Living Dead Dolls Roundup 6

For a moment, due to the gritty, ugly first doll in this group, I was considering throwing together a dedicated "scary roundup" for a theme, but I found the concept a little too nebulous and my collecting budget for the month was pushed heavily toward building my Halloween pool of LDD posts in October (where I made great progress!) so I decided to just go for another assorted pool. I did, however, end up with two significant wishlist dolls!

Zombi 22: Menard 

This is my first doll from Series 22, which is themed entirely on the zombie genre of horror. The series has six characters, but five in the main set. (Patience Xero, the archetypal "first infected" zombie, was exclusive to the black, white, and red variant set of the series before getting a "main" full-color second release with a pink dress as an exclusive direct through Mezco. As such, Patience has both a variant-exclusive doll and an exclusive variant doll!) Within Series 22, Menard is the boy doll, and he derives from voodoo zombies, the entities from legends of the Haitian Vodou folk religion. Vodou was the origin of the zombie, where zombies were living people or corpses enslaved by dark magic. The zombie in this form had its own hold in pop culture before George A. Romero reinvented the concept with his flesh-eating ghouls in 1968's Night of the Living Dead and subsequently helmed the new zombie genre that's become the definitive monster idea. You can see examples of the voodoo zombie in pop culture in the 1950s and 1960s before Romero's work supplanted the idea. Today, voodoo zombies or zombies otherwise depicted as controlled by sorcery are still seen, but they're not the dominant concept. 

Menard interested me because he's an unusually drab, grotesque, ugly-designed Living Dead Doll, reflects an interesting archetype, and has an unusual face sculpt and paint job. I also had the other LDD voodoo zombie, Series 4's witch doctor Macumba, and realized both dolls would benefit massively from a shared photoshoot during my vacation where I knew just the spot to stage an island. As such, I had to get them before that trip, and they joined the healthy list of dolls who had to travel with me for photo-ops at the lake! I didn't know when/how I wanted to publish this doll's review (before or after Macumba in the uncomfortable roundup? Solo post?), but it worked out that Macumba would be finished first. See his discussion here.

Menard came sealed.

Series 22 was one of the releases during LDD's 13th anniversary, and they made an event of the year. Nearly all of the dolls released that year (which also includes Series 21 and the anniversary collection of Series 1 rereleases) had a unique coffin style, with a printed design of bluish wooden planks and a logo on the back mixing the text "13th" with the LDD alchemical sulfur sign. This symbol is also painted on the back of the necks of the dolls. Menard is my first 13th-anniversary doll, but he probably won't be my last. 

I like the bluish color of the wooden coffin print, though I don't know why that was the chosen hue. The coffin is covered in carved thirteens in the form of Roman numerals, Arabic numerals, and tallies.

I believe a wooden-style print was also used for the Dia de Muertos-themed Series 20 coffins. That series might have one of my favorite packaging variants of all. 

The proper back of the box under the optional cardboard lid also breaks from standard, featuring a unique poem about the 13th anniversary, and a change to the standard tagline for this occasion: "Because deader is still better!" I like the choice of yellow text against the blue here. 

The interior of the cardboard lid has its own print.

The only dolls released in this year who I'm know did not have this box design were the wave of Scary Tales dolls from this time. Their dolls have the 13 mark on the back of their necks, but their coffins just have a sticker with the anniversary emblem slapped on their clear coffin lids. That makes me think there was a rush job, perhaps, like they were somehow released earlier than this printed box design was ready and so Mezco had to make do with a sticker? Seeing as the dolls have the logo painted on their necks, it can't be the case that the dolls were finished and packed before their release time delayed into the anniversary year and Mezco patched it up by slapping stickers onto their coffins. They couldn't slap the paint on after the dolls were finished. 

The Series 22 tissue color is red, which feels a little uninteresting here. Red tissue is relatively common in LDD coffins, and zombies don't really feel especially red of a concept to me. I'd go with a grey tissue for this bunch myself.

I really like the Series 22 chipboards. All of the dolls are rendered as bald heads in a pink sky above a black horizon, with bold text spreading out in perspective from the heads. 

This is a striking design, and it's a direct imitation of the movie poster for George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead (second in his Dead trilogy after the foundational Night of the Living Dead, and followed by Day of the Dead). 

I love the "no explicit sex in this picture" disclaimer!

The original poster features a zombie head from the "Plaid Shirt Zombie" featured in the film. Two actual LDD Dawn of the Dead dolls were made in the LDD Presents licensed line, including the Plaid Shirt Zombie. 

While it's a stylistic choice for the movie-poster mimicry that the S22 dolls are depicted as bald on the chipboard, Menard and Goria (the latter of whom has a sliced-off dome and exposed brain like Purdy) are actually bald dolls and their heads are depicted entirely one-to-one as a result. The other dolls are bald for effect on the boards but have hair as toys. The chipboard portraits seem to be edited photographs, so did LDD use painted but unrooted bald copies of Ava, Peggy Goo, and Roxie as models for the chipboards?

Menard's chipboard poem says:

Trapped on an island

Cursed with voodoo

The dead are among us

And they want to eat you

I think this poem reads and scans well enough as it is.

Menard's death date is July 18, 1980, the same as the English release of Lucio Fulci's Italian horror film Zombi 2 (released in English as Zombie). Fulci was a gnarly, gory horror director on the "exploitation film" side of things, and this film was sold as an unofficial sequel to to the Italian release of Romero's Dawn of the Dead, titled Zombi in Italy.

Zombi 2 is a major factor in the doll's concept and design, with the whole doll acting in homage, not just the death date.

Zombi 2 concerns a group of people visiting a Carribean island called Matul (or Matool). They're going because a woman is concerned about her father who has gone MIA after visiting, and meanwhile, a zombie has traveled on a boat and started problems in New York. On Matul is a Dr. Menard, a White British scientist who has been trying to treat the native residents with medicine and cure the strange disease that resurrects them after death, but he has not found any success yet and has formed a protocol of tying the dead up and shooting them in the head once they try to rise. Dr. Menard is consumed by his belief there is a medical cure, while the native community believes it's voodoo and out of their hands. The film largely seems to agree with them, and shows some very grisly gory scenes as the leads try to escape once they realize what they've arrived into, and the party eventually dwindles and the survivors return to a New York that's gotten completely overrun since the beginning of the film.

Menard's certificate poem alludes to the film as such:

Convinced this sickness was caused by a disease

Menard tried to answer the dying pleas

But when he got too close to one of the condemned

They ripped out his throat and made him one of them

And a rewrite.

Convinced that this plague was purely disease

Menard worked to answer the invalids' pleas

But he got too close to the sickly undead

Who tore at his flesh and emptied his head

Dr. Menard in the film is killed by zombies, but his face is bitten instead, and he's never shown rising nor decaying to the extent of the Living Dead Doll--he dies during the climax before the leads escape the island.

Here's Menard unboxed.

As zombies go, Menard looks more decayed and earthy than gooey and gory. His colors are all warm, neutral, and black, and his paint job uses dabbed blended colors that make him look more dry and dirt-colored. His aesthetic is similar to the undead in Zombi 2. The doll himself is cast in a brownish vinyl, but yellow and a different brown are dabbed over the hands and face (the visible parts of his body under the costume) such that his skin color looks entirely removed from reality and living humanity. Dr. Menard in the film Zombi 2 was a White man, and I don't have concrete reason to believe the LDD Menard is meant to have been a dark-skinned person before dying. The S22 variants, which are greyscale with red accents and added blood detail, seem to have cast Menard's base in very pale vinyl. 

Menard's costume is a tattered brown robe with a separate hood piece that hugs his face. The costume looks very old and reads as that of a Christian monk first and foremost. It's hard to dismiss the reading that this doll could be a Brother or Friar Menard, an evangelical Christian missionary who met his end by choosing the wrong island to visit. It wasn't the case in the character he's homaging, who was a modern scientist who set up base on the island, but "Menard" works very well as a monk's name to me. The doll looks nothing like the film character, and it doesn't look like the LDD Menard would have been an advanced scientist in this costume, though his poem does allude to the film Menard's interest in treating the zombie disease scientifically and finding a cure. Maybe the doll was a missionary trying to provide medical aid? The clothing just doesn't match modern highly-developed countries, nor does it read as something that would have been native clothing of the island he died on. The costume also matches nothing seen in Zombi 2. This looks like old monk robes, and nevermind the death date clashing with the antiquated costume. 

There's definitely a xenophobic and racist read to the scenario of "white person is killed by voodoo monsters" if we're meant to sympathize with the white person, but LDD Menard is so scant on text that we don't actually know if he's White and don't know how innocent he was. His poem says he was trying to help, but the costume being so monkish could lend a reading that he was an evangelist who got more than what was coming for him by trying to overstep and assert his values over another culture that had just fallen under a curse. That might be the read I take with him--the savior complex getting punished in ludicrous overkill.

Devoid of context, someone trying to help out in a zombie plague is a good thing, and failure in that scenario is tragic, but in context, a Caribbean nightmare story framed in a White POV with White characters being the center conveys certain messages about the setting and puts a spin on the existing voodoo myth that becomes othering. I watched Zombi 2 for the first time to get context on this doll, and the film does have a strange lack of Black authority on the island. Dr. Menard and the protagonists are White foreigners, but the native residents have little power or impact. The most prominent Black character on the island, Lucas, speaks less English and displays a superstitious reliance on voodoo ideas, which could be demeaning...though the film certainly seems to land on trusting the native beliefs because science fails Menard and his obsession with the cure undoes his entire life. The film is awkward in its mix of "trust the natives" and "White people are the center of the story"; the combo of "these beliefs are real" and "this voodoo is really scary and bad". A Caribbean voodoo horror film could absolutely work in an authentic Caribbean perspective (I think it'd make for a great take on zombie fiction if rooted in the mythology and culture of the setting and leaving foreigners out of it) but there's a discomfort in the setting being used by foreigners as an exotic scary world they still lead and are the primary narrative victims of.

Menard's hood is brown and finished around the edges, with a rounded portion that falls over his chest. The hood has a pronounced point at the back of the head, and velcros open a bit from the bottom to let it pull off easily.

It's also possible to pull the hood down off his head while it's still secured around his neck.

Nicely done.

The prototype or mockup image of Menard shows a looser, more voluminous hood and a tattered collar. This could read as less monk-like, but I don't think it's impossible to read the design like that here. 

I prefer the produced hood shape.

Menard's face is a grimy blend of browns, yellow, and orange that looks very dry and textured. The coloration makes it impossible to assign a racial demographic or skintone to the Menard who lived before this zombie state. The paint has visible strokes and dabbed layering that you can feel with your finger, though the head paint feels smoother than on the hands and feet. No two Menard copies will be exactly the same due to the imprecise nature of this paint concept. This doll is not cute. He's gnarly and grotesque.

The head is a highly divergent sculpt first debuted for use on an LDD Presents Jason Voorhees doll who was a convention-exclusive, and has since appeared on a second Jason based on his appearance in the second Friday the 13th film as well as mainline LDD character Wurm, the limbless performer in the Series 30 freak show. (Wurm was exclusive to the S30 variant set.) 

Jason Voorhees has always been portrayed as deformed and implicitly intellectually disabled, and his makeup designs operate on these ideas in the Friday the 13th films. Jason's disability is often played for sympathy, and his backstory had him mistreated and bullied as a former victim, but his deformities are also objectified and played as a scary unmasking reveal every time they're shown, and Jason is unambiguously the antagonist every time, killing many innocents or undeserving victims. It's very awkward. 

The LDD Jason sculpt features a partially open mouth with three sculpted upper teeth, a cleft lip, asymmetrical eyes with the right bulging and wider, a crooked nose, folds and bulges around the head that make it look abnormally shaped and contoured, and a scar coming from the forehead, alluding to a memorable fatal head-impalement wound given to Jason at the end of the fourth Friday. 

Here's some more angles of the head's compelling sculpt and paint job.

Maybe a new contender for "most rotten-looking LDD". Certainly one of the grittiest and scariest. 

LDD Presents is host to many divergent face and body sculpts per the demands of licensed likeness, and almost none of those sculpts designed for LDD Presents made it into the LDD main line, likely because they're so removed from the typical style and/or so specific that they'd be easily clocked as licensed sculpts if you tried repurposing them--enough that license-holders might even forbid their reuse. I'm frankly shocked the Jason sculpt got into the main line for two dolls (Menard and Series 30's variant-exclusive doll Wurm), because it's very different from the classic LDD dolly face and it's highly specific and no closer to a typical LDD than some other extreme Presents sculpts. I believe the only other Presents sculpt that got into the main line is (probably) the grinning-mouth sculpt. I don't know for sure it was developed for Presents first, but I'm suspecting it was, due to it appearing far more times on the licensed dolls than the mains. Only Beelzebub and Bea Neath in the LDD-original cast used it. See the grinning sculpt in action on my custom Tinselton Stitches.

I believe the choice to use this sculpt for Menard was because the teeth could be used to homage the face of the "Worm-Eye" zombie on the Zombi 2 poster. You can also see how Menard's paint job is very similar with the yellow and brown tones.

This zombie appears in the film, but does not "grin" in this way during its screentime. Using the Jason sculpt to homage this unrelated character was a pretty clever move, and paired with the colors and paint, the visual is clear despite the obvious departures built into the mold.

The rest of the face sculpt works pretty well for a zombie. Perhaps there's discomfort in the sculpt being based on a character who's loosely based on real birth deformities, but Jason is caricatured enough in the movies and the doll is caricatured enough as a toy that I can accept this as a fantasy zombie sculpt in this context. There's definitely a root in ableism, but by the point of the Menard doll, there's a few degrees of separation from the raw disrespect.

I like the choice to give Menard opposite black/white eye colors. The white eye has a black iris and red pupil. I wish the white paint hadn't spilled over the edge of the sculpted eye, and I'm not sure about the inside of Menard's mouth being orange. Black would be better.

Menard's face is extreme enough for him to barely feel like a Living Dead Doll. Part of this is the sculpt, but it's the paint which seals that distance for me. The Jasons and Wurm mingle better with other LDDs because their paint is simpler and they have a flat skintone. They feel less like they're in a different art style. It's still surprising the Jason head ever made it into the mainline dolls, but Wurm doesn't feel as foreign to the LDD look. This isn't a slight against Menard. He'a a very good scary earthy zombie portrait. He's just so different. 

Menard is bald, and I don't think any LDD with the Jason sculpt (debut Jason doll, Menard, Wurm, and deluxe Friday II Jason) has ever had rooted hair. At the back, you can see the doll's real body color, which is a purplish brown that can read more mauve or lilac than skin-colored. It's an odd choice for his base, especially when his frontal face covers all of the cast body color. 

Like all 13th-anniversary LDDs, Menard has the "13th" insignia painted in black on the back of his neck.

I understand the semantic value of the "13th" phrasing specifically denoting an anniversary, and it does prevent the dolls in this year from being mistaken for Series 13 dolls, but the "13" without the "th" would look much cleaner. 

Menard's remaining costume is a simple unfinished brown robe with a layer of different-brown cloth around his neck in tattered strips. It looks like the classic haunter's "creepy cloth" material, and is sewn to the robe around the neck with the rest hanging loose.

The robe comes down to his feet and has dark intentional stains on it. This piece is thin, but it's not as glaringly translucent as The After's similar costume in Series 29.

The After-- pictured is a loose doll copy I got for parts. No particular interest in obtaining him for my collection for real right now. He's not backlit, but the robe still looks sheer.

Menard's robe velcros at the back. The After's costume had no closure/opening and the doll needed to be taken apart to remove it.

Menard's hands and feet are painted with the same kind of texture as his head, and his body sculpts are all standard. The difference between the visible, painted parts of his body and the unpainted, covered parts is stark. The vinyl color is so indecisively between pink and brown. I wonder how Series 10's Demonique compares to this vinyl color, because she has a unique ashy pink skintone. She looks much pinker than the Menard vinyl and appears to be a White character based on the skintone of her Resurrections, but her color is a bit odd in a similar way. 

I'd believe he was a Black character if his body matched the brown paint on his face, but this color feels more abstract to me, rather than any realistic indication of who Menard was pre-resurrection. It might play as a human skintone in the right design, but it's an unusual doll color.

I'm okay with the body paint being so limited here because the rest is covered. While I otherwise like and want Series 34's dusty Tommy Knocker, a big problem I have with him is that his toe paint dirt texture looks very abrupt, and most of his unpainted legs are visible due to the cut of his pants.

To gather more data on the ball joint manufacturing, I checked Menard's joint pegs, and they're opaque black plastic. This narrows my range a bit--now I know the switch from translucent pegs beginning at S9 to less-brittle opaque pegs would have happened between Series 17 (a translucent-peg series which I've checked via Bloody Mary) and Series 22, if S22 wasn't the first series to have them.

I'll probably get more data between S17 and S22. I could see myself getting at least one doll from any of those interim series.

Menard kind of works in a duo with Grace of the Grave as a medieval-looking grimy peasant, though the unsettling gory lumpy Grace looks like a smooth, clean, and shiny child's toy next to the gritty Menard.

The After would be a good visual midpoint between the two.

Variant Menard would match Grace even better, and both could work with the Pestilence doll sans the mask and hat (which cast him as a plague doctor, an archetype emerging after the Black Death). 

And here's Menard with witch doctor Macumba. The aesthetic differences might be even starker here--there might be no other main LDD quite as dirt-caked and ghoulish as Menard!

I dug a hole outside to take pictures of Menard rising. My favorite shot in Zombi 2 is a wide shot of a landscape as several zombies begin to rise, almost mechanically as if pulled up by strings, from the earth. I wanted to capture some of that, and reached toward an eighties film look with the lighting and color edits.

Then I had the idea to make Menard a mask. I've always loved the creepy look of a zombie or mummy with a peaceful-looking death mask, or the idea of a reanimated bog body with a frozen sleeping face, so I thought this could a be a nice way to make a tamer and more spooky display option for Menard if you didn't want to see his confrontationally scary face. I sculpted over Menard's face with a layer of plastic wrap covering him, using white oven-bake Sculpey. I gave him a heavy brow and eyeholes and no mouth, and aimed for an oval shape. I carved wood grooves into the shape and put a sulfur symbol on the top. After baking, I painted the mask and glued an elastic strip into it so it wore snugly on his head. This is actually a really cool mask:

...it's just not at all tonally correct. The style and coloring of the mask turned out feeling more Polynesian/Hawaiian than Afro-Caribbean to me, like it's meant to be a tiki-style design, and the expression is far too angry and the eyes being visible was a mistake. I might use this mask for somebody at some point (maybe a forest sorcerer?) but it didn't achieve my goal.

I went back and looked at simpler masks online that were attributed to Haiti for some better grounding in my design. From this, I saw the shape should be more oversized and narrow--I compromised with the LDD proportions by going for a flat oval that would work with the face shape. I also decided to shape it from a flat piece of pre-cut clay I then laid over the head, rather than building it up over the features, because Sculpey is harder to smooth together. I decided to carve the eyes in as lines rather than eyeholes, and made them reflect Menard, with a narrower eye a closed-style line while the wider eye is an almond shape. I drew the mouth as a flat line with a diagonal on top mirroring the lip cleft of the face sculpt. The sulfur symbol was retained, but the nose is longer and more in the middle of the face than before, making the symbol smaller and higher, and the wood texture is fainter. This piece baked and I kept it very greyish and dark to set the color apart more from the clothing and all of Menard's skin colors so it looked more grave and more separate as a mask. I think this is much better for my idea. This is a face that looks eerily serene and disarming compared to the grotesque detail underneath, while still being creepy and reflecting the character specifically. I think the look of a simple death mask has been well achieved.

Neither mask displays great without the hood because the elastic is bright white, but that doesn't matter to me.

Because I designed this mask to reflect his zombie deformities, in Menard's case, I think this would actually be a revival mask crafted ceremonially by the reanimating voodoo sorcerer after Menard was resurrected as a zombie.

I took Menard on my recent vacation to the lake, and found some good plausible island staging on a bushy rock and beachy area, paired with Macumba as the practitioner resurrecting him. The mask took some abrasions in transit that left a few white spots from scraped-off paint, but it still photographed okay. I made all of the greenery brown in post to suit the mood.

I think his hood stretched and widened a little, but that's not a problem.

Menard is not a sweet cartoony Living Dead Doll. His aesthetic is gritty and scary and more like a zombie Halloween prop than a doll. But his visual design is well-executed and he stands for a unique niche in zombie horror, as well as referencing a cult classic film. He's a good show for LDD's aesthetic variety and I like the setting he takes you to. He is also relatively versatile, since he could easily be framed as a medieval European what with his monkish robe, so he could fit into a plague scenario alongside Grace of the Grave and the Pestilence Horseman. He's an unusual doll.

A Walk on the Other Side: Alison Crux

I am astonished that this doll ended up in this roundup. Very pleasantly so!

Alison Crux is an unusual doll. Her appearance is vintage and drab, but she has strange blue skin and a facial aesthetic not really matched by another LDD, with a haunting shadowed mournful eye. She's said to have died in a revolving door, but also has a mysterious key around her neck and has taken on the grandiose role as a guide to the afterlife! This latter aspect became a bigger deal in the Resurrection VIII set, where Alison was a lead character in a narrative woven through the four(!) variant sets of the Res VIII dolls. I always liked the original Alison the best of her releases, though. She's just on the edge of passing for a real antique, and she's very strange and evocative. 

I had also found her to be a big grail doll to work toward, much in the vein of S14 compatriot Daisy Slae...but in August, I was suddenly finding cheaper offerings for Alison, sub-Daisy in level. That doesn't make Alison a cheap doll, but I jumped at the chance to get her for cheaper, wary that better opportunities may not come. I'd envisioned Alison as a much later acquisition, but here she was!

I got Alison sealed. By a small margin, the sealed was the cheapest offering while pricier ones were opened!

I didn't notice until it fell out during the unboxing, but her right shoe was not on her foot.

Alison Crux's chipboard poem says:

Ushering lost souls to the other side

Is a job in which she takes great pride

To the final resting place Alison holds the key

But where that may be knows not she.

The last line doesn't seem grammatical even with poetic license. Unless you're Yoda.

She ushers the spirits who recently died 

And takes them all down to the dark other side

Her key leads to somewhere the living can't know

And yet little Alison never can go

I'm not sure where Alison's name comes from. "Crux" suggests an allusion to Alison being some focal point in the world's workings, perhaps that she is the crux of the death process as someone who died and now guides the dead to the beyond. It's not clear how supernatural Alison really gets. She could just be a zombie who guides others to an afterlife she cannot reach, or she could be a fully spiritual entity. 

Here's her certificate.

Alison died on April 4, 1944, or 4/4/44, and she's a rare doll with a death hour provided, which is 4:44 PM. Four, like thirteen, carries superstitions of being an unlucky number related to death, which originates in Asian cultures due to a similarity in multiple Asian languages between the words for "four" and  "death". In such countries, the superstition can manifest in similar ways to the thirteen thing (like buildings not having a floor numbered 4). While the spooky-4 idea is Asian in origin, the superstition is often used in Western works, perhaps when thirteens seem too silly, obvious or cliché. As a dead guide of the dead, a 4/4/44 4:44 death makes perfect sense for Alison, and the extent of even the hour and minutes corresponding adds to some cosmic sense of her death being fated. 

Alison's death certificate tells a more mundane death story for her, which must necessarily precede her transcendence into a psychopomp.

Alison loved to play in revolving doors

Until she got stuck

No one saw her on the floor

Of all the rotten luck.

The note about "nobody seeing her" suggests to me that Alison might have gotten caught in the door and was unnoticed for long enough that she died of thirst or starvation--she died by getting trapped alone somehow? Certainly, a death or trapping in a revolving door sounds very unlikely unless there were no witnesses for an extended amount of time. This doesn't sound like a case of her being trampled by a crowd. I still don't know how she got stuck--maybe her clothing was caught under the door or something? The door itself jammed and wouldn't turn to let her in or out and she collapsed and died before help could come? Maybe that's the most likely, and I can see it being a very scary scenario to be trapped in between a building and the outside in a clear enclosed doorway like that. It's still a strange origin story for this eerie character, and a weird death for any LDD. I would have never envisioned someone dying in a revolving door.

Here's a rewrite.

Revolving in the door

Until the door got stuck

Trapped between outside and in

The girl was out of luck.

I think I can see a possible link between this death and her main story--a sealed revolving door chamber is its own kind of limbo and liminal zone, so maybe that marked her soul and condemned her to walk between worlds, never passing on or belonging to the living--always going around and around and never getting anywhere. Maybe Alison Crux's afterlife is its own grand stuck revolving door. Maybe her fascination with revolving doors fated her to this liminal afterlife and it was always going to be this way. I think that feels evocative of real legends and superstition. "If you walk under a ladder, you break the triangle" is a thing, so "die in a revolving door and your soul is going nowhere too" has its own kind of logic. People love the metaphor of doorways and boundary rituals, so there's a level of distress in a door that turns forever and might get you caught somewhere between.

Either I'm onto something and deciphering a very clever literary theme with Alison Crux's two poems, or I'm doing a lot of free creative interpretive work to tie together ideas that aren't intentionally connected.

Here she is unboxed.

Alison has long black curly hair and her blue skin isn't the palest, possibly suggesting she might have Italian, Latina, Jewish, or Middle Eastern background. While it's not stated she's American, her first name is very common in English. I could definitely see her as a second-generation kid coming from an immigrant community in 1940s America. Maybe even New York City, given the story of revolving doors which connote a metropolitan setting. Of course, I cannot ascribe intention here and it's very possible LDD had no set connotations for her with these design choices. I just try to latch onto diversity where I think I can see it in this brand because it's pretty scant!

The hair starts a little matted, so I finger-combed it out a little. It got more floaty than perhaps I'd like, but boiling could remove all of the texture and I don't want to risk that. The hair can be arranged well enough.

To keep the volume within reason, the rooting necessarily had to be thin.

The main point of intrigue with Alison is her uniquely haunting, sad, eerie little face.

She almost looks like an insipid kitschy doe-eyed porcelain figure of a child gone mournfully twisted. Alison's eyes aren't overdrawn--they're the normal size and oval shape, but her pupils are dilated almost completely, making the eyes look huge, and the slivers of visible irises are dark blue, making her eyes look totally black. She also has a two-toned pink water line on the lower edge of her eye, and her eyes are very glossy, like S14 compatriot Daisy Slae. This all makes her eyes look oddly realistic and plaintive. 

There was what looked to be an errant splash of eye gloss that traveled above and to the left (our perspective) of her left eye. I was able to clean up the excess with nail polish remover. Some of the gloss spill is over the shading, but I couldn't remove that without removing the paint, and that part doesn't show as much as the part that got onto the unpainted skin.

Alison's other face paint consists of black stippled and smudged shading, which isn't like the painterly smudged eye shading that often appears on other dolls. This effect is different and looks more like soot and shadow mixing together. She has smears around her mouth and shading between her lips to make them look open. Her eyes are surrounded with shading which peaks up in a shape that suggests worried or unhappy brows in lieu of eyebrows being present, and this expression goes well with her upturned gaze. More smudges appear on her her forehead, the sides of her head, and neck.

This paint also appears on her hands (both hands and both sides). 

Alison's skintone is the oddest thing about her, being a muted blue color with a slight green cast. It's so unusual, but it looks incredible against her dress and it makes the doll for me. Had she been flesh-toned or pure white, the visual appeal and intrigue would be slashed. There's something so captivatingly bizarre about her body color in context, and in context, it absolutely pulls the doll together at the same time. Alison wouldn't be Alison with any other skin color.

Around her neck, Alison has a black cord through a loop of an antique silver key. The key has an oval head containing a sulfur symbol inside. This key is not metal; it's rigid plastic with a metal antique painted look. A real metal key would be awesome. Maybe the Resurrection Alison key(s) had metal material? Nonetheless, the piece looks really nice. I don't know if the cord loop looks too tacked onto the key or not. With this design, the cord couldn't go symmetrically through the head of the key without obstructing the sulfur symbol, so I guess it's fine. 

Part of me thinks the loop could have been more flush and subtler, though:

The cord is tied tight and is not stretchy, so you'd either have to undo the knot or pop out her head to take it off. I won't. The cord isn't long enough for the key to reach her hands while she wears it. I think the Resurrection one is, and might even be long enough to slip off over the doll's head. That's because it had a use.

See, this Series 14 key is purely decorative, but one of the cool things done with the Resurrection VIII Alisons is that, instead of a fourth doll in the series, there was a "Chaos Capsule" totem made of metal. 

This capsule (a different metal color depending on which of the four Res VIII variant sets it was in) had a spring-loaded keyhole the Res Alisons' key (all four had the same shape) was designed to just push into and open (not a turning lock mechanism). Once done, this allowed you to open the capsule to find a sleeve/magazine with slots holding three engraved square metal tablets of the Resurrected dolls' faces inside, though there were oddly more tablet slots than tablets. You'd only be able to fill a Capsule by using tablets from another Capsule, and save for the metal color, each Capsule's tablets appeared to be the same set. 

While I'm sure a pencil poke probably could open the Chaos Capsule as well, I like the effort to make Res Alison's key do something. Res VII had so much narrative lore that it resulted in four variant sets to deliver the story in parts (two design sets, regular and "Lazarus", and a variant set for each of those), which is a lot. It would also be completely unrealistic to expect anybody to get all four sets of dolls, so maybe LDD was encouraging fans to compare notes and share the fragments of the lore from the sets they got so the whole community would be able to see the complete story?

The Capsule gimmick might be overdone, and it took the slot of a potential fourth Res VIII doll, but it's cool. Maybe I could see myself trying to get a Res variant Alison and a Capsule to try that out. 

Of the four Res Alison variants, her primary variant (i.e., not the main Res or the variant of the Lazarus version) is my favorite. It does what I love best in a Res doll by capturing the spirit of the character with a wildly different look. Her face has the right Alison Crux energy in a way the other Res Alisons' don't.

Key not depicted, but included in all four Res VIII Alisons. 

The main Res Alison is a little boring and doesn't hit the same way as the S14 original.

Also depicted sans key.

Here's her Lazarus doll to show the key, which is shaped in entirety like the sulfur symbol in Res VIII. Lazarus Alison is based more on the main Res.

Mary Janes with no socks? I worry this doll cannot stand easily.

And the Lazarus variant, taking more from the white-dressed variant.

The Lazarus and Lazarus-variant dolls were reportedly exceptionally scarce, but the variant I like is also outsizedly rare and expensive. More of a pipe dream for me, or else to be designated as a major-event gift to self if ever the budget aligns.

Back to the S14 doll, who I adore and still can't believe ended up so relatively accessible this month. 

Alison's dress is a muted reddish-brown embroidered(!)-fabric piece with a cut and color and pattern that all pass as a 1940s dress to me. 

The dress has a shirt-style collar which is sewn in place to keep it down.

The shoulders have puffed bell sleeves with elastic inside at the bottom. The skirt has a seam around the waist and flows down from the seam to her knees. The fabric is thin but not translucent, and fairly soft and flexible. 

The dress velcros down the back, but there's also a tie at the back of the waist made from the same fabric. The band originates at the sides of her waist and doesn't go over the front. I'd prefer this dress to have a fake tie that was split across the velcro so it had the look but didn't require actual untying and tying. Other LDD dresses have done that.

Alison has the classic sock and Mary Jane setup--white socks, black shoes. Like my S1 Sadie, Alison had decayed elastic bands around her sock ankles that I had to scrape off. I don't know why. Most socked LDDs don't seem to be packaged with elastics there, and Daisy Slae in the same series, with the same sock and shoe type, wasn't.

The sock bands pre-removal.

There was also a disintegrated elastic around her waist to keep her key in place for packaging. That also got scraped off.

I took Alison down for a thorough comb and condition to detangle her hair. Here's the result.

It doesn't visually look much different, but to the touch, it's night and day. Her hair feels so soft and pleasantly fluffy now while before it was snarled and definitely felt like the plastic it is. 

It breaks my heart, but it would not be practical in any way to get Alison a revolving door to photograph her death scenario. The logistics of building or faking the door (how?) and setting up a believable outdoor façade and interior for it to be between were daunting and likely expensive and I feared the effort wouldn't pan out to my satisfaction after all was said and done. At that point, I'd aiming for a whole stop-motion-quality set, and I'm not that skilled or committed. Maybe I can make an interior, but not a street and building. 

And obviously, a human-scale revolving door would necessarily be attached to a public place where human traffic and the sketchiness of photographing a doll in one combine to make that prospect impossible. She'd be too small and finding a door that matched her vibe would be too difficult anyway.

For my shoot with Alison, I took her outside and around my house when it was dark, and later again in lighter hours. I kind of like the idea of Alison being this indistinct, hard-to-notice entity to those who are living, since she only deals with the dead. There's this idea you could never get a good clear photograph of her, or she tends to end up out of the way, like she doesn't want to be the subject. I ended up invoking the ancient internet spooky-photo "when you see it..." genre of imagery for a few, actively hiding Alison in a composition in a horror "Where's Waldo/Wally" fashion. I guess it's a mix of classic ghost photos, the "when you see it..." trend and modern cursed-image horror.

This one was digitally-composited.

This one was all in-camera. You might not even be able to see her if your screen is in bright surroundings!

While Alison isn't a classical ghost, I think she fits this style of grainy, lonely, obscured paranormal photography better than any other LDD character I could think of. She's certainly one of the creepiest faces that could turn up in a photo like that. She doesn't feel as fake or cartooned or doll-like as the artistic rendering of many other LDDs, so she does look more like a little thing or an entity than a plastic toy in a lot of these photos. I don't know, if I had no familiarity with LDD, that I'd identify the more obscured photos as being in-camera un-composited images of a vinyl doll.

They say that a photo of Alison Crux

Is so rare, it's worth at least fifty-ish bucks

In lieu of a revolving door, I did order a 1/6 scale dollhouse door for her to interact with. I had the idea that she would pass between worlds through impossible doorways. Here's how I'd explain her story and afterlife existence. 

______________________________________________________________________________

When Alison returned to awareness, she was no longer caught in that revolving vestibule. Looking around, she found a dark grey landscape of hills and doorways attached to nothing. There was a strange key around her neck, and it was able to open a door. Alison was startled to find a familiar sight when she looked through.

On the other side, she was in a city block, and she saw a lonely ghost sitting on a bench.

Alison still didn't understand what was going on--surely she must be dead, too, but she was so different from the ghost. She got the feeling that this ghost needed to go to the place where she was--she didn't seem to realize she was no longer alive. Alison was able to coax the ghost over. The door had locked the second she closed it, so she used the key again. Would nobody else be able to open the door? Looking through, it still showed that strange place. Perhaps it was an afterlife.

Alison went back in, still confused. 

The ghost followed.

The ghost then floated silently ahead of her and phased through one of the other closed doors standing in the hills without emerging through the back. Alison went to the door eagerly, but was soon disappointed. While the ghost seemed to have entered whatever space was beyond the door, it had remained physically closed the whole time, and the door wouldn't open for Alison or the key she was wearing. She was unable to follow.

Any door Alison could open with her key led her right to a dead soul somewhere on the other side. She could send them back, but the door would vanish behind Alison once she and the spirit entered the liminal zone, barring her from turning back and reaching the same space directly again. If she opened a door, ignored the ghost she was sent to, and tried to stay in the land of the living, nobody could see her--unless they were having a near-death experience. She would eventually have to go back to the ghost and help them. There was never anything else to do. Alison could not leave a living area without bringing back a ghost, either--the key wouldn't work until the ghost was in tow.

She quickly understood that there were no other guides. The afterlife zone was never humming with activity.

It didn't seem to matter that the doorways stood out like a sore thumb in most places she was sent to. The doors were just as invisible to people as the ghosts and Alison herself. Paired with the paths vanishing once a ghost was brought over, it seemed that the doors were conjurations rather than existing doors in the living world which temporarily linked to the afterlife. It made some sense. As she journeyed, Alison saw lots of regions , communities, and classes, and many different types of doorways which wouldn't work as inaccessible portals. She couldn't imagine using her key on a curtain, tent, or paper screen. Some of the impossible doors transcended time, sending her into places from times before and well after her own life. She began to lose the sense of where she "started" in the grand scheme of history. Was she the little girl who died in 1944? Or was she always extant? Perhaps the afterlife always needed her and never had someone until that fateful day. Perhaps the jumps to different times were the compensation for her delayed arrival. 

Thus, Alison went forever back and forth to find the lost and bring them to an afterlife she could never reach. It must have been the revolving door that had done it, trapping her in the great between. And nobody could have gotten stuck like her and taken her role before the revolving door came to be. Still, it gave her purpose and it felt right to aid the souls. Maybe one day, she would find the beyond.

_______________________________________________________________

And outside of obscure and surreal photos,  I had to enjoy her appearance more directly too, because she's a great design. Against a wooden furniture piece and with some light and color editing, I got a photo that looks like an oil portrait!

And a couple more direct portraits.

I think this doll is so magnetically unsettling and endearing. Her colors, her vintage style, her mysterious key, and her uniquely haunting eye paint all come together to form an unforgettable creepy little doll who's so very interesting for making all the right tiny design choices that set her apart. I love the eerie nature of the doll and her aesthetic, and she's entirely her own. 

Wilkommen, Bienvenue, Welcome: Maitre des Morts

This is my second Series 33 doll (read about the first here), the second of the series' two boys, and the only one of the series who was on my original illustrated wishlist when I was a teenager.

Within the sphere of cabaret depicted in the Moulin Morgue's halls, this doll is literally Cabaret--as in, he's an unlicensed adaptation/homage to the Emcee from the popular musical show (and Liza Minnelli-starring film adaptation) Cabaret. The musical is a discussion of the rise of Nazism set against a countercultural cabaret in 1940s Weimar Berlin, and the story features an Emcee figure who exists outside the narrative. The Emcee is metaphorically the spirit of the cabaret and Berlin, hopping in as a host for the show audience as much as the audience in the story, and it's unclear exactly how literal and "real" he is in-universe because he can be taken more as an omniscient device and metaphor than a more direct narrative character in the story. In the original show and the film adaptation, the Emcee was portrayed by Joel Grey as a man with a dapper suit and slightly garish makeup who had an eerily cartoonish and slightly doll-like uncanny demeanor. He was a bit like a perverted Pee-Wee Herman. His role is mesmerizingly repulsive, and can be taken as a personification of the encroaching evil in Germany at the time.

See Grey's Oscar-winning Emcee portryal in the opening number "Wilkommen" in the film adaptation here.

The revival show debuted Alan Cumming as a more youthful, more androgynous and sexual Emcee portraying a lot of the edge, allure, and danger of the cabaret scene and the worsening Germany in a very magnetic way. He was capable of wolfish growling in a skimpy mime-like costume--that's the vibe. One hard-hitting scene new to this portrayal shows the Emcee framed as a victim of the Nazis singled out for his sexuality, changing his metaphor in a way that he can be read as the alluring but dangerous approach in turning a blind eye and embracing hedonism, as forgetting troubles in the fantasy of the cabaret doesn't save you in a time of unrest and political evil. See an abridged performance of his (even naughtier) "Wilkommen" here. It's honestly surprising there wasn't a remake movie/film adaptation based on the revival where Alan Cumming's performance could have featured on the big screen, because I think he could have been honored similarly to Joel Grey for the same role if such a film was made. Maybe the original film and its (Best Picture excluded) Oscar sweep proved untouchable in the eyes of studio heads. 

 

As the eeriest and most detached Cabaret character in either form, it makes sense for LDD to have adapted him from the cast, and his role as master of ceremonies is a great niche to depict in this series. Maitre des Morts effectively mixes elements of Grey and Cumming's Emcee characters while adding his own unexplained but spectacular twist that makes him a must-have novelty. 

Reportedly, the creators skirted around this doll's gender and avoided using pronouns for him in conversation, but his name and chipboard poem gender him as male and his basis is a male character. He is androgynous, but not evidently genderqueer. The way the LDD guys avoided talking about his gender could have been an awkward or ignorant attempt at a gag, but I can see if it was an earnest attempt to depict and engage with gender nonconformity. I don't actually know what they understand about queerness. Still, neither defining stage Emcee appears to be a heterosexual paragon (and if it's worth anything, neither were portrayed by straight men), so this doll might be the closest we get to a textually queer LDD!

According to Google, Maitre des Morts' French name translates to "Master of the dead", but LDD have translated it as "Master of Death". This appears to be incorrect, because "Master of Death" would be "Maitre de la mort".  I think "Master of the dead" sounds way cooler and makes more sense for the entertainment host of a zombie cabaret--he controls the horde of undead audience and performers alike!

The copy I got was still wired into the box, but didn't have the plastic coffin lid, which took me by surprise in a bad way. 

I later decided to resolve this by shuffling some lids around. My Tinselton Stitches custom, being a non-canon doll, doesn't absolutely need a plastic coffin lid, so I found a lid that fit the Maitre's box (surprisingly tricky; I think the dimensions are ever so different between his and older coffins) and put Tinselton's lid (originally a Vincent Vaude's) on the box I stole from. 

Here's the Maitre's chipboard. The imagery is the same as on Carotte Morts', with only the text being different.

The poem, which confirms the doll's he/him pronouns, says:

Like a morbid emcee or a prophet of doom

He welcomes you into the darkened room

Once the show starts he will slice your smile away

Death is a cabaret, old chum, die in the cabaret.

This poem is written to reference the title song "Cabaret" from the musical, performed by female lead Sally Bowles (Liza Minnelli's role in the film.) The song contains the lines:

What good's permitting some prophet of doom

To wipe every smile away?

Life is a cabaret, old chum

Come to the cabaret

The LDD poem is close, but extends the verse and meter to no longer fit the song. Let's trim that back down.

This deadly Emcee's a prophet of doom

Slashing your smiles away

Death is a cabaret, old chum

Die in the cabaret

Maitre des Morts is the most recent death of Series 33, with his death date corresponding to the debut of Alan Cumming's portrayal of the Emcee: December 12, 1993. I'm not intending to collect all of Series 33 (I only otherwise want Madame La Mort for certain), nor to build a lore history like I did with Series 5, so this doesn't have huge weight to me!

His poem says:

The Master of Death welcomes you to the show

The audience is anxious for the blood to flow

The curtain arises and the performers take the floor

And our gracious Emcee showers the attendees in gore

This poem is okayish, but I want to see one quoting "Wilkommen" so both of his poems are song references to the musical.

Wilkommen, bienvenue, welcome

Leichen, cadavres, corpses

Er will dich töten, il veut te tuer

He wants to kill you

Mord, muertre, murder

Unboxing was slightly different. Unlike Series 23, the Series 33 dolls with hats have the plastic hat cradle attached to the doll tray and not the back of the coffin. Maitre des Morts also had a silica gel packet under his back which was plastic-tagged to the cardboard tray. I removed it.

I also noticed this time that the chipboard has more imagery on the side, depicting a stage light switch under an illuminated red windmill. The red mill is the icon and the namesake of the famous Moulin Rouge cabaret this series derives its name from, and is also referenced in one of Madame La Mort's poems.

Photo of the Moulin Rouge.

Here he is unboxed.

The doll looks completely black-and-white, but he's not exactly. His skin is less white than his shirt and his pants are an aged yellowed color (deliberately). Still, he's very high-contrast and looks right out of the silent era of film.

Maitre des Morts is wearing a black bowler hat, which is flocked plastic, but doesn't feel quite as flimsy as older hats. 

The hat does not seem to come from either prominent Cabaret Emcee, but it fits the vibe of the Joel Grey version. I suspect the real reason this hat is here, though, is because it's absolutely iconic to another Cabaret character--Liza Minnelli as Sally Bowles in the film. During the film, Sally famously wears a bowler during her cabaret chair dance in the number "Mein Herr". Watch it here, it's great. I guess you could call her Sally Bowler?

The hat is held on with a clear band of flexible plastic, but it's not as stretchy as a hair elastic. It doesn't look great worn from the front, but isn't held on tight on the back of the head. I don't know how much he really needs this strap, and I prefer the thin elastic cord of a doll like Macumba or just no band at all like the S23 dolls. I think S33's Madame La Mort has the same clear band situation with her hat.

The doll's hair is short and black and parted, and mostly gelled, but not rock-hard. The hair has a longer curve to the side, a bit like a bob haircut, and is taking clear inspiration from Alan Cumming's Emcee hairstyle, but also possibly a bit of Liza's in the film. Two vertical lines of hair are also gelled down over his left eye, adding a somewhat emo stylized effect.

The hair isn't perfectly tidy, but it's not that bad. 

Maitre des Morts' face is all done in shades of black and white paint. His eyes are classic LDD cartoon ovals with small black irises and white eye reflections--no separate defined pupils. His eyes have thick winged eyelashes on the upper outer corners, and his lips are very narrow and elongated in a classic pursed dolly or mime style. His eyebrows are asymmetrical, with his left being a downward stroke while his right is arched. The eyes have airbrushed grey shading around them. As mentioned before, this face feels very silent-era 1920s to me. Maitre des Morts' is also the most feminine male faceup in the brand. I like it.

His face had some blemishes and goop from gel (I assume) and needed some cleanup later.

Maitre des Morts is wearing a black jacket. It's tailored very skinny to hug his torso, and has full-length sleeves and a jagged-cut tattered lower edge. 

The lapels have long wide "shoulder points" on top, and a metal chain is sewn across the front of the jacket. This does not disconnect. I'm guessing this doll was popped together inside the costume, with the arms slid into the sleeves before being attached to the body. I think this chain is a bad move that essentially discourages removing the jacket, and that's especially bad because there's all the reason to do so with this particular doll. I will take a look and see if I might be able to detach one end and implement a small hook to let the chain remain but be removable for dressing purposes. To take it off this time, I popped the arms off inside the sleeves to slide them out and move the coat down.

When I did so, I discovered that the doll's ball joints are molded in dark red!

This must be a deliberate creative choice, given that Carotte Morts' joints were white like his skin. Given the gory highlight of this doll coming up, I think this will come into play.

Underneath the coat, Maitre des Morts is wearing a dickey--historically, a fake shirt front used under a jacket to complete an outfit with less. This piece has an attached black bow tie and stud button detail, but is cropped with a rounded lower edge and is sleeveless with no lower back, making for a daring, scandalous image when paired with an open jacket that directly exposes how skimpy the piece is. Wearing a dickey incorrectly on purpose for skimpy effect is a really fun idea, and it works well with the edgy cabaret idea and the Alan Cumming version of the Emcee. I also don't know if there's ever been another doll with a dickey that was made as a literal representation of that kind of piece!

The Maitre's pants are long and vertically striped vintage-style between black and aged yellow-white. The stripe print is precise and clean, not done with a shaky weathered effect. Black and white stripes are classically French and mime-like, though usually in the form of a horizontal shirt pattern. Interestingly, the trousers velcro more realistically in the front, unlike most doll pants. Perhaps this is because the doll is more risqué in aesthetic? He doesn't have painted underwear, either, and the Alan Cumming Emcee had elements of a stripper to him. The Maitre's pants also have black elastic suspenders attached, which are sewn into a crossed shape in the back. The suspenders are meant to go over the dickey like it's a real shirt.

Here's the dickey removed. As it lacks sleeves, it functions more like a collar than a shirt!

The Maitre has the round-toed boots in black worn with no socks. They don't like to sit level and he rocks between stable positions like my Oz Walpurgis.

Now for the big thing. Under the chained-on jacket and the scandalous dickey, you might have noticed a dark bloody spot. Well, Maitre des Morts has a secret. He's got a big wound. And it's not just paint. He has a circular actual hole punched right through his torso!

This is a unique feature to this doll and makes him one of the essential LDD novelties to collect, in my eye. I'm glad we got such a wild detail so late in the game!

The hole (or is it two?) is not a closed tube or "tunnel" through his torso, so you can see into the rest of his hollow body. I'm not too bothered by that, even if a tunnel wound would be more polished for the cartoony gore concept. The inside of his body isn't painted (how could it be?) but the red color of the joint pegs pays off here because they look like gory internals, just a little.

The paint around the hole looks the same on both sides.

I don't even know what did this to him. Impalement? A shotgun? Cannonball? What were the circumstances? It's very Death Becomes Her (speaking, of, LDD, we deserve Mad and Hel dolls) and I love it. I think the only strong color in the doll being from this hidden wound is a good creative choice.

While this being a secret is really fun, I'm kind of disappointed his outfit isn't cut around it so it looks like the hole was made in him while he was dressed. It would make photos with the hole a lot more fun, since he has to be entirely topless and with his suspenders shrugged off to get the full view through him as he is.

The hole in the torso was a true gift from Mezco. I got so much work out of it! I started by playing with red cord, which looks like guts in this context.

And Carotte was all to happy to put a cane through him.

I borrowed the heart from the Bride of Valentine Tin Man to make it look like he was impaled and his heart popped out.

Maitre des Morts makes a unique silhouette.

I also thought Maitre des Morts could use his torso as a light focuser to create the Moulin Morgue's stage spotlight for other performers! I set this up with a headlamp on a box of pencils.

And from Carotte's perspective, in black and white.

I love this photo.

Carotte and the Maitre may not be very serious about it, but I think they're definitely into each other, and Carotte certainly has his heart.

I love how visually hard to parse their bodies are in this kiss photo due to the insane pose. 

I was able to shove Carotte's arm through the Maitre's torso by taking it off his body, heating the Maitre's torso until it was more pliable, and pushing the Carotte arm in from the shoulder, pushing it back through the front of the Maitre's torso until it popped out the back. I then re-connected the arm to Carotte, which was not easy with this setup. The oddity of the image was very worthwhile, though.

If the hole in the Maitre's torso was a closed tunnel wound, I might not have been able to do this concept.

They make a good duo.

And some more portraits of the doll just looking great.

This could be my favorite picture of him. The suspenders! The shadow!

[Alison found her way into one of these photos too! That might continue to happen; it's such a fun spooky game to play. Keep your eyes peeled!]

Here's Maitre des Morts' cabaret poster, done in the same format as the one I did for Carotte Morts. I used a photo base and flattened it with digital painting-over, and added the hole in the torso entirely as a freehand drawing, since it's his best feature and deserved to be shown even if it isn't visible while the doll is clothed.

And here's Carotte and the Maitre's posters together.

I think Madame La Mort will have to be on a red background!

I made a similar curtain-shroud epitaph poem for him, too. Here's Carotte's:

And the Maitre's.

With the jacket, I first glued a small hook where the chain was sewn, and that worked for me for a bit, but it eventually fell off and I was finding it too fiddly and difficult to thread the chain onto it anyway. So I revised the system. I took another piece of wire with a loop and cut it longer, while closing the loop around the end of the chain so it couldn't come off. I then poked a hole into the jacket so the wire can slide in, turning it into a very easy-to-use pin and hole. It lets the chain come open while being easy for me to manipulate!

The pin dangling loose. This just slides downward into a hole on the other side of the jacket.

Carotte Morts got a really wonderful performing photo with blue and orange lighting contrast and crowd silhouettes. 

To recapture that, I first needed to set the Maitre up with a prop. I tried out a microphone I made of wood pieces and tied it to knotted red cord I poked inside his torso like his guts are the microphone cord. I added a second line to make it look messier and tacked his dickey to be flipped up, almost like that cartoon gag of the piece flipping out of a jacket. The idea of this guy rummaging into his hollow torso is horrible. I like it. This is another idea that wouldn't work if the hole wound was a closed tunnel. Being able to stuff the cord into his hollow body was an advantage this time.

This was okay, but the lighting was too dark for silhouette figures to have any room to be added in as the audience like I did for Carotte, so I chose another take and edited it in post to use a green contrast for weird cabaret lighting that also looked like an old expressionist poster. I then added in the silhouettes of Macumba and Jezebel and maskless Hemlock (upcoming Halloween review), who were available to me in the moment as unique dolls separate from the cast I put in Carotte's crowd.

I really like Maitre des Morts. His design is vintage and spooky and striking,  and he has one of the most interesting, creatively exciting novelty gore features of the doll line. Between the two Moulin Morgue dolls I have, I think Carotte gave me better digital-art inspiration while Maitre des Morts' physical novelty gave me more exciting in-camera pictures. I'm not sure what I'll do with Madame La Mort. I like her a lot but photo concepts could be harder with her. She definitely wants for a very specific accessory. I'll try to get that together for her sometime. Perhaps sooner than later--though a published review of her could end up later than that. I'll see how my September budget and Halloween blog project plans work out. If I have room and a good plan to build a roundup trio for September, Madame La Mort is in it. If not, maybe I'll still get her and save her...or just do a solo feature. I don't actually need special justification for that. I only do the roundup trios because I can!

And that concludes the trio!

Menard and Maitre des Morts are both really interesting cases of LDD's flair for media homage. Both reference and pay tribute to a specific production by synthesizing iconography or narrative elements from multiple characrers-- LDD Menard is both Dr. Menard and the "Worm-Eye zombie" from Zombi 2, and Maitre des Morts is a tribute to the stage and screen legacy of Cabaret, managing to be both Joel Grey and Alan Cumming's defining portrayals of the Emcee while also having a little bit of Liza Minnelli's Sally Bowles to boot. LDD has homaged several other films with unlicensed reference dolls, but these two are more thorough references blending together multiple characters from their source works!

Of the three dolls here, there's no easy favorite, though Menard is an easy least favorite--not because he's bad, but because he's just not exactly my vibe.

Otherwise, Alison and Maitre des Morts put up a fierce competition. Each is doing a very different thing very well, and both inspired me with a lot of great ideas. I'm very glad to have both.

Thus concludes this roundup. See you for whatever comes next.