A Beary Hungry Guest: Living Dead Dolls Series 23 Teddy by Mezco Toyz

Time for the third member of the tea party, and the boy doll of LDD Series 23!

Read my first S23 post (Agatha) here, and my second (Betsy), here.

[And temperature check on LDD Roundup 2--the dolls are ready, but the art photos on #3 aren't. Still hoping for a finish before this Tuesday, but no promises. Some more clay has to dry!]

Teddy is the first Series 23 doll representing a guest invited to the party, since Betsy is the lady of the house and hostess, and Agatha is a servant. Teddy is also one of two dolls in the series dressed in a fuzzy animal costume, with the other being Quack, who dresses as a sailor duck. This is the reason Teddy is the third doll of this blog series specifically--I didn't want to have both animal-suit characters in a row, so Quack will be the last doll, with Jennocide coming between the two as doll 4. 

While this animal costuming does feel authentic to vintage toys, who would sometimes wear animal suits (or sometimes be plush toys with creepy plastic faces sewn in), this could also be LDD's way of suggesting that the dolls are standing in for what would be full plush entries in a real tea party of mixed toy types--i.e., because teddy bears are a whole other toy medium from a Living Dead Doll, their best way of representing that classic toy is to dress a doll in a teddy bear suit. LDD did something similar with Rotten Sam and Sandy, LDD parodies of Raggedy Ann and Andy who were typical vinyl dolls with unique rag-doll face paint and yarn hair. One or both of them would easily work as extra Series 23 characters.

Teddy and Quack fetch the most expensive aftermarket prices in the series. Since one item I'd planned to get fell through (listing was gone by the time I checked again), Teddy might be be my sole big-ticket LDD of the month. I don't love my S23 progress purchase also counting as the major acquisition of the month, but if I'm trying to claw myself back to reason, he has to be. That might be for the best, since there's not a lot of room for another big thing this month. I also had the Addams Family Skullector dolls to preorder (!!!!!) and LEGO Minifigures Series 26 to get (the latter will probably be posted next week since they should arrive soon).  I'll pace myself better this month, already helped by a late start, but I can get a couple of inexpensive LDDs to build things out instead. Maybe more S6 progress and/or the start of Roundup 3...which precedent has led me to expect will probably be complete by the end of June!

This Teddy came mint. I don't think every one of my S23 dolls will be sealed, as I've seen some copies of Jenn complete and open. She looks like the second-cheapest doll in the series, but that doesn't mean a lot because there's quite a gap between her and Agatha.

Teddy is described as a zombie who will eat his party companions. My take on him, due to his teddy-bear theme and zombie nature, is that he's a greedy, hungry, selfish, difficult little boy, but not with any malice or intellect behind it like Betsy and Agatha. He's just an innocently selfish child who's neither especially nice nor cruel. He's one of those kids that's generally a big nuisance, who touches and takes everything, and is hard to like or put up with despite knowing he's innocent.

Teddy's chipboard codes him with the color blue by the text on his name, which matches what I was thinking for him. While his table setting took on a green woodland theme because I couldn't resist it, blue was the color I had in mind as his signature. 

His chipboard poem reads:

It's a tea party and Teddy was ecstatic

He found his bear costume in the attic

However, Teddy was a zombie, ya see

So he ate some kids and drank some tea

This poem feels a little lost and unfocused to me with the way it's phrased. How about:

The call to the party made Teddy ecstatic

He fished out a bear suit from deep in the attic

But Teddy was hungry--a zombie, you see

So he ate up the guests as a snack with his tea

There was nothing of note about Teddy's unboxing. Here's his certificate.

Teddy died on September 1, 1985. There isn't any apparent thematic link behind this date. The most famous thing to happen on that day was the discovery of the sunken Titanic wreck, but that has nothing to do with this doll.

His certificate poem says:

Teddy got bit by an odd kid on the playground

Winds up the kid was dead but still walking around

So now Teddy is also a zombie boy

Dressing like a bear is what he enjoys

And a rewrite.

That little bear Teddy bumped into a kid

The kid was a zombie- you know what he did

Now Teddy himself is a walking dead child

His costume will tell you he's hungry and wild

Because Teddy required so few photos to look him over, I ended up doing most of the pictures before I assembled the tea. Probably a good call this time, due to a slight disaster that befell me later. Still, the serving comes first as usual.

My plan was to get multiple scones, but my local bakery solved the excess requirement by instead having massive scones. Just one was too much! It also led to the fun staging of the teacup having to sit on top of the scone. 

However, during this session, I suffered a catastrophic honey explosion that soured my mood a bit. The way the lid on the honey bear is shaped, it screws on facing backward, so I loosened it for the cover photo to face it forward and forgot and splattered half a bottle of honey when it fell--not in my workspace or table setting, but it was still horrible and I wasted a good half hour cleaning it up as best I could. I felt sticky for the rest of the setup, and eating the scone had to take place separately. The massive lump felt like a punishment for my negligence after all of that. I had only expected it to be a chore. Oh, well. 

Being far beyond done with honey definitely resulted in the assembled tea being less gloppy and uncomfortable than I had first envisioned it. 

Here's my second photo of the tea setup with the doll and mysterious server (though I also like reader Bitty's description of the role as a "tea master!")

While I had sacrificed one of the cotton gloves to dip into Betsy's red tea and stained it, I was ready to write it off and use the clean glove for the rest of these posts...and then I paused and rethought when a brief Instagram interaction with Bitty brought up the idea of keeping and using the stained glove as a prop. I was inspired, and concluded that it would be far better if the posts led to the progressive destruction of that one glove instead, as if the series is taking its toll on the server, guest by guest! I did ultimately end up faking this, though, as I had thrown the first glove away and it had gotten dirtier after that. The stain also looked blue, which, while genuine, looked unrealistic coming from a red tea, so I grabbed the new glove and stained it with watered-down paint. Teddy here has added some fierce claw damage now too!

I also had to take pictures of the scone pre-honeying (and pre-disaster) just to show Teddy going over the moon with it.

Here's Teddy unboxed.

Teddy's bear suit makes him very novel and it does feel advanced and fancy, but the visual execution of the doll feels deliberately spare, making Teddy the least visually complex doll in the series. It's an interesting combination of craft and simplicity.

Since it's covering him almost completely, the outfit comes first in the discussion. Teddy is wearing a brown bear onesie with simulated claws, and has a separate hood with bear ears that leaves his face uncovered. It's clear from the claws that Teddy is intended to be a tad more realistic and reference scary real grizzly bears, because if he was purely dressed as a plush teddy, I'd expect clawless paws--and maybe a lighter belly, too. I think the choice of fur texture also suits a grizzly theme well. While I've seen and owned teddies with fur that's a little longer and rougher like this, it looks less tidy and doesn't feel fluffy and sweet, so it works great. The fur is still very soft.

Here's the top of the hood. The little bear ears have black fabric inside, and the face cutout is pretty circular. 

The hood falls over the shoulders a little and has a squarish shape once the twist-tie around the neck from the packaging is removed.

The paws of Teddy's suit have black fabric bear claws, and the feet have black fabric pads underneath. 

Because Teddy doesn't have plastic shoes, his stability when standing is pretty low. That just happens with soft-footed LDDs.

Here's the back of his suit. The back velcros open.

The suit does not have a tail.

Teddy was sheddy when I took him out, but there wasn't too much loose fluff.

Teddy's hood pulls right off his head with no fasteners or closures, and is lined inside.

The suit portion is not lined. 

While the designers could have given Teddy a full-face fabric bear mask to make him look more like an actual teddy bear toy, I like the cutout option to make his LDD nature clear. 

The other way they could have done it would be to give Teddy a plastic bear mask  that would cover his face and "complete" the hood, giving him a two-part head covering. I can see why they didn't, though, since the plastic LDD masks are thin and fragile, like the hats, and a mask would look the best if it was inside the hood rather than out. That'd be hard to wrangle. The other dolls also don't have anything like that and tea parties, even in a child's playtime, aren't typically full masquerade, anyway. Return Eggzorcist has something like that going on, though, with a bunny mask and a bunny hood (both have ears, though; I hope the order worked so I can talk about it!). Maybe Teddy could get a Return doll made that way.

The next Living Dead Doll to have an animal-onesie effect after the Series 23 dolls is Beelzebub in Series 25, who wears a housefly costume as the demonic Lord of the Flies. 

It's hard to tell, but this doll debuted a creepy toothy grin sculpt.

Resurrection-variant Hush also has one, being dressed as a rat. 

Both of them could also easily be put into the Series 23 tea party alongside Rotten Sam and Sandy. The first character with an animal onesie was Series 1's Eggzorcist, though most of her dolls don't give her a plushie effect. Teddy himself would get a different animal onesie (not plushie-styled) when his concept led him to be cast as the Cowardly Lion in the Oz doll line.

I'll try not to need him.

Under the hood, Teddy has hair, which is short and brown and side-parted. It stays in shape well and doesn't feel gelled, but maybe that's just years of hood-hair keeping it in shape!

I think his Oz doll is bald.

Teddy's face paint is extremely simple, and the least complex of any LDD I've had yet.

His eyes are blank white with blue outlines, and lighter blue airbrushing surrounds them. More blue smudges appear on the rest of his face, and his lips are washed in with dark paint to define the sculpt. No brows. It's very classically spooky and works for a zombie character as well as a creepy old toy from a haunted tea party. The face is a bit like S1 Damien's, but a bit more haunting due to the lack of brows and subtler paint. Teddy is a pale flesh tone.

Here he is undressed. There's nothing wrong with Teddy's hip joints (hooray!). He's just standing kinda wonky here because the log blocks are not so stable and this is how I had to get him to balance.

Teddy has a teacup and a table leg. 

He can't hold the cup with the thick paws of his costume. I think it would have been cute to make them as mittens with strings attached to the sleeves so they could dangle and leave his hands bare to drink tea. Or else also throw in like, a napkin or something so there'd be something he could hold? Quack has uncovered hands, so she won't have this limitation.

Here's a few more pictures. My breakfast tea supply currently comes from a giant can of bags which I bought because it was beautiful and could be a great storage vessel once emptied. Teddy saw only paradise. It was also a chance to use a bluish paper backdrop that aligns with him and honors the blue coding he's been given.

This has become my new Instagram profile picture. I think it says everything about what I am and what I do here.

Here's both LDD teddy bears together. Teddy doesn't hold Return Sadie's bear super well, but I made it work.

And here's a collection of teddy bears. This isn't every teddy I have, but it's all ones that match Teddy's classic look. I like the staging and lighting here making Teddy pop out, almost like an impostor--it's a game of "find the evil toy" that's very easily figured out!

Three bears who are licensed merchandise are here. The large round cream bear is an I Love Lucy replica bought at the Lucy-Desi Museum; Teddy from Mr. Bean, a Beanie Baby bought at Harrods of London, is in front; and the eponymous Little Bear (from my favorite books/cartoon for a time in childhood) is just to the right.

Here's the tea room now. Two legs isn't enough to stand up the table, but it's progress! Teddy's position might not be permanent, but it's good for now. It's important that Betsy be in the middle and Agatha be symbolically behind her as the lurking evil in this series. Maybe Quack will be to Betsy's left so the two fancy hats aren't standing together, and Jennocide will be on the other end.

So that's Teddy! I'll be honest, I think I like the doll more than the experience setting up his tea this time. I'd wanted the setup to be more horizontal but the space (my desk) wasn't quite long enough and the log blocks don't show through as well in the cover as I'd hoped. I had a blue teapot I wanted to have alongside the brown one, but that wasn't possible to stage without creating total clutter. I also wanted the base fabric to be dark brown, but I don't have anything in that color, so I'm not sure I'm satisfied with his tea table. The honey catastrophe was also a real damper on the mood, and that tipped my irked feelings with this session into the outright negative.

But the doll himself is really nice. He's simple but he stands out as unique and cute and charming. He's got an old-fashioned creepiness to him but also an innocent childlike quality and his novel costume is really nice. I wish his accessory worked better with him and that his stance was sturdier, but he's a very cool doll and he gave me a lot of inspiration. While it was a nightmare in execution, designing his tea was the most fun I've had so far since the bear concept gave me so much to work with!

There's ultimately not a ton to talk about with Teddy because what you see is what you get, and he's not immediately making a run for the top spot in the series. I do also feel pretty certain I'll like Quack more than him. But what you get with Teddy is not weak or disappointing. He's just a good little bear.

Again, really trying not to want his second doll.
...It's gonna be in Roundup 3, isn't it?