Living Dead Dolls Roundup 3

I don't set out to theme my LDD roundups, but by circumstance, dolls on the lower end which had good offers and piqued my interest around this time happened to all be boys! Basically none of the dolls I was considering for this roundup felt reasonable within the budget for May, so I improvised and ended up with another set of dolls I really liked.

I do have quite an interest in boy dolls just because the doll industry has arranged itself so they're a minority, and this holds true for LDD too, but I don't find myself taking a particular interest in most LDD boy dolls compared to other doll brands. These guys are exceptions!

Died in the Theater: Carotte Morts

Stylized gory imagery ahead.

This doll comes from one of the later LDD series--Series 33, "Moulin Morgue", and he's a rare case where he's one of two boys in a series. 

Top: Larmes de Sang, Ella von Terra
Bottom: Maitre des Morts, Madame La Mort, Carotte Morts

Most series have either one boy doll or none, and S27 is the exception with three. S32 has Ernest Lee Rotten and Nicholas, though Ye Ole Wraith's gender, while likely female, isn't confirmed in the poems so you could read that as a three-boy series if you were so inclined. S31 has two dolls who could be read as boys, but both are explictly nonhumans who are given "it" pronouns and the two S31 dolls referred to with binary gendered pronouns are femmes with she/her descriptions. Umbral, while femme in look, is referred to without any pronouns in the doll's two poems. Perhaps Umbral has no pronouns at all and must be referred to by name or by a noun epithet ("the doll", "the spirit", "the shadow", "the entity", etc). Or perhaps the writers just didn't realize no pronouns had been applied to the doll. Could be fun to adapt to writing about Umbral if I took the former as true and somewhere down the line, I think S31 will be a completed series reviewed here--just perhaps not in as extended of a timeframe as my S23 dolls. 

As the "Moulin Morgue" subtitle suggests, S33 was based on vintage theatrical entertainment with the specific overarching flavor of French cabaret--most obviously the famous Moulin Rouge, itself named for the red windmill marking the building. A loose semi-incorrect translation of "Moulin Morgue" could be "Dead Mill" to rhyme with "Red Mill", though one of the doll's poems alludes to the "Red Mill" name of the real cabaret. 

All of the S33 characters are implicitly French with French names, though I have reasons to doubt the grammar is proper for all of them. "Carotte Morts" means "dead carrot", and is likely a reference to comedian Carrot Top as well as the doll's own bright orange theme. I couldn't replicate the particular way his name is rendered by LDD through typing in dead carrot phrases in Google Translate and seeing the French result, so the grammar may be wrong on LDD's part. It might be more proper to render his name "Carotte Mort" (no "s") for "dead carrot", or "Carotte Des Morts" for "carrot of the dead". Maitre des Morts appears to get the grammar right, with his name meaning "Master of the Dead".

Carotte was not one of the S33 dolls I was sure I wanted, but his unique painterly cabaret-poster visual aesthetic grabbed me more and more and his color palette was incredible. Plus, he had cheap offerings! I had been sure my first S33 doll would have been Maitre des Morts (my initial favorite in the series) or Madame La Mort (who I've since come to really appreciate). C'est la mort, if you will. Death is full of surprises.

Carotte Morts is an entertainer of unknown discipline, though it's possible he was a comic based on his seeming reference to Carrot Top, and that's the direction I think I'll frame him in. He died by splitting his head on a swinging door, though it's possible he got right back up and performed his first undead show moments after. It's indicated everybody at the Moulin Morgue ends up spilling a lot of blood onstage as their primary mode of entertainment, meaning torture and mutilation would be the primary spectacle. While this is very extreme and edgy, some French cabarets did trade in the shocking and morbid without committing violent atrocities. There was the famous Cabaret du Néant, which was themed entirely around death, and as a proto-theme restaurant, had scary scenery and magic-trick illusions to depict ghosts and feel otherworldly. There's also an alluded-to element of conspiracy within the setting of S33, as dancer Ella von Terra was murdered for disagreeing with the horrors of the establishment.

Almost everybody in the series references a known figure. Carotte Morts seems loosely inspired by Carrot Top, Madame La Mort is loosely based on the theatrical character Sweeney Todd, Maitre des Morts is a composite of the two distinctive portrayals of the Emcee in the musical Cabaret, and Ella von Terra is based on burlesque dancer Dita von Teese. Only Larmes de Sang doesn't have a clear link to a real performer or established character. Ella and Larmes are the two S33 dolls I have no personal interest in.

I got an opened but complete copy of Carotte with some relaxed hair gel.

It's a new one for me, though. Carotte Morts, in being resold, had been re-sealed in secondhand shrink-wrap! This is the first time I've ever gotten an unboxed item that I had to unseal! This wrap is more rattly and stiff.

The pricing stickers were on the clear coffin lid, but that peeled off easily.

The S33 boxes are basic black with red tissue, matching a theatrical look. The chipboards have an arced top and depict a bloody stage framed by curtains and a marquee of letters for the series' subtitle. 

Carotte is not visually depicted on the chipboard and the image doesn't appear to be at all personalized to him. This could have been a great opportunity to do a cabaret-poster style for the chipboards, but that might have been too similar to S30's freakshow posters...and Carotte is his own poster already!

His chipboard poem says:

Carotte Morts played in the theatre of gore

And smashed his head on a swinging door

His final words while he lay in the back stage salon 

"C'est la vie, the show must go on!"

And a tweak.

Carotte Morts, in the the theatre of gore

Smashed his head on a swinging door

His final words in the players' salon:

"C'est la mort! The show must go on!"

It's not clear if Carotte died onstage or backstage before the show could start, but I tend to read it the latter way since I'd imagine it being easier to crack your head on a door in the back areas. I don't know what he would have been doing with a door onstage, especially since he doesn't feel much like an actor in plays.

I was delighted to discover that S33 has a unique death certificate design! It's nothing super specific or special in execution and the changes are all subtle, but a break in style is still appreciated.

The standard certificate design, modeled by Chloe's.

Carotte Morts died on February 9, 1913.

The death certificate reads:

 

This poor petite rouge smashed his crane

He lost too much blood and rattled his brain

The French for what I think is meant to be "little redhead" appears to be incorrect, and the gender of  "petite" is incorrectly feminine. I've also never heard "crane" as slang for "head", so that might be a big stretch that I'm not sure I buy. Here's a tweak with what I hope is better French.

This poor petit roux cracked open his brain

He bled out and learned the true meaning of pain.

Here he is out of the box. There was one twist wire around his neck making a feeble effort, but it wasn't threaded through both holes or twisted or holding him into the box at all. I tossed it out.

Out of the S33 characters, Carotte Morts stands out from the others because his visual aesthetic is very very bold and looks more rough, flat and illustrated, as if he's leaped right off a vintage French cabaret poster. I love the effect of his "outlined" costume and rougher painterly face and how he reflects the artwork associated with the scene. Doing the whole cabaret series without a character in an illustrated art style would have been a big missed opportunity. I think Carotte might benefit from coming after S32, the vintage Halloween series where everybody had line-art painting. Mezco was likely able to get the hang of rendering an LDD that way from S32, and Carotte succeeds beautifully.

Carotte's hair is very unusual, being a vertical pile of curls in the middle with slicked-down curled hair all along the sides and back. These lower sections have lost some gel, giving them the volume of a bob haircut, which isn't the desired look. I think the top curls were also initially meant to be more compact and comped to his right, but I like the top being more vertical and voluminous.

 I've seen Carottes with even more relaxed hair that works well, but I might try acting against my nature and re-gelling this guy to get the silhouette in check. 

Carotte's hair is actually a blended orange, with redder and yellower highlights. I don't think I've ever seen a Living Dead Doll with a subtle hair blend like this. It's usually obvious streaks or a solid monochromatic tone.

Carotte's face is expressionistic, with rougher, flatter line work and unusual shading in the service of evoking cabaret artwork.

His eyebrows are jagged strokes, his eyes are rough layers of color, and bold purple shading falls under his eyes, which also doubles as the lower outline, because only the tops of his eyes are lined in black. Unreal, more emotional color choices are present in his white skin, red for the beauty mark and pupils, and pale blue streaks that shade the face in deliberate but chaotic placement. Carotte's wearing black lipstick like Maitre des Morts, lending the Moulin Morgue boys a vintage androgyny that reflects the transgressive theatrical displays of cabaret. Of course, the head wound dominates the paint, with a large pink split down his forehead bleeding rough streaks down the right side of his face, stopping before it goes under his jaw or down his neck. Formerly, I found the head wound too graphic and disturbing, and it was a deal-breaker, but I've come around to it. The doll is so unrealistic that it passes for me, and he feels more like a Beetlejuice ghost casually strutting around with a lethal injury like nothing happened. I think the undead-ness of the dolls saves a lot of the imagery from being too disturbing to me today, and I've come to re-evaluate several I found too grotesque previously. That's torture for my massive wishlist, but more and more LDDs feel on the table for me as long as they don't get too completely mauled.

There's a spot on his upper lip that's dark and appears to be punctured a little, so I tried to fill it in later with some acrylic paint. 

The blue shading also features in his ears.

Can't you see this on an old poster?

It's such a cool look. I can't stop gazing at it. 

Carotte Morts is wearing a scarlet suit with short pants, made from a satiny material. 

Satiny shiny fabrics were visibly something of a crutch for LDD in the earlier series, seeming to become the go-to fabric after felts were reduced, and it sometimes came across as a dubious attempt to make a simple outfit look finer and could look like party-store costuming instead. Carotte isn't one of those dolls. The fabric choice feels purposeful. The jacket and shorts have thick black embroidered trim that continues the theme of linework to make him look like an illustration, though I wish this included the trim of his legholes too. The jacket has fake pocket flaps on the hips and the left breast, and one fake button. The real front closure is velcro.

Under the jacket, Carotte has been stained by the fabric, which even got to his hand that had rested on his hip. 

His dress shirt is white and has a fake button panel but no simulated buttons, and is sleeveless and opens in the back. While that's typically just a practical concern for redressing, I think Carotte is in a context where a sleeveless shirt would work. Maitre Des Morts is even skimpier under his own jacket! The shirt doesn't tuck into the pants, and the grey necktie is separate, on an elastic loop that pulls over his head and under the collar. Putting it back on, I threaded the loop over his body to avoid disturbing his hair.

Carotte is wearing dark grey ribbed socks and black formal boy shoes which I've gotten in that sculpt before with Dedwin as the Wizard of Oz. Carotte's shoes are more matte. The socks stained his ankles, which means I had to be vigilant about keeping them pulled up, and failed to catch it for one photo. Oh well.

Here's all of his pieces.

Carotte Morts stands very easily and stably. I also discovered his ball joints are white. You'll see the photo that led to it. The color actually helped a lot!

Here's the hair reshaped. 

Gosh, this doll is stunning.

I feel like a whole different person after doing this. Maybe I'm not so anti-gel after all!

Then, I had to stage him in a theater. I tied him into a black cord noose and hanged him from some basement pipes to create a scene. I struggled to focus light into a sharp and properly-sized spot with what I had, but I did get some terrifying photos of him highlighted in the distant darkness.

There are few worse vibes than being alone in an empty dark theater with before a tiny spotlight reveals a guy onstage, no matter how dead he is. Absolute nightmare scenario.

Here's some more pictures of this scene.

The scene of his death was pretty simple to stage. I don't have a door that's LDD-sized, but I used the miniature door I had and used the photo frame to keep from revealing its true proportions. That was easy with him lying on his back. 

And naturally, I had to create a full cabaret poster to honor his art style. Here's a take with a bluish tint that looks pretty painterly.

This was great, but the photo still looked too much like a photo, so I did a fully painted-over flat take too, which also fixed the French grammar for the "Living Dead Dolls" title on top. I realized the words would be flipped.

I think the text looks absolutely perfect for the vintage cabaret style in either case, and the latter poster feels more authentic to Carotte's look and the aesthetic he reflects.

Lastly, I used a photo to create another poster, since the blood-splat paper design looked good projecting from his head and I thought it'd be fun to write laughter text over the blood splash to mix the injury and the comedy. This poster ended up very inspired by more expressive Futurist typographic design, which would have been just starting when Carotte died. It's also a lot like the branding of the 2018 version of the horror movie Suspiria, which I'm obsessed with. I don't know if Suspiria was directly doing Futurist aesthetics, but that's the vibe. I hadn't planned for the filtering of the photo to turn the background orange, but I loved the result and built the rest of my tweaks from there.

The base photo.

The result!

I had so much fun with this doll. 

There's just no other doll that looks like Carotte Morts. I'm incredibly charmed by him and I felt I understood his aesthetic intimately and used it to great effect. While I took a small leap characterizing him as a comedian, that angle gave me lots to work with in terms of morbid puns--I would have squeezed a "die laughing" one in somewhere if I could fit it!

I  just really really clicked with this doll. He's dramatic, spooky, and very artsy in his design and makes for a unique, characterful presence. Carotte Morts is a wonderful intersection of vintage, pop, and horror aesthetics and I love seeing a boy doll be so interesting. I have no specific love for France or cabaret, but this doll's vibe is incredible and he's definitely my favorite LDD boy so far. He makes me want to shortlist the other S33 dolls I like, because I have so many ideas for them after working with the S33 theme for Carotte! Madame La Mort and Maitre des Morts will be more expensive, though.

So rests Carotte Morts the comedian. He had the audience rolling--in their graves.

-fin.

Nobody Likes Vincent: Vincent Vaude

Very ugly corpse imagery ahead.

All known data indicates that this guy is the least beloved LDD ever released. Large numbers of him fall in the low end of eBay LDD listings, and I've never heard of anybody having a soft spot for him. You can get him sealed for $30, and his variant was listed for just $10 more. That's unheard of. 

And the thing with me is, I'm a little contrarian, and broadly unpopular toys can fascinate me and make me want to investigate just what went wrong. 

Vincent Vaude is a Series 5 character. S5 was the first fully-themed LDD series (before, S2 was mostly bent toward a school theme but had no unique branding and Lizzie Borden didn't really fit the idea). S5's broad concept is the golden age of show biz, including Hollywood movies and other popular entertainment famous long ago. The death ranges of S5 extend to pretty modern eras, but the whole idea is generally nostalgic and none of the dolls look exclusively modern. 

Themed series quickly became the majority. The full list is as such:

• Series 5: Classic showbiz/Hollywood
• Series 6: The number of the beast/666-- six dolls, each with a pet
• Series 7: The Seven Deadly Sins--seven dolls in total, named for their sins with their real names in parentheses afterward.
• Series 13: Bad luck superstitions
• Series 16: Séance--Four dolls, while not thematically super connected, each had a panel piece of a spirit board, with Death in the series having the planchette pointer to complete it.
• Series 16: Trick or treat/Halloween costumes
• Series 17: Classic urban legends
• Series 18: Trick or treat/Halloween costumes redux
• Series 19: Vampires
• Series 20: Dia de Muertos
• Series 21: "Things with Wings"--all winged dolls
• Series 22: Zombies
• Series 23: A dolly tea party
• Series 24: Demons
• Series 26: "Season of the Witch"
• Series 27: World folklore monsters 
• Series 28: "Sadie's Sweet Sixteen"--vague party theme surrounding Sadie and starkly pale-skinned characters with limited color palettes
• Series 29: "The Nameless Ones"--original characters in the vein of ghost tales and urban legends where the names have been lost to myth
• Series 30: Carnival freak show
• Series 31: "Don't Turn Out the Lights!"--bedroom boogeymen
• Series 32: "Vintage Halloween"--similar to S16 and S18 but without trick-or-treat buckets and a line-drawn flat art style for the faces
• Series 33: "Moulin Morgue"--theater and cabaret
• Series 34: "The Devil's Vein"--dusty ghosts from an old mining disaster 

Vincent Vaude is the boy doll of the S5 set, is the oldest death on the timeline within the series, and is loosely based on Harry Houdini. Vincent was a wannabe escape artist, locking himself in a trunk and asphyxiating, creating himself a coffin through his ineptitude. Similar real deaths and traumatic injuries through failed escape stunts have happened in real life, including one where a man died after burying himself in a Plexiglass coffin that was crushed under the weight of the dirt. Houdini himself did not die from a failed act, though, making Vaude's reference to him feel morally acceptable. Houdini died from appendix complications a week after a fan visited his dressing room and punched him in the stomach repeatedly during a stupid test of his strength. A causal link between the two was not confirmed, but the stomach trauma resulting from that scene certainly couldn't have helped.

Vincent's last name (not many LDDs have those) refers to vaudeville. While it was a massive live entertainment industry in the older days, from which many early film and television actors originated, "vaudeville" more often connotes variety theater dominated by song-and-dance numbers and comic routines, not necessarily death-defying stunts. However, Houdini did get his big break in the vaudeville circuit doing escape acts, so the reference in Vincent's name is sound. Vincent's alliteration is surely a loose reference to Houdini's own--"Harry Houdini" was actually a chosen stage name for the performer Erich Weiss. "Vincent Vaude" also invokes alliterative names like Vincent van Gogh or Vince Vaughn, though I think those are accidental associations.

My Vincent came opened and wrapped in bubble wrap inside his coffin, but I took it off for the photo. His clear coffin lid was a little dented.

The S5 boxes are the first divergent color for LDD coffins--they're silver, alluding to the "silver screen", and have printed handles and red tissue.

I knew the variant S5 boxes were silver, but I had thought the mains were black. Nope. It's all of them silver. 

I don't know if it was S4 or S5 that introduced the handle printing that ran for that chunk of time. I just know it wasn't any series before those two, since S1 and S3 don't have them.

The illustration inside the opaque lid (and on early series like this, on the back of the coffin) stands out more with the lighter color and the illustration being darker. The negative space on the back of the box is printed black, which might be how it was done on the black coffins too, but it stands out here due to not matching the box.

I think the silver coffin color might be close to or the same as the S25 coffins.

The chipboards are cut and printed to look like a clapboard from a film set held by skeleton hands. Interestingly, Ed Long and Damien Glonek are listed as film directors on the chipboard, which suggests they're not going to be credited as the morticians for S5 like they are for the other series.  Not everybody in S5 is an actor, and Vincent is one of those exceptions, but the clapboard visual works for the broad concept and the rendering and colors match the previous chipboards' art style.

Here's Vincent's chipboard poem:

He dreamed of performing on the grand old stage

An amazing escape artist of a tender young age

So small Vincent Vaude locked himself in a trunk

By the time someone found him his body sure stunk

And a rewrite.

He dreamed of performing such stunts on the stage

The art of escaping had been all the rage

So small Vincent Vaude shut himself in a trunk

By time he was found, the backstage had stunk

The Series 5 death certificates were also the first with a divergent design, though most series stuck to the one template and the themed branding for unique series concepts very rarely affected the certificate design. Series 5's are styled like comparatively modern coroner's reports rather than old undertakers' notices, and place the dolls in the fictitious location of Athens County, California by the address on the report. I'm surprised it isn't just Los Angeles County, the real place. Or Los Diablos County, as it were. The real Athens County is in Ohio, and I don't think a California medical examiner would be set up there. The dolls are photographed in evidence photos "clipped on" and causes of death, time of death, and examination info are listed in clinical prose, so there is no second poem for these dolls. The only other series I can think of where that was the case is S30, where the chipboards had no poems--only the doll's name and series and the freak-show illustrations. I think the unique S5 details of time of death, location, specific means of death, and injuries are interesting and several mysteries could be cleared up if all LDD certificates were so detailed. Red blood stains splatter the certificate, including, alarmingly, a ring from someone's glass. Evidently the morgue is displaying extremely unsanitary standards even if the coroners aren't outright drinking blood as a beverage.

The paperclip depicted on the death-scene photo looks useless because it's not printed to look like it's going around the edge of the physical paper certificate and there's no suggestion of other photos clipped underneath it.

The coroner is listed as Tinselton Stitches, referring to the "Tinseltown" nickname for Hollywood and his job doing autopsies. Such a character has never been physically seen. He's not a doll character. (It would have been fun if this character was Dr. Dedwin instead.) Stitches seems to be listed on all five dolls' certificates (if Jezebel's, which I've gotten, is any indication) despite them dying across multiple decades and eras. This would mean either he was very old by the last star's death (Jez in 1999) or he was undead from the start and never had to worry about aging or being replaced. Realistically, this is probably just something the designers never thought about when they slapped a throwaway name onto the certificates. Hi, I overthink things.

Interestingly, the LDD text logo appears rendered with a singular "Doll". I wonder why. I thought the brand name hadn't ever been in the singular since preliminary designs of the coffin. 

As mentioned, Vincent Vaude died on Houdini's death date--October 31, 1926. Two other LDDs died on this exact calendar date, and both are from Series 32--Nicholas and Ye Ole Wraith. While those dolls may or may not be connected by their exact shared date, both of them are using it for Halloween purposes while Vincent is not. Houdini just happened to die on the holiday. Vincent is my second Halloween deathdate doll after Lamenta.

I have a second copy of Vincent's certificate, as well as one of variant Jezebel's, since they came with my Viv. All of the S5 certificates were flat rather than being tied up in a roll, though I can't be sure yet if they ever were rolled and tied like every other series. They might not have been. It'd actually be nice to try flattening the other certificates and have them in a card album or a corkboard frame for a wall display. That could be a fun project, but maybe only at a much later time when I consider my LDD collection more "finished". Could be ages. And while it'd make it easier to cite the certificates to have them in one spot where they could easily be read and cross-referenced, it'd amount to building a separate collection to rearrange and keep track of, and that could be annoying.

Here's Vincent out of the box. It must be a great relief to him to get out! As with buried-alive Chloe, I feel like I'm rescuing him just by removing him from confinement!

Vincent Vaude has short blond hair parted to his right. While the style looks fairly shapeless out of box, I've seen pictures of variant Vincent where the hair on his left is flat to his head while the right fans out a bit, and that feels very 1920s-theatrical and gives him a lot of character.

All Living Dead Dolls are dead, but Vincent has always struck me as looking much more corpse-like than most, and it's all in the nasty face. 

He's screaming, and his skin is grey and veined, his mouth is wide open, and his eyes are dully rolled up into his head with his lids peeking over top and bottom, creating a very unpleasant image of a dead body in its dying gasp for air. The concept of asphyxia is communicated well with the deoxygenated blue tongue and veining, and the eye detail is cool, but the thickness and unemotive low set of the eyebrows paired with the squeezed lids and super heavy eye shading takes what could have been a haunting, even tragic theatrical horror design into something purely repulsive. He feels musty, ugly, and dead without being very undead. It's not hard to see why he didn't strike a chord with people. There's no charm here. 

I do think the doll looks a bit better from a distance where his dark eyelids blend into the shading and outlines of the eyes. The brows are still wrong to me, but I'm guessing Vincent wasn't really meant to be viewed so close. 

Vincent is my second screaming doll, and his upper teeth are much shorter than Viv's, showing one of the several mold variants for screaming LDD faces.  Vincent's teeth aren't a straight line, which may not be intentional. They slant lower on his left. 

Vincent's coloring is very similar to Agatha's, as both are blond with pale greyish skin. 

Vincent's oufit feels very appropriate for a 1920s vaudevillian, with a semi-formal outfit of a white dress shirt and corduroy trousers with patterned suspenders, and a bowtie that matches them. 

The suspenders and tie are green and blue plaid, which works with his blue tongue, and the tie is tidy and the buttons down the front look good. I also like the cuffs on the brown trousers. This outfit is all one piece, with the shirt and pants being stitched together while the straps are loose at the top and can slide down off his shoulders. It doesn't come off super smoothly, but it can be removed. The suspenders cross at the back, and the velcro closure runs between the shirt and pants section. The suspenders are not elasticated.

Vincent has the LDD formal boy shoes in brown, with a brushed leather-like paint job. He has white socks underneath. 

His palms are not pierced to work with accessory pegs. Whether LDDs had pierced hands seemed to be very spotty for a good while. S1 had a manufacturing variant from Japan where those dolls were visually the same as elsewhere but had the piercings (despite, I believe, no S1 accessories having pegs), and my copies of S8 Faith and S3 Lottie both have palm holes despite them lending no functionality to those specific dolls, so I don't know when the dolls finally reached a point of only being pierced when it was relevant. I know the Lost in Oz dolls were within that era, since only the Wizard and Tin Man have palm holes, both have accessories that utilize them, and only in one hand each. 

Looking at Vincent, it's really not hard to see why he flopped. His colors and line work look too bold, turning haunting asphyxia into a really ugly character design. The deoxygenated blue is fine, but the golden yellow isn't working here. It feels like there's too much saturation here, and his eyebrows and eye sockets look way too heavy. He looks like an old man, not a little boy, he's probably too cadaverous in appearance, and he doesn't have that 1920s theatrical look

I realized from photos that variant Vincent in the black-and-white set looked far more elegant and genuinely spooky, so I decided to get him. He looked like of the easiest variant LDDS to get despite looking like he might lack the issues of the main doll, and I wanted the opportunity to discuss a variant doll alongside an original. Despite the variant looking like its nuances fix the problems with the main doll, it still doesn't go for much, so I couldn't pick a less expensive avenue for variant comparison! The S5 variants are greyscale-themed to invoke old films, and individual variants were randomly inserted into complete sets of five, or else were available in more limited quantities through the Club Mez membership.

The only other variant LDD I'm aware of to have a full greyscale palette was one of 2018 Halloween exclusive Vesper's variants. Series 19 (vampires) and 22 (zombies) each had variant sets in greyscale with bloody red accents (and one variant-exclusive character in each variant set), while the most conceptually similar variant set to S5's occurred in Resurrection IX, where there was a sepia-toned variant set to reflect old photograpy per the historical murder-stories concept of the Res set.

Variant Vincent being the third doll in this post does not make him the finale. He's the test case forming the standard that these roundups will typically feature three characters, but variants are on the table for extra dolls within one section. I don't know if Resurrections would hypothetically share a roundup entry with originals like I guess variants do now, but I really doubt I'd have to deal with the technicalities there. Resurrections are mostly out of reach and unreasonable to get, with few cases where I'd bite regardless, and the only cases I can think of where I'd be comparing a Resurrection to an original are one where the character would get their own separate post to go over their dolls because they have a variant from their original that I'd discuss too, and one where I already have the original to bring in for discussion if I get the Res doll.

Then variant Vincent arrived. Variant Vincent...in black and...white?

What.

Um...

This is a sealed S5 Vincent Vaude from the main set. So somebody gave me the wrong doll. I double-checked my order history and I realized the first Vincent was meant to be the variant. The second was the sealed Vincent I had ordered for my main. I messaged the seller of the incorrect main to tell them this, trying to be open and polite while being frank, clarifying the issue with photos of both Vincents new, and saying I would accept a refund or return in the case the desired doll was not available.  I was a little disappointed to see that the erroneous Vincent was in nicer condition than the one that came correctly, but I'm an adult and I could work with the second doll.

After raising my concern with the seller, I waited tensely. I've had both lovely and disappointing interactions with sellers who made mistakes before, so I didn't know if this was going to be a kind person who made a simple flub or if this was going to get frustrating.

Fortunately, it was a simple error-- the seller had thought the variant doll was marked by a silver coffin and got it wrong. That could be seen as inexcusably sloppy, not checking the doll inside before final packing. Maybe it was, but I was inclined to be understanding because I'd had the very same misconception about the S5 boxes! I knew where the mistake came from. The seller promised to send the correct doll ASAP and I thanked them and asked what was to be done with the original I received so there was full clarity. I didn't want to cheat the seller after they'd made a simple error they were eager to correct. My only foray onto eBay selling with Skullector Jack and Sally ended in a day of stress when the package wasn't delivered directly to the buyer and there was nothing I could do about it because it was marked "delivered", so I knew the seller's side of a problem and was happy to let the Vincent I've already shown you return home. I'd only feel entitled to keep the doll if it was a knowingly incorrect sale, and knowing this was a nice person who made a simple mistake made it only fair to make a return.

I was very touched and appreciative when the seller allowed me to keep the incorrect Vincent for my trouble, making him the first LDD I've been given as a gift. Under other circumstances, a gift of Vincent Vaude could be disappointing, but I genuinely appreciated it here, and I was growing to like him on his own merits. And because he could stay, the gratuity Vincent is the "canonical" S5 main in my collection. It oddly cheered me to be able to continue using him just because handling and planning photos with that copy already created a bit of a superficial bond. Aren't toys funny that way? He may have a face only a mother could love, but maybe I'm embodying that proverbial mother a little, and I honor him as a token of generosity.

Because I could use the correct second S5 main's box as a prop and the doll for a custom project, I kept it around. There are few circumstances where customizing an LDD feels acceptable, but a spare Vincent Vaude being remade won't get many, if any, collectors upset and I relished the opportunity to fully do over a Living Dead Doll. That'll be shared sometime later once I get clothing in order to complete the work.

There wasn't much to say about the second main Vincent as he came. His coffin was slightly yellowed and dirtied, but there weren't especially meaningful differences in his face. His clothes were dirtier. I was able to confirm that the S5 death certificates are packaged flat in plastic sleeves when new! They weren't ever rolled or tied in ribbon. 

The intended variant doll arrived soon after. I've said it directly to them, but again, my sincerest thanks to the seller for so graciously amending the error. My Vincents are in a good home and will be well cared-for.

This is not my first LDD variant doll (that'd be Emerald City Walpurgis, a variant on the main Walpurgis as the Oz Wicked Witch of the West), but this is my first variant I can compare to the counterpart main, and I was glad to have the opportunity to compare a main and variant!

The S5 variants are representative of the look of classic films and photographs before color imaging became widely available and the industry standard. In this set, Hollywood and Dahlia's hair colors also swapped, with white-blonde Hollywood becoming brunette (and way more curly) and dark-haired Dahlia becoming white-haired. Each hair change slightly removes the characters from the likenesses of the real people whose tragic deaths they reference, so the variant dolls are morally more acceptable to me. I do still really like the main Hollywood despite her more extreme look, and she reads more immediately as a classic movie star with enough of a generic archetypal aesthetic to remove her from her real-life reference. She's on her way, but she'll be relegated to a unique "gruesome roundup" of more extreme dolls that have caught my eye.

I was immediately taken aback when I saw an opaque black window cover for the coffin, which I'd only known to be in use for Resurrection X dolls, and wondered if this could possibly be original to the doll...but it looks like it is! 

The LDD site explains that the S5 variants which were randomly inserted into orders of a complete set of mains came in a "closed-casket" style. I'm assuming that means instead of being fully closed with the opaque cardboard lid like I had assumed, the "closed casket" was the black plastic cover. That makes sense. No other classic LDD I know of was factory-packed with the cardboard lid over the doll. I was also able to find evidence of other S5 variant copies with black covers as well as S5 variants with the standard translucent lid, so it looks like this is all legit and I had bought in on the rarer variant release of Vincent--the randomly-acquired one! So if you're collecting S5 variants, they have two different plastic lid options. I don't think the black lid matches the coffin, but it looks great behind the doll, as we'll see later.

For the cover photo in the new style (which I'll probably discuss in the next roundup, since I changed the LDD Roundup cover photos after this post was initially published), I just popped a clear lid onto the variant coffin so I could utilize the white tissue in the visual while arranging dolls on the surface of the lid.

The S5 variants have white tissue.

 

I'm not sure if any other series' variant sets changed the packaging colors from the main set this way, but it suits the overall concept. Because S5 was the first series with a variant set at all, it's likely the unique packaging things are from testing out the implementation. Here, they fully wanted the surprise factor--randomly inserting dolls into main sets with opaque lids so you'd be surprised with an entirely different color scheme down to the box when investigating. I believe all future variant sets of dolls would have been exclusively ordered direct without randomly disrupting a purchased set of mains. The next series with a full variant set was S9, where they were ordered only, not randomly inserted, and I think the only other series to have fully random dolls in a purchase set was S35, with a set of six mystery dolls that you could get one of at random in each purchase set of five. And even there, one of the five was guaranteed to be one of the mystery dolls--the mystery doll didn't take the slot of one of the mains so there was no "disruption" factor.

Other mystery/variable factors in LDD dolls which were not variant sets include:

• Series 6's Dottie Rose, which had two variants (eyebrowed and browless) which you wouldn't have been able to choose from when offered new through Mezco 
• Series 8's Angus Littlrot, a bag-headed character with three equally-available variant heads, where only opening the doll and undoing the sack mask would reveal which of the three face variants you got
• The Resurrection dolls of Lottie, who would very very rarely come with an umbrella accessory, but most of her limited copies did not. The doll and her variant both had a gripping hand on all copies, which thus was not a "tell" for whether she had the umbrella or not
• Series 8's The Lost, which could be a rarer white-dressed variant carrying a black-dressed rag doll (the black-dressed The Lost with the white-dressed doll was the more common edition)
• The Series 34 dolls, copies of which would get a gold nugget accessory at random

I'm partially intrigued by the mystery of getting an Angus, though only one of his faces really strikes me, and I'd like to get a few S34 dolls, so seeing if I get a nugget with them would be fun.

The variant Vincent's death certificate makes the "death scene photo" greyscale, but it's an edit of the image on the main certificate, not a photo of the unique variant doll. The suspender straps are a dead giveaway. Variant Vincent's suspenders aren't plaid.

Then I took the doll out.

His hair is the same shape, but it's a silvery color.

Variant Vincent's skin is more off-white than grey. His paint color changes and the application make for a more appealing doll.

Because his eyelids have changed to black, the eyes feel less narrowed and squeezed and just look shadowed here, and his tongue blends into his mouth with the black color. The color not being so strange for the irises also helps, and his brows and eye shading aren't as heavy, either. The more delicate eye shading is such a massive impact change.

Putting them side-by-side creates a stark difference. There's even some kind of optical illusion making main Vincent's face look more squat and round. The variant looks like it has a more open mouth and a longer face even though the heads are a shared sculpt.

I find the variant face to make a huge difference, and it's variant Vincent who feels like a haunting 1920s zombie. This face doesn't look like a rotting grandpa. It has actual polish. The doll is far less grotesque and I find him genuinely striking and aesthetically appealing. 

Vincent's costume also looks a fair bit more formal with this higher contrast. His slacks and shoes and buttons are now black, and his bow tie and suspenders are solid satiny black rather than casual plaid. This feels more fancy and theatrical to me. 

Vincent and Carotte Morts compare well since both are stage entertainers and each of their series is based on vintage performers, though variant Vincent is more on par with Carotte for striking vintage drama. It would be interesting to see how LDD would do/would have done a potential third show-biz series. A cast of stage actors referencing famous shows? Modern Vegas variety acts? A series of musicians?

I also wanted to see how the Vincent dolls compared for color palette--did color Vincent in a greyscale photo match variant Vincent, and did they look that different if both were in a greyscale photo?

The skin and hair match near exactly when both are viewed in greyscale, but variant Vincent's use of black instead of lighter tones means his palette is overall not equivalent in color value to the main.

I find these departures with higher contrast to be great strengths, though.

Variant Vincent is not the first greyscale-themed doll I've gotten. Read about more with the start of my Shadow High deep dive here.

I then took variant Vincent down to boil his hair a little flatter. Here's that result. I think it suits the time period even better this way.

Putting his outfit back on was very slow and difficult. It's tightly-tailored and the thick corduroy did not help one bit. I only removed the outfit on the spare Vincent, so I hadn't had to try putting it back on until this moment. 

Now, for photos. I started work with main S5 Vincent while I waited for the variant because I had an idea requiring color and wanted to be fair to the main doll. I had sought an acrylic case to create an escape box for him that would photograph well, because a locked opaque trunk with a person dying inside isn't that dynamic. The case is only just able to fit a Living Dead Doll with short shoes with no allowance, which is good because I couldn't find any suitable alternatives online with slightly more generous dimensions. LDD boots or sandals would prevent this from working.

The case doesn't have a door or lid--the box is two bracket shapes -- [ ] -- which each comprise three of the prism's faces and nest together. 

To stage Vincent in the box, he needed some doing-up himself. I had a chain to wrap him in, and padlocked that together on his front. I also tied a strip of rag around his waist and wrist to imply that his left hand has been tied down to his body and can't help him. I then added rope around his ankles and put a tiny key in his open mouth. I had to cut a key from a Playmobil figure's ring-of-keys accessory to get a key small enough for his mouth, but it works as if he's coughed up a pre- swallowed key for his act. I had considered tying it to a string so it would dangle out of his mouth, but it didn't read well on the thin thread and among the rest of the noise, so resting the key on his tongue with a bit of putty to hold it was the best move.

Set up like this, he looks way better! Accessories typically get the least focus on LDD, but Vincent is one of those dolls who could have done with some. Bindings and chains to communicate his concept better, like these, would have elevated him, and those could even count as part of his outfit. Sure, Vincent's story doesn't imply an official escape act and he just got shut in a box...but those are words and would have cost nothing to rewrite for a doll who had the full stunt show. Why have a doll based on escape artists who doesn't have any real iconography for it? I like my setup here better.

I decided to see what metal bits and bobs I could add to the case to make it look more detailed and like a reinforced escape tank. I found some brackets to put on the edges and some round tacks to cover the holes with. Everything is just being glued on because screws could break the acrylic and I didn't want anything poking inside the box. I made sure to be clever and not glue any brackets in such a way that the interlocking panels of the case would be stuck together or unable to interlock. I also found a padlockable latch from a secondhand shipping trunk I picked up on the sidewalk and which didn't fit together on the big trunk, but could easily do on the escape box. I wanted the gag to be Vincent with a lock on himself and the box with a lock on itself, and I had the two locks. This latch was rusted, though, so I put it in vinegar so that could be removed. The bonus of the latch was that it was big enough to cover a small hole in the front of the case when locked. Vincent did suffocate, after all, even if his textual death was far more pathetic than this grand spectacle, so I didn't want any suggestion of air getting to him. I also added a hook to the top where a key can dangle, adding a cruel twist--that key is implicitly vital to to Vincent's escape, but there's no conceivable way he could reach it from the inside, and it couldn't open either of the locks in this setup. The lock on the box actually does keep the two panels from separating, so it's not a total cheat where the box can open even when it looks locked. The key outside can open the lock because it's one of those simple diary-style mini padlocks that will open to any narrow object wiggled inside.

Here's the pieces of the case after being dressed up.

And here it is put to use all together. I decided to give Vincent an entirely different audience from the dolls I composited in silhouette onto Carotte's stage photo. Because I wasn't using the closet shelves this time, the audience could be fully diegetic as well, not needing to be edited in.

The curtain is a shirt that matches his plaid.

The sign was written on the other side of the Carotte piece!

And an epitaph.

Then I put together a newspaper that could have come out in LDD-land days after his death. 

Spot the haiku.

I didn't have a box that would fit an LDD and also work as a trunk, but I didn't need to have one when I could just use a photo of the human-size trunks in my basement--the lower of which I sourced the escape-box latch from. Not like it makes any difference when the trunk is closed what size it is or whether the doll is in it or not.

I had first wanted the ghost story on the side to cite a Living Dead Doll as eyewitness to Ye Ole Wraith (herself referenced due to her exact shared deathdate with Vincent), but few dolls died in the early 1920s and either the dolls were adaptations of movie characters (Nosferatu and Victim), are uncomfortable to reference (Schitzo with his ableist name), don't make sense (Envy is a jungle girl) or aren't available for comment (Nicholas is said to have vanished off the face of the earth). I didn't have to be so sticky about the canon here, but I decided not to name a witness for a lack of candidates that made sense for this moment in the LDD timeline.

And going off the gag in the paper about "Grauman's Chinese Graveyard", I decided to go all-in. In the real world, Grauman's Chinese Theater gained the attraction of sidewalk slabs signed and handprinted/footprinted by celebrities, with it becoming something of a tradition for famous people to create a slab for the theater, adjacent to the other tradition of the star tiles in the Hollywood Walk of Fame. I decided that the LDD equivalent of this attraction would be a sidewalk graveyard where every star was buried underneath their respective tile, and adapted the successful sidewalk tile idea from my Dottie Rose to create a Grauman's slab for Vincent. I put the shoes in (I then had to carve out the prints deeper) and then did handprints under cracks to suggest someone trying to smash at a container he's trapped in, and also added chain imprints and the signature. The composition is a lot more compact and the tile is comparatively small compared to a real example, but it works. I didn't even really need to paint this one.

I'm not yet done with Series 5. In fact, I intend to get each character! Giving myself a creative gimmick to craft for them might have doomed me to it. But I like Siren at her current prices, and as mentioned, Hollywood has been secured for a later review. I'm even interested in challenging myself and directly confronting Jezebel and Dahlia--the two most objectionable dolls of all LDD for me personally, and who I had up to recently entirely written off. Those will have to be in a more philosophical and serious long "uncomfortable roundup" I've been planning to discuss LDD's worst looks, but all of the S5 characters' slabs have been made now, ready for their arrivals as they come. There was also a loose copy of Hollywood's variant on eBay with seriously untamed hair (though it would have already been extremely curly new) and no boa, but that had since sold, solving the question of which one I'd get. 

Lastly for the main doll, I put together a vaudeville/theater poster. The thing is, I really like the color palette they were going for with Vincent, and those shades turned out a great poster...the doll's rendering just missed so many marks that the colors feel like a negative the way they're used.

It was fun figuring out the nuances of these posters and showcasing two very different stage spheres. Carotte's poster is undeniably cabaret and Vincent's can't be mistaken for the same.

Then I put together photos with the variant. First, an outdoor escape as he's being hanged from a building.

And then I made a creepy hood for him out of a sleeve from worn-out pajamas and put him in the only box I had which worked as a trunk for him to have suffocated in--but he only fits in it seated with the lid open.

And I tried him out with the chains. I think he keeps these for shelf display, while main Vincent can get the fabric binding and ropes and golden lock.

This is a color photo.

And then I was thinking about the variant dolls as something like the ghosts of the main dolls. If not their physical spirits, then certainly their recorded legacies, right? The main dolls in color would be the actual dead people, but the variants, with their film theme, could be the images and film videos taken of the dead, the stories that survived them and turned into legend. 

Or maybe a less abstract scenario. What if Vincent's body was removed from the vessel he died in, but he never quite got out?

This image was done entirely in-camera with the only editing being the color removal--no compositing. The picture makes use of the classic Pepper's Ghost effect--when a clear pane you can see through also catches a reflection in front of it, the reflection can look like it's "inside" the view through the pane--like when you walk up to a shop window and your reflection looks like it could be inside the store. I just reflected the real variant doll off the front of the case, and squeezed him out of view through careful framing. The desk light behind Dedwin was necessary to get the ghost so clear, but it works diegetically in the scene as theater equipment or something set up for the investigation.

Vincent (to the side) reflecting off the case.

Vincent wasn't that kind of stage magician, but it felt appropriate to use that old stage trick to create a ghost and have a photo where the two Vincents made sense sharing a frame. The staging was really tight and framing it so you couldn't see the doll or the platform he stood on was difficult. I think the reflection ends up a little too small because of the way this had to be set up, but whatever.

And lastly, a signed celebrity photo. I started doing these later on in my collection with Hollywood and Dahlia, so this is a retroactive addition.

So does Vincent Vaude deserve to be the least-loved Living Dead Doll?

...yeah.

S5 mains Vincent is a dreary, ugly corpse of a doll--no question about it. He's not beautifully morbid like Hush or his own variant, and he has no extra trimmings or accessories to sell the escape-artist concept in a more dynamic way that would counteract his unappealing faceup. I was able to find his best and stage a great scene with him, and I treasure him as a symbol of kindness from a seller who dealt with an error with grace and undue generosity. That has to be valued because it's all too rare, and it lent Vincent a sentimental worth he wouldn't have had without the mistake. It was very kind of the seller to allow me to keep that Vincent, so I'm inclined to be kind to him and I have no plans to get rid of him. But putting sentimentality and photo art aside, the doll as produced by Mezco is just not an appealing figure. His expression is vacant and heavy, and his paint is overdone and makes him look too decayed.

Variant Vincent is the best form of the character design, and I think he's definitely undervalued. The coloration and contrast and minor nuances of paint make him look more theatrical and striking for the time period and he squeaks by without any escape trappings because the doll itself is nice to look at. I think the variant coloration hugely benefits three of the S5 dolls. It does the series concept great service by leaning further into the imagery of the time and it changes some characters' palettes to make them less accurate and less distasteful depictions of real deaths. I'd say the S5 variants are mostly superior to the mains and I'd have probably released the color dolls as the variants instead. Only Siren and Jezebel's variants don't look all that striking to me.

Here's my Vincents finalized. I have an obvious favorite, but there's value to both and to having the two together. 

Outstanding in His Field: Isaac

I had initially thought I'd do Teddy as the Cowardly Lion in this roundup, but I wanted to be committed to the idea of consecutive progress on Series 6, so its boy doll entered this part of the review instead. 

Isaac is Living Dead Dolls' first scarecrow doll (read about its second in my first LDD post here). He's also one of LDD's novelty dolls, because to lean into the scarecrow theme, he's a soft-bodied floppy plush for most of his body, only having plastic doll parts for his head and hands, plus plastic LDD shoes sewn on. I don't know if this endeared him much to LDD collectors, and I knew there was the concern that he required a doll stand if he hoped to display like his fellow LDDs, but S6 in general isn't the highest-fetching series on the aftermarket, so I don't know. I certainly liked Isaac's character design and was intrigued by the doll, even if I didn't come away finding him the best in his series.

Oh, and remember how I said S6, with its Frankenstein, ghost, scarecrow, black cat, and creepy goths would be a good series for Halloween despite not being a themed Halloween series? Well...why didn't I just check the release time? 

The dolls came out in October 2003. They're totally a Halloween series at the same time as they're built around the Number of the Beast concept. S6 was actually the first Halloween series, it just wasn't branded as such. 

My Isaac came sealed, making him my third of four S6 dolls to be acquired that way. Here's the wrap and lid removed.

And his chipboard.

His poem reads:

Isaac is a scarecrow

Who wants to steal your soul

But he is too busy hanging

And loving his Ole' Crow

I like that there's more to this poem than just "Isaac is creepy and has a pet". It might be a little generic, but stealing a soul is a motivation that gives him character. Here's a tweak.

Isaac is a scarecrow

Who's searching for a soul

But for now, he hangs around

A perch for his Ole Crow

Here's his death certificate.

Isaac is my first LDD with no known death date. This makes sense, since an animate scarecrow inhabited by something dead probably can't count as having ever lived in the first place, and whether Isaac is a ghost or spirit or just a scarecrow that got up and walked on the dark side would be hard to determine. 

The certificate poem is as follows:

Nailed to a cross

This false prophet hates

Crows pecking on his innards

He just hangs and waits

Isaac's name and poems allude to the Stephen King story Children of the Corn, about a cult of parentless children in a farm area, led by a boy named Isaac in the 1984 film adaptation. Isaac in the film is sacrificed by the others but returns possessed by the entity he preached about, "He Who Walks Behind the Rows". I don't know how the idea of a punished false prophet suits a scarecrow, but there's something very Promethean about the idea of being pecked by birds for your sins. I want to try leaning into that. How about:

Nailed to a cross

His prophecies frightened

But he knows that the birds

Only peck the enlightened

Isaac's unboxing was slightly nonstandard even for S6. Because his arms are not rigid jointed pieces, two extra twist ties were used for him to hold his wrists in place, in addition to the extra tie used for S6 dolls to secure the pets. Here he is out.

Isaac does need a stand. His legs are firmly-stuffed enough that they can lock upright, but he's top-heavy and his hips are too floppy for him to at all be able to free-stand. He needs to lean against something, and even then, I don't fully trust it. It's also not super easy to find the pose where his legs feel stable, so a stand is more reliable.

Here he is in the one old-fashioned doll stand I have, which fortunately works perfectly for him.

The first thing I wanted to do was compare proportions. As it turns out, Isaac isn't too much taller than a regular LDD, but his long arms, wide shoulders, bulky torso, high waist, and skinny legs give him a very gangly clumsy silhouette that's totally unlike the standard shape. I think this is very cleverly done to maximize the "skinny" effect within a size that's compatible with the regular dolls and the coffin boxes. The tweaks to his proportions like raising his waist and crotch and lengthening his arms do a great job at making him seem spindly and tall even though the doll doesn't tower over his fellows.

Up on top, Isaac has a hat with straw attached under the brim, which appears to function as his hair. The hat is glued to his head. The hat feels like denim and has a wide triangle point and an irregular petal-like jagged brim, as well as a yellow patch that's really sewn on with red thread.

The hat isn't stuffed, so the shape is a bit collapsed. It works for him, but there wouldn't be a way to stuff it if I wanted to without risking unfixable damage to the doll. 

 

The hat is black, but appears intentionally dirtied by yellow-brown "dust" coloration to make him look more weathered. 

All of the straw is real, and it's attached under the brim of the hat, not to the head. This means it's a bit ambiguous whether the straw is part of the hat or whether it's his hair. It casts quite a shadow on his face regardless!

Isaac's head is a vinyl LDD mold made for all-vinyl dolls, and is the only body part he shares with another doll. This is the specialty sculpt which debuted the previous series for S5's Siren. Siren introduced a stitched-lips sculpt that works very well for a scarecrow. The stitches have texture like rope or yarn laces, and are here painted black. The ends go into recessed circles to represent the holes they're threaded through!

I keep thinking at least one other doll used this mold, but it might just be Isaac and Siren after all. Ella von Terra in Series 33 debuted an alternate stitch-mouthed mold with crossed stitches that, to me, looked too thick and unrealistic, but I wonder if her sculpt was made because the older one was out of commission or built on a pre-ball-joint head? Both Isaac and Siren came before the LDDs needed overhauled molds for the new articulation, and several specialty sculpts released before the overhaul didn't seem to return on the ball-joint dolls. I think it's just the screaming, devil-horns, bumpy, and ripped-cheek faces that survived the transition of body styles. 

Isaac's head is cast in a golden color and features painted patches of brown--a circle over his eye and a triangle on his neck. 

Neither patch is outlined, but I think it passes here. The stitches on both are uniformly done in X shapes all around. His eyes are depicted as black sockets with piercing white irises, making him look inhabited or haunted by a supernatural entity. The pupils appear to be deliberately unfocused to make him look more empty or clumsy. The lip stitches coming from the Siren sculpt are clearly dimensional, but the other stitches are all just painted. The painted patchwork makes him much like S6 fellow Calico, who is entirely patches.

I guess if one doll in S6 got the stitched mouth, it had to be Isaac. Both having it could make sense, but it would feel redundant, and it could be overkill on Cal.

There's a lot of commonalities and links you could throw between the S6 dolls, and I'd love to do an analysis of how you can chain them together once I have them all.

Airbrushing features around Isaac's eyes and also his mouth, and the boundaries of the mouth shading aren't a clean fade, but I think it looks okay. It resembles a fabric stain that way. Isaac has no eyebrows.

While the face is classic and pretty cute, it's also a lot scarier in person than I'd expected it to be. He's very spooky.

Isaac's soft body is a separate layer from his clothes, though the outfit, despite opening with velcro, can't really be removed. Let's look at it first. 

He's wearing a red flannel shirt with straw in the neck and sleeves, and a pair of long black pants with elastic suspenders, as well as black round-toed LDD boots.

The shirt has no simulated buttons or panels, but it does have a collar and another yellow patch sewn to the left shoulder.

The pants are the same black dusty denim as the hat, and are very simple, with elastic suspenders, a yellow patch on the front right hip and a tattered ankle that comes down around the boots. 

The suspenders aren't super tight around his shoulders, but I don't know if they would have been tighter when new. The straps don't cross each other in the back.

Here's how the outfit opens in the back, and the plush torso underneath. Pants and shirt are attached like usual for LDD. All of Isaac's soft body is blank black fabric.

While the outfit looks removable, this is deceptive for two reasons. For one, his boots are pinched and sewn to the rag feet with thread.

I'm not cutting these threads. I learned my lesson from the soft-bodied Dracula. Plush dolls don't fit in shoes that great! Next to the head, the boots are the only piece of Isaac that exist on other dolls.

And back to undressing, even if you took the boots off, good luck getting Isaac's sleeves over these hands!

These are unique hand sculpts sewn into the ends of his fabric arms. 

For some reason, some straw was sewn into the arm despite the sleeve already having a lot.

The hands have a gnarled appearance and a washed paint job to make them look half-wooden, like they're twigs and sticks in a hand shape. And you're not seeing things--both of Isaac's hands are deliberately left-handed shapes, and the left hand on the right side of his body also has a sixth digit! Superstition casts the left hand as evil, and it's imagery LDD seems to invoke a lot by having the surviving hand of one-handed dolls be the left one, or in the conjoined twins Hazel and Hattie (who I really want). The two are conjoined at the shoulder such that each sister has only one arm, and it's evil twin Hattie who ends up with the left hand between the two. Meanwhile, extra digits was also once seen as a sign of evil. 

I think Isaac's extra-digit hand is actually supposed to be his left left hand to be extra evil, and my copy has it switched via manufacturer error. Oh, well. 

Both hands have the palm facing forward when they dangle down. Very cool pieces, but they prohibit the outfit coming off.

Isaac's pet is Ole Crow (the apostrophe in the poem is not correct; it would be if it was "Ol' Crow with no "e"), who is stylized akin to the others, and is sculpted cawing in a horrible shriek, tongue and all. 

Ole Crow balances properly on those feet, which is good because I've heard some copies aren't molded properly to let that happen. 

The beak is subtly grey, and grey appears on the tail feathers as well.

Isaac's motion is technically greater than other dolls, but he doesn't have any rigidity to hold a pose with. His head is able to flop back and forth a little, and there are sewn pinches in his limbs that create floppy joints at his shoulders, elbows, hips and knees. If he was stiff, these joints would make him the most poseable LDD until the Return dolls, but as he is, they don't add a lot of practical display function.

His big hands can grip some things and they can interlock. Isaac proved able to hang from my desk here!

Isaac is too small and too plastic to be cuddly, but I think his soft body adds a lot of rag-doll charm to him and makes him very endearing and classic-feeling to me. I love the soft body.

Here's the two LDD scarecrow dolls together: Isaac, and Purdy as the Scarecrow from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

It's striking how different they are, and it shows how well each executes their goal. Isaac, with his exclusively warm color palette and caricature, is a quintessential spooky autumnal Halloween scarecrow--among the best spooky scarecrows I've seen, actually. Meanwhile, Purdy's costume feels more folksy and it suits a fantasy take on a scarecrow and does read "Oz". Her blue colors are not only true to the book lore of the Scarecrow being made by the blue-wearing Munchkin nation (a detail I'm only just realizing, and which I've since added to her review), but they remove her from a Halloween domain in the right way.

For photos with Isaac, I did similar to what I did for Purdy and build him a scarecrow stake, and did make it cruciform to match his poems. While Isaac references it with a religious and mildly blasphemous context, it doesn't have to be taken that way because it used to just be an execution without any specific significance. But also LDD is shock-goth, so this is what you get with it. His stake is larger than the one I made for Purdy so I could accommodate the long limbs, and it's made from thicker branches. His design works perfectly so he can hang from the crossbar by his suspenders while his arms stretch over the top, and his hand shapes work really well for resting on the bar. Purdy had to be tied onto her stake, but Isaac's clothes are perfect for hanging him up just as he is!

I tried one picture in afternoon daylight on one of the dirt patches around my house. I had to really edit the colors to turn the spring greenery into sickly yellow plants and match his autumn vibe. This isn't the proper time to photograph Isaac, so I faked it!

Ole Crow perches surprisingly well on the bar!

Then I noticed the cicadas crawling around the front path and got the heck out. No thank you. I moved to where they weren't. I then tried holding him up to find a patch of sky, which I thought would be very powerful.

And some text work with these.

Then I waited for it to get a little darker and set up a black background for spookier pictures. I recently painted a poster board black and have been using it every time I need a black backdrop I can darken in post. It's so much easier to plop a board into a shoot than a fabric like I'd been using before. Cat fur doesn't get stuck all over the board, either!

And I took more photos in the full garden scenery, using the same color-grading edits as before.

This was where I discovered Isaac could lock his hands together and hug his crow. 

This is just about the most darling thing; I'm gonna scream. Isaac's unique ability to hold his pet makes him seem so much sweeter and the bond looks so much more wholesome. Which I'm pretty sure is entirely antithetical to LDD's goals!

He's even more cute dangling his knees on my desk bars.

Yeah, I fully love this little guy.

Isaac is such a unique and charming Living Dead Doll. His soft body allows him to have unique scarecrow proportions as well as the tactile charm and physical motion of a real floppy stuffed dummy, and his character design really couldn't be better for the task of a spooky Halloween scarecrow. While I'd prefer for semantic reasons if his hands hadn't erroneously swapped sides during his manufacturing, he does look spot-on as a whole. Of the entire soft-Halloween S6, Isaac might one of the most directly Halloweeny. Maybe I should have even waited to get any S6 dolls because they'd have been a good Halloween feature in October, but I have enough planned for that, and one of my posts will discuss decorating with dolls for the holiday, where S6 is sure to feature. 

Here's all of them so far now.

I think my two best S6 experiences so far have been Hush and Isaac out of a combination of sheer love for the designs and doll quality, though Dottie Rose gave me the best photo session of them. I'm surprised; I really hadn't expected Isaac to get out of the bottom three of the series, but my final ranking might have him in the top half.

And here's my three roundup boys and four dolls together.

In terms of favorites, I think I might like Carotte Morts and Isaac the most, despite the Vincents giving me a lot of fun photo work. Nobody here is bad except maybe S5 main Vincent, and I do like and value all of them. I think all of these dolls except main Vincent are undervalued by the market right now. Variant Vincent is the S5 doll done properly and in a striking way, Carotte Morts is an unmatched aesthetic, and Isaac is cute and spooky and unusual. But I'm not complaining. They were easy to get and made for a much breezier roundup than the previous ones! 

I'm not entirely sure which roundup will be next now that I'm setting categories for some, so it could be the gruesome roundup or another roundup of three miscellaneous dolls. Keep a look out for whichever it is.