Let's Talk Trolls, Part 1: My Childhood Russ Berrie Troll Dolls

One of my many childhood toy collections was troll dolls. They weren't new on the market anymore when I got them, but they weren't as long-retired as they are now. I used to have a lot of trolls, but now only have the most unique ones I'd gotten. Let's look at them! 

The novelty trolls all came from one toy store whose owner was a savvy collector and got all the best ones into my hands.

For reference about troll history, I'm going to be citing and photographically quoting the Collector's Guide to Trolls by Pat Peterson, which gives a good overview on the development and styles of troll dolls. It's the only authority I've come across, but I noticed it is a bit dated today (it was written when the trolls I'm talking about from Russ were still being made) and has a lot of informality and speculative language when cataloguing various troll specimens without any known origin. 

It can feel at times like an independent collector remarking on some items that just look neat because there isn't anything more concrete to say. But trolls don't always leave a paper trail and many of them are unbranded, so fair enough.

Troll dolls are derived from Scandinavian folklore and folk art. 

Scandinavian trolls in folklore are ugly, coarse cow-tailed people who cause problems and turn to stone in the sunlight. For an entertaining and nicely-illustrated collection of troll folklore, I recommend d'Aulaires' Book of Trolls. 

Being entirely enchanted with wooden folk toys for all of my life, I of course have one wooden troll from a Scandinavian shop that used to run near me but has since closed down. His tail has come unbraided, but that's all right.

While I love him, I'll hazard to say this is among the less interesting ways to do a folk troll figure. I really really love this one from the collector book:

My heart belongs entirely to this guy. This could probably be easy to imitate and make for myself. Either way, I want one. 

There are also much more realistic and grotesque folk troll figures which more often than not are genuinely ugly and don't have any appeal to me. I've seen this type at the same store the wooden troll came from. 

Folk crafts of the trolls would turn into cute plastic figurines by the Dam company, then adopted by various manufacturers until they basically had nothing to do with folklore and could be dressed as anything.

This is the exemplar of a Dam troll provided by the book:

It seems that Dam trolls would more commonly have head swivels, but the template is all there. A goofy little squat body with spread four-fingered arms and a grotesque face with those weird eye sockets that can't be described as anything else but "troll doll eyes". 

This is a Dam troll with more folkloric influence, tail and all:

The Dam sculpts aren't fully for me, but I really like this troll.

Dam otherwise made trolls in little costumes that were more familiar to the typical troll doll. Dam is a big deal in trolls as the founder of this genre, but not really appealing to me in particular.

I was fascinated by this bizarre Dam baby doll made with distinct troll features. It reminds me a lot of changeling mythology, like this was a troll baby swapped into a human household!

If that's the aesthetic target, mission accomplished.

Following Dam trolls were the Wishniks by Uneeda, which looked very similar but might have been overall smaller as a standard. The book lists the heights in inches, which is very helpful.

I didn't find much of note in the Wishnik section of the book until it got to the Double-Niks-- troll dolls with two conjoined heads!

While this looks bizarre and out of nowhere, this appears to be another vestige of Scandinavian folklore because trolls having multiple heads was not uncommon in the stories, and those realistic ugly trolls also had some two-headed examples in the photo above. 

Excerpt many-headed troll illustration from d'Aulaires' Book of Trolls.

I covet a Double-Nik, but they don't go for under $100 and that just isn't worth it to me. 

After Wishniks came Norfin trolls, which could be large with articulated limbs, but even the smaller Norfins are set apart by their more posed limb shapes. 

The Norfins are less grotesque than Dam or Wishnik, but they're largely too cutesy for my tastes. 

The trolls I'm familiar with as the iconic standard are from the Russ Berrie company which exploded in the 1990s. The troll world only diversified to begin with because Dam failed to secure the rights properly, but they got them back in 2003 and have maintained control over trolls since, shutting down the active brands that weren't them. Russ, if still active in trolls by 2003, couldn't have proceeded past that point if they wanted to.

Still, while Russ had their time, they were prolific.

The Russ trolls were the character model used as background troll doll characters in the Toy Story films, which should say something about how ubiquitous they were. 

Russ trolls in the "playtime" fantasy Western sequence at the start of Toy Story 3.

Unlike the preceding troll styles, Russ trolls have smaller round ears and less childlike expressions, and are often more vivid and cartoonish and character-themed.  After Russ, trolls have since been reinvented through more fantastical visuals such as the Zelfs toys or the modern DreamWorks Trolls film franchise where everything down to the bodies has more color and cartoony stylization, more removed from the near-human look that classic trolls established.

You could probably argue that the Russ trolls are the flattest and most soulless of the lineage to that point, and while they are more colorful, symmetrical, and machine-precise as molds, I still find a lot of charm and humor and personality in them. There have definitely been much more cynical and empty collectibles since them that are really too inoffensive to be interesting to me. Russ trolls still feel weird and atypical in a way that has some authenticity.

Today, I only have the one standard-base Russ troll who works as a generic model!

Troll dolls from the Russ era are goofy little humanoid vinyl figures with fake-fur vertical conical hair. Russ trolls are tan-colored by default. Trolls can often be naked like this, but most Russ trolls were dressed in themed archetypal outfits and staged as specific characters. 

The hair is pretty dry and airy. It can be combed and shaped to a fair degree, and even squeezing it through your fist can give it more of a point.

This troll's hair has loosened glue around the edges.

The Russ trolls have wide lumpy noses and big smiles which feel mischievous but not particularly childlike. 

The body and head are all one static molded piece, and as is typical, the head is hollow like a bowl where the tuft of hair is glued in. The eyes are separate plastic pieces glued in. The body is short and squat with stubby four-fingered hands and arms which are usually spread out and down in classic style. The trolls have a round belly, a belly button, and a butt. Trolls, not just from Russ, have always been both gender-neutral and physically sexless, which lends them a goofy innocence that allows them to get away with being a toy that has a reputation for nudity!

Some trolls were more matte than this, and those were always the ones I liked best. Modern glam culture disagrees, but I don't think shiny skin looks good in most cases. 

The standard Russ troll is four inches tall to the top of its brows. The only other doll type I have in the same height is Living Dead Dolls Minis Lottie, though she's much more petite overall. 

And here's the Russ troll with the folk troll, which is quite small.

Despite her base body being very standard, this particular troll doll wasn't totally generic--she had a fun theme. I got her because she's a witch! 

She used to have a yellow buckle glued to her hat. Maybe that's drifting in storage somewhere. The broom is sewn to the dress, which velcros all the way up the back. Most Russ troll clothes use velcro unless a pice slid up over the legs without any, and I think all shirts and dresses opened all the way. The collector's book mentioned that Dam clothes would have been affixed to the early trolls with rivets.

I'm frankly quite suprised she doesn't make it into the novelty category I'm spotlighting because her skin is the default color when I'd expect otherwise. Green would be an easy choice based on some of the trolls you're about to see.

The witch troll is my only acquisition I encountered "in the wild", having gotten her at a neighborhood garage sale as a kid. Witches tend to find me!

I got rid of many of my troll dolls in the same moving clearout that decimated my original Monster High collection, but I really did keep all of the best trolls! I think I remember them all, and I was able to find pictures in the book of a few I used to have.

There was a rail engineer, who I had in the exact same coloration:

And a magician with a troll baby playing bunny. This might have been my very first troll, gotten during my magician phase. I had him with magenta hair.

Then there was the astronaut, which I had in the same coloration. I was always disappointed his suit was so bland and didn't cover him fully despite the fun of the fabric helmet.

I had these Santa and Mrs. Claus trolls, too;

I also had a brown-suited reindeer troll with red hair, a Christmas present troll wearing a square gift-box costume that originally played sound with a button (but never did while I had it), and a caroler troll in a green coat. 

The other trolls I remember are a gladiator troll, an Easter troll with a bunny-ear headband and corduroy overalls, and a caveman troll with orange hair. I think it's those last two I miss the most. I loved the turquoise color of the Easter troll's hair and overalls, and the overalls were a nice corduroy. The caveman was very very simple, but it was always especially charming.

While the book isn't a comprehensive list of trolls, it's also possible that some of the trolls I had weren't catalogued in the book because they simply hadn't released yet, as the book was written while Russ was still making them.

The speculative market for Russ trolls is not booming these days, so replacing any of them could be pretty easy. Maybe a few would be expensive for troll standards, but not at all wallet-breaking. There is one prize troll I might get whose cheapest offering is pretty hefty, but the trolls I used to have aren't big gets. 

The book also showed me some other interesting trolls, like these two other takes on a troll baby doll:

The one on the left is scary. 

There's also a Russ male adult entertainer?

Um.

I think Russ, with their sheer breadth of archetypes represented by trolls through careers, life events, and holidays, was aiming a little for gag-gift buyers, so there was a troll for every occasion. There's a carpenter, a Cupid, a pregnant troll, etc. (The latter piqued my interest for a moment, but it looks like her silhouette is entirely from the costume and not from a novelty pregnant sculpt.) I imagine this guy might have been intended for ladies at bachelorette/hen parties to have a giggle over.

There were also some vintage movie-monster trolls with non-troll heads. 

The book highlights a ton of fascinating troll-adjacent toys which adopted bits and pieces of the troll template without being full trolls. 

But now to those full trolls which I have!

Martians

These might have been my very first of these most unique trolls. They could be considered the least unique of the most unique because their only manufacturing departures are in their coloring. 

These trolls are a boy and a girl in the classic sci-fi Martian mold. They have lime green skin and red eyes, and blended hair tones. The boy has magenta and purple and the girl has coral red and orange.

Both have very Jetsons-esque retro sci-fi outfits, with the boy having a footie bodysuit with a triangle collar and the girl being barefoot in a dress with flared shoulders. Both costumes are solid silver tones. 

The girl had silver fabric slippers originally, but I would have lost those. Here's a picture with a pair stolen from another troll in this post.

The girl's hair is less soft and feels more puffy.

My reason for getting these then was due to loving green monsters and aliens at the time, as well as their retro look. I still love them and am glad I held onto them.

Grandma and Grandpa

These are elderly troll dolls with unique sculpts each. Both have the typical skin color and have silvery aged hair, and each has a different face from the norm. Grandma has wide cheeks, a narrower nose, closer-set eyes and less wrinkled eye sockets which make them look smaller, and Grandpa has heavy brows, half-lidded eye paint, and a contented smile with an underbite. Both have additional wrinkles to age them and their ears stick out more. They seem very sweet.

Grandma and Grandpa might be the only Russ trolls with sculpting delineated by gender, but it's entirely in the faces.

Grandma wears a brown dress with a frilly apron, and Grandpa wears a two-layered outfit of a velvet blue vest over a plaid shirt, pants, and shoes. The bulk of Grandpa's outfit is one piece and it velcros in the front. The vest is separate. Grandpa carries a brown wooden cane glued into his hand, which has a pose to suit it.

The material on Grandpa's shoes looks scuffed with real toy aging. I don't think they always looked like this.

Their bodies are slightly stockier and dumpier. Side note: Grandpa was the hardest to undress out of everybody, and it wasn't even entirely his cane's fault. Just a very tight outfit.

Grandpa's cane actually reaches longer than his legs, so he's not stable when undressed. His costume's shoes pad his height a little.

Despite their mundane subject matter, the old folks end up being some of the most divergent and uniquely-manufactured trolls in the Russ output! I've always loved them.

Androids

More space trolls! These are commonly cited as silver aliens or "spacemen" for lack of an official title, but I always saw them as robots due to their metallic silver bodies, and am now revising that to call them androids more specifically. While their style is retro, their skimpier outfits, metallic emphasis, and the visual style of their laser gun pieces all feel more like 1980s sci-fi than 1960s. Due to gender stereotypes, I had always cast the blue one as male and the pink one as female, but their genders could be any combination.  

The production factors making these trolls special are the tinsel in their hair, the metallic silver paint for their bodies, and the more translucent vibrant eyes. Most troll eyes have flat sclerae and aren't as translucent, but these guys have eyes that catch the light more and have a bit of a following effect.

I don't know why these eyes are more glass-like than others, but it does make them feel more striking and glowy. I also really appreciate how the colors directly complement the hair, with the blue troll having yellow-orange eyes and the pink troll having green eyes. There could have been a third troll with yellow hair and purple eyes or vice-versa, but it appears these were the only colorations of this design. 

Their clothes are tops and sci-fi speedos with buttons on the waist that seem designed to cover their belly buttons, but the bottoms like to pull down a little and spoil the effect. The only difference in the costumes is the color of the waist buttons.

Slipping down.

The costumes could have probably been made as single pieces to keep it tidy. 

Here's a top removed. It's difficult to pull over the gun, and that might be why these outfits are two-pieces. It could be very frustrating, if not impossible, to remove and replace the clothes while the gun was affixed if the costumes were a one-piece.

This is how the gun is affixed.

Both trolls have the silver slippers the Martian girl originally had too, so these are where I sourced them to show what she would have looked like complete. 

Their eyes really popped and glowed under a blue light filter! UV light could be even more stunning.

And here they are in lighter space lighting.

Travis the Teenage Troll--Kite Outfit

This was an attempt by Russ to make a more traditional fashion doll line out of trolls, with a taller articulated body. 

Travis was the boy troll and was paired with a female counterpart, Tracey, and each released in multiple outfits with variable hair colors per release. The collector's book quotes press copy where both were described with absurd objectifying mature language that didn't at all match the goofy cartoony youthful look of the toys, and even though it was almost certainly meant to be tongue-in-cheek, I don't know if the joke lands. Travis is a "hot masculine dude with a sensitive macho look?"

Travis has an offensive mix of colors and patterns that's very charming and deliciously eighties, and wears a top that velcros only on the upper half, and shorts which just slide down.

The shorts alone suit a beach look.

His accessory is a fabric kite with an elastic strap for his hand, but it doesn't look too natural on him, and the fabric is very creased and won't lay flat. I might have to iron it.

The fashion trolls are about six inches to the standard Russ four. The sculpts are all different but still quite similar. 

I don't think Travis looks that much like a teenager. He's very childish in aesthetic and doesn't strike me as a troll for older kids in any way. The smaller troll faces look more mature to me.

Here's the body sculpt undressed.

The belly is flatter and the proportions are more humanlike, but the defining aspects of a troll have been kept. Travis still has no neck, his arms are spread down with his palms forward, and he has a belly button and a butt and four digits on each limb. The palms being up makes for an unusual effect when posing, though. 

Travis swivels at his head, shoulders, and hips, much like a budget Barbie, and even more like a Series 1-8 Living Dead Doll. (Travis's release precedes the latter.)

In fact, there are some superficial similarities between a classic swivel LDD and a fashion troll.

And would you believe these two dolls can actually swap clothes pretty well?

Travis is feeling himself in the switch way more, though.

This might be the wildest fashion swap I ever discover because it's between two obscure niche dolls of entirely different tones. It's not eminently practical because the heights are so different, and I don't think Russ's fashion trolls promise to be a great source for LDD clothing ideas. Maybe a couple of longer Tracey dresses could cross over, though! Travis's feet were also too wide to wear Dottie Rose's sandals. But still, it's fascinating finding anything that works so well on LDD because their bodies are a weird niche that most doll brands don't correspond to. 

There's another Travis I really like, and I'd definitely be interested in a Tracey with a long dress just to see how well that'd suit an LDD. I'll be on the lookout.

Frankenstein's Monster

Whoops. I completely forgot about this guy when building both of my previous Frankenmonster toy collages! In my defense, if I had remembered, his purple and orange colors add complications to the harmonious color arrangement of them all, but because I have LDD Calico now, I could probably use her purple hair to flow into his purple shirt somehow.

This isn't Russ's only green-skinned stitched monster troll, but it is the most interesting due to having a different sculpt. His sculpt combines head bolts, outstretched zombie arms, and one "missing" eye with stitch paint, meaning the doll has one molded eye as part of the head and one plastic troll eye! He also has notably shorter hair chopped into a troll's equivalent of the Monster's flat-top.

The troll is wearing a purple jacket sewn for his outstretched arms, and a one-piece orange and black vest/shorts combo. With this one, you get all four main Halloween colors plus a bit of gory red!

Here's his body.

This troll is probably the most thoroughly divergent of the group. His skin color is unusual, and he has unique character sculpting. His eyes are atypically made and he has painted detail, his body has a different pose, and his hair breaks from formula. He's the prize weird troll of this group.

It doesn't appear that Russ ever did a mad scientist, so Grandpa dressed up for the role. 

So those are my novelty Russ trolls of the moment, but I'm not done. As with my Playmobil series last year (starting here), looking into my old toys has inspired me to update the collection at hand, so likely within the month of June 2024, I'll have a new pack of novelty Russ trolls to showcase, which I've become aware of since I collected these guys. LDD Roundup 3 seems to be on track to finish fairly briskly for such a post (the others took ages), with two dolls wrapped and the third coming in soon, and Series 23 will continue with its next post within June. I also hope to bring in some new Monster High. 

See you in the next one.