Blind-Bagged: Living Dead Dolls Series 8 Angus Litilrott by Mezco Toyz

 This was an interesting experiment, because this guy is something of a mystery surprise doll!

Warning for scary imagery and brief photos of gory doll imagery.

Angus is Series 8's boy doll. He's a bizarre green fellow with a hook hand and a bag-hooded head, and seems to be LDD's first foray into urban-legend iconography. Series 17 would later directly adapt classic urban legends for all of its cast, and S29 would make up some original legends depicting nameless figures that sometimes approached the tone of modern local folklore. The more unique thing with Angus is that the sack mask formed a fun gimmick--Angus was released with three different equally-distributed variant faces, each with a different sculpt and paint combo for a scary surprise so you didn't know which Angus you were going to get when you received the package! While I'm not wild about all of his faces, I found myself liking Angus more and more over time and the experience of getting him blind and discovering which face I got was tempting. It's a fun little game for a doll I wasn't hell-bent on getting any particular variant of. I do like one of his faces much more, but not enough to get upset over it.

There was nothing necessitating that this doll be a standalone special-topic post except my general impatience. My next LDD roundup (all dolls selected and purchased, one already received and worked up) is a themed "gruesome roundup" of dolls, while this Angus was bought on a whim with the possibility of including him in that roundup as doll 3 depending on the variant I got. Because he didn't qualify for that once received, I had the option to push him into the next assorted LDD roundup (which would likely be Roundup 5, after the gruesome roundup), but I didn't want to sit on this doll writeup for so long, particularly because I suspected the gruesome roundup could head into delays for parts with one of the dolls and it could get pushed into the next month. Coupled with other dolls I was buying for long-term work I couldn't publish right away (LDDs for Halloween and the uncomfortable-dolls roundup), I couldn't stand having yet another doll on hand who couldn't be published for a while. So enjoy! I guess this makes sense, too. He was bought on a gamble of whether he fit a roundup or not, and he doesn't, so he's solo!

When I received Angus, it was immediately obvious from my first look through the box window which face I had gotten because the sculpt showed clearly through the thin bag hood. This was disappointing for two reasons (I found out the surprise earlier than I wanted to, and it immediately confirmed he didn't qualify for the role of doll 3 in the gruesome roundup) but I was nonetheless delighted because I'd gotten the face I liked most without selecting for it! You'll get to see the full scope of the face when it's uncovered, but none of it was a surprise for me once he arrived.

My very first LDD, Faith, was a Series 8 doll, but she came open, not sealed. While another S8 doll was purchased as part of the upcoming gruesome roundup, Angus arrived first and so he's my second S8 doll. I can report that the S8 plastic shrink-wrap was the rattly stiff kind because Angus was sealed. I chose a listing that didn't disclose or make obvious what face I got, and he's not super in-demand so getting him sealed was actually a low-end offer.

Here's his chipboard. He's drawn dragging himself out of what looks like muddy ground.

His poem reads:

What was it that resurrected him is unknown

But at the stroke of midnight his face shall not be shown

Be fair warned if you must have a look

You risk getting mauled by Litilrott's hook!

And a rewrite.

Why he still walks here is ever unknown

He skulks 'round at midnight; his face is un-shown

Heed now this warning-if you dare take a look

You risk getting torn up by Litilrott's hook!

Here's his death certificate. Angus died on April 11, 1890, the same day as Joseph Merrick "the Elephant Man". In the film adaptation of his life story, Merrick is seen wearing a bag mask over his deformity, creating the point of reference with Angus.

Frame from David Lynch's The Elephant Man.

Angus's chipboard poem is a whole dang novel, spelling out the classical urban-legend origin story for the character.

A stranger said to Angus, "Do you want some candy?"

"Why thank you kind sir," replied Angus. "That would be dandy."

But when he reached down into the dark box Angus hesitated

"Come, come now, your treat is free and sweet", the stranger debated.

"To pass up such an opportunity would class you a chump!"

Angus couldn't resist, drove in his fist, and pulled back a bloody stump!

Euphorically light headed he gasped his final breath

And our poor little Angus Litilrott sat there and bled to death.

There's no rhythm here. Would you like some?

The stranger said to Angus, "Come, do you want some candy?

"Thank you sir", said Angus. "Why that would be just dandy!"

But when he reached into the box, our Angus hesitated

"Grab your treat, it's free and sweet!" The stranger demonstrated.

He chuckled and he chided him. "Don't be a little chump!"

Angus, swayed, then obeyed, but he pulled out out a stump!

Dizzy and light-headed, he gasped and choked for breath

Without his hand, young Litilrott slumped and bled to death

I think the stranger-danger setup feels classic, but there's an intriguing mystery and horror to the vagueness of just how this went down. What on earth was in that "candy" box that could sever Angus's hand so instantly? Kind of sticks with you.

The chipboard and death certificate also threw me for a major loop, because for my entire LDD career, since teendom, I've believed Angus's last name is "Littlrot", but instead, it's spelled "Litilrott" here consistently on the physical toy. I haven't been Mandela-effected with a false memory, either. I had a clear documented source of the misconception--on the LDD website archive, his surname is spelled "Littlrot". I'm guessing the website name is a typo then, because the toy is locked down on Litilrott being the spelling. LDD should have caught that on the site, because the typo name is pretty widespread. As with death dates, the information on the toy is gospel because the website has had discrepancies there, too. I trust the toy info. I have some typos to correct on my calendar and timeline posts!

Resurrection X Angus's name on his chipboard does not include his surname, and I don't think Res dolls have death certificates, so the Res Anguses wouldn't set the record straight.

Here's the doll removed.

I don't know how to describe Angus's visual aesthetic. There's something flat or caricatured to me about the colors, where he looks more cheap or low-detail in a very charming spooky way. This doll has a strong Halloween vibe to him as well, where he's between a Gothic horror look and a modern gory serial-killer idea. 

The big thing about Angus is his sack hood. Here, it's a muslin cream fabric cut in a rectangle with defined corner points that give his silhouette some character. The bag has some dabs of green and black staining on it, and it has an upturned cutout over his right eye which aligns with an upturned eyebrow and gives him a sorrowful look. 

I could probably do without the green stains. They're too close to his skin color and can make the bag look more translucent than it is.

The bag isn't finished around the edges or eyehole, so I think I'm going to dab some matte glue into the fabric later to seal the edges a bit. The bag is a risk for fraying and unraveling and sheds fibers. I want to keep this together.

I'm surprised the bag doesn't have any bloodstains on it. I understand that the different face variants and their varying gore levels would logically affect the bag's staining in different ways, so maybe the absence makes sense.

The back is tied around his neck with a very thin piece of hairy twine. I've heard these are a risk for disintegrating.

Angus is wearing a black overcoat. The lapels are velvet while the rest is more canvas-like. The coat has a split at the back and the right side has tattering effects with a shorter tattered sleeve above the hook and a jagged hole cut in the side. The tattered sleeve also has a grey patch sewn on to be even shabbier.

This is actually very clever wardrobe storytelling, as it creates the impression that Angus has wrecked the right side of his coat because his hook keeps snagging and tearing it, either through pulling it on or through making reflexive gestures that wouldn't cause damage if they were done by a hand.

The coat doesn't seem very well tailored and the front doesn't want to lay flat very well. I might iron it.

Angus's hook hand shares a sculpt previously used by exclusive-doll pirate character Captain Bonney. The hook hand is one of the most iconic images in the pantheon of urban legends, with the story of "The Hook", where a couple hears about a hook-handed killer and drives away only to discover a hook in their door when they stop, being among the most famous. As such, a hook hand is an easy way to evoke urban legend, which the Candyman films also do with their central character. 

The hook portion of the prosthetic piece is soft plastic that won't poke or snap, and it's painted with rust and solid-red blood.

I was delighted to discover that the cup of the hook is on a swivel peg so it can be turned for effect.

The peg could probably be popped out safely with some heat to soften the arm. Here's just a peek with it partially dislocated.

It's funny that Angus was the second and last doll to wear this hook, as it was replaced in Series 17 with The Hook, a direct adaptation of the killer from the urban legend! 

The Hook's hook is larger, reaches significantly longer than the LDD hand, and has an angular shape to it. Also, at least on him, the hook was mounted to an alternate arm sculpt with a shredded wrist, severed hand, and protruding bone with a ball on the end that popped into the hook cup. The severed-hand sculpt was debuted in S14 for GreGORY the ventriloquist, where the bone popped into his dummy to complete his arm. 

Every LDD with an amputated hand lost the hand on their right, meaning each is left-handed by default. This seems like a deliberate invocation of the old superstition/stereotype associating left-handedness with evil. 

Neither of the dolls with the old round hook came after the introduction of the ball-joint body, so I'm assuming the hook was replaced by the newer sculpt because either it was easier to make a new sculpt instead of modifying an old one, or else the older hook mold was retired alongside the modified swivel arm paired with it by the time S17 rolled around. The Hook's hook was probably developed as such because it needed to be removable anyway, and then the shape was available for any future hooked dolls. I don't know how any of the hook-handed dolls after The Hook worked. If their hooks rotated, maybe they had a similar system to the Angus hook, popping into a socket on an arm designed for it, where the hook wasn't intended to be removed. Or else the hook was glued onto something. I'd like to investigate that sometime. The post-Hook hook-handed dolls might not be able to take their outfits off due to the trickiness in sliding sleeves off the large blade and possibly larger cup.

While Angus has the old hook and that's represented in my collection now, I'm still interested in Bonney. For one, she's marked by her original price and high detail as a deluxe collector doll, and that interests me. For two, there are easily-found modern offerings of Bonney at the same price range as she started in! And for three, Bonney has an entirely exclusive left-leg sculpt depicting a peg prosthetic below the knee, so she retains a novelty no other doll took away from her. If I want to collect LDD novelties, she's on the list, and she looks really good even to me, who's generally uninterested in pirates.

Also, more on S17 soon, though it won't be spotlighted by The Hook! Angus is actually kind of a good teaser for the next roundup because his theme and series each link to a different doll in it!

Under the coat, Angus has a short-sleeved grey dress shirt with a thin attached neck bow, non-functional buttons, and a patch of blood on the chest. His pants are oddly baggy around the thighs. 

Slightly MC Hammer.

The shirt and pants are one piece that velcros in back. Angus has glossy black male LDD dress shoes and black socks that aren't seen.

Now, for the grand reveal of his face! 

While I knew I'd gotten this variant from the first glance at the masked doll in-hand, I was glad at least to know it was my favorite Angus! Look how spooky!

This is my favorite of the Angus faces because it's so surreal. This Angus variant uses the most basic screaming face mold and has blood around the mouth, dry-looking lips, and two irises and pupils on his left! No other LDD has anything approaching that, making this the best Angus to me for having something fully unique. So weird and so scary in such a campy way, though it's not entirely implausible--the doubled eye could be a genetic mutation. Multiple pupils have been documented, but I'm not sure multiple irises have. Images of eyes just like Angus's might be photo edits. 

Angus having an eye deformity in this variant does make the Elephant Man association work better than it does on the other Anguses, but it's still a very minor tenuous connection.

All of the blood on this doll being primary-red feels very stylized and flat, and the black and grey costume pairs so well with the green skin and yellow eyes.  Angus's tongue is not painted a separate color, making the doll look a bit more plastic and cheap, like a party-store blow-mold ghoul Halloween decoration--this is not an insult in the slightest!

The other two Angus faces are each different sculpts, so if the bag wasn't already tight and thin enough to visually blow the surprise, I'd have deliberately kept from touching his head because feeling the sculpt would be possible. 

There's a variant with the standard neutral sculpt that has a yellow-brown burn across the left side of the face, and the eye socket there is greyed-out and empty-looking. This is the "tamest" Angus, but also the least interesting of them in my opinion.

The last Angus is much gorier, using the torn-cheek sculpt with solid-red bloody paint. This one's left eye is swollen shut.

Photo from Worthpoint.com.

If I'd gotten this variant, he'd have been number three in the gruesome roundup.

All of the faces are medium green, all have yellow eyes with the same shading, all have upturned rectangle eyebrows, and all have a painted red inverted-cross cut in his forehead. All of their sclerae are grey like the shirt. Interestingly, all of them have asymmetrical eyes, which seems related to the bag--you can always see the one eye through the cutout, so they decided to make the other eye different in some way! Every Angus's shock feature except the doubled eye on the screaming doll is plausible as a consequence of the attack which killed him. The eye on the screaming Angus would have to have been something he lived with prior to his fatal encounter, and it brings up the question of whether the screaming version of Angus hid his face even before he died. That Angus's only clear mutilations are the forehead scar and amputation that all of them have. But he's also green with yellow eyes and flat red blood, so maybe the screaming design is just a scary face to be spooky; a lurid visual for scary stories that doesn't have any logical basis.

While the three different sculpts of the doll do provide a pretty clear spoiler as to which Angus you've gotten because the bag is thin and tight by default, I do at least appreciate that the paint you can see through the eyehole is identical on all three so that isn't a giveaway. 

The feature of Angus having three different facial shockers depending on the copy also feels like part of his urban-legend motif, like his story has been retold and changed from person to person or community to community like legends tend to do. Maybe one town's tale was that Angus was slashed, one town's Angus story had him burned, and another town told that Angus was born with deformities. What everyone holds as certain is that he wore a bag. But the reason why was theirs to guess...or embellish. And indeed, just like storytellers from different communities meeting, you'd never know yours wasn't the only version of Angus until you compared with another. Even while the bags are on, it's not super obvious there are multiple designs! I kinda wish they'd taken this even further by having a different death date assigned to each variant, or no known death date at all, as if maybe Angus was never actually real and only exists in a myth to scare kids.

Invariably, the doll makes me think of Candyman. Not just because he has a hook, but because he reaches at similar themes of urban legend and storytelling legacy that the Candyman films discuss. While Candyman is very powerfully racialized to discuss lynchings and police brutality and the hate victims that haunt us, the idea of an urban legend with many faces is specifically similar to the way the 2021 film (released well after this doll) shows that years of racial violence have made the Candyman spirit grow into a many-faced hive of different victims who switch out as avatars of the hook-handed ghost, showing how every community has their own boogeyman of a victim to horrific injustice. While Angus doesn't have the political racial commentary that the Candyman films deliver, I think it'd have been more appropriate for his death date to tie into the Candyman lore. That'd be more thematic than The Elephant Man.

Also, a licensed Candyman LDD Presents doll should have happened ages ago and we still don't have one???

Angus's hair is short and center-parted with a full gap in front to make the appearance of a super-clean defined formal part. The hair is quite gelled, but also very thin and not rooted far down the head at all, creating something of an undercut effect.

The hair does feel successfully old-timey, but it probably should be longer down the back. Maybe this was done so sparsely so it wouldn't interfere with the hood. The hair feels like it's a little greasy, but if washed, it could be the same sleek and appealing fiber as S1 Sadie's. I just don't think I need to do any hair-care in this case.

I did comb it out much later, and here's how that looks.

Angus's head and arms have some black streaky smudging to dull his color a bit, and his surviving left hand has blood on it, but his torso is unpainted. Angus's color value is fairly dark, but he doesn't appear to be coded as any form of non-White. Here's the undressed doll and all of his stock (sans twine).

In taking off the bag, the twine broke because there was a complete tight knot in the works and I couldn't undo it.

I don't mourn it. I have what I need to replace it.

Putting Angus's pants/shirt back on was tricky, but not nearly as difficult as Vincent Vaude's tight, suspendered, corduroy-pants one-piece.

I took Angus down to seal his hood a little, and I slathered a piece of thin white yarn in brown paint to create a new string for his bag.

This works pretty darn well, and I have no insecurity about its upkeep.

Angus reminds me of the later bag-headed LDD Purdy as the Oz Scarecrow. Her sack mask is burlap and ties with a thicker cord, and is done to cover her sliced-off scalp (and exposed brain, if you've completed her with the Wizard doll).

Here's a swap. 

You know, Angus feels like another runner-up for the role of the Scarecrow. The first obvious choice Mezco didn't do was Isaac, the actual scarecrow, but if they were doing a sack-masked character, Angus could make a lot of sense to cast in this doll design as well. Of course the "Scarecrow needs a brain" motif won out and it went to Purdy instead.

Resurrection Angus looks very similar to the S8 doll, if significantly less characterful to me. His bag is rounder and splattered with blood, and he wears a grey suit with a tight short jacket. He has a unique head sculpt and face design with a carved left side of the face, a blinded bulging left eye, and an indented cross scar. All Res Anguses had this one face.

 

Photo from an eBay listing.

Resurrection variant Angus has been one of my grail dolls since his release. He wears a fur-trimmed Slavic-looking velour overcoat with a dirty look and has a really characterful sandbag-shaped sack over his head, which also has a cutout for his cross scar. He's bloodless and stained with rusty brown instead of red.

His skin is white with green smudging on the face (I believe the head is cast green and white is layered over, but the body is cast white), and he has his own unique face sculpt which looks abstract and surreal. I always thought this Angus was one of the most perfect LDD character designs, and he's on my long-term list of bigger-ticket items.

On a scale of unreal urban-legend killer camp, Res is the dullest, S8 is in the middle, and Res variant is the most stylized and grandiose.

Teenage-me's wishlist drawing of Res-variant Angus.

Then I took some pictures of the doll I have, really playing on the stranger-danger imagery. LDD Minis Lottie was the perfect actress to play a child in danger.

I needed a ton of putty under and inside Angus's shoes to keep him from toppling forward, and it wasn't stable for long. Neither was his tempting popcorn in his hand. Nor Lottie. This was a tricky setup.

Then I built a small scary alley under my desk.

The celebrity sidewalk slabs I made for the cast of Series 5 came in handy when flipped to their blank sides.

Then... 

"GOTCHA!"
"Oh...wow..."
"Wait...you knew I was there all the time!"
"Sorry, Uncle Angus..."

"That living babysitter of yours is making you too clever."
"Hee-hee!"

"Come on. You can pretend to die again today."
"Wheeee!"

And then I found a miniature paper white paper bag I had lying around from another project and painted it for him. I think it interacts really well with his hook and helps communicate his concept even clearer. As a bonus, the candy bag works with his Halloween vibe as an item for trick-or-treat just as much as it's a predatory con!

"Hey, kiddo. Nobody's biting, so do you want some candy? For real?"
"Ooo, yes please!"

"Tasty, tasty, yummy!"

"Wow, you got the good ones! Those 'live kids don't know what they're missing!"
"I know, right?"

The next day, I took a couple of pictures with some other Minis--the Xmas Carol Ghosts of Christmas Past and Present are making a very early cameo here before going back into their wait in storage before December.

I realized I could tie up a Mini in the hood to use it as an actual sack for them to poke out of.

I made him a couple of poem pieces. One, with a picture edited to look like a vintage daguerreotype or tintype discussing the legend of Angus.

And another writing a nursery rhyme kids would have made up about him.

I had also taken the coat for ironing and some tactical gluing in front to keep the lapels down inside and out.

Here's some more stark spooky pictures.

Couldn't he have been in a Halloween set?

And with his S8 compatriot Faith. They're going to be joined imminently by a third from their series, and no guesses who that is because she's in the gruesome roundup.

Angus was a pretty nice surprise.

Quality-wise, I'm not pleased with the tailoring of his outfit or the fragility of his hood and twine, but aesthetically he's very bold and cheesy Halloween-gory in a fun way, I love the detail of his hook ripping his coat apart, and of course I'm delighted to have gotten my preferred Angus face through random chance. That definitely boosts my opinion of him, especially because I like the screaming face paint even more in person than I expected to. I also love his hook hand and its wrist rotation adds a lot and was a nice surprise. I had assumed it was static! There's something very iconic about the design of Angus, mixing lots of classic aesthetics into his own recognizable character, and he executes the motif of urban legends really cleverly. 

Definitely glad I decided to take the risk!