This blog project is going to be tricky. I will attempt to navigate the social issues as best I can.
Content warning for scary horror imagery, and discussions and imagery relating to fatphobia, suicide, and true-crime misogynist brutality.
Not everything decays equally well.
There are some LDDs in the brand which are fascinating for standing out as unique on a production level, and depict something or feature craft unlike any other LDD. But being unique does not equate to a fully neutral or positive representation, and there are LDD pieces I've grappled with because their ignorant or offensive qualities coexist with their status as standouts in the brand. So I decided to make a discussion to work it out to the best of my perspective and ability in their own post. I want to challenge myself and confront these parts of the brand which had previously written off with confidence. I want to see if there is nuance, and if any nuance can change my dismissal of these dolls. This is treacherous territory and please do not take me as the authority here, but these dolls deserve examination and thoughts even if they're not going to be positive or conclusive. I don't want my reactions to be knee-jerk or unconsidered in nature, even if they still end up negative in the end.
Through examining and re-examining candidates for this idea, I eventually decided to turn this into a two-part project with eight dolls in contention. Some of these dolls are uncomfortable for less severe reasons than others, and I wanted to explore the range of taste and tact (or lack thereof) that got my attention. These posts will not be completed in close sequence, so they'll function more like the Series 23 project in non-linear fashion.
I don't want this to be a "cancel LDD" project, nor do I want it to be apologia. I still love LDD, but I want to be critical and honest about its flaws. These are just my thoughts and attempts to examine the issues that feel so glaring here, offering grace and criticism in turn. We'll see where this goes.
I first thought it would be five dolls, then six, then nine, then ten being discussed, but then ultimately decided for my sanity and budget to rein it back in to eight and make this just two parts and an overview post after the fact. I'll admit my final chosen structure was heavily motivated by a desire to close the book on LDD Series 5, which was completed within this project, and which I wanted to have an S5 overview published for before I completed Series 6 in real time. I just wanted to document the completion of a series with accurate chronology. Series 23 was my first full set and S5 was my second, and that's how I want it posted on the blog timeline. If I did two posts of four dolls each, I could tidy away Series 5's last two dolls within this post, because both were included in the first four dolls I purchased for this project. That also allowed me to just make the batch fully chronological in terms of my acquisition order, when previously I had been fussing about symmetry and balance with the ordering in a way I didn't have to.
The other four dolls I really want to discuss can then be acquired at my leisure and don't have to be bought or published anytime soon. So no promises on just when the second part of this project can be completed. That's completely open.
This project will not be a comprehensive discussion of LDDs in poor taste, even setting aside the fact that everyone's line is crossed at a different point. Heck, I could (and maybe should someday) discuss the creepy sexualized Fashion Victims wave 1 because those dolls make me very uncomfortable. And even in the classic dolls, there are a few other candidates who qualify, but I declined to discuss them for different reasons.
As for who's not in the plans here despite being good candidates?
Well, I was seriously considering featuring the Series 9 doll Blue due to her suicidal-emo theming that made me feel weird, but ultimately, I don't care much for her--I prefer Blue's variant doll aesthetically, making for a steeper ask if I was to get her, and I have no reason to own her main, so what's the point? And either version of Blue is too expensive for me to justify at this current time when the doll would mostly be there for investigative purposes without any real collection appeal. I need to think on her more. Had Blue been in contention, I'd have done nine dolls divided in three posts in my formulaic three-doll roundup size, but that would delay the closure of the Series 5 throughline in a way I didn't want.
I also considered the UK-exclusive Jack the Ripper for his true-crime themes, but ultimately he didn't make me as truly uncomfortable as another doll on that same issue, and had I chosen him, that would have been for another possible structure where I paired five sets of two dolls with each duo landing on the same social issue. That idea would again potentially delay Series 5's conclusion too far and would further bloat the project.
Lastly, I was thinking about discussing Series 3's Schitzo because his name is a pejorative for mental illness and his clown design references serial killer John Wayne Gacy's clown guise, but his icky elements don't overwhelm him enough in my mind at the moment. Blue and Jack and Schitzo could potentially be topics here at another time, even a postscript sequel roundup, but they're not the most offensive cases of their respective issues in my book. Blue is trite and callous stereotyping, but her suicide theme is not graphic like a doll in this post (yeah.) Jack is the avatar of a brutalizer of women, but he's not a depiction of the brutalized like a doll in this post. (And Jack's victim from Resurrection IX, Fairy Fay, is worse, being a pretty straightforward brutalized, mutilated bloody murdered woman. She's pretty inexcusable, but what saves her from this discussion is that she's based on an apocryphal figure, not a real person, she's too expensive, and she's so gory I don't personally want her in my collection right now. My tastes haven't broadened to there so far.)
Schitzo is actually callous toward both mental illness and true crime, but I have a more direct subject doll for each of these topics.
These dolls might get rough to engage with. Read at your level of security.
Boulevard of Stapled Dreams: Dahlia
Warning for discussions and themes related to true-crime exploitation and misogynist brutality.
Elizabeth Short was a civilian working odd jobs in Los Angeles, and it's often stated she had aspirations of fame in the film industry, though there is no evidence of her entering any kind of acting work or becoming an actress to any degree. Short was found murdered in early 1947 with her naked body mutilated by bisection at the waist and cuts in her mouth that spread toward her cheeks. She thereafter became famous, but only as the murder victim labeled as "The Black Dahlia" by the sensationalist press, becoming a legendary face of an unsolved crime. The moniker given to Short was in reference to a thriller called The Blue Dahlia, but that has since fallen into obscurity and has not endured nearly as long as the nickname for the dead victim.
Living Dead Dolls turned that terrible murder into a toy.
I used to pay no mind to LDD Dahlia, and then, once I became conscious of the dehumanizing exploitation and disrespect within true crime media, I formed my first opinion of the doll, which was to turn completely against her and rank her as my number-one "never" of the brand. But when confronting uncomfortable dolls in LDD, she rushed forth as the one to discuss. And interrogating the premise, I began to wonder. Can she be given the benefit of the doubt--at least the way she was actually presented?
Because she was sequestered into this longer-term side project, Dahlia was obtained a good amount of time before publishing. She was a June doll, while the two after were July and the the last was an August acquisition. Dahlia was my third Series 5 LDD in terms of chronological acquisition, but ends up the fourth to be published on this blog. Siren precedes her in publishing order.
At the time of purchase, Dahlia ranked as the most aftermarket-expensive in Series 5, and it looks like that goes for both variants. (Hollywood comes second, Jez and Siren are about on par below her, with Siren maybe falling a bit lower, and nobody wants Vincent.) I'm assuming it's because of some mix of Dahlia's novelty sculpts, her true-crime basis, and her more fragile standards for completeness (her necklace might be lost or damaged easily enough to make a complete Dahlia more of a prize). I'm working with her black-and-white variant, and the copy I chose was originally a chase copy inserted into a main-set bundle replacing the standard Dahlia. She has the same opaque black "closed-casket" plastic lid as my variant Vincent Vaude has. The S5 variants ordered separately, rather than those obtained randomly by buyers purchasing a complete set of mains, had standard clear lids.
Here she is uncovered.
I have to say that the visual design and color contrast are very strong with this variant. There's minimal grey midtones and the black and white are balanced attractively. She and Vincent may be the most improved by the variants, and are the two best value palettes within the variant set.
Here's the chipboard.
The poem says:
Little Dahlia wanted to be on the big screen
As she would find out--the scene was quite mean
On the morning they found her, she had been cut in two
Just who had done this nobody knew.
The phrasing of this poem suggests that the Black Dahlia concept might have been significantly fictionalized into a different horror story from reality--doesn't it sound like this Dahlia was killed by a cutthroat industry rather than an unrelated killer? Again, I absolutely know referencing Short this way crosses at least one line ethically, but it sounds like maybe this Dahlia was targeted by competition in the acting industry rather than a sick killer with no motive. The poem associating her unsolved crime with the film scene creates that implication, and that might be worth adopting as LDD canon because a different backstory makes her more divergent and loosely-inspired.
Dahlia dreamed of a gig on the screen
She caused quite a stir in the bloodthirsty scene
One morning they found she had been cut apart
But blood was still pumping through Dahlia's heart.
The first thing I noticed before taking Dahlia out was that she was covered in black fiber curlies from somewhere. It almost looked like a main-set Dahlia (or perhaps a variant Hollywood; she's super curly) had her hair cut right across from this one and these are the sheds of a separate doll?
I don't know where they came from, but these brushed off easily.
Dahlia was still wired into the coffin, never removed. When I took her out, I was surprised to see there was a plastic cradle under her neck and shoulders. I've never seen this on an LDD before.
The cradle was just held in between the tray and her body. I don't know what she needed it for. Maybe something to do with her neck twist tie and her necklace? I wonder if any other dolls had such a shoulder prop.
There were a few decayed rubber bands to remove from the doll, which seemed intended for holding her necklace down.
Her certificate was floating in its packet loose in the back. Like with Vincent Vaude, the photograph does not depict the variant doll; it's just the main doll's photo greyscaled.
On Dahlia, whose variant color values on hair and costume are completely inverted, this lazy edit is exceptionally obvious, and it should be the same problem with variant Hollywood's certificate. Only Jezebel could really get away with this because she doesn't have any significant color-value or detail changes in her variant. Siren's variant is actually lower-contrast than her main, so the fudged variant certificate photo wouldn't pass with her, either.
Dahlia died on January 15, 1947 at 10:03 PM, inexactly referencing the time of death attributed to Elizabeth Short, who was determined to have died at an unknown time during the late hours between the 14th and 15th. Dahlia would have died later, dying at night on the same day Short was discovered dead in the morning. I suppose it's possible in the LDD universe that Dahlia is a fully separate person and was a copycat death on the same day as the real Short? I'm not going down that route, though, because that's unfounded and the doll is clearly an analogue for Short herself.
Dahlia's cause of death is said to be bisection, which is not true to Short's case. Short was ruled dead from cranial trauma and was bisected postmortem. Dahlia being stated as dying from the mutilation might be due to the media portraying Short's death as an extended lurid torture for shock value and obfuscating the comparatively duller horror of the truth. The doll kind of perpetuates that sensationalism, but at the same time, it's an argument for her being based on the media phenomenon rather than trying to be the real person who died. I'd argue she really can't avoid being a portrait of Short, but the doll's intention evidently is aimed at portraying the legend the media created. Dahlia's report notes a lack of blood or fluids at the scene, indicating the bisection was performed elsewhere. This is true to the real case, where the body was found drained of fluids and cleaned, though a bag of blood was found on the scene.
Dahlia's hair is cut in a very wavy fluffy 1940s ball shape, corresponding loosely to the real Short's documented hairstyle. I think this style is a little more round.
Variant Dahlia's hair inverts her color directly, just like Hollywood. Hollywood went from white to black, while Dahlia does the opposite. Both of these changes in the variant set distance the dolls from the real women they're based on, which I like, especially for Dahlia, who's so much more direct about her basis. As a platinum blonde, she feels ever more like a derivative fictionalization of the murder and not the real victim at the center, and that feels less exploitative than the main. Variant Dahlia's hair looks like it may be fluffier and more voluminous than the main doll's. That was definitely the case with variant Hollywood, whose curls were a lot tighter than the main's. I think the hair here looks really good and its glam factor helps to steer the doll away from an image of suffering. This copy also has a curl that comes down on her forehead in a way I love.
While you could say the variants of Hollywood and Dahlia invert their hair colors because their mains' hair would be unchanged through the lens of greyscale and the variants needed a difference, that doesn't explain why Jezebel does keep her black hair color unchanged in the variant set.
The hair might be a tad yellowed in spots, but certainly not enough to go through the rigamarole of a peroxide whitening soak. Hollywood's was bad, Dahlia's isn't.
Dahlia's face debuts a divergent sculpt with stapled-together cuts coming from the sides of her mouth.
Her eyes have thin upturned brows and smudgy shading, and her irises have a sparkling-ray effect while her sclerae have squiggles to look bloodshot and her pupils are outlined grey dots rather than solid black. Her cheeks have grooves cut in and the staples look pretty realistic the way they're sculpted. The grooves are black and the cuts are shaded with grey, which makes her look especially dead and drained of fluids. The variant feels more like a clinical morgue corpse than the main doll, if that makes any sense, and the coloration helps her look more tidied-up and ready to burst back onto the scene. Her facial expression looks quite assertive and confrontational to me. She has a genuine smile with her lips; it's not just her scars mocking the expression.
This face brings me to the most interesting things about this doll's execution--she's repaired and she's confident. While she reflects the shocking mutilations done to Short in the real crime, she's been put back together and she's up and walking and rocking it. While the staples are prominent for edgy goth shock factor, there's something very interesting to me in how LDD chose to have their take on this incident end with the Black Dahlia victim getting fixed up postmortem and going on her way. She certainly doesn't look frightened, sad, or pained. If anything, she's coolly angry, and good lord, shouldn't she be?
Is this a twisted empowerment? Dahlia rises up and gets revenge, shows the world blatantly what happened to her, becomes the star she wanted to, and rains down her well-earned fury? For all the very poor taste in this doll concept, LDD has chosen to give the victim an afterlife with agency where she's been put back together and looks powerful.
The gender politics of much true-crime brutality are depressing, fairly obvious, and should never be ignored. Much of the most famous murder stories are male violence against women, and misogyny had to be a factor in Short's murder...and probably in her media sensationalism as well. But while LDD are still depicting her as a corpse and her stapled wounds remind you of it, the undead conceit of the line also affords her consciousness and personhood as a character, and LDD chose not to depict her as suffering. I can believe the perspective that LDD were simply using Short because she's a famous death story, with nothing insidious (if also nothing cautious) behind their reasoning. And while it might have been a bad idea, as done, the doll doesn't feel like it sides with what Short went through, or that it supports her horrific end. There's a very contrary tone in the way she's been repaired and walks from the grave, and she looks fierce about it too! The reminders of the real-life misogyny in Short's death may be too strong to overcome, but the artistic gaze of the Living Dead Doll doesn't really feel like it's ogling a female corpse or romanticizing her murder.
Dahlia's stapled-cheek sculpt would also be used for Hot Topic exclusive doll Misery, released solo alongside his female counterpart Tragedy.
I was very surprised to discover that Dahlia has earrings!
These are little pearl-like studs glued into her ears, and they look really nice and match her necklace. I had no idea this doll had them, and so few LDDs do. Dahlia was my first LDD with earrings, but I've written about my second here.
Around her neck, Dahlia has a long string of pearls, and this might be the first LDD necklace piece given to a doll. I'd heard the string was elasticated to be able to come off over her head, but I did not find this to be the case. Maybe it's simply too old by now and has lost all its stretch, though, to its credit, it also didn't snap and break when I tried, so perhaps it never was stretchy and the notion of it being elastic was misinformation. As it is, you'd have to heat and pop out the doll's head (which is no-risk and easy on a swivel LDD) to take this off of her. I just rolled the beads up around the circumference of her head for some photos to just get it out of the way.
A string of pearls like this was also used on S23's Jennocide and Dahlia's Resurrection variant, though those necklaces are shorter. Jenn's doesn't come off, either, though there'd never have been a hope of it for her.
S5 Dahlia is wearing a robe and a two-piece set of short sleepwear, placing her death as an attack and possible abduction in the night. It's unknown what Elizabeth Short was doing just before she was killed, so whether this corresponds to her case or not is up in the air. Her final outfit is also unknown because Short's body was not clothed when discovered. The doll's sleepwear style is more apparent on her main doll, where her top and bottom are peach and her robe is pink, looking more like vintage bedclothes.
On the variant, where the clothes are all black, she passes for wearing a gown, and I like that a lot. The main doll would match the vibe if she was wearing all white.
The robe is entirely sheer save for the trim at the hem and cuffs, which features fringe accents that look really nice. The piece isn't very flowy, but it has a good length and drape behind her.
Underneath, Dahlia has a matching top and shorts, which are here rendered black and match her robe--the main had them in a separate color. The shorts have more fringe trim and velcro in the back.
The shorts are really nicely made and could well be the finest piece of clothing craft in the S5 set.
They're definitely the most impressive pre-S6 piece I've seen so far.
The top has some lacy ruffles and ribbon straps with tiny loop texturing on the sides.
The shoulder straps end up looking like rows of stitches, making me wonder if that's a subtle piece of deliberate costume design! You don't quite get that effect with the peach-colored main top, though, and Hollywood's dress has the same style of shoulder straps, with no connotation of stitches on her.
The shape of the outfit is designed to bare the midriff so her bisection scar is visible. The scar rings her waist above her belly button and diverts in the front to a smaller "dead-end" errant cut, and is entirely sculpted with skin pinches and staples that match her cheek scars. The ghoulish aim to show the waist scar aligns well with a sleep set anyway, so there's some serendipity in her wardrobe.
While all of the S5 ladies are wearing the sandal mold introduced in S5, Dahlia's stand out. In the main set, she has pink sandals, a unique color for the shoes, and both editions have pom-poms glued onto the toe straps, suggesting that on Dahlia, these shoes are to be read as house shoes or even bedtime slippers. On the variant, the pom-poms are a different color from the shoes, being white.
It's rare for LDD shoes to have modifications or extra details like this.
This Dahlia's feet and shoes are quite stable and she stands like a champ.
Variant Dahlia's nails are all painted black.
I think there's a definite tone of camp and reclamation in the costume. While they are the clothes she would have died in, it's also kind of a power move to turn a bed set you were killed in into a movie-star gown, and to wear something that directly confronts people with the injuries that killed you. Particularly in the more chic variant coloration, Dahlia feels avant-garde and edgy and angry (even punk!) in this costume, flipping off the world with a dress that tells everybody what happened to her in style. While that probably overreaches into disrespecting the tragic reality by imagining a fantasy (the "true-crime fanfic" problem), it's another aspect where I think LDD chose to invert the suffering into ownership or triumph. If the colorful main doll was light-haired, on the other hand, she'd be very camp, bustling around in her flowy bed set with her rosy fancy glam.
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| Crappy mockup to demonstrate. This feels like a John Waters character. The face design does suit a punk glam star more than a campy caricature, though. |
Dahlia's torso is a unique sculpt that only featured on her two Series 5 dolls, unlike the head.
This sculpt debuted before Viv featured a bisected body that actually separated into two pieces. I'm really glad that Dahlia didn't end up with one, but I can't be sure LDD wouldn't have done it if Dahlia was designed after Viv's body was made. Resurrection Dahlia's two designs were on the ball-joint body, while S5 Dahlia and Viv are swivel dolls, so their unique sculpts would have been retired by the time Resurrection VII rolled around. Thus, I can't be sure Res Dahlia doesn't have a splitting body by conscious restraint either. The Res Dahlias' torsos reportedly totally lack gore detailing, without even hidden paint, but their faces are more graphic without the notes of repaired wounds. Main Res Dahlia (actually the scarcer doll; the Res VII variants were oddly more common) feels the most exploitatively gory of the character's editions with her graphic torn-cheeked face, though you could argue she's got a similar angry energy that makes her appropriately vengeful.
Here's Dahlia alongside Viv. Viv's bisection is a clean linear logging-saw cut while Dahlia's is messy. The errant cut line on the front makes it look like it was done with a much smaller one-handed blade. In real life, Elizabeth Short's inconclusive murder investigation turned toward surgeons as suspects because her body had been bisected cleanly with a medical technique, and independently accused/alleged suspects brought up in decades since the case went silent have included surgeons. In that way, LDD Dahlia might again be opting to emulate the real-life media sensationalism with the case by making the cut look more gruesome than truth.
Both Viv and Dahlia have their factory stamp relocated vertically across their right buttocks in the same manner because the waist sculpting got in the way of the usual placement. Now I know Viv took this relocation scheme from Dahlia, who did it first.
Viv splits in two. Dahlia wants none of it.
While it's possible Dahlia would have been a splitting doll had she been made just a bit later, maybe she's stapled together on purpose to deny that kind of visual as a statement. The way Mezco made her, you can't have her bisected like Short at the crime scene. Is this in some part a gesture of respect to keep the doll adaptation from being too similar and to prevent the real crime scene from being mocked? (I would never go there with my pictures, but another version of her might have presented that option.) I certainly think it's good the bisection feature was only used on a fully-fictional character, but did Mezco have the same thought?
It's really up to you which torso sculpt is more disturbing. Dahlia's torso staples are particularly creepy and realistic the way they interact with her flesh, and her silhouette is pinched in at that point, but Viv is gorier. But notice how Viv is screaming and Dahlia just looks like she's ready to strut in a slightly pissed-off way? Think how much worse Dahlia would be with a screaming face. There was a choice to make her look confident, and it's the biggest saving grace of the doll. None of the four LDD Dahlias, regardless of gore, are screaming, and I appreciate that.
As uncomfortable in basis as Dahlia's gore is, the torso sculpt does objectively make her a novelty with collector's appeal. If you want to get every unique LDD body/face sculpt (I might just restrict that to every unique LDD sculpt that featured on an original character), then a Series 5 Dahlia has to be on your list.
I also noticed Dahlia has the same wider bore hole in her head that Hollywood did. Still mysterious.
It's cool how the doll is almost all white when her costume is to the side.
Here's Dahlia's Grauman's slab. I made it split into pieces and repaired with metal like she is, to align with the positive notes I see in her reassembly, and drew dahlia flowers onto it. I pressed the holes in with bent wire curves and took the wire out before baking, then glued the wire fragments into the holes once the piece baked.
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| Freshly baked. |
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| Assembled. |
She looks especially good standing on the slab as a base, though her feet don't fully align with the spacing of the prints because I used Calico to make them.
I was surprised by just how effective the wire join "staples" were at holding the slab together.
For all her major conceptual alarm bells, she really is an attractive and characterful doll design.
To work with her, I had to disconnect a little and view Dahlia as her own separate entity from Short--the doll is the bitter undead victim who became a glam-punk star actress just to stick it to the world, never letting people forget what happened. Her photos looked good in both color and in true greyscale.
Here's morgue photos, including my Tinselton Stitches custom fan design.
Because Dahlia's news presence in 1947 would realistically be in a more traditional newspaper akin to the one I mocked up for Vincent, I decided to make her news rendition simpler by placing it on some inner page of the paper so the design wasn't too redundant or difficult to engage in. I'd struggle to muster the energy making a whole other traditional front page. Other dolls referenced here are recent deaths Alison Crux (a girl who became a guide to the afterlife) and Greed, Ms. McGreedy (exemplar of the Deadly Sin). She's the topic of a retrospective posthumous hate piece (with the joke being that "reviling" is replacing the word "remembering" here).
As with the newspaper photo I made for Hollywood, every doll in Dahlia's picture adheres to the broader timeline and was dead by this time period. Vincent Vaude has been the common denominator because he was the first S5 celebrity death. Agatha skipped out this time, but Carotte Morts and Calico came in. The banquet table repeats the trick of S23's tea party table and borrows the two table legs I had to attach to the silver lid of Dahlia's coffin. A mini bench is holding up the other end of the lid.
I can tell how long I've been sitting on Dahlia's review because when I made this newspaper piece, I used LDD's official photo of Alison Crux because I thought it would be ages before I ever got her. I have her now!
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| Coming to a Living Dead Dolls Roundup 6 near you. |
And a movie poster. While I thought Hollywood would have been tastelessly and harmfully exploiting her own death story under the veneer of prestige, I think LDD Dahlia is the kind of person who would produce an insightful and powerful piece about her end under the guise of a trashy exploitation film. Dahlia is the artist in the trash while Hollywood is the garbage in the cinema scene.
I bet Dahlia can't stand Hollywood, seeing her as commercial and vapid and hating how she took her own murder into romanticized falsehood. There'd probably be a generational thing, too, with Dahlia seeing Hollywood as the complacent young no-good while Hollywood would dismiss Dahlia as washed-up and past her prime.
So in the end, here are the arguments I could think of to defend the doll.
1. While Elizabeth Short cannot be extricated from the doll's concept, and the doll makes deliberate references to the real crime and person, it also seems fairly obvious that LDD Dahlia is based more on the larger-than-life legacy of the shocking unsolved crime and its pop-culture legend, down to the name of the doll coming from the media portrait of the story. She's meant to be the abstract of the Black Dahlia more than she is Elizabeth Short.
2. As with Jezebel, there's a bizarre bittersweetness to the concept of a zombie Dahlia, as if she has come back to do whatever she wanted to before she was killed, and it's fascinating that she's "repaired". Her stapled wounds are alarming and creepy because edgy, but she's in one piece and she has agency as she is, as if she's a grim but uplifting fantasy about the victim getting her second chance to strike back at the world. One of the biggest saving graces of many LDD dark concepts is the implicit consciousness, agency, and awareness of the character after undeath, and Dahlia feels like she's meant to be kind of a queen with her confident expression, coiffed curls, exposed staples, and reclaimed nightwear.
3. Purely from a collector standpoint, Series 5 Dahlia represents a unique novelty in the brand, as her torso sculpt was only used on her two S5 editions.
4. The variant Dahlia is less visceral with her greyscale coloring, and her greyscale-blonde white hair color is a welcome remove from the likeness of Elizabeth Short. Her color choices also feel even more like a polished icon reclaiming her brutal death to become a star. She's like a glam-bombshell Frankenstein Riot Grrrl in the best ways. There's a very strong adversarial indie character I see in her as a righteous angry rebel. She seems like she'd be pretty awesome.
As for the arguments against her...
1. No matter how much she may be based on the abstract of the pop-culture crime legend, Dahlia still recreates the image of a real murdered mutilated person to serve as a collectible toy, and focusing on the phenomenon of the Black Dahlia corpse and her unknown killer decenters and dehumanizes the person Elizabeth Short. The more credit and leeway you give to the doll, it feels like you're giving less respect and dignity to the real story, and it can be argued that deviating from the real story can be equally or more insulting than being accurate.
2. Dahlia was reportedly released before Viv, the LDD with a separating bisected torso, and that torso was then discontinued in the wake of ball-joint LDDs, before Resurrection VII's Dahlia editions. Because of these circumstances, I cannot be confident that it was ever a willing choice or self-imposed aesthetic restraint for Dahlia's dolls to lack a bisection play feature that could split the doll in two. All I know is that they developed the mechanic for a doll after the first Dahlia was made, and it's possible they only declined to make her Res dolls split apart or stapled around the waist just because the Dahlia and Viv sculpts were retired by that time or couldn't be easily adapted to the ball-joint body.
3. Resurrection Dahlia is more facially visceral and tasteless with her cheek cuts on the two copies, particularly with the main edition and the ripped-cheek sculpt.
4. The variant S5 design does a lot of lifting in the way of making her more acceptable and I made this much easier for myself by choosing the edition which was more stylized and unlike the real story. There are fewer excuses for the main doll.
The last point of ambiguity to consider is what tangible harm this depiction may stand to do. As far as living relatives of Short or descendants of her family, I don't know if there are any around today and I haven't heard of any such relatives speaking out against other depictions of the Black Dahlia crime in media. Maybe they did, but I haven't been aware of it. The crime occurred long enough ago that there may not be connected people around now who are rawly hurt by the sensationalism of the case or the original crime. And if that's true, then Dahlia just poses an aesthetic and personal-moral challenge to the individual assessing her, and those personal challenges are still real and fair. Everyone has a right to object to something on the basis of their own morals even if there's not a documented harm to advocate against. But on the other hand, any true crime story being watered down and used for horror like this could stand to decrease empathy and tact toward current crimes.
So...hm.
One thing? If this was going to feel more okay, all four designs of LDD Dahlia ought to have been blonde to distance their look from Elizabeth Short. That's why I was able to get as far with her as I did, because one edition was. And ideally, they'd take the idea of a grisly Hollywood murder and fully fictionalize it so none of the details were shared with Short.
You can interpret LDD Dahlia more charitably, but I'm not entirely sure she deserves or needs all that. You can argue I shouldn't have entertained or artistically engaged with this doll in any way, and I couldn't call you wrong for saying so. There was cognitive dissonance involved in treating this like my other LDDs. But I wanted to see if there was a way to engage that didn't feel wrong. There might not be. Maybe she shouldn't be treated as casually.
Perhaps Dahlia is just a bad-taste curiosity. She's a document of a true-crime fascination that accurately shows the public media interest and the unfair callousness intertwined with it. I'm comfortable leaving it there and concluding that Dahlia is just questionable memorabilia, and that assessment doesn't require mental gymnastics. Maybe LDD just sucked for doing this character and my uncomplicated first assessment of her was correct. That still makes her a piece of relevant pop culture history.
I just don't know. I can't like her with a clear conscience, and I probably should condemn her just on the basis of her concept. It's simple, right? Bad idea; done. That was easy to say before I decided to look twice at her. It's just hard to shut down the outstanding craft, appealing variant coloration, and the semantics of the doll that indicate an earnest attempt to not be completely rotten. She is camp and she isn't suffering. She'd be a killer revenge-story protagonist.
I ought to hate this doll. And I can't honestly say I love her. Argh. I've tried to write a conclusion over and over now and all I've done is ramble into further wishy-washy paragraphs. So I guess...
...This doll is fascinating, and a very challenging object. That is the most confident possible statement I can make about her. I am open to your judgment.
Gloomy Saturday: Macumba
Warning for discussion of racial issues that will briefly dip into heavy territory in the context of death.
Macumba is LDD's Black doll, and I mean the only Black doll. The only other instance you could count for certain is just...Macumba again, in the LDD Minis. (He had no other editions and wasn't Resurrected.) While there are other dolls that are non-White (Calavera and all of the Dia de Muertos S20 dolls have implied Latin heritage or origin, Yuki-Onna is Japanese, the Hopping Vampire is Chinese, and Milu--gender-flipped by LDD--is a Hawaiian Pacific Island deity), none besides Macumba are clearly Black (no Black characters were picked up by LDD Presents licensing, either) and I don't think any others could be taken as Black-coded when you look into them or their conceptual references. As such, Macumba invites the discussion of the elephant in the room: LDD's significant lack of Blackness.
Macumba is also a voodoo witch doctor who turned into a voodoo zombie. That has a lot of baggage paired with his status as the lone Black character, but I want to see if it's misinformed or ignorant when taken by itself.
Vodou, also spelled Voudoun, is a Haitian folk religion combining aspects of Catholicism and Central and West African traditions. When I use the word "voodoo" in lowercase with that spelling, I'm referring to the pop-culture derivative or adjective that sprung from Western exposure to Vodou ideas and iconography. The zombie originated as a concept in Vodou legend, so it's entirely fair and proper for LDD to include that legend as part of their cast and throw back to an older form of the undead idea.
In Vodou tradition, a zombie was a reanimated corpse or a living person controlled by the will of a sorcerer, and this concept permeated pop culture in the 1950s and 1960s (for one example, you can see the trope in an episode of Gilligan's Island). This was untill the word "zombie" was then adopted for the concept of undead ghouls from anywhere who ate human flesh, and then brains, spawned by the films of George A. Romero. Romero didn't start off calling his antagonists "zombies", but the word transferred over and stuck. By the point of 1985's The Return of the Living Dead (not by Romero), the word "zombie" officially referred to an undead corpse who ate brains, the zombie infection became a viral pathology rather than a curse, and the icon was solidified. Magically-controlled zombies and zombies rooted in Vodou culture still have their appearances in media, but they're no longer the dominant concept.
I feel like there's something you could say about a Black cultural folklore being painted over and supplanted like that. Not that there's anything insidious or calculated motivating the evolution of the zombie concept, but it could come across as an eerie echo of other issues and patterns.
Series 22 LDD zombie Menard (upcoming review, also for Roundup 6) is also indicated to be a voodoo zombie, though his story is that he was a victim of other voodoo zombies on the cursed island, mixing the magical zombie and viral zombie in execution with a scenario where cursed zombies could spread their condition. While Menard's base body color is brown, it's covered with layers of yellow and black on the uncovered parts, and his name and death date likely point to him originally being a White foreigner due to the name and date referencing the film Zombi 2. That film is an Italian production featuring a White British doctor Menard who visits a cursed Caribbean island and tries to find a cure, so the doll is likely a similar setup. I opted to get both Menard and Macumba at the same time in July so I could add both to my list of vacation travelers--I realized my vacation spot included the perfect setting to create a few island photos for their concept, so they joined the packed suitcase. You'll see a couple of pictures of Menard with the mask I made for him in this review as an early cameo.
Macumba is a Series 4 doll, and my first from the series. I got him sealed to ensure he was complete, and a reseller's label was on the front.
Series 4 was the last LDD series to use the original packaging aesthetic created by Series 1 with the pink tissue, blank-sided black coffin (no handle print, S5 was the first in that run), and illustrated black-and-white chipboards with blood splatter. Series 8 imitated the 1-4 design but wasn't exactly the same, and Series 5 was the first of many uniquely-designed coffin schema, setting the brand on a path of every subsequent series having its own packaging flair.
Like with Betsy, another hat-wearer, Macumba's hat is tilted over his eyes for the packaging.
Here's his chipboard.
His poem is brief.
With a doll,
He casts his spell
No one is safe
From this zombie hell
And a tweak.
Doll in hand
He cast a spell
But wasn't safe
From zombie hell
It's vague how Macumba factors into the zombie problem that ultimately claimed him. I'd gotten the impression that he accidentally turned himself into a zombie, but that's not textually clear in the poems and was an unsupported assumption. I don't know if he started a zombie plague, or if he only created a finite number of undead servants. Something happened to make him a zombie, and I think I latched onto the "cursed himself by accident" idea because it only makes sense that Macumba, who is clearly a Vodou practitioner and not just an ordinary citizen, would join the living dead through consequences of his own magic. It would also be especially boring if he was in the practice of zombie sorcery but died a mundane death and came back to life...though I suppose that could work if there's some unseen witch doctor puppeteer offscreen who Macumba is now beholden to. Maybe he's fully innocent of dark sorcery himself. It's up in the air.
From what I found, the term "Macumba" is an umbrella word referring to Afro-Brazilian folk religions, and carries a connotation of spookiness or taboo to them from an outsider perspective--in practice, "Macumba" has been used in ways equivalent to the phrase "black magic". This doesn't seem geographically appropriate to any permutation of voodoo, since the prominent disparate forms of the voodoo tradition (Haitian Vodou, Louisiana Voodoo, and even the separate but historically similar Hoodoo) are associated with the Caribbean and southern U.S., not Brazil. Even the West African Vodun tradition predating all of those doesn't seem to fall under Macumba. I understand the thought process for why LDD went for the term to name this character, but it's not on-target and it makes the doll look more ignorant if you go to research. Maybe the choice was based on outdated/misinformed information available to the LDD guys at the time, but I don't know. More research probably should have discouraged the choice in favor of something more on-target.
Something similar was done in Dia de Muertos-themed LDD Series 20, where the dolls would all likely be Mexican citizens or Mexican in heritage, but one of them was named Santeria after the Afro-Cuban religion that doesn't inherently relate to the holiday. Maybe LDD Santeria is meant to be Mexican-Cuban in heritage, or maybe the choice was just a conflation.
Here's the death certificate.
Macumba's death date is June 15, 1881. This is a reference to the death date of famed New Orleans Louisiana "Voodoo queen" Marie Laveau, known as a pillar of her community, local icon, and practitioner of Louisiana Voodoo. Louisiana Voodoo and Haitian Vodou are two distinct spiritual practices, so I don't know if the reference is appropriate. Macumba seems most based on the Haitian tradition and its impact on pop culture, and I don't think he's framed as a U.S. citizen or immigrant. I like to view him as a reflection of the Haitian tradition. Even though Macumba has his problems, there aren't other dolls I can identify as Haitian depictions.
The death certificate poem says:
Placed under a voodoo curse
It was an evil spell he could not reverse
A soul trapped behind lifeless eyes
All things alive are now despised
And a rewrite
Placed under a voodoo curse
An evil spell with no reverse
The lord of death, behind his eyes
Seeks the life that ghouls despise
Macumba's doll tray had a rectangular hole cut out of the top back, which I figured had something to do with the hat--was the brim supposed to poke through it so it would have more space and wouldn't sit too far forward in the box?
If that was the case, that clearly didn't happen. The only thing poking out was a strand of his hair. I don't think this had a functional impact. Later doll hats would be accommodated by molded plastic tray cradles that replaced the upper third of the normal doll tray inside the coffin.
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| Betsy's coffin demonstrates. |
Here he is unboxed.
While his name and death date reach into different places, Macumba's look and clothing seem like they're anchored to Haitian Vodou in styling. His clothing feels intended to evoke simple, worn attire from the time period he died in, and the whole getup is a deliberate reference to the Haitian Vodou lwa/loa (divine spirit) Baron Samedi. Baron Samedi has specific iconography, being depicted as a skeletal figure or a Black man with skeletal face paint, usually wearing a top hat and sunglasses with a broken lens, and a black tailcoat.
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| Two different depictions of Baron Samedi. |
Baron Samedi sometimes has cotton nose plugs like a corpse buried in the Haitian style, and is associated with death, the afterlife, resurrection, and debauchery. Haitian Vodou fosters a belief in possession by the lwa, so practitioners might dress as Baron Samedi hoping to invoke him. Macumba hits the hallmarks of the skull paint, top hat, and black jacket. While the doll taking Baron Samedi's name exactly might not be the most appropriate, a rephrase/translation of his name, like "Lord Saturday", would have suited Macumba better than the name he has. ("Baron Samedi" means "Baron Saturday").
The most famous character to reference Baron Samedi to Western audiences is probably Disney's Dr. Facilier from The Princess and the Frog.
Facilier is a scheming modern Louisiana witch doctor with many debts to the spirits who boasts "Voodoo, Hoodoo, and things I ain't even tried" in his sales pitch.
I think Macumba was the second Living Dead Doll with a plastic hat, coming after Doom of the Died and Doom wedding-couple exclusive set. (I know Died and Doom came first because Doom was the first LDD with the torn-cheek head sculpt, and that was very early because he came before before Series 2's Deadbra Ann with the second use of that sculpt.) This hat is thin fragile plastic with black flocking over the top, and features a unique plastic skull-and-bone ornament sewn on the front. The threads show under the brim, but I love the unique sculpt of the skull.
The hat has a black elastic chin strap to hold it on. My copy has three vertical cracks on the right side, which bulges the hat's silhouette outward on that side. I'm disappointed, because I expected the untouched copy to have a pristine hat, but it's whatever. It doesn't clash with the ragged look of the costume.
These splits turned into a hole later on. I crossed my fingers it would stop at this.
It's possible the packaging was responsible for this hat taking impact and getting cracked. Because the rear brim wasn't nestled properly in the little gap in the doll tray (or more likely, because that system would be inadequate even if the hat was in the right spot), the hat got bumped and jostled and cracked.
I can see why LDD changed the packaging for hatted dolls later on. Betsy and Jennocide's hats are just fine.
Macumba was the first Living Dead Doll with yarn hair. His is all black and is used to depict a Black hair texture. The thickness of the yarn is between the very thin yarn used for Hush and the yarn used for Calico. Macumba's yarn size is closer to Calico's than it is to Hush's.
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| Left to right--Hush, Macumba, Calico. |
As such, it makes the most sense to assume that Macumba's yarn depicts braids rather than dreadlocks. It's quite a lot of braids for one head of hair, but it works.
The character illustration on the chipboard showed his hair long and hanging in front, so I tried that out. I think this looks pretty good.
Macumba's skin is a dark muted brown color, but his face is dominated by white Baron Samedi skull makeup.
The skull paint depicts the whole upper half of a skull face and meets Macumba's hairline, but has no lower jaw, and thus cuts off on his upper lip. The paint is deliberately streaky to look like applied makeup (nice touch), but there were a couple of "crumbs" of white paint I had to scrape off from a lack of total smoothing. Rather than Macumba having actual eyebrows, the shape of harsh eyebrows is included in the skull "eye sockets" formed by the negative space of the white paint. There is no gap in the paint over his nose, so a skeletal nasal cavity is oddly not implied in this makeup design. The later dolls of Death itself all used the standard head but featured painted nasal cavities, as do the sugar skull-faced dolls of Calavera in Series 18 and the Dia de Muertos dolls of Series 20, plus the skeletal face of Butcher Boop in Series 32.
My favorite touch of Macumba's paint is probably the way it continues onto the neck with a couple of stylistic vertebrae.
I always enjoy when LDDs utilize the neck for paint detail.
Macumba's zombie eyes are fully outlined but all white--solid black for the iris borders and pupils, but no color in the irises. The irises do look a slight shade of white away from the sclerae, but it's very subtle.
I'm not entirely sure how well or poorly the LDD face sculpt suits Macumba. Looking at...the entire output, it really doesn't seem like the LDD team had much intention of depicting Black people in the brand, so the sculpt doesn't feel completely racially ambiguous. But typical Black phenotypes are not universal among Black people, and it's not like Macumba screams "White face sculpt" when looking at him. The childlike look being less defined helps.
The only other LDDs cast in brown-toned vinyl that I can think of are Menard (which is mostly covered up by paint on the parts of his body that are exposed) and Scarecrow Purdy, whose body is imitating a tan burlap color. Neither seem intended to be non-White dolls, especially not Purdy, who seems White-coded in her other dolls, but Scarecrow Purdy's body color could have been useful for a darker flesh skintone.
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| Purdy's burlap-brown body color. |
Series 10's shameless Demonique has a unique ambiguous skin tone with a slightly ashy darker pink hue, but it's not clear if she's supposed to be from a different demographic than LDD's usual. Her Resurrection dolls are pale White girls.
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| Series 10 Demonique. I can't decide if she's too trashy or not. She's definitely interesting. |
I'm pretty sure LDD would be a viable doll brand for body dyeing because it seems like all of the pieces are made of the same vinyl and a dye job would be very even. If that's true, darker-skinned LDDs could be pretty easy...so long as the color holds, which is never really a guarantee. You might have to revise in such a case.
Macumba is wearing a necklace of tiny cartoon bones around his neck. It's one solid closed vinyl loop and not very flexible, so I wouldn't attempt to pull this over his head-- popping the head out would be the way to get this off. The piece is molded to sit wide around his shoulders and can't hang naturally down forward on torso.
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| The correct necklace position. |
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| Incorrect. |
I'd heard this necklace got LDD Series 4 or the whole brand banned from release in Greece due to being shocking or offensive imagery, but I can't attest to whether this is something seriously wrong in context or whether this was just too edgy for the Greek government at the time. Other LDDs in Series 4 and before were more shocking. (And if they got confused and thought LDDs were for young children, then that's really not Macumba's fault.) The inclusion of bone clothing might be derived from harmful Western portrayals of island nations and tribal cultures as savage and primitive, but this might have some Vodou ritual authenticity. I can't say, but I don't know if LDD can, either.
The necklace is slightly awkward but can be tucked in nicely under his jacket. Eve-a-Go-Go (exemplar of Envy in Series 7) reused this piece as a belt for her jungle outfit.
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| I think she'd also have to be taken apart to remove the piece. |
Macumba's clothes are designed to look spare and tattered. He wears a black jacket per Baron Samedi and a red sleeveless simple shirt and ragged pants tied by a rope belt.
Unlike a lot of LDD boys, his shirt and pants are separate pieces, and the shirt has a crotch strap that loops between his legs to keep it pulled down and tucked in when the pants go on. I didn't attempt to remove his outfit fully, though, because I didn't want to deal with the pants and belt. The pants have no velcro--they just slide off and are held up by the "rope" tie. The twine looks like the same cord used for the LDD Minis noose keychains.
Macumba is barefoot.
Macumba has an accessory, and he's lucky--Series 3 beforehand was the last series to feature individualized accessories on all of its dolls, and accessories became afforded far less commonly thereafter. There are a few later dolls I want who I consider incomplete as-made, and I'll have to supplement them due to their glaring lack of accessories. Macumba comes with a red stitched canvas voodoo doll that has black straight doll hair coming out of its head and limbs, as if stuffed with the hair of the chosen target of the doll, and it's wrapped with black and tan yarn and has a spooky rag-doll face print.
It's a spooky visual and a fun piece, but again, feels like a stereotype or conflation. The concept of a doll that harms people through sympathetic magic (i.e., what you do to the doll happens to the person it represents) is not a part of Vodou tradition, and has been denounced by Louisiana Voodoo as irrelevant to their practices. The idea seems to mix doll rituals of Vodou with the concept of sympathetic magic in European poppets--so basically, it sounds like Europeans and Americans may have applied different magical doll stuff to interpret what they saw Haitians doing, and got it wrong and it stuck...or just maliciously lied about Caribbean religion having sinister practices to demonize it. A voodoo doll has about as much to do with the Vodou zombie as it does with Vodou itself (i.e., nothing). Modern Haitian and Louisianan groups have sold the stereotypical voodoo dolls as souvenirs because they're expected and profitable, and it's a fictional icon to be sure, but this idea is the pop-culture side of voodoo, not a part of the tradition.
Macumba can tuck the doll under his arm, or slide his fingers into the chest ropes a little to hold it upward. I'm not convinced the latter was intended.
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| I've pulled some of his hair forward through the hat's elastic band to disguise the band and give his hair more volume. |
Here's some portraits.
I took Macumba on vacation to the lake to get some more natural scenery. I didn't get very much photo work with him, but I like what I got. I put the cloth doll on a tree for one picture, and then went to a rock with trees growing on it, as well as a beach area, both to create island scenery. I paired Macumba with Menard and the mask I made for Menard so Macumba can be the sorcerer resurrecting his own zombie thrall.
I was careful to pack the hat in a hard box (the treasure chest I painted for Captain Bonney), but then I took it out and it got squished enough for the section holding one end of the elastic to crack and fall out of the hat, so I tucked that out of view for photos. Upon returning home, I glued that shard of hat back on, and tried to make a green patch for the hole, but the shape was too large and awkward, so I added more glue to the cracked areas to stave off further damage and left the hole open. I was already curious about getting a second copy as a custom doll base, but maybe I'll go for a second copy with the hat as well to replace it. LDD ought to have devised better packaging for these hats earlier in the game, or they should have used thicker or less brittle plastic, or full stiff felt hats like you can buy for dolls at the craft store.
I'll admit I felt a little challenged to find picture opportunities for Macumba, just because I'm very leery about treading wrongly on cultural and religious traditions.
I've mentioned in passing that I find witch-doctor Jane Boolittle to be the most regrettable G1 Monster High character due to her theming, but I'm surprised to say that there are things I find distasteful about her which Macumba, a similar concept, avoids for me. My big problems with Jane were that she echoed colonialist narratives of voodoo and tribal cultures as wild and spooky, and that she had no determined home or ethnicity, making her feel like an "othered" character whose lack of a specific targeted representation couldn't fully save her from being offensive in my mind. Macumba conflates and sensationalizes some things and his lonely representation of Blackness really hurts the optics of his concept, but what Macumba has over Jane is a sense of authenticity and specificity. Macumba is based on real Vodou legend of zombies. He's non-White in a specific way. He seems implicitly Haitian re: his culture, and he's visually inspired by the real Vodou deity Baron Samedi. The voodoo doll is a stereotype with no basis in Vodou and his name is dubiously related, and he mixes in a reference to Louisiana voodoo with his deathdate, but more of Macumba feels substantial than Jane, almost like he's making some effort to get it right, or even trying with innocent intentions to reflect a wider picture of voodoo traditions, rather than trying to downplay a concept the designers secretly felt was a bad idea. Even if he's not getting it right, he's based on something real and traceable. Jane feels like something the designers were ashamed of, censored with nonsense plastic coloration and vague background out of some recognition that she was doing something wrong. That's the point where you should probably just not pursue the idea at all, and I can respect Macumba's design confidence. Compared to Jane, it seems earned due to his higher authenticity.
Now, for however much Macumba doesn't strike me as a hateful doll (and who the hell am I, an outsider with no authority, to say), he does still feel ignorant and sensationalized in the way most "spooky voodoo" characters are, and mixing traditions in his presentation can be more homogenizing than inclusive, and offensive to groups and traditions who consider themselves distinct. It's also a big problem that he's the only Black character in the brand, though that would be true regardless of his portrayal or concept. I think the problematic elements of his portrayal would be lessened if other Black characters who didn't feel foreignized or spiritually "other" existed in LDD. I'm seriously tempted to get a spare Macumba loose to give it a makeover and try my own LDD custom doll design with a Black skintone just to explore how that could be successful and neutral representation. Or else try dyeing another, lighter LDD brown to be able to make other Black dolls from another LDD base with nonstandard sculpts or ball joints.
Maybe this token status is a case of a defeatist mentality. Backlash to Macumba could have convinced the team to stay in their lane and avoid Black characters in the future, but I think that's the wrong lesson to take away here. If you make a mistake with a character from a new demographic, yes, you'll do less harm if you drop the topic altogether going forward...but you're not engaging with an opportunity to learn and grow, and you could consult and get input from representative voices to fix the issue with more representation that shows growth, range, and better understanding. The only cases where I'd call for a creator to stop representing a demographic is if they proved they were outright incapable of representing it in a non-virulent non-hateful way (and at that point, them not creating at all might be even better than them just avoiding a subject that drives them to bigotry). That latter scenario is not what I'm getting from LDD, but it can feel like they just stopped trying.
I do also understand that Black characters in LDD would require some more care to keep things light-heartedly twisted, since certain imagery of death and injury in the context of Black dolls could evoke a history of racist hate-based violence perpetrated in well-known patterns of attacks and murders motivated by white supremacist bigotry. But there are fates any human can suffer which wouldn't ring those alarm bells if also depicted on Black dolls, and Mezco would have plenty of examples of injured deathly White dolls to back them up against accusations of marketing brutality against Black people.
(I guess that functionally happened in LDD Minis Series 5, actually. Macumba's rendition in that line was a doll who could be hanged by a noose, per the keychain gimmick, and that could very easily be taken in the worst way...but the four White mini dolls alongside him had just the same nooses. So did the rest of the classic Minis. That seems fair on Mezco's part.)
The same goes for villainy--dangerous Black LDD villains would be fair game when there's so many brutal malicious White dolls in the brand. And at a certain point, there's an argument to be made that there's no equality if you're walking on eggshells. There are a few unproblematic concepts I can think of for LDDs that would specifically suit Black characters, such as musicians in spheres pioneered and dominated by Black artists, and those kinds of depictions would be great paired with other Black dolls being there without their concept being connected to race. There was more potential than just Macumba.
Macumba would stand a little more comfortably--flawed, but more passable and maybe excusable by the time and pop culture---if other Black dolls in LDD followed him and proved that Blackness did not have to be pigeonholed as stereotypical and "other" in the brand. But as it stands, Mezco's only Black LDD is conceptually anchored to his Blackness in an exotic way. That can leave things feeling like we might never have gotten a Black LDD at all if not for a horror concept you couldn't separate the skintone from. Macumba seems earnest but the doll demonstrates some cultural and diversity blindspots.
I don't think the word "racist" is quite appropriate to put onto the Living Dead Dolls brand (maybe I'm wrong!) though its diversity is certainly inadequate and it's hard not to side-eye the lack of color in the brand. And that's where I end up when I think about Macumba. Ultimately, the biggest racial failing in Living Dead Dolls is not in the way he represents Blackness--it's in the way every single other Living Dead Doll doesn't. Did Mezco really just have no interest in Black dolls after all? I can't speak for them. But it's not hard to come to that conclusion as a passive observer.
Feasting in Hell: Gluttony
The Deadly Sin Gluttony is the brand's fat doll, and I think you already understand everything wrong with him just from that.
Warning for repulsive imagery, butchery-horror imagery, cruelty to undeserving teddy bears, and fatphobic themes.
LDD Series 7 was based on the Seven Deadly Sins, and had a unique total of seven characters, each being an exemplar of one of the abstract sins. (This coming after Series 6 having six dolls for its own numerical concept derived from Christian ideas of evil, with its allusion to the "number of the beast".) It's implied by the chipboards being dictionary entries listing the deadly sin and then "see also: [doll's real name]" that these are not metaphysical beings who are literally avatars of the sins--they're just characters who were so outstandingly damned in their specific ways that their actions and reputations made them the icons of their sins after death.
S7 has some good ideas (I like Wrath, Envy is cute, if conceptually confusing, and Greed is spot-on), though Lust...well, let's just say "part 2"...and then there's Gluttony. His novelty in the LDD brand is that his body is composed of entirely unique fat sculpts that were never used again. He also has other unique pieces that never saw the light of day again. But his portrayal is framed as negative and repulsive.
Here he is. I got him sealed.
S7's coffins were unique in that the different characters had separate tissue colors, each coded to a traditional color historically associated with the respective Deadly Sin. Gluttony's tissue is orange in correspondence. Every other self-contained collection of coffined LDDs had the same tissue color for the whole set. (Conversely, the only set with the same tissue color but different coffin colors was the Twisted Love Valentine duo Rose and Violet--both pale pink tissue, but the coffin boxes are bright colors of solid red and blue to match each doll.)
The chipboards feature medieval illustrations of punished souls in Hell according to their sin. Here we see gluttonous sinners fed by devils.
I was able to find the medieval image quoted for the chipboard:
I'm guessing the series this image came from was quoted for the other S7 chipboards for consistency's sake.
The chipboard text is stated as a dictionary entry, rather than poetic verse. Each doll's sin is defined with a "see [also]:" disclosing their real name.
While the doll is representative of Gluttony and that's the main title the doll is known by, the actual character's name is Vulgar the Obscene. That's an awfully Middle Ages-sounding title for a modern butcher, isn't it? It works with the medieval chipboard and ancient nature of the construct of these sins, but nobody from the past several centuries would ever be called that.
The Series 7 certificates are standard. Gluttony is the name on the certificate, which doesn't make much sense for a character literally named something else, but the doll name is different from the character name here and "Gluttony" is shorter. He died on July 29, 1974.
This death date is shared with Cass Elliot, of the band The Mamas and the Papas. Elliot was overweight, and it formed an unfair amount of her public image. Her weight may have been a factor in the sleeping heart attack she died from, and may have been resultant from her lifestyle, so referencing Elliot's weight could be taken as an objective citation of of dangerous weight gain and consumption...though Elliot's death has lent her a legacy of cruel mockery and sensationalism, including a famous false rumor of her dying by choking on a sandwich. (And this rumor was spread by her own circle, who thought the implication of "our friend was a hog" was somehow less harmful to spread than having the public assume she died of a drug addiction? Hello?!?!?)
It feels like an undue insult to Elliot to reference her in this way, even if LDD knew the truth and were just trying to reference the pop culture myth about Elliot. The other Deadly Sins use citations of famous figures in their death dates, but not all of them feel like insults the way this does...and one of them which is a clear insult, Greed, has aged like the finest wine in my book (her death date is Donald Trump's birthday).
Gluttony's poem says:
The excessive food and drink that he craved
Sent this butcher to an early grave
Now trapped in Hell, all he can partake
Is being force-fed rats, toads, and snakes
And a rewrite
All of the food and the drink that he craved
Sent this sick butcher right into the grave
He now lives in Hell, where it's all you can eat
Rats, toads, and snakes--and what else could compete?
Each of the poems for Series 7 cites the punishments in Hell associated with the deadly sin in question, so I had to make sure I preserved the details of each animal Gluttony must gobble in the underworld to preserve that mytho-theological accuracy.
With the tissue colors, individual quoted medieval chipboard art, and poems all being personalized to make each doll reflect traditional doctrine and depiction of the sins, it's clear LDD extended some research into this series and went further than the surface general knowledge of this concept. I respect that.
Here he is unboxed.
I was concerned from the listing photos, but seeing him in person confirmed that Vulgar's head was oddly shiny in an off-putting way. He looks sweaty, and I was pretty certain this wasn't a manufacturing effect for this doll. I didn't know if some gloss had been sprayed on him by accident or if there was a prototype difference or something, but touching his head felt a little greasy, so there's a physical problem here. He felt gross in a way beyond his visual design and design lens. I proceeded with the review but was desperate to scrub him and see what was up.
Vulgar is a bald doll, and his body was all a one-off production, meaning this head sculpt (like Grace of the Grave's or the Jason Voorhees sculpt) has never been used with rooted hair. Since the Grace and Gluttony sculpts are total one-offs, the Jason sculpt is the only one listed to have been never rooted while releasing on multiple dolls. Unlike other bald LDDs, Gluttony's head feels entirely smooth, with no obvious molding patch on top.
Vulgar's face is sinister and disgusting.
He has angry hairy eyebrows and asymmetrical eyes. His irises are blended between an upper and lower half in blue and green, horizontally mirrored between the two eyes, and the right eye has a red sclera almost like it's filled with blood from a burst vessel. This might be an allusion to clogged bloodflow from an unhealthy diet. Vulgar's left pupil is also smaller than the right and ringed with yellow, making the blood-filled right eye also look dilated. This can occur in a heart attack, and combined with the reference to Cass Elliot, that's indicated to be how he died. The eyes are ringed with brown smudges but also shaded with black airbrushing that extends far on his face as it fades out. Vulgar's mouth is dripping bile, suggesting an excessive intake of food that occasionally comes back out, the creases by his nose are shaded in grey while the gap in his lips is lined in black, and the whole face is sprayed with blood splatter from butchery or possibly raw meat consumption. While the doll is gross and objectifies fat for horror, there is a forensic quality to the details here that's impressively readable. This is a doll you can perform a visual coroner's inspection on very easily to understand exactly what he was about and what killed him. His blood flow was disturbed, his eye is dilated, he's overweight and vomiting. You certainly get the full picture.
Vulgar doesn't look as youthful as the main LDD sculpt, making him feel less like a doll that could play a child, but maybe that would change with a different faceup.
There was also a blue spot on his temple that seemed like a paint error or stain. I was able to wipe off the tiny dot in the middle with nail polish remover, but not the rest underneath. I don't know how this got into the doll, but it looks like pigment, not mold.
Vulgar is a butcher, but he's about the sketchiest one possible. Hygienically, he's a nightmare, as he's wearing an apron over a bare torso and has no gloves or other protection. I'm sure there's meant to be some "eww shirtless fat guy" stuff going on here, but I'm more concerned about the bareness than the body shape here. Splattering yourself with blood and guts without any proper coverage...let's just give it up to LDD's later Butcher Boop. She's dressed much more properly for her line of work. (Review coming in October!)
Vulgar's apron is white with splattered bile and blood. There's a shaped bloodstain in the form of a handprint on his right from his own hand wiping on it. The stain would be from his left hand reaching over, but the placement is awkward considering how low it is. Alternatively, it's from a bloody victim trying to grab him before dying.
This was the first LDD with a handprint-stain design on their clothes. Grace of the Grave followed the in series after.
The apron has a pocket on the front and ties behind his neck and waist with long strings.
Vulgar is packaged holding what looks like a hunting knife, with a serrated blade and ridged black handle.
This sculpt looks just like the type of knife featured on the original handmade-custom doll that was the genesis of Sadie and LDD altogether.
I wonder if it's an inside reference to that handmade doll? I don't recall any LDD before or after him using this knife sculpt, and the visual match is very close.
The knife is elastic-banded to Gluttony for packaging, but it also has a peg that fits into his palm so the knife stays in even when the elastic is off.
Vulgar's other loose accessory is in the sleeve with his death certificate, which is a bloody meat tenderizer. Both of his hands are pierced, so he can dual-wield, but the pocket can also hold the knife and tenderizer together, leaving no accessory floating around regardless of what you do.
While I can't be confident about the use history of the serrated knife mold, I know the meat tenderizer never returned and was a total one-off, which is a shame because Butcher Boop could have used it...or any accessory. I'm surprised the cleaver piece which debuted with Schooltime Sadie in Series 2 wasn't used for either this doll or Boop. That's something I want to fix in the case of the second LDD butcher.
Vulgar's pants are blue jeans with painted bloodstains, rolled cuffs, real back pockets, and an attached faux-leather belt threaded into belt loops. The pants are really detailed.
On the hips, he has pieces of twine rope tied to the belt. On his left, a rope holds a long bone piece, which isn't meant to be removed or held. No accessory peg, and the string would need to be untied to take it out. I'm pretty sure no other LDD used this piece.
On the right, he has a second knife, and the rope has a tied loop that lets the knife come out!
That was a total surprise. This is a kitchen knife just like Series 1 Sadie's, but this mold features an accessory peg on the handle allowing it to be held, unlike hers. The peg also helps the knife stay securely in the rope loop that was tied for it. It could fall out without the peg. This guy's well prepared to serve some meat, and I love the different options of accessories and the texture they add to his outfit in the hip ropes and apron pocket. Two knives and a tenderizer and places for all of them to be stored, hands or body, make this doll super display-variable and display-friendly. The only other LDD I've seen like this, with multiple handheld accessories that can always be displayed on their person, is Captain Bonney, and Gluttony could be considered to win over her by having three handheld accessories instead of two (though Bonney's sword and scabbard are impossible to argue with).
As factory-packed, Gluttony's pants are sagging in an unflattering way, but this isn't due to the way they're sewn. When I put his clothes back on after investigating his body sculpt and washing him, I got his pants pulled up properly without any trouble.
His shoes are the LDD round-toe boots in a light orange-brown and have separately-painted cream soles. No other LDD boots visually match these. Blood is splattered on them, of course. These are tucked tightly under the cuffs of the jeans, and it's a little bit tricky to redress the doll as a result because you have to slide the boots on and then pull the cuffs over them.
Gluttony's body sculpt is head-to-toe bespoke to him. While it's an unkind design, it's kind of fascinating.
His head is wide and round-cheeked and has no defined neck when meeting his body (the head does have a very wide internal neck that plugs into the large hole on top of the torso.) His torso is wide, with fat breasts, side rolls below them, and a big belly protruding forward and to the sides. His arms are pudgier than normal and splay out more. His legs are a little pudgier, but the lower legs end in the same foot size as other LDDs so he can wear the standard boot sculpt. Blood splatter continues onto his collar and his hands look blood-soaked. Pink airbrushing defines the contour of his breasts. His left shoulder features the classic tough-guy heart tattoo, but it honors "MEAT" instead of the typical "MOM". That's a good joke.
It's been well-known to LDD fans that Vulgar has the amusing touch of pink underwear paint, apropos of nothing. It's a fun choice, and the paint is actually slightly metallic.
Here's Gluttony next to a standard LDD sculpt (S1 Sadie).
He looks maybe a tad taller than Sadie, though even if his height isn't much different, everything is raised up a bit on his body. His hips, waist, navel, fingertips, shoulders, mouth, nose, and eyes are all higher than Sadie's are when in the same pose. You can also see their face sculpts contrasting. Gluttony has less forehead and his face looks a bit longer, making him look less like a toddler, though I think there is a read of him being a twisted baby doll with all of his sculpts in conversation, and a lighter, softer faceup could probably make his face look more youthful.
The physical doll is not all that much heavier than the standard doll, but he does weigh a little more. The weight disparity between the characters would be greater than it is on the dolls.
Gluttony can sit down, but his legs might spread further than other LDDs to do so.
This doll is solid on his feet barefoot or clothed. I always like that.
Vulgar's body sculpt is not husky or chubby. He's fat. But if we want to offer LDD some benefit of the doubt, I can easily see how much worse and how much more hateful this could look. Sure, Vulgar is repulsive and he's fat...but does it make sense to say that it doesn't really feel like his body is what's so repulsive about him? He's got blood and bile about him and he's clearly evil and piggish, and has abysmal butcher's attire and hygiene...but his actual body sculpt is symmetrical, smooth, and clean. This could be way more disgusting and irregular, with folds and wrinkles and skin problems that would serve to make him look unhealthy and also really dehumanized. And an unhealthy realistic skin effect is something they've done on another doll, Lydia the Lobster Girl, in a way I dislike. (Series 30 is a whole other project and discourse to tackle later.) Gluttony borders on cute, even if he's not quite endearing. Sure, the association of fat and evil and gross is still present and harmful, and I do think the sculpt crosses the line into definite fatphobia, but this sculpted depiction of a fat body is not as unflattering and disgusting as a depiction of Gluttony can get. I appreciate that so much importance is thrown to the brutality and sickness that excessive hunger can invoke in the hyperbole of the deadly sins, as the vomit and blood and butcher tools do a lot of work in his villainous portrayal in a way that makes it feel less like his weight is the main takeaway. Maybe LDD were also pulling the reins back to keep Vulgar within the range of classic dolls LDD aims to parody so they ended up with something adorably vile rather than something fully sick. (Again, consider the possibility--unconfirmed--that Vulgar might be emulating a baby doll in some way.) Or consider that the standards for what extreme weight looked like back then were downright trim, where the time's "plus-size" models would be considered very average now and the visibility of sensationalized excess obesity has grown in the years following with shows like My 600-lb. Life. Even though this doll is pretty low, I personally think there's something really interesting about having a doll body like this, and the contours are kind of nice as a physical object when holding the doll and carrying him around, if that makes any sense. I wouldn't blame anybody for being offended by it, though. You certainly couldn't identify with the doll without indulging in significant irony and self-deprecation. I think this doll is probably trying to be offensive, and it's certainly tasteless.
I don't know. This could have gone a lot harder and grosser in a terrible way, and I think the Vulgar body sculpt could have been repurposed for other characters. It's possible this being a swivel body is the only reason it was used once. At the least, I could have seen it for a sideshow fat lady in Series 30 or even for a couple of purely incidental uses had this been in the ball-joint era. As with Macumba, this is a doll base I'd be curious to get another copy of to see what else could be done with it through customizing. I do wonder, though, if this sculpt works because this is a depiction of Gluttony. Perhaps this body would feel more fatphobic if it was employed more casually on an incidentally fat character, because then there would be the question of unnecessary cruel detail on the sculpt. If the character had nothing to do with fatness, then this sculpt would feel oddly specific and targeted, and I can appreciate that it might not feel right on a character who's not explicitly hyperbolic.
LDD has touched in this field on other occasions.
Series 28 doll Ruby has been read as a fat character, and it seems like this was the implication, since she is said to have eaten gemstones until her stomach swelled and she died.
Her doll has the standard sculpts, but the face paint, hair, and costuming choices do make it work to read her with a heavier body type when you look at her, and her look is just spooky and glam, not repulsive. It would have been interesting if she was on a bigger sculpt for real, but if she's meant to be a fat character, she doesn't bother me at all. And the gemstones wouldn't actually contribute to her body fat, anyway, so it feels more incidental on Ruby than anything.
LDD did also make a new fat sculpt later on--they created a new shape for LDD Presents Uncle Fester from the two licensed MGM animated Addams Family doll releases. Fester has a sculpt that looks nearly identical to Gluttony's--at least from what I've seen of his torso. Beyond the presence of the ball-joint setup, it looks like the belly portion on Fester just might be more circular, but it might not be. The only reason I know the sculpt is modified for sure is because the Fester is a ball-joint doll, and the top of the torso has a standard-size ball-joint neck hole rather than the wide "neckless" shape of Gluttony. The shape is very close, and I think Gluttony was definitely cited and/or modified when building the new molds for Fester.
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| Screenshot of Fester from Joshua Lee's video review of the Fester and It set. |
So Gluttony's body sculpt basically exists now in the ball-joint era. Fester's head is very specifically stylized to the cartoon character, so it's not very useful for other characters, but it does look like any ball-joint LDD with the same skintone as Fester could swap onto his body, which would not be the case for Gluttony and his unique head/neck setup. So if classic-bodied LDD original characters are still on the table for the brand going forward, the Fester body could be used for fat characters. Customs are certainly possible if you can get a color-matched ball-joint LDD head with a more classic sculpt. Fester's use of a fat body is not hateful. He's a lovable character. However, it does go into fat as a comical trait, which is its own kind of reductive. I doubt the Fester body will ever be used again, but LDD gave themselves an option for heavier characters if the original line ever returns to form again.
LDD Presents Leatherface (from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre) also appears to have an entirely unique dumpy body sculpt to match the character's physique and allow his arms to hold his chainsaw.
I don't know what this body sculpt looks like undressed, but that doll also has a very specific head sculpt that doesn't lend the doll base to being applied for other uses. His head looks like it might be a wide-necked swivel like Gluttony's, but LDD Presents only started in the ball-joint era from what I know, and I've seen pictures of Leatherface in the box where his arms are more spread, proving they're ball-jointed. I'd be really curious to see the doll in-person just to see what his build is, but I don't really want him for my collection all that much.
I then took Vulgar down for a wash with soap and baking soda. Fortunately, the gross layer of greasy goop washed right off and made his head clean dry matte vinyl just as it was meant to be. I cleaned up some blemishes and painted over the weird blue circular stain with red to blend it into the blood splatter. I'm suspecting the grease was a reaction of the vinyl material under heat conditions, and other dolls have been known to develop the condition in improper circumstances, but I'm surprised only his head was affected because LDD bodies seem to be made entirely of the same material, unlike fashion dolls. The grease washed off just fine and he's all clean now, but that was very unsettling. I'm glad no real damage was done, and I hope it doesn't recur. Here's the doll washed.
I then decided for personal preference to tweak his face a bit by reducing the airbrushed shading around his eyes and in the creases by his nose. I think the change is subtle but it adds a bit more of the typical LDD cartoony appeal.
Of course, I had to put Gluttony in a butcher's setting. And for the main gimmick, I figured an evil doll's butcher shop would consist of toy meat and slaughtered teddy bears. I wanted to toe the line of shocking and macabre without making the scene too genuinely gory and realistic and disgusting, so I leaned into the lens of LDDs being literal dolls and translated gory animal slaughter into a toylike filter. I made him a table with one human (i.e. Ken-doll) leg replacing a table leg, and carved a sulfur symbol into the same corner. I painted it in a brown that matched his boots and splattered it with the same stuff the doll has.
I also got some wooden play meat to work with the idea of a butcher in a land of toys. The more fake his victims and meat look, the more campy it becomes.
I had to empty out my closet to give him a good space with three walls and a brown color. I ordered small meat hooks and some sacrificial teddy bears to disembowel and hang, and set up cords tied to tacks in the walls so the hooks could hang. I also added some small hooks made from paperclips to hang one of the wooden sausage strings and Return Sadie's tiny bear, who did not get pierced by the wire in the hanging. Vulgar is also borrowing her cleaver for the table. I also hung a chain from one of the tacks and added a wooden panel on the back wall to imply a door. The other table I made went in the corner, with a paperweight beanbag frog and S1 Sadie's knife on it, to allude to the toads Gluttony is eating. The crate from the wooden play meat went in front of it. Then, I took a larger teddy bear and bisected it. I got an old crushed red pop-tube toy that I thought would be a perfect intestinal tube and put it between the halves of the bear. Here's the setup in an unproduced photo.
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| I did feel a little bad about this bear carnage. |
I then put the pieces of another bear in the meat crate and started snapping pictures. I used green and yellow lighting together, and while I had been aiming for more of a sickly yellow-toned Saw lighting, what came out was a bit poppier, but definitely welcome in its hypersaturated pulpy look.
I was able to tweak the lighting in post for some pictures to be more Saw-like.
I found one composition that felt like a classical painting, with Gluttony turned to the side, so I made some variations.
And some more pictures shifting between color aesthetics and lighting types.
The twisted doll then ended up wearing the poor disemstuffinged bear.
And final photos in infernal light. This suits the idea of Hell as well as his color-coded orange sin.
Then I made him a drawing imitating the style of the medieval piece quoted on his chipboard. I had to compose photo pieces digitally to have the right base to trace from, and then made the piece by hand and then photographed it and edited back to a clean 2D digital format. I could see myself doing this (oh no) for the other S7 dolls I get, too. No plans for a full collection, though.
This doll had a lot of work put in by LDD. He certainly would have required the most development in Series 7, as he needed eight or nine new molds, depending on whether the serrated knife is a unique piece or not (and I think it probably is). I know the six body parts, the meat tenderizer, and the bone were only used for him. His sculpts are well-done and his paint is complex, and his pants are very detailed. His outfit and hands allow you to shuffle his three holdable accessories around in a really nice way. Gluttony is unassuming, but arguably the most lavish doll of Series 7..and for what?
I'm just not sure about the end to which all of this work was applied, because this is a disgusting fat doll where the two adjectives are intertwined. Sure, he's a valid horror archetype and a cohesive character design. But the way gluttony has been moralized has always led to strays being fired at anybody who isn't thin or mid-weight, and that's treacherous. I can separate Gluttony from the broader demographic of fat people, and that can allow me to enjoy him as a nasty horror villain, but I don't know if LDD were making that separation when creating him. Nor most media with fat antagonists.
I could take him as a time capsule of what society thought at the time. Certainly, fat acceptance or body positivity/body neutrality (I tend to favor the latter) were not cultural conversations at the time, and gestures toward inclusivity were very narrow--as mentioned, "plus-size" models on reality shows like America's Next Top Model at the time do not count as abnormal or heavy to most people today. It was normalized to ridicule, reject, and revile fatness at the time and obesity is still exploited for cautionary freak-shows like My 600-lb Life, though it's always hard to navigate between the valid medical health message and self-improvement motivation and the shaming and objectification of the people with the physical, economic, or mental health issues that landed them with their extreme bodies. I think something very similar occurred with Series 7's Vanity (Madame Dysmorphic), a woman who died from cosmetic surgeries and has bruises and stitches and bandages on her face. Cosmetic surgery still has a stigma, and still has valid concerns and pitfalls and extreme cases of unhealthy modification, making it hard to navigate between responsible people partaking harmlessly and people risking harm to themselves by getting procedures for unhealthy reasons. Vanity's imagery also feels potentially dated in its comparative tameness, just like Gluttony, as now we've all seen fillers, implants, and extreme mods that are far more shocking and striking than just facial scars. This is possibly also happening with Lust, who's a dominatrix devil. Kink, while still niche and obviously adults-only and for private consenting spaces, has become less stigmatized as a moral issue or failing on the behalf of its participants.
I know you'd be looked at like you grew a second head if you suggested a doll line should have a fat character who wasn't a boogeyman or punchline at that time Gluttony was released. Today, certain circles would cry "woke" as a pejorative, while in this doll's time you'd be seen as too "politically correct". And LDD certainly had no reason to make a fat doll where the weight was irrelevant. That's just not what the thought process was. And again, there is some horror validity to this concept, and he is explicitly a portrayal of a hyperbolic corruption of ideals. I have no personal place to tell LDD to make more fat dolls that are less gross and sinister, nor do I even know if that would actually accomplish anything positive or feel very graceful. It's just an odd thing with the way the conceptual sin of Gluttony and its translation to weight imagery reflects a cultural value and human condition that often has more nuance than we're willing to afford it.
If you'd like to see a full-figured doll whose portrayal is entirely lovely and respectful, enjoy my review of Monster High G3 signature Catty Noir as a palate-cleanser.
The Fatal Flirt: Jezebel
Of the dolls discussed in this post, this one has the potential to be the most seriously upsetting.
Warnings for discussion of suicide and depicted suicide self-harm imagery on the doll. I do not recommend reading this segment if those topics will distress you. I will not exploit or lean into this doll's upsetting imagery in my work with her, though I will show it as documentation and discuss its impact.
And yeah, because of those distressing topics I just warned, I was half-certain Jezebel was an "absolutely never" doll for me, just like with Dahlia. I've never been super comfortable with the LDDs who died by suicide, and particularly not with Jezebel and Blue, who put their suicides front and center to the concept. Jezebel's graphic depiction of her methods (she died by cutting her arms, which is a painted detail) really unnerved me and made me feel like the doll was too dark and tasteless to entertain, and there also seemed to be no reason to depict it on her. It felt like gratuitous edge. But at the same time, suicide is a reality that would realistically have a presence in a cast of undeads, can be a struggle for any person, and I believe depression and suicide are a nuanced kind of tragedy that everybody responds to and processes in their own way. Some people can't engage safely with the topic, entirely understandably. Some people process it with humor or irony. Some people are deeply affected by being touched by suicide in their social circle, or have experienced the ideation themselves. I myself have been seriously rocked by suicide loss from somebody I didn't even realize I was that close to before it happened. (It happened a few years ago and I assure you, I'm okay.) So I've had to grapple a whole lot with what my outlook on media discussing suicide is now...though fortunately, while never entering that headspace myself. I guess I'm interested in exploring the topic in media and I don't personally feel a need to mute the concept entirely. There are instances where comedy featuring suicide can be so absurd and extreme that it can genuinely work for me, but there are cases where I feel disturbed and hurt by a media depiction for finding its usage tasteless, and that's where I'm leaning with Jez. While she isn't LDD's only death by suicide, she's the most real, raw-feeling depiction, and with that, I also think, the most exploitative and tasteless.
But I acknowledge that it's possible for people not to be upset by her, I can't call them wrong for that, and maybe even some people can feel seen by her. I can imagine her being darkly endearing to people with mental experiences like that, though hopefully after coming out the other side and reaching a better place. And...well, darn it, with that distressing piece of her visual design put aside, Jezebel is a pretty awesome vintage-passing doll design and she has some surprising hidden details and a strong level of craft. I wanted to give her a chance and see how I dealt with her.
Jezebel's entertainment sphere within the S5 celebs is a little obfuscated on purpose, but multiple factors make it clear who she was. Here's your first hint: owing the the reputation of the antagonistic Biblical queen, the name Jezebel has been stained with evil and also, not very fairly, with connotations of wicked sexuality and seduction. The name "Jezebel" automatically means "sinful" and "temptress" by association. (And yes, while this name has been historically also used as a dehumanizing archetypal title for a racist Black stereotype, that is very obviously not related to this doll.)
My Jezebel came sealed, though something seriously dented the box and window cover, pressing it downward in a cylindrical shape.
Here's her chipboard poem.
Jezebel was a runaway who lived on the streetSaddened by the sound of her own heartbeatWith a razor in hand it was all just too muchHer body fell fast, ice cold to the touch.
This grim backstory seems somewhat at odds with the idea of Jez being an established performer. This might be the only case where it seems like LDD could be saying a Series 5 character became a celebrity after death, because being described as an unhoused runaway sounds like the origin-story portion of a celebrity tale--someone gets cast out of home and struggles before making it big. Here, though, she didn't get through that time in her life, and I couldn't imagine "runaway" being used to describe somebody who had a career. This may well be a dreamer who found her spirit and her home on the other side.
Her dreams saw her cast out, alone on the streetHer heart felt like breaking, it struggled to beatShe ended her life, there was no one to blameShe faded but heard them all cheering her name.
I removed the reference to her death method due to my personal taste, but I have to acknowledge it's kind of a net good in the released chipboard poem because it broadcasts the doll's most upsetting feature and might be a helpful content warning.
Jezebel's death certificate might display an earlier prototype for the doll, because I notice the fingers and front of the hands on the doll in the photo have bloodstains that are not present on the produced doll. While she still has gory cutting imagery, it's more restrained on the final doll...but also potentially more realistic and upsetting as a result.
Jezebel is the most recent death in Series 5, dying on January 29, 1999 at 2:47 PM. Her death date correlates with classic burlesque dancer Lili St. Cyr, which cements Jezebel's line of work: burlesque. The certificate just calls her an "entertainer" probably to not be blatant about it. Burlesque and striptease are often associated, and we don't know what Jez's ethos was in regard to the level of class in her shows, so LDD might have not come out and called her a burlesque dancer to avoid those grey areas and making her seem too inappropriate. While burlesque is considered a theatrical performance art and is above-board entertainment for grown-ups, it still has connotations that could make Jez seem more dirty than was intended if LDD named her profession. There would be nothing wrong with Jezebel being a sex worker if she was, but I can agree that's a little too weird to imagine in this world of horror dolls, so I'm fine keeping her at burlesque. I think that's the extent of her intended concept.
The deathdate reference to Lili St. Cyr might explain why this doll was suicidal, since St. Cyr had a reputation for the same in tabloids. St. Cyr did not die by suicide.
Jezebel is one of the two LDDs whose death date is closest to my birthdate. Jezebel is the only 1999 death, which is a year before me, putting her close compared to other dolls. Sheena died the year after me, also as the only doll in her death year. I was initially disappointed that, in the absence of a shared deathday doll, these were the two dolls I was closest to, but I've reconsidered Jez (obviously; we're talking about her) and maybe Sheena's not a "never" anymore, either. Sheena's still not an immediate interest, though.
Because I ended up with variant Jezebel's certificate in my copy of Viv, I can show both certificates. As with the other S5 dolls, it's the same photo desaturated, but variant Jezebel appears to actually match this faked image, because unlike the other S5 variants, she doesn't appear to change any value tones or details in the new color palette.
Variant Hollywood and Dahlia invert their hair colors and change the value tones and contrast of the costumes, variant Siren is lower-contrast than her color counterpart, and variant Vincent has more formal suspenders and more black tones in his coloring that make him higher-contrast. Variant Jezebel, however, appears to really just be equivalent to the main doll sans color, so reusing the certificate photo in black and white passes for her variant certificate easily.
Jez gets custody of both certificates in her coffin storage now. I had failed to realize when I got it that the Jezebel certificate I with Viv was the variant edition!
In the coffin, Jezebel had the same loose packaging shoulder cradle as Dahlia, leading me to believe I was right and it has something to do with protecting a piece around the neck. I don't know if any previous or future dolls had the same, though.
Jezebel had plastic over the wires around her ankles and neck for protection like several other LDDs have had.
Here's the doll unboxed.
While Jez's death date is very recent for LDD, her styling looks pretty 1930s or 1940s to me, particularly with her hair, though the cut does work just as well for the 1990s when she actually died.
Jez's hair is short, black, and curly, sitting above the ear and looking very vintage. It's similar to Dahlia's, but the curls might be fewer in number and more dense.
The shaping is really good, but untidy hairs are distracting due to the dark color.
To help arrange and accent her hair, Jezebel is wearing a satiny red elastic headband decorated with two rosettes. Roses are commonly a flower of romance or passion, suiting a seductive performer.
I'd have expected at least one more rose on the band; two is a strange number. It still looks good. The headband isn't super tight, but it's not going to fall off, either. It just needs to be braced right against her hair to sit snugly.
Jezebel's skin is pale flesh-toned-- the only example in the series (everyone else is greyish or white), and she looks the least black-and-white of the cast overall.
She is painted for the Devil himself: she has red eyeshadow arches all the way to her eyebrows, thick lashes, a (certainly, applied) beauty mark, a black lip outline, and trailing streaky mascara in two tones to look more watery.
This makeup is not delicate, nor even all that classy, and it is deliciously campy. Pure LDD cartoon appeal, and she makes for a really scary intense face with that piercing gaze.
I said LDD Hollywood would be a good drag look, but Jezebel might be an even better candidate! Then again, she's kind of leaving a queen with nothing to go on. You can't amplify this face!
Jez's eyes are unusual, with yellow sclerae, red irises, and red eye reflections over her black pupils. The eyes aren't entirely even, but not in a distracting way. The coloration looks more supernatural in an unspecific way, and it gives her face a theatricality and a weirdness that contrasts her lively skintone and might help to take the chilling sting out of her disturbing imagery by making her less real and more clearly undead.
Around her neck, Jezebel has this delicate set of feather epaulettes which are attached to a collar and mimic black bird wings around her shoulders, with long feathers under short ones for a more realistic wing effect.
The short feathers are just like the ones Hollywood's boa is made of. The long feathers are equally soft and flexible. I'd worried they would feel stiff and brittle. While the piece is very delicate, and the big feathers are a risk for falling out (one did on my copy and I repaired it with glue), I think the look is worth it.
The epaulette collar is a separate piece which velcros at the back of her neck. I think a lesser outfit would have this element sewn to the dress, and for the purpose of preventing damage to the piece, having it separate was the right move. It still makes me nervous!
Despite the saucy nature of her artistry, Jez's outfit isn't super scandalous. It definitely stands apart with its red color and central skirt slit, but if it would be shocking by vintage standards, it's not by contemporary ones. The piece has a tight neck and no sleeves, and is made of the satiny fabric also used by Siren this series. The fabric doesn't help Siren a bit, but it works for Jezebel's theme. Across the bodice and waist, a black lace accent is sewn, and the slit in the skirt is trimmed with lace too.
The cut on the shoulders makes the dress look like it has a halter neck, but it doesn't. The back of Jez's neck and shoulders are fully covered. The sewing on my copy looks a little asymmetrical so the left-side section of the bodice doesn't feel laid flat or pulled leftward enough. It's hard to tell in the pictures, but in real life, I see it, and I have to use her epaulettes to disguise it.
The back of the dress seems sewn a little awkwardly, like it wants to have a train behind her but doesn't. The dress doesn't drape or trail behind at all and the seams seem a little untidy.
Jezebel's fingernails and toenails are painted black, but with red around the cuticles, making it look like her nails are bleeding. Spooky.
However, the red layer didn't make it onto Jez's left hand when it should have. Hm.
The undersides of Jez's arms are painted with the vertical razor cuts which killed her. These are meant to be something of a hidden surprise detail, of which Jezebel actually has three, but having this as a surprise comes across as fairly irresponsible, so I disclosed it early. Here's the picture of what that looks like.
You've been warned.
I have an icky feeling about this, but I did expect it to hit harder in person than it did.
I have no history with suicidal ideation and haven't, to my knowledge, encountered anybody who cut themselves, but this imagery still gets to me. Perhaps in LDD's realm of horror, the expectation is that no holds are barred and that imagery like this isn't to be seen as uniquely upsetting, such that a warning wouldn't be necessary and that buyers would be cool with it. I think over time, the understanding has developed that this imagery is far more tragic and triggering than edgy, and that it's irresponsible to spring on unaware audiences, particularly because horror fans and trauma-affected people are not mutually-exclusive audiences. Use of such imagery for edge can also look like you're broadcasting that you're lucky enough to have never been there or affected by it yourself, because then you probably wouldn't treat it so lightly. I wouldn't expect Jezebel's imagery to be repeated on a LDD today. There's no indication any of this happened with her before the lethal incident, but it's still very hard to look at. This feels a little too real, and the bizarre thing is, I'm totally fine with Miss Argentina from Beetlejuice. Is it the fact that that character is green-skinned and cut just once across each wrist? Maybe she feels too fantastical to hit hard, or else her setting as a weary afterlife clerk in a whimsical ghost comedy lightens her up by depicting her after the end and post-suffering. But Jez doesn't look like she's suffering....hm.
I'd probably be so much better about this doll if she was scarred rather than bleeding. It would still be extremely dark, but it wouldn't feel as present and painful.
Jezebel's shoes are black sandals, just like Siren and Hollywood in this series.
Now for the other two hidden features, which are both to aid her bad-girl effect.
First, on her right leg, she has a blue vine tattoo design all the way up to the hip, all hidden by the skirt!
This is feels like a more modern feature that reminds us Jezebel is actually a 1990s girl, but it can be seen as timeless to a degree and suits a bad-girl type in general. It could also be meaningful and suggest a bit more richness to the character. Maybe Jezebel was more artistic or spiritual underneath her stage persona as a flirt, and the tattoo could reflect an unrecognized part of her personality that wasn't thriving.
Then, on her left leg, out of view under the dress, Jezebel has an elastic garter slid up on her thigh.
Originally meant to be practical tight bands to keep the tops of stockings in place, garters evolved into a fashion statement and have taken on sexy "forbidden" connotations as leg garments you'd only see in certain moments, like when a skirt is tactically flipped. Betty Boop wore one! It absolutely suits a burlesque theme for this to be an outfit piece on Jezebel, and it's cool to have an extra feature hidden away.
Perhaps Jezebel would be friendly with LDD's French Moulin Morgue cabaret star and fellow burlesque dancer Ella von Terra (herself referencing modern burlesque star Dita von Teese).
Jezebel's profession doesn't make her any less modest than the typical LDD. She has white underwear paint on her torso (and also some expected red stains).
Because the cuts made me still feel a little weird, I made Jez some arm bands from some doll stockings.
These don't fully censor her gore or hide the problem, since she has blood trailing onto her hands.
The bands do reduce the overtness of the cuts, though, hiding those injuries more than when they're just open on the underside of her arms. The optics of the bands kind of both honor and reframe her story, too. They feel like bandages and specific pieces for her specific situation, but imply a sense of recovery and moving through the incident to me. You could even argue, if you can see the paint as a harmless gory surprise, that the blood trailing into the hands serves as a visual prompt to check under the bands to find more detail. If I had doll socks I could use as full elbow gloves, the whole thing would be covered...but then, so would her bloody manicure...and it might not be quite right to completely wash out her backstory to make her more palatable to me. I think the bands work well for my purposes.
I'm still freaked out by Jezebel and I can't speak to her being at all acceptable...but if you're willing to extend your grace, perhaps there's an uplifting spin to her. Several LDDs have a kind of triumphant element to their resurrection, like their hellish lives or deaths have been overcome by reanimation--a second chance, if you will. Series 8's Hollow even uses that idea as text--she was catatonic and unable to act with any agency at all in life, but the certificate poem notes that in death, she is now unburdened and has the capacity to do what she wants with herself after a life trapped in a personal hell. So Jezebel took that action and it can't be undone, but she came back and she looks pretty powerful. I mean, honey, with that makeup? Perhaps she found what she needed once she reanimated and truly became the bold personality she was only pretending to be before. A fresh start and a new life after hitting the bottom, but with a the grim spin of a true death experience, rather than a near-death one. That's how I'm going to view her--as a queen who got a second wind way later than most recovery cases.
And with the death story aside, what a presence.
The camera loved her.
Here she is being bandaged in autopsy by Tinselton Stitches.
For her celebrity news media feature, I gave her a full tabloid cover aping the National Enquirer and its ilk of trash, basing it on 1990s Enquirer covers...not that the design has changed much since. Because the Enquirer is horrendous, I imitated its rancid tone.
Let me make it very clear that this magazine page is deliberately revolting, creepy, cruel, offensive and terrible because it has to be for that mimicry. Depiction is not endorsement and I do not remotely agree with the fictional "journalists" writing this publication on anything.
Vile tabloid garbage like this is something you kind of just have to laugh at the ridiculousness of...because otherwise you'll start crying and hitting things. I think this grotesque imitation kind of proves that the Enquirer and tabloids like it are truly beyond parody, though. This is hardly a critique; it's just exactly what they do openly.
It was a valid exploration of a real "news" type, and I think Jez might court trash by nature due to her extreme drag-style look, but I also wanted to offer her some respect and gravity, so she got a second news piece where I offered a take on her voice to let her speak.
Here's a poster for her burlesque show.
And I set up a stage show to photograph. The clothing from Viv's factory outfit and the skirt I tried to make for Viv worked great as a dramatic burlesque outfit--I see Jez's own dress as something she'd wear in public, not to perform in. When using a mix of red and white light, Jez's pink skin was neutralized and turned ghostly pale in a striking way, allowing me to see what this doll would have looked like with stark-white skin.
I also tried another outfit with Viv's top and tights and the wing epaulettes for a "dark angel" look.
While these pictures were good, they didn't reflect the elaborate staging and kitsch of burlesque theater, so I set up another scene on the mudroom bench. I took some foam board and cut out a moon like you see as a cliché of old stage shows, where a lady sits on the curve as the moon lowers from the ceiling, and also did some stars and glued them to pale cord that would serve as obvious strings. I tied these to the top of the bench so they'd hang, and with the right posing, Jezebel was able to be balanced free on the moon without bracing against the back wall. For this shot, I put her in the pink L.O.L. O.M.G. Fierce Lady Diva boa with no top and the Margot di Perla Rainbow High skirt for more of an innocent/dainty angelic burlesque look to pair with the moon. I put some china flower decorations on the floor, and then decided it was still too empty. Fixing this, I added in two dolls to be Jez's backup dancers--Viv, with her legs walking off separate in a high kick, and Carotte Morts, carrying Viv's waving torso. Fortunately, both were dead before Jezebel so were viable candidates for her show!
I think this staging turned out really well and captures the vintage-theater kitsch vibe as well as the grandiosity of a burlesque show.
Here's Jezebel's Grauman slab. I just drew a flower similar to her tattoos and a bleeding heart.
And here's an arrangement with all five S5 characters on their slabs, centered around Hollywood. The outer pairs can switch between themselves, but I liked this lineup best.
Tinselton Stitches can stand in the middle alongside Hollywood, and when I get GreGORY someday, he will be in the middle too, since I chose for their footprints to be centered like hers. The Great Zombini and Viv could also qualify for Hollywood sidewalk tiles, so they could be added to the LDD celebrity line too--if I decide to fully pursue their two-pack. I might be coming around to having the canon set, and my first Viv could find a fully new reinvented identity.
And here's Jezebel's autograph photo. I went back and made autographs for Vincent and Tinselton too, which I added back to their posts but will also be compiled in the S5 overview.
Jezebel's a little dodgy quality-wise. Her dress isn't sewn perfectly, her epaulettes are fragile, and one of her hands is missing a paint effect on her other three extremities, lacking the red on the nails. Jezebel's imagery and suicide backstory are also very hard to get past for anybody badly hurt by the matter of suicide, and I can't fully say I'm one who got past it. I certainly like Jezebel's design and had a lot of fun with her concept as a burlesque artist, but I felt like I was enjoying Jezebel in spite of her cuts. I'd like her equally, if not more, had she died as an accident or murder.
A Series 5 overview post will be forthcoming.
So ends this first batch of dolls that might make you tug your collar.
All of these dolls were definitely interesting...but I don't feel straightforwardly proud to own them. They're a fairly bad look for Mezco and they feel like they could be a fairly bad look for me in buying them. I was able to find a charitable angle for most of them, but a casual viewer is probably not going to see that angle when they notice those dolls in my collection. I still want to keep them as challenging thought pieces and novelties and genuinely cool dolls, but these could require a lot more explaining than other LDDs if someone noticed the problems I did, and I'd surely be perceived as making flimsy excuses for them in the event of that discussion.
Of this group of four, I found Macumba to be the most defensible, or the doll who required the fewest leaps of faith and mental gymnastics. He's a starkly lonely token by default and he participates in stereotyping and conflation, but he's not a hateful design and there's reason to believe that authenticity was aimed for in his development. Conversely, though, Macumba is the simplest, most basic doll of this group. He has a cool face paint design and debuted yarn hair, and is a unique presence just for being Black in this very white doll line, but has the least surprises or physical novelties. Gluttony is a very interesting elaborate doll who's hard to endorse. Vulgar is successful at what he does, but what he does is create a thoroughly repulsive gross character associated with fatness. While weight and health can intersect in extremes where cautionary tales are useful, fat people catch strays from depictions like this and shaming isn't a productive approach. The body sculpt is inherently unkind, but it still could have been reapplied to less harmful uses rather than being wasted. Maybe the Fester doll is a sign of LDD agreeing with that sentiment. Jezebel is still visually upsetting thanks to her graphic suicide imagery, but she's fabulous if that's not in view and there are ways to take her character that honor her tragedy without making her extremely heavy and depressing. Dahlia fictionalizes a real murder victim, but she looks strong and vengeful and independent, like she's coming back powerful.
Interesting to note that all of these are early entries on the swivel body. The brand is kind of front-loaded with objectionable content on the release timeline, though two of the four dolls in the next uncomfortable planned group for whenever will be from the ball-joint era later on.
While these dolls have some really immediate concerns in their concepts, they all have interesting or redeeming factors that make them easier to appreciate, I expect, than the next group of dolls in this project. I think it will be harder to find even a guilty form of pleasure in the next set. I don't regret buying these LDDs, if that means anything. I think there are genuinely cool aspects to them and just posing this tricky discussion was worthwhile to me. It's healthy to engage with things you find objectionable or distasteful, and it's important to find nuance in your reaction to media.
I leave the rest of the thoughts to you.
But I acknowledge that it's possible for people not to be upset by her, I can't call them wrong for that, and maybe even some people can feel seen by her. I can imagine her being darkly endearing to people with mental experiences like that, though hopefully after coming out the other side and reaching a better place. And...well, darn it, with that distressing piece of her visual design put aside, Jezebel is a pretty awesome vintage-passing doll design and she has some surprising hidden details and a strong level of craft. I wanted to give her a chance and see how I dealt with her.
Jezebel's entertainment sphere within the S5 celebs is a little obfuscated on purpose, but multiple factors make it clear who she was. Here's your first hint: owing the the reputation of the antagonistic Biblical queen, the name Jezebel has been stained with evil and also, not very fairly, with connotations of wicked sexuality and seduction. The name "Jezebel" automatically means "sinful" and "temptress" by association. (And yes, while this name has been historically also used as a dehumanizing archetypal title for a racist Black stereotype, that is very obviously not related to this doll.)
Variant Hollywood and Dahlia invert their hair colors and change the value tones and contrast of the costumes, variant Siren is lower-contrast than her color counterpart, and variant Vincent has more formal suspenders and more black tones in his coloring that make him higher-contrast. Variant Jezebel, however, appears to really just be equivalent to the main doll sans color, so reusing the certificate photo in black and white passes for her variant certificate easily.
Around her neck, Jezebel has this delicate set of feather epaulettes which are attached to a collar and mimic black bird wings around her shoulders, with long feathers under short ones for a more realistic wing effect.
I'd probably be so much better about this doll if she was scarred rather than bleeding. It would still be extremely dark, but it wouldn't feel as present and painful.
Jezebel's shoes are black sandals, just like Siren and Hollywood in this series.
Now for the other two hidden features, which are both to aid her bad-girl effect.
Perhaps Jezebel would be friendly with LDD's French Moulin Morgue cabaret star and fellow burlesque dancer Ella von Terra (herself referencing modern burlesque star Dita von Teese).
I'm still freaked out by Jezebel and I can't speak to her being at all acceptable...but if you're willing to extend your grace, perhaps there's an uplifting spin to her. Several LDDs have a kind of triumphant element to their resurrection, like their hellish lives or deaths have been overcome by reanimation--a second chance, if you will. Series 8's Hollow even uses that idea as text--she was catatonic and unable to act with any agency at all in life, but the certificate poem notes that in death, she is now unburdened and has the capacity to do what she wants with herself after a life trapped in a personal hell. So Jezebel took that action and it can't be undone, but she came back and she looks pretty powerful. I mean, honey, with that makeup? Perhaps she found what she needed once she reanimated and truly became the bold personality she was only pretending to be before. A fresh start and a new life after hitting the bottom, but with a the grim spin of a true death experience, rather than a near-death one. That's how I'm going to view her--as a queen who got a second wind way later than most recovery cases.
Here she is being bandaged in autopsy by Tinselton Stitches.
Let me make it very clear that this magazine page is deliberately revolting, creepy, cruel, offensive and terrible because it has to be for that mimicry. Depiction is not endorsement and I do not remotely agree with the fictional "journalists" writing this publication on anything.
Vile tabloid garbage like this is something you kind of just have to laugh at the ridiculousness of...because otherwise you'll start crying and hitting things. I think this grotesque imitation kind of proves that the Enquirer and tabloids like it are truly beyond parody, though. This is hardly a critique; it's just exactly what they do openly.
It was a valid exploration of a real "news" type, and I think Jez might court trash by nature due to her extreme drag-style look, but I also wanted to offer her some respect and gravity, so she got a second news piece where I offered a take on her voice to let her speak.
Here's a poster for her burlesque show.
And I set up a stage show to photograph. The clothing from Viv's factory outfit and the skirt I tried to make for Viv worked great as a dramatic burlesque outfit--I see Jez's own dress as something she'd wear in public, not to perform in. When using a mix of red and white light, Jez's pink skin was neutralized and turned ghostly pale in a striking way, allowing me to see what this doll would have looked like with stark-white skin.
I also tried another outfit with Viv's top and tights and the wing epaulettes for a "dark angel" look.
While these pictures were good, they didn't reflect the elaborate staging and kitsch of burlesque theater, so I set up another scene on the mudroom bench. I took some foam board and cut out a moon like you see as a cliché of old stage shows, where a lady sits on the curve as the moon lowers from the ceiling, and also did some stars and glued them to pale cord that would serve as obvious strings. I tied these to the top of the bench so they'd hang, and with the right posing, Jezebel was able to be balanced free on the moon without bracing against the back wall. For this shot, I put her in the pink L.O.L. O.M.G. Fierce Lady Diva boa with no top and the Margot di Perla Rainbow High skirt for more of an innocent/dainty angelic burlesque look to pair with the moon. I put some china flower decorations on the floor, and then decided it was still too empty. Fixing this, I added in two dolls to be Jez's backup dancers--Viv, with her legs walking off separate in a high kick, and Carotte Morts, carrying Viv's waving torso. Fortunately, both were dead before Jezebel so were viable candidates for her show!
And here's an arrangement with all five S5 characters on their slabs, centered around Hollywood. The outer pairs can switch between themselves, but I liked this lineup best.
Tinselton Stitches can stand in the middle alongside Hollywood, and when I get GreGORY someday, he will be in the middle too, since I chose for their footprints to be centered like hers. The Great Zombini and Viv could also qualify for Hollywood sidewalk tiles, so they could be added to the LDD celebrity line too--if I decide to fully pursue their two-pack. I might be coming around to having the canon set, and my first Viv could find a fully new reinvented identity.
Jezebel's a little dodgy quality-wise. Her dress isn't sewn perfectly, her epaulettes are fragile, and one of her hands is missing a paint effect on her other three extremities, lacking the red on the nails. Jezebel's imagery and suicide backstory are also very hard to get past for anybody badly hurt by the matter of suicide, and I can't fully say I'm one who got past it. I certainly like Jezebel's design and had a lot of fun with her concept as a burlesque artist, but I felt like I was enjoying Jezebel in spite of her cuts. I'd like her equally, if not more, had she died as an accident or murder.
All of these dolls were definitely interesting...but I don't feel straightforwardly proud to own them. They're a fairly bad look for Mezco and they feel like they could be a fairly bad look for me in buying them. I was able to find a charitable angle for most of them, but a casual viewer is probably not going to see that angle when they notice those dolls in my collection. I still want to keep them as challenging thought pieces and novelties and genuinely cool dolls, but these could require a lot more explaining than other LDDs if someone noticed the problems I did, and I'd surely be perceived as making flimsy excuses for them in the event of that discussion.
Of this group of four, I found Macumba to be the most defensible, or the doll who required the fewest leaps of faith and mental gymnastics. He's a starkly lonely token by default and he participates in stereotyping and conflation, but he's not a hateful design and there's reason to believe that authenticity was aimed for in his development. Conversely, though, Macumba is the simplest, most basic doll of this group. He has a cool face paint design and debuted yarn hair, and is a unique presence just for being Black in this very white doll line, but has the least surprises or physical novelties. Gluttony is a very interesting elaborate doll who's hard to endorse. Vulgar is successful at what he does, but what he does is create a thoroughly repulsive gross character associated with fatness. While weight and health can intersect in extremes where cautionary tales are useful, fat people catch strays from depictions like this and shaming isn't a productive approach. The body sculpt is inherently unkind, but it still could have been reapplied to less harmful uses rather than being wasted. Maybe the Fester doll is a sign of LDD agreeing with that sentiment. Jezebel is still visually upsetting thanks to her graphic suicide imagery, but she's fabulous if that's not in view and there are ways to take her character that honor her tragedy without making her extremely heavy and depressing. Dahlia fictionalizes a real murder victim, but she looks strong and vengeful and independent, like she's coming back powerful.
Interesting to note that all of these are early entries on the swivel body. The brand is kind of front-loaded with objectionable content on the release timeline, though two of the four dolls in the next uncomfortable planned group for whenever will be from the ball-joint era later on.
While these dolls have some really immediate concerns in their concepts, they all have interesting or redeeming factors that make them easier to appreciate, I expect, than the next group of dolls in this project. I think it will be harder to find even a guilty form of pleasure in the next set. I don't regret buying these LDDs, if that means anything. I think there are genuinely cool aspects to them and just posing this tricky discussion was worthwhile to me. It's healthy to engage with things you find objectionable or distasteful, and it's important to find nuance in your reaction to media.
I leave the rest of the thoughts to you.
Wow wow wow wow wow!!! This is my first of blog posts I’ve read from you after finding the announcement post on Instagram and can I just say, I’ve been blown away TREMENDOUSLY. I clicked on to this thinking it was to discuss the problematic effects of the dolls and only the problematic effects and instead, I was met with pure artistry, depth, history and high quality photos I wouldn’t find elsewhere. I’ve been into living dead dolls since I was a young kid and, though aware of some of the problems, was immune to most of them and overlooked them for a series I loved. Now I’m older, I’ve been aware but nowhere on this level so here are some things I can say: I totally agree with everything said about Macumba. For a doll line that I’ve seen fans pride on diversity, there is the only black doll heavily based off of stereotypes which always made me uncomfortable, and I agree with what you said about Jezebel. I had absolutely no idea about the first secret on the doll (and if I did, then I forgot) but that was shocking in an unpleasant way. Overall, this was an absolutely astounding blog post and I look forward to seeing your others!
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for your kind words! I hope you enjoy the rest of my work here!
DeleteThis was a genuinely interesting and well thought out review, honestly I think one of your best. You really thought these over, and it shows. I screwed up my nose at the idea of Dahlia, I get the choice, the case is so, so famous, but she was a very real person. Detaching her from the actual human suffering and your choice to give her a new character, and agency, made me able to enjoy her. Ditto with Jez, I love how you handled her burlesque photos, and the armlets/gloves, really help.
ReplyDeleteMakumba I agree, wouldn't be nearly so stark if he wasn't so very alone. It's honestly shocking to me he's the only black doll. You're right, there is a definite need to tread carefully, but that doesn't mean to exclude.
The photo set for Vulgar, I also need to tip my hat. You got creative with the gore!