Duck, Duck, Her Goose Is Cooked: Living Dead Dolls Series 23 Quack by Mezco Toyz

The final doll of Series 23 has arrived: Quack, a loopy-looking doll in a fuzzy sailor duck costume whose tea was implicitly drugged.

I liked Quack's oddball charm and detail, and she was planned as the finale of the collection for a while. I expected to like her a lot, my ideas for her worked as a cap to the doll reviews, and it made sense with her being the most pricey in the aftermarket.

Go here to read the first post in this series (Agatha), here for the second (Betsy), here for the third (Teddy), and here for the fourth (Jennocide).

Quack came opened but complete--fully complete, table leg and all. I made sure this time. Quack is highly valued and low...ly sold, but that fortunately resulted in her scant offerings all looking complete and her cheapest listing not lacking any necessary parts.

 

Here's her chipboard. 

Quack is coded with the color red, which makes perfect sense with the colors of her costume and eyes, but I didn't go for that with her table setting. This scenery is actually on top of my bed, including a pillow, since Quack entered an endless sleep, and I went for a deliberately eclectic and messy setup evocative of both a colorful child's playroom and somebody losing their faculties to an unknown mental world. Quack absolutely feels the most childlike to me of the set, and gives me strong nostalgia for classic toys.

Her chipboard poem says:

Every tea party needs a dizzy duck

And Quack is excited to arrive.

But this play date will find her out of luck

A celebration she won't survive.

The grammar is disjointed and the first line doesn't make any sense to me. Who said anything about dizzy ducks being a staple of parties? Here's an alternate poem with the same themes.

She really was the oddest duck

The party day she lost her luck

So sweet, so gentle, she only said "Quack"

She drank her tea and she never came back.

Quack's name is obviously the onomatopoeia for a duck noise, and it reminds me of a previous LDD dressed as an animal-- S16's Squeak, dressed as a pig and named for a squealing pig sound. Squeak's costume is made to look homemade and built on repurposed pajamas or long johns and has a plastic mask, so she's not part of the fluffy-onesie club like Teddy, Quack, Beelzebub, Eggzorcist's 10th anniversary dolls, or Resurrection-variant Hush. I think it makes sense, given how very young she seems, that Quack might just be a tiny toddler who loves ducks and is called Quack because that's the only word she says--at least while in the costume.

Quack died on March 4, 1982, which corresponds to the release of the murder film The New York Ripper by Italian exploitation-horror director Lucio Fulci. The choice would make no sense without understanding that a key quirk of the film is that it portrays the serial killer character using a Donald Duck-style voice. 

Quack's certificate poem says:

This little ducky got dizzy

After she drank a cup of tea

Next her limbs became heavy

And then she just couldn't see

Soon all she longed for was sleep

Heavy, eternally dark and deep.

This poem doesn't have a consistent meter, but I think it scans well enough and it's evocative. I won't touch it.

While Quack's tea was obviously spiked and it's said she's going sleepy, the substance in question is unclear. She could have been overdosed by a medication that put her to sleep forever, she could have been outright poisoned, or, going by her swirly eyes, it's even possible she got a psychotropic substance that sent her tripping...or even all three!

Because Quack is addled and substance-laden, I decided to make a tea that mixed allusions to sleepy drugging and psychedelics and all the panache of a tea brewer who's gone entirely out of their mind. 

This ain't pretty.

I considered making her menu color pale yellow for reasons you'll see soon, but it didn't read as her aesthetic, so I went with her grey tones instead.

This is a cup of chamomile tea (to suggest sleep) with mushroom slices (to suggest psychedelics) as garnishes. Also included are a peppermint and candy cane (matching her swirly eyes and stripy legs). The plate features banana slices ('cause she's bananas) and frosted Cheerios ('cause she's loopy). I'm very pleased with how I created a serving that's entirely thematic while also looking quite horribly thrown-together and thoughtless.

Quack had gotten a hold of the tea master's glove and decided to paint on it. Let's review the damage now that he's dealt with everyone.

Betsy demanded he dip his index finger in her bloody berry tea, staining it red. Teddy tore off the thumb and made gashes in the side. Jennocide's burning lemon tea ate holes in the back and took off the middle fingertip. Quack has put her stripes and some dots onto the ring finger.

Agatha is the pinky finger--clean, untouched, traditional and proper. None of that upstart nonsense. Why is she the pinky? Because it's most refined to stick one out when drinking!

Here's Quack out of the box. My first reaction is that she's absolutely stinkin' adorable. 

Quack's duck suit is all one piece, and it's got more going on than Teddy's bear costume. The duck character depicted by the suit has a sailor hat, black feathers, a red bill and feet and stripy red-and-white legs. The duck and sailor imagery combined feels very much derived from Disney's timeless Donald Duck, but the stripes and sailor hat also connote Raggedy Ann and Andy to me. Quack overall feels very believably vintage, and I'd place her at somewhere between the 1930s and 1960s in terms of toy design eras she connotes. 

On top, Quack's suit has a jaunty grey sailor's hat. The hat is made of a slightly stiff felt material and has red print of a sulfur symbol flanked by two stars on the brim. 

This kind of print is what I wanted from the Rotten Sam LDD who parodies Raggedy Andy (alongside Rotten Sandy parodying Raggedy Ann). Sam has a sailor hat with no decoration on the brim, and that feels wrong to me because many classic Andy toys have had his name embroidered in cursive script on the brim. I thought a sulfur symbol on the brim would be the least Sam could have done, and Quack does it!

For some reason, the use of the star designs makes her look like an old Japanese toy design to me. Red stars are objectively more Soviet, historically, but I can't shake the feeling of vintage Japanese toys here. 

The hat is sewn down on the far end, by the side of her head, but is loose at the top end. I think a thread has come undone. This does let it be set at more of an angle, though, which I like.

Quack's hood is attached to the suit and frames her face tightly, but doesn't have the same "cutout hole" effect of the circular opening in Teddy's hood. At the top of the opening, a thin stuffed red duck bill has been sewn to suggest the face of the duck character depicted by the costume. Very fun.

Quack is white-toned, but less stark than Betsy, and she uses the bumpy-skin face sculpt, making her the second of two dolls I got this month who I didn't expect to have it. (Next one will be posted in August). 

This face is the same sculpt I've seen before on Faith and Dottie Rose, but this is the first LDD I've encountered with this sculpt on the ball-joint head mold. The bumpy face was one of the few specialty sculpts to survive the transition to the ball-joint body schema, and I'm wondering if we have Posey alone to thank for it. I believe she debuted this sculpt in Series 1, and she's had later reissues and remakes that would demand the mold be remade for the newer body type. I know Series 23 comes right after the 13th-anniversary year of the brand, during which the Series 1 dolls got remakes on the ball-joint body, so that collection with Posey's remakes might have been where the ball-joint mold of the bumpy head debuted. I also know Posey had a collection of translucent dolls with different color editions, but those might not have been before the 13th-anniversary dolls. 

The only other doll I'm sure has this sculpt in the ball-joint era of classic LDD is The Silent One in Series 29, a creepy ballerina with a vague disease. Maybe one or two other ball-joint LDDs have it and I never realized.

Quack's faceup is great. Her lips are black with a red center and are painted in a stylized overdrawn upturned smile with a layer of grey shading underneath. Her cheeks are flushed while her eye sockets are shaded in black and grey layers. As an effect of her substance intake, her eyes are filled with red spirals rather than irises or pupils, and it's really striking and charming. Red spirals in horror kind of belong to the Jigsaw Killer, but it works well here, too. The other LDD with spiraling eyes was S4's Sybil, an asylum prisoner depicted as mentally vacant and/or insane. I am a little bugged that both of Quack's spirals don't meet the edges of her eye outline. 

Quack has no eyebrows. 

Quack might have one of my favorite LDD faces. Her look treads the line of horror shading and stylized cartoon features with the big smile and spiral eyes, and she feels properly vintage and toylike in a really bizarre way I adore.

Quack's duck suit is very fluffy and gives her a pear-shaped silhouette. The fabric feels the same as Teddy's, but Teddy's costume was body-hugging. 

Quack's hands are uncovered, which allows her to hold her teacup, unlike Teddy with his suit paws forever covering his hands. The belly of the duck suit has a grey patch, and the back has a little duck tail! You can also see the padding that widens her lower torso.

Absolutely the cutest.

I opted to stuff the tail with a scrap of tissue to make it stick out more.

The legs have short sections of "feathers" that transition into the skinny duck legs, depicted by striped grey-and-red tights that end in flat felt foot covers shaped like webbed duck feet. The legs are all attached to the suit. The effect is remarkable. 

Like any LDD with fabric foot covers, Quack is not the steadiest on her feet. But that kind of works for her.

I like the specificity of the duck costume. It lends the look a verisimilitude that makes it feel like an authentic retro toy because it doesn't feel generic. The spooky colors also make the costume design feel more grounded and real. Had Quack been in a fluffy yellow duck suit with solid orange legs and no hat, I wouldn't have found her nearly as appealing. This suit feels like a real old plush that existed.

Quack's costume opens with velcro down the back, which includes her hood opening.

When I undid the hood and pulled it down, another stitch fell out of the hat. Oops. 

I was quite disappointed to see Quack's hood left black line stains on the edges of her face. Teddy's hood was lined, preventing this, and I wish something had been done with Quack's. There was also a curious patch of what looked like pale yellow paint on her lower right cheek, and I have no idea where that would have come from.

Oh, well. She's still great.

Like Teddy, Quack has unseen hair under the hood, and hers is just incredible. When fluffed up, It's pale blonde and thin, and its texture is wavy and wispy, allowing it to form a tiny child's nest of hair that makes her look super carefree and young. It also looks like a duckling's yellow down, which I assume was intentional.

I love Quack in her hood, and I love Quack with her hood down. It's impossible to choose which looks better, because they're both so perfect with her face!

The effect of this hair is really impressive because it's not typical "good" doll hair, but it looks so spot-on. This hair supports my read that she's the most innocent and youthful of the doll series, and I suppose that could make her predicament heartbreaking, but I think it's more of a mix of unsettling and even comedic because it seems like she's completely lost in or happy in her fugue.

Quack has the typical teacup, as expected.

The two fluffy-suited S23 dolls couldn't have more different vibes. Teddy is full antique-toy horror, while Quack is much more surrealist.

I know who I prefer.

Here are some portraits. This doll gave me lots of fun ideas for trippy and strange scenes.

I'm extremely happy with the swirling tea set visual!

(That's the basin I made for Lamenta repainted and filled with tea. The flamingo was the only rubber duck I had. The Ophelia vibes are absolutely intentional, and Quack was only in the tea for about three seconds before I snapped the photo and got her out and washed.)

This feels like a real classic 1970s-80s horror film still.

Then Quack started to feel sleepy. Very sleepy, and calm...and quiet...

Quack's tea serving wasn't as unpleasant as I feared I'd made it for myself. The mushroom part was just as gross as I expected since the context was entirely wrong and it takes a lot of cooking in oil and salt for me to like a mushroom anyway, but the rest was fine. I don't care for chamomile tea, but I think the mint candies dissolving in it made an improvement! The banana slices and cereal worked really well together, even if it's a little childish.

Quack's table leg completes the tea table, and all of the dolls can come together on the shelf!

Teddy is roaring, Agatha lurks treacherously behind Betsy, who lords over the teapot. Quack is zoned out on the floor, and Jennocide reels from her acid splash.

I really like this display. I honestly relish getting the real estate back on my shelf after all this time, but I will probably want to find some way to keep these dolls displayed with their table. 

And yes, there are four legs on that table. On the side, I ordered a spare loose Agatha with her accessories to get the leg I didn't with Jennocide. The second Agatha had the same chunk of flawed grey paint on her neck, but her hip was tighter. It wasn't ultimately worth giving her the hair care to replace my original Agatha, but I did decide to keep her and strip her down as a base for a potential custom. Maybe a sixth boogeyman for the Series 31 cast? The doll probably won't be finished anytime soon if that's the context I choose, particularly since the S31 dolls are not on my plans for 2024, but that's something to work on. 

The table isn't the sturdiest because the legs can turn side-to-side on the lid and collapse, but I'm happy to have it all together. Here's the full display tableau. I won't be able to use this easily as the tea room for the photo-story segment, though, so this is just for the shelf display. 

I adore Quack. She's ridiculously charming with her colors, face paint, and amazing sailor duck suit, and she looks so cheery and innocent while being perfectly spooky and memorable. Her hair is a wonderful feature that makes it hard to choose how to display her, while her costume is so soft and pudgy and perfectly creates a silhouette--belly, tail, skinny legs and all. I appreciate that Quack is able to hold her cup, too, and her bumpy face is unexplained but still a welcome bit of creepy texture. I'm glad there's one S23 doll with a textured sculpt. Quack may just be one of the most darling LDDs ever made, and the character design is absolutely immaculate.

She has significant deficits when it comes to errant paint and staining. The hood is particularly inexcusable because it puts a damper on displays with her hair down, but she still looks good enough from the front for me to let it slide. Her hat was also not very tight, though I can't be sure if this was user-influenced from previous handling or from poor manufacturing. 

None of these issues stop her from being an instant all-timer. Quack is weird and cute and spooky in all the right ways. She's a strong contender for #1 of the series, and one of my LDD favorites. 

This post is not the finale of my Series 23 project! I plan to publish a photo story playing out the way I've read this series soon, and then a series overview reflection, followed by a marathon recut compilation of every preceding S23 post into one long piece. All will be done before the month is up and I go on vacation, and I don't have anything lined up between this and those conclusion posts, so see you right there in the future!