular series because you could also use that as the nickname for the Tin Man played by the Bride of Valentine. 

Walpurgis as the Wicked Witch of the West is clearly based on the depictions of the Witch as indelibly established by the MGM film, and not the book. 

The Witch as a black-haired, black-dressed, green-skinned, two-eyed woman was ingrained as her image thanks to Margaret Hamilton's costume design and iconic portrayal of the figure.

Margaret Hamilton, in the act of cementing an archetype for generations.

This LDD take on the Witch also invokes younger, prettier takes on her as seen in Wicked and Oz: The Great and Powerful-- I think Val is actually the most like the latter. 

Image of Theodora, the Oz: The Great and Powerful take on the Wicked Witch of the West.

I've never seen Great and Powerful, and it's left basically zero cultural impact, but I loved its character of the China Girl and the nearly life-size Jakks Pacific doll which you've already seen.

I think she's already begun to pack her bags, hearing the Wicked Witch is here!

In the book, the Witch was described as having only one eye, which worked like a telescope to survey all of Oz, and her hair, clothing, and skin color were never mentioned. W.W. Denslow illustrated her with a Halloweeny witch hat and an eyepatch, though neither were in the narration, and the Witch was far more kooky and whimsical-looking in his illustrations, with a frilly, striped outfit and hair in three braided pigtails.

Denslow was the only person to illustrate the Witch of the West during the initial runs of the Oz books because she dies in the first book and Denslow was replaced as the series' illustrator by John R. Neill from the second book on. 

The LDD Emerald City Witch, like the other variants, changes the color palette but not the doll's construction, save for the addition of emerald sunglasses which my copy lacks. I'm not bothered by that. Since the Witch looks so good, she can just as easily be the normal edition in my mind, and I might even prefer how her palette makes her less derivative of the MGM Witch. She's a huge icon and she's absolutely scary, but that comes at the cost of the pop-culture Witch of the West being so imitated and so simple that she winds up as of the least interesting witch designs in the pantheon to me.

Here's the variant LDD Wicked Witch as she arrived.

Up top, she wears a black satin witch hat. It's not sewn to pull down over her head. It rests on top, and is held on with an elastic chin strap like the Tin Man had for her cap. The hat has wire sewn in to pose the brim and point, and the hat can be adjusted to different positions on her head. It's possible to hide the strap by having it go behind her ears with the hair streaming out the back, but it's more secure attached under her chin, and it lends her a cute retro-dolly charm that way. 

I think she looks just as good without her hat, though, where she adopts a more arcane medieval-sorceress look. With no hat, she feels like she could be playing the Arthurian enchantress Morgan le Fay.

The most immediate coloring difference with variant Walpurgis is her hair, which has changed from black in the main set to a vivid green. Original Val's hair was white. The Wicked Witch's hair would have come tied in a ponytail (both dolls had it), but this seems to have been done purely for packaging, as official photos of the Witch, in both versions, have her hair down. I think this is a good move. The Witch's hair being loose isn't a trait of previous visual depictions of the character, and for Emerald City Val, the loose hair brings the green out way more.

The hair isn't very orderly, so I will try to boil it.

Oz Val is a glow-in-the-dark doll with a yellow-greenish translucent color, and I think it looks sooo so good against her green tones. Even though it's a "default" color for glowing cast plastic, it feels beautifully coordinated with this design, at least on this Emerald City variant. Vivid or greenish yellow tones play so well with greens and they're a great accent to a heavily-green design. I discovered that with one Halloween tableau I set up last year. 

The yellowish body color also makes her feel more unique than a straight green, and it could even be book-accurate to an extent given that the Western country she ruled was identified by the color yellow. She looks yellower in certain lighting, and I think the doll looks best in scenarios where her skin looks yellow against her green tones.

Val's doll in the glow-in-the-dark variant set of the Oz series was completely unchanged from her main doll since she already glowed. The original Walpurgis had opaque off-white skin. Revenant in Series 6 was the first Living Dead Doll cast in glowing plastic, but there were some some dolls with luminous paint jobs to glow with opaque bodies. I think Revenant is the same color as Oz Val.

This is her glowing.

And she looks cool illuminated to make her glow internally with a light source, too.

Oz Walpurgis has fairly few similarities to her original doll, but she is still easily recognizable with her face paint that includes an airbrushed branched design on her forehead.

LDD photo of the original Walpurgis with her face uncovered (she wears a goat-skull mask).

It's never been clear if the forehead paint is supposed to be Palpatine-style creepy wrinkles or if it's perhaps an ash drawing of a sigil or tree or other paganistic marking, but it looks nice. Her eyes and eyelashes are also similar to the first Val. Her brows and lashes are super bold and exaggerated, and her sclerae are a darker version of her iris color. Val also has grey airbrushing around her eyes to sink them in. Because this is her Emerald City doll, the eyes are vivid green within green sclerae, which looks absolutely incredible, but the main doll has white irises in red sclerae like original Val, which pops against the green really nicely. Because the Witch was mostly green and black before, the change to green eyes makes her the Emerald City doll with the most stark color palette, as she's purely greens and black. Both Wicked Witch dolls have her black lip paint in a cheeky little smirk, which is amazing.

My copy had some smudges that cleaned off and black lines by her right eye that didn't. Maybe paint from her original shades rubbed off. Her hair also is rooted just a little bit off-target, with a little bit of her hairline falling behind the painted area of her scalp. 

The Wicked Witch's dress is the same as the main edition, just with black and green swapped on the skirt, cuffs, and shoulders to make the green elements more prominent. The dress has a pointy villain collar behind the neck, puffed shoulders with ribbon stripes, lace sleeves with frilled cuffs, a waist frill, a pleated skirt, and the same lace laid over the front half of the sweetheart bodice. The non-lace fabric is a satiny fabric like her hat, and the dress velcros up the back.

The dress feels very glamorous and regal, more like an evil queen than a witch, though the color and collar also remind me of Winifred Sanderson!

I was very surprised to discover Val had a pair of black footie tights under her skirt.

These aren't at all visible without lifting the skirt, and they don't offer a whole lot of objective value, but I appreciate them. I think they probably missed a trick by not doing stripy witchy tights like a few dolls have had before, particularly since the crushed Wicked Witch of the East in the MGM film, who is only seen leg-down, had striped tights. Still, the black works fine, and this doll is not from the film. Unsurprisingly, she has the pointy boots because they're the witchiest LDD shoe.

Walpurgis's legs or boots don't seem to be molded very evenly, because she rocks back and forth between two stable positions instead of having one firm flat stance.

This take on Walpurgis also gives her the longer claw-hand arms introduced with the Count Orlok Nosferatu doll. I really like the threatening presence of these arms, and they have a creepy straightened stiffness to their shape too. They're a super fun choice for a witch doll.

Here's how her arms compare to a typical sculpt (on the older swivel body, but it doesn't make a huge difference).

I'd heard and seen photos suggesting the ball-joint body was actually taller than the swivel body, but the difference seems subtler in this comparison than I'd seen elsewhere. Val does seem a little taller, but I expected a starker contrast.

The Wicked Witch is the first Oz LDD I've encountered with painted underwear.

Because of the shape of her hands, it's possible to slide Val's sleeves down off her arms to undress her, but to put her outfit back on, you need to pop her arms out and slide them up the sleeves through the cuffs, and then reattach the arms to the body when the dress is pulled up over the doll. The claws will catch on the lace and the hands are too wide to push down through the sleeves. 

The clawed arms aren't cast in a softer vinyl than usual, so they're a little pokey and sharp.

These arms, in addition to Nosferatu and the Wicked Witch, also featured on demonic Resurrection Lilith, the reimagined Beast in the Resurrection-esque Beauty and the Beast set, and my first favorite LDD, boogeymonster Thump. 

The Witch has no accessories, which might be part of her not being able to take too much from the film. A broomstick would be expected, but that's a movie thing.

Her hair tidied up okay. I think it got a little fried and frazzled, but it's fine. 

I collect witches, but not on principle. The witch has to be good. And this is not a good witch. She's an absolutely wicked one. She's easily my favorite plastic witch doll. 

She's just completely fabulous. She's all the glam and camp and outrageous bold femininity an all-timer villain lady has. The colors and contrast are perfect. I don't employ the phrase in my everyday vernacular and I will use the family-friendly version right here, but I really can't react in any other way than to say she is absolutely serving it.

I want to break out all of the ridiculous laudatory drag-inspired slang I know because this doll really is that kind of campy evil glam drama that feels incredibly iconic--she's everything people love about classic villains and looks amazing doing it. She's even got the element of rocking ugly features like claws and possible forehead wrinkles in a bad-girl beauty way. To call a Living Dead Doll a "queen" feels so atypical and out of the norm, but in fashion sense and camp-drama appeal, that's exactly what she is. She's delicious. And she's definitely a standout witch in my book. I think a lot of it comes from being the Emerald variant. I don't know if the main doll would have enchanted me as much.

I got plenty of other great photos of her too. Some were taken at night with the trees.

And I got some photos in my room with different lighting colors.

And here's all my green-only dolls.

My favorite picture, though, staged the Wicked Witch in her castle. I just used a brick corner on my front doorstep at night to stage a brick room for her to stand in, and I simulated a window by pressing terra-cotta clay onto the wall so I could edit in a sky. This one was just a test.

The final setup shuffled some pieces and added a life-size broom behind her and the window edit. I'm not entirely satisfied with the window effect, but I decided it was good enough, and it transformed the front step outside into the interior of a tower room. I tried to get the lighting more yellow-toned because I think the Western castle from the books would have been yellow.

I love this doll. She's just absolutely stunning. Screw the emerald sunglasses; this was a steal as it was. So glad I second-guessed and decided to jump on that offer. She's gonna be a star this Halloween. I have the feeling LDDs are gonna direct a lot of my decor this year, and I'm excited.

I didn't get the Winged Monkeys LDD Minis to pair with her, since they don't go for cheap and they'd just be supplemental to this doll, as well as very similar to each other. There's lots more I want more.

Each Oz doll I get gives me more appreciation for the series. The dolls feel more accessible and innocent and classically spooky in a way that pairs well with the classic-style doll sculpting and a children's fantasy tale, and I admire that they didn't go too extreme or gory to make Oz "twisted". The dolls are also remarkably easy to take out of context. The Witch, Scarecrow, and Wizard are easy Halloween dolls, Dorothy looks like a goth dolly, the Tin Man works as a sci-fi character, and the Lion could be a costumed trick-or-treater. There's a really fun versatility to the set, and I might go as far as to call the Lost in Oz series one of the most wide-appeal, accessible collections of Living Dead Dolls made. They're iconic characters, not too extreme as designs, and don't have to be their Oz selves. I still don't know if Dorothy and the Lion will be in my collection, but maybe? There are many other things that would come before them.

Here's my Oz collection on the shelf now.

Miss Hodgepodge '03: Calico

Well, I didn't wait very long on this one, did I? She came mint, and I had to scrutinize different listings' photos because I knew her dress was prone to cracking and decay that vinyl fabric befalls when not kept with precautions, and I wanted a copy that didn't look like that was happening there. Fortunately, my Calico's dress is pristine.

Calico's chipboard features her own eyes and her poem, confirming that photo closeups of the eyes are the Series 6 chipboard theme. I'd be very interested to see Dottie Rose's, because she had a variant where, intentionally, half of the copies of her doll had S3 Lottie-style eyebrows and half had no brows. 

(Listen, you probably will not have to wait long at all to find out. The browless Dottie has always been on my list, ever since the time I discovered LDD. She'll probably be in the next LDD roundup, whenever I make one.)

Calico's chipboard poem refers to her pet just like Hush's, which I'm assuming will be the case for everyone in the series--chipboard mentions the pet, death certificate does not. It reads:

Calico sure loves 

Her pet Muzzy

Some parts are scaly

And some parts are fuzzy.

 

Here's a rewrite.

Calico walks with her funny pet Muzzy

Some parts are scaly and some parts are fuzzy.

Calico's unboxing was smooth and her tissue remained in order when repacking. Muzzy was packaged under a twist tie and rested in a plastic cradle just like Shriek, but its position was very odd, being placed head-down by Calico's side.

Here's Calico's death certificate. She evidently modernized her fashion sense after she died, since she went to the grave on August 20, 1903!

Dottie Rose died just the year after, and she'd also be somebody dressed in a style that emerged well after her time of death, since Dottie Rose is firmly a 1950s girl on the visual level. Calico's death date seems to have no thematic significance. The LDD website lists her death date as "8/20/03", creating the impression she died in 2003, the year of her release, not the century before. There may be occasional discrepancies or false impressions from the website, so I'll always treat the printed certificates actually released with the doll as holding the canonical date, whenever I get the chance to see one.

Calico's certificate poem says:

Calico was a puzzle to everyone she met

A mystery to be solved, but never to forget

She always chose to keep her body modified

Stitched together jigsaw, unliving zombified

And a rewrite.

A calico jigsaw so foul and rotten

Forever unsolved and yet never forgotten

Again and again, the patches modified

A quilt of a gal, a dolly zombified. 

Seems like Calico is a bit of a fashionista who rebuilt herself into oblivion. While she looks like a Frankenstein undead monster, the poem creates the haunting implication that she started as a living human and replaced herself bit by bit until she was no longer alive. Calico could be a walking Ship of Theseus!

Here she is unboxed. Her yarn hair was still pinched together from being under a twist tie, but the shape instantly relaxed after running through it with my fingers.

That hair is a thick purple yarn which is pulled out of her face on top to make her hairline a little more monstrous. The yarn is glued down around the middle of her scalp, possibly to try to cover it up or force it to project outward into more of a wild mane, but most of the hair is loose and flexible. The glued-down hair is a little thin on the right side and doesn't fully hide her scalp.

Her hair can be swept back over her forehead and it will cover the entire glued-down portion and her scalp, which is the style she's meant to have anyway.

Since Calico is all stitched-up and her name reflects miscellaneous assembled fabric, she can safely be considered to be themed after rag dolls as well as Frankenmonsters, and her hair would thus be literally depicting yarn! I always thought it would have been cool to see her Resurrected in plush form to really realize that concept. While this puts her in the same ambiguous monster niche as Sally, I've let go of my Nightmare Before Christmas Skullector dolls, so I can't take a photo of them together.

Calico's face paint isn't exceptional in the face details itself, but introduces her wild paint job, which is absolutely exceptional--head to toe, her body is painted in an asymmetrical patchwork of stitched scraps of olive green and dark and pale shades of muted blue.

She had some grime to clean up with a wash.

Her scars are dark red, and the stitches are black, with several crossing over in X shapes.

This paint job leaves her skin color with no dominant tone you can label her with, and her look changes from different angles. The extensive and unlikely nature of the paint design really makes her shine. The patches really wrap around and cover her, so the paint job isn't missing much potential. A lesser doll would have far fewer patches on easier-to-paint areas, like just on the front without wrapping around.

A very similar patchwork skin design would later be done for both versions of the Resurrection Bride of Valentine doll, who goes for a more traditional Universal Studios look with a vertical hairdo and head bolts! She'd be incredible to own either way, but the variant looks way more polished to me.

Resurrection Bride of Valentine.
(Official LDD photo.)

Variant Res Bride. There is not a scenario right now, at her value and rarity, where obtaining her would be remotely easy or sane, and pursuing her would shut down all other collecting for a long time. I'll go nuts for LDDs, but not that nuts. Probably a pipe dream forever.
(Official LDD photo.)

It's admittedly a little hard for me to look at Res-variant Bride and not think of Calico as a consolation prize, like "Oh, we have Resurrection-variant Bride of Valentine at home" and all. But comparing a Series 6 mainline doll to a Resurrection variant released years later in extremely limited quantities is entirely unfair to Calico. And she is a cool doll with her own visual flair. Her patches are more extreme! And I can build her out a little with extra pieces.

Calico's torso has some staining from her red dress, which does hurt the impact of her body a bit, but this is still really cool.

However, not all of Calico's seams have stitches on them, and not all of them are painted at all--there are a few places where colors meet with no scars or stitches.

The unstitched seams might be done for effect, but the places where there are no painted scars at the intersection of patches just feel unfinished to me.

The paint is pretty clean and mostly precise, though there are a few slight textural giveaways that indicate the blues are exclusively painted and the body parts are all cast in olive. None of her green spots look like paint, but a few of the blues, in both tones, do. Still, it's genuinely hard to tell because the paint is so opaque, and she's super fun to look at--her poem is quite correct in that I did find her to be a puzzle to solve in terms of analyzing how her paint was done. If all of her seams were painted and stitched and the paint job was a little tighter, I would call Calico one of the hands-down most impressive LDD paint jobs--but painting shapes and lines across a 3D form is technically demanding and I'm not surprised to see a few letdowns in it. What matters is that she looks really cool. And she does, and she's still an achievement.

God, it'd be great to compare with a Res Bride of Valentine's paint job. I could theoretically settle for the main doll because she's (comparatively) far less pricey and could be built out, but it'd still take a very weak irresponsible moment to make that decision, so I probably won't. I'd be able to get more dolls I wanted more with the money she'd cost, including a Res doll I wanted more than her.

Calico also happens to feel like a midpoint between the G1 and G3 Frankie Steins with her skin colors.

Calico came before both of them, though, and had the squared hairline and mismatched eyes going on first. Monster High is gorgeous, but Calico really has some of that edge and weirdness I love about horror. Conventional beauty and a young target audience can be barriers to types of expression I enjoy.

Placing her in my whole array of Frankenmonster toys would be very difficult, because she's in the middle of three of the color groups I found in them--green, blue, and red! I'd have to switch to a display standing in a cluster with more use of foreground and background where the others can branch off of her, because she breaks the flat lineup concept.

She would short-circuit the color flow of this setup.

Living Dead Dolls as a brand is starving for characters of color, and while Calico would most likely be aracial or supernaturally very mixed-race, I kind of want to grasp at the opportunity to view her as a nonwhite character. There just isn't a lot to pick from otherwise.

Calico's facial features are simple. She has no brows and pinkish smudging around her eyes, which are two different colors--right is green, left is very pale purple. This follows from LDD's first Frankenmonster, the Bride of Valentine, who was more Gothic and minimally influenced by the Universal films. 

I think Jinx is the only Series 6 doll to have unambiguous or constant eyebrows! Calico, Revenant, and Isaac don't have them at all, Dottie Rose only has them on half of her copies, and Hush's face paint can be read as both browless and browed depending on how you look at it.

Calico's lips are red. Her eyelashes are long and a bit awkward in shape, which lends the possible reading that they're actually stitches, not lashes--maybe they're even holding her eyes open!

Calico's hands and feet have purple nail paint.

Calico's outfit makes a bold statement--as a way to let the body paint shine and ground the design a bit, Calico is dressed in a simple glamorous vinyl dress and sandals, and she's wearing only a single flat color--primary red. This also matches her lipstick, creating a strong visual balance. 

The dress is a strapless vinyl fabric number that hugs her body and has a slit up the right side. The bodice has a rounded line, and the dress velcros up the back. The back of the dress isn't really any lower than the front; it just dips down under the arms before curving up again in kind of a tulip shape when viewed from the side. The dress is seemingly consciously cut to show off a lot of the paint job, since her shoulders and upper back are uncovered this way.

Vinyl fabric isn't a polite choice for most clothing, particularly not a slinky dress, so the outfit might feel maturer than I think is warranted for LDD and this character. I don't want any LDDs evoking the Series 1 Fashion Victims, but this is fine. Calico doesn't feel filthy. We'll treat it as an unorthodox choice that's weird for being weird, not as anything salacious. Calico is a style anomaly (and icon) driven into absurdity and fashion faux pas by her extreme pursuit for beauty and that's the entirety of her drive, thank you. I could definitely see this corpse on an avant-garde runway. If anything, I'm more bothered by the fabric choice because of the threat of it aging poorly. Satiny fabric has been overused by LDD, especially in early series as the go-to after felt material, and it's been employed in a lot of outfits that just looked like cheap party-store costumes by accident, but I think it would have suited Calico better than vinyl, for posterity and tone. At the same time, I do like the way Calico's vibe hits hard on the pop and begs for the reaction "shocking!" What did she do to herself? we ask, looking at how far-gone this diva is.

Calico's shoes match her dress and lips and are the LDD sandal pieces.

The LDD sandals debuted on Series 4's pretty widow Ms. Eerie, and have ankle straps and open toes. The straps cross over in back and have pin holes to let them be unfastened. I struggled to pull them far enough to refasten them around her ankles, so my method for putting them back on became to hold the straps closed while very carefully scooting them up her feet. With the sandals, I think I now have most of the common LDD shoe sculpts. I've seen the Mary Janes on Sadie and Lottie, the boots on the Tin Man and Scarecrow, the pointy boots on Agatha and the Wicked Witch, masculine dress shoes on the Wizard, and now the sandals on Calico. I just don't have a doll with the sneakers.

The sandals also give Calico a bit of a platform and add to her height in a good way. 

Calico's pet is even more mishmashed than she is, depicting multiple animal species mixed together. Muzzy has a more textured and nuanced paint job with dimensional stitching that makes it look more realistic than Calico, but it's a really wicked little animal. 

Muzzy appears to have the head of a dog (or two dogs) with a duck's bill instead of a snout, and the body of an iguana. One of its legs is still iguana, while the right legs are dog and the upper left is evidently from another bird species, since it has non-webbed feet. The tail seems to be part snake and part demon! As such, it's not entirely clear just how many animals Muzzy is assembled from, nor which ones in specific were used, which feels exactly correct. 

Muzzy has an obvious horizontal "waist" seam where two pieces of plastic were molded separately and assembled together. Jinx's pet Hellcat has a similar artifact on its neck, but the other pets might all be one piece.

I'm calling it early: Muzzy is the best pet in Series 6. It's such a cool and wild sculpt, and so detailed paint-wise too.

Muzzy's slinky curved shape makes it feel like it's meant to be peeking out from behind Calico. I like this dynamism.

So Calico is very cool, but I can't escape the impression that she's just a tad incomplete. So I decided to remedy this with completely optional extra pieces to build out her ensemble a bit more. LDD are not fashion dolls, but I like the idea of bizarre fashionista Calico being the exception, coming with extra clothing options and accessories to make her the original monstrous fashion doll. A girl like her would have a wardrobe with options. And giving her more excitement will help fight the insecurities I have about that out-of-reach stitched lady, Res-variant Bride of Valentine.

First, I decided to make a leash for Muzzy with a noose knot in red yarn. The knot didn't tidy and tighten properly, but it's functional. I left the loop loose enough to slide back over its head.

The next idea I had delayed this post for a while. I wanted to give her a red noose as a scarf to build out her look just a bit more, but this was a comedy of errors. I failed to order the right size and color of macrame cord the first two times, then tried dyeing cord and even brute-forcing it by using diluted acrylic paint, and the dyed cords weren't getting the right color.

Too dark, too light, and type of cord didn't help things much.

The painted one worked, but looked muted next to the dress..and then the noose slipped out of the knot, rendering it unusable because I couldn't undo and re-tie the piece after it had been stiffened and saturated with paint. I put my faith in one last attempt, where the listing seemed to truly show the correct tone and size of cord, but I swore to give up on the idea if that arrived and was somehow wrong, too. 

Fortunately, this last cord was right.

The relative short length of the tails of the noose means I have to be slow when widening the loop so I don't end up pulling the end out of the knot, but this works pretty nicely. 

Besides that, I then tried to search online to find a hat for her--I think a style with a wide brim and round top would suit her...but the problem is, Living Dead Dolls are very niche and have unusual proportions, so pretty much nobody is making custom clothes for them, and none of them hats. Most doll hats that looked right were either obviously or very likely too large for an LDD head, or else they weren't the correct red. I thought a rain hat would be good to look for, because that would lead to comparable fabrics to her dress, but again, there were no options I felt confident would match or fit her in-person, and I wasn't taking risks on that. LDD heads fit Rainbow High hats and eyeglasses pretty well, so I searched through eBay and Etsy for RH options, and I didn't find anything red or vinyl...but I did think I found something pretty perfect for her in a custom RH outfit from LittlePrincessShopPL on Etsy. It clashes in the exact right way for me. A leopard-print beret!

I decided to keep the matching jacket, too. I cut the sleeves off so Calico could wear it, and while it's obviously not cut for an LDD body, which is wider, it stretches enough for her to rock it pretty decently, and her hair covers the poor fit on the back. I paired it with OMG Spirit Queen's sunglasses, and bought some green net ribbon that reminded me of Muzzy's scales to serve as an alternate scarf. I trimmed it down on both sides to make it less thick around her neck and remove the wire in the edges. 

While the ribbon was consciously chosen to reflect Muzzy, it wasn't until the Etsy pieces had arrived and I'd dressed Calico that I realized I might have felt so certain the beret was her because I subconsciously picked up on the fact that it matched Muzzy's bill. The animal print is also perfect for someone with an animal made of everything. The color and animal print are obviously perfect for her because of her pet, but that wasn't in my mind when I chose the pieces--at least not consciously.

I really like this look, and it fulfills my adoration of metropolitan fashion. I think it completes Calico beautifully to make her production level feel a bit more impressive than her base look, which can strike me as a little bare. While Calico's body paint is de-emphasized by adding more pieces to her, the visual chaos is resonant with her design, and I love that this extra costuming harmonizes with her pet--which it should do in a series of dolls distinguished by the presence of pets. It also feels very nineties chic, like something you'd see in Clueless.

Here's some pictures exploring fashion permutations.

All of my portraits with Calico had to be set against fabric backdrops because I'm an artistic nerd about things like that. Paper backdrops just don't resonate with a character theme like this. 

Here's Calico on the red carpet in her full metro chic.

And a more elegant look. 

I have a wall hook that's just the right height to hang shirts or costume capes from, but my bookshelf corner is also very handy. 

Since I did a vampire-collection tableau in my last doll post, here's a picture of Calico with all of my Frankenmonsters so far, plus Wizard Dedwin as her resident scientist. I have other scientists, but I didn't think my LEGO and Playmobil scientists would be required for this tableau.

This was a good enough composition, but this next arrangement most ideally utilizes Calico as the missing link between the blue, red, and green Frankenmonsters. With everything placed this way, Frankie and Dedwin perfectly transition between the green and red, and the colors all stem off of Calico nicely the way this is laid out. 

One of my LEGO monsters fell out of sight between photos and I forgot he was missing from this second setup. I Spy Challenge--can you spot the difference and identify the little minifigure monster in the first photo that didn't make it into the second display?

If I ever get the original LDD Bride of Valentine from Series 3 (she's on my long list of potential candidates), she'd go somewhere near G3 Frankie and the Skullector Bride of Frankenstein in that setup, since she's blue-skinned and wears an off-white costume. She does have elements of red in the bloodstain and her heart and scars, so she'd have to also be placed in such a way to complete the "circle" and segue into the red monsters.

It's a shame this arrangement doesn't photograph into an appealing portrait composition, but a close-up looks good.

And this was my very favorite picture of Calico. I decided to stage her at one of her frequent surgeries. 

Mixing fabric-sewing imagery and a medical surgery was a really fun challenge, as well as staging thread, fabric, and cotton to look like she was getting stuffed, stitched, and having the rag-doll version of a forehead peel. I drew her forehead paint back on in post to blend the fabric flap better into the head, and also just to reflect the fact that the lower edge would still be stitched. Ironically, a seamless blend of the fabric and doll required the re-addition of the seam! She's still on a coffin lid, but that's covered in white fabric. I also liked showing the red thread like her dress is being worked on too, and the clear bin of eyes and hands (borrowing Symphanee's display case) was fun. I wanted Calico's surgery space to feel very campy with the red fabric and fancy white; almost a little Rocky Horror in its aesthetic. Wizard Dr. Dedwin is still tending to her, since he mixes Frankenstein and medicine in his own way that works just right with this photo. It's plastic surgery, fabric crafts, and reanimation all colliding!

Calico appeals to my sense of the weird. She's not like any other Living Dead Doll. She's also not traditional or remotely antique in aesthetic, so she's not like a lot of the dolls I favor from the brand. But she's fun, and she has elements of pop and classic horror and camp to her that I really like. She's defiant of standards and I applaud her for it, but she's also great for Halloween.

This is the full assortment I created for her.

And this is the final display I chose for her.

Overall, like the Lost in Oz series, LDD Series 6 works great as an unofficial Halloween series, particularly now that pastel has become a valid Halloween aesthetic and Dottie Rose doesn't feel like such an outlier! With a ghost, a spooky cat, a creepy dead girl, a rag doll Frankenstein, a scarecrow, and a pastel scary lady, all of the characters have a degree of pop and iconic spook that make them great for the holiday. 

Here's my two Series 6 sisters together. For two yarn-haired creeps with fully-painted bodies, they have a lot different about them!

See what I mean about the tall sandals? It's a perfect Frankenmonster height boost for Cal!

Dang it, I am going to end up with all of them, aren't I? Lucky for me, Series 6 dolls aren't on the high end of the aftermarket right now!

One last note--I really appreciate, and am pleasantly surprised by, how little difference the swivel joints/ball joints dichotomy had made to me. There are great dolls who were released on the first LDD body and they can still be interesting, dynamic dolls despite their lower articulation. It's possible the jointing has had some small part to play in the lower prices of some of the pre-S9 dolls, but there's no reason in my mind that should be the case. LDD is LDD regardless.

And that's my first roundup post.

I can't say which of the dolls is my favorite. I think Hush holds up the best in terms of craft. She feel cohesive, skillful, and she's absolutely arresting to look at while managing to feel oddly luxurious. She's wobbly on her feet and has some weird discoloration, but she required no treatment or changes beyond a light scrubbing. The Emerald-variant Wicked Witch is just iconically fabulous. Her drama and color palette are incredible, and she's by far the best fantasy witch LDD has done--and my favorite fantasy witch doll to date. She just has disappointing hair and her boots don't let her stand firm. Calico is pure oddball charm and has a very cool body paint job. The body paint just feels a little underbaked and I found Calico to err a tad too far toward simplicity. I respect her outfit showing off her paint job, and I like the theme of it being all flat red...but it just needed a bit more. 

Not sure when the next LDD roundup will come, since April has been set aside for a lot of priority collecting purchases that wouldn't contribute to another roundup pool (I have to do my series on getting back the first three dolls I obtained on their anniversary, needed another Series 23 LDD, and I needed to get on the list for 2024 LDD Eggzorcist.) I want to pace myself a little better, so I might at least get another Series 6 doll later but before May, and I do have someone else for the next LDD roundup who was just taking too long in fixing up to make it into this post (which is already long enough anyway). Stay tuned, because I have Creepro Abbey being reviewed, and my MH inaugural dolls ought to be next.