"DIRECTOR'S CUT" COMPILATION RE-EDIT: Living Dead Dolls Series 5 Assembled

While all of the reviews of these dolls came from separate roundups rather than a broad-scope concept with standalone posts like with Series 23, I thought these could be cut together into a marathon feature with some edits in just the same way to make the reviews all self-contained. Consider this your one-stop shop for my Series 5 thoughts.

Warnings for gory imagery and discussions of true-crime misogynist brutality and suicide, as well as graphic suicide imagery on one of the dolls.

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

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

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

I didn't think I would be especially invested in Series 5, but my work with the first doll (motivated by curiosity as to whether he deserved such a low fandom status) ended up sucking me into this little world of death and celebrity. Let's begin.

Nobody Likes Vincent: Vincent Vaude

Very ugly corpse imagery ahead.

[Vincent's review was originally published in Living Dead Dolls Roundup 3.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don't know if it was S4 or S5 that introduced the handle printing that ran for that chunk of time. I just know it wasn't any series before those two, since S1 and S3 don't have them. [Hindsight note: Series 5 is the first with the handles, as I later learned.]

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

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

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

Here's Vincent's chipboard poem:

He dreamed of performing on the grand old stage

An amazing escape artist of a tender young age

So small Vincent Vaude locked himself in a trunk

By the time someone found him his body sure stunk

And a rewrite.

He dreamed of performing such stunts on the stage

The art of escaping had been all the rage

So small Vincent Vaude shut himself in a trunk

By time he was found, the backstage had stunk

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What.

Um...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The S5 variants are representative of the look of classic films and photographs before color imaging became widely available and the industry standard. In this set, Hollywood and Dahlia's hair colors also swapped, with white-blonde Hollywood becoming brunette (and way more curly) and dark-haired Dahlia becoming white-haired. Each hair change slightly removes the characters from the likenesses of the real people whose tragic deaths they reference, so the variant dolls are morally more acceptable to me. I do still really like the main Hollywood despite her more extreme look, and her more cohesive design made her main doll the one I selected.

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

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

The S5 variants have white tissue.

 

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

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

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

I have gotten Angus in the time since this Vincent review was first posted, and I'd like to get a few S34 dolls, so seeing if I get a nugget with them would be fun.

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

Then I took the doll out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The curtain is a shirt that matches his plaid.

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

And an epitaph.

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

Spot the haiku.

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

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

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

This solidified for me that I was not yet done with Series 5. Giving myself a creative gimmick to craft for the dolls might have doomed me to get them all. I made plans for getting all of the S5 characters, and made their slabs all in advance, ready for their arrivals.

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

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

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

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

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

This is a color photo.

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

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

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

Vincent (to the side) reflecting off the case.

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

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

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

...yeah.

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

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

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

The First Splatter Star: Hollywood

[This review was first published in the Gruesome Living Dead Dolls Roundup (Roundup #4)]

Hollywood is kind of feels like the exemplar of the series concept. In name and look, Hollywood is Hollywood. She's a perfect caricature of a classic star actress from between the 1940s and 1960s...she's just also really really bloody down the right side of her head. 

Hollywood died in a car accident set up by a male stalker, which is horrifyingly plausible. Her death method, vague appearance, and death date all correspond to actress Jayne Mansfield, which makes me uncomfortable and I dislike that. What narrowly saves Hollywood for me is that her death is relatively generic and is written to have some different circumstances, and her look feels more archetypal of the bombshell blonde than directly imitating the real person. Those are caveats that Series 5 Dahlia cannot benefit from. 

Here's Hollywood's chipboard.

The poem says:

Hollywood was a famous glamor gal

She liked to race around with her rich promoter Sal

But late one night this resulted in their death

For the brakes had been cut by a stalker named Seth

Sal and Seth don't exist in any form beyond these words in this poem, and the names only appear to have been thrown in at all for the sake of rhyme. 

Jayne Mansfield also died from head trauma in a car crash and lurid rumors were spread about the condition of her injuries, but her death had no element of foul play or her social life dooming her. Hollywood's death being more sinister can be a welcome departure, though it can play into the sensationalism of the real thing without much self-awareness.

Here's a rewrite to test a version without specifically naming offscreen characters.

Hollywood was known to be the biggest glamor star

She traveled and she dazzled in her boyfriend's shiny car

But Hollywood was coveted by fans who wished her dead 

The brakes were cut, the news was made 

In black and white-- and red

Here's her coroner's report. 

These flat ones are so easy to photograph!

Hollywood died on June 29, 1967, same as Jayne Mansfield. Her 4:07 AM time doesn't correspond. Mansfield would have died over an hour earlier. Hollywood died of head trauma from impact with the steering column.

Here she is out. She's looking a little rough, and that's beyond the ways she's supposed to.

Hollywood's look is big, glamorous, and luxurious. She's the kind of movie-star archetype that would capture the press with all her glitz and presence...and she also has the space-taking big-presence look of of a classic star who'd have certainly become a gay icon and/or common drag impersonation. There's probably at least one real-world queen who's done LDD Hollywood. But I'd be surprised if there were two.

Hollywood's hair is white, curly, and voluminous, going for a glorious starlet effect, but I wasn't immediately impressed. A patch at the top of her hair has yellowed, and the curls are separated into chunks of visibly different lengths that don't blend. I've heard the curl on this doll's hair is susceptible to tightening in heat, and that might have happened here. It looks much more poodle-curled than official LDD photos indicate it should, and the texture doesn't track for a silver-screen queen of the classic era.

 

Variant Hollywood has even tighter curls with her factory hair, and the copy I was eyeing on eBay before it sold would have been a nightmare to tame if I'd have gotten her because she seemed to have gotten extra extra curled, to a vertical degree.

I was pre-warned, but the black feathers from her boa can get caught in the hair when they shed, and they stand out.

I'll try to whiten the hair in peroxide (she needs to be a literal peroxide blonde!) and sun and then ty to tame and even it out a little. 

One thing I noticed here was a larger hole bored into the head. I don't know what this would practically be for, and it's not a diegetic detail because Hollywood wasn't shot in anything except film. I haven't noticed this on any other LDD, not even the Vincent Vaude spare from this same series who I stripped bald for an as-yet incomplete custom character.

The doll filled with liquid when I had her soaking in peroxide, likely because of this hole, so I had to pop her head out to pour it out.

Hollywood's skin is a pale off-white tone that's subtly yellower than her hair, giving it just a touch of flesh hue. She might be even yellower than off-white Dottie Rose.

Her face is painted with an extreme half-and-half contrast with her right side being very battered and bloodied by the accident.

The right side of Hollywood's face is covered in blood that drips and smears from the edges, her red lips look like blood coloring instead of lipstick and streak toward her right, and even her right nostril is filled in with a touch of red.

Hollywood's right eye is made to look severely bruised and swollen shut with squeezed lids, and it's an ugly look, but it feels as ugly as it was meant to be, unlike the similar eyes of S5 main Vincent Vaude which felt fouler than intended. The untouched bright cartoony left eye also lifts the face up and gives it a caricatured appeal. Series 21's Sunday, a girl who believed her angel costume would let her fly, has a similar asymmetric bruised-eye effect, but both of her eyes are shaded and her face is cut and looks more detailed and less cute.

Part of me wonders if Hollywood should have had the glam lashes on the swollen eye too for a bit more outlandish sultry camp factor that would balance her face in a less upsetting way, because the bruised eye really does drain some of the cartoon appeal away.

Like so.

Hollywood's face paint had some obvious blemishes, and some of the streaky paint felt intrusive to the look for me, so I cleaned her up a little with nail polish remover to remove the blemishes and streaks which I felt were depriving her of pop and caricature.

The side of Hollywood's head is covered in multi-tone red paint that cuts off behind her ear, and it drips down her neck onto her torso. Her right arm is also covered in bloody cuts.

A similar extreme bloody-head effect would be done for Series 11's Isaiah, a newsboy who also died from a car impact. His battered side is on his left. 

The LDD picture doesn't show the side too well.

Isaiah appears to be a fairly unpopular doll, but he had one of the coolest accessories in the form of a fully-printed miniature newspaper with Easter eggs about the brand and tying into the eerie story of his papers being prophetic-- the paper he carries, implictly the edition he was delivering at the time of the accident, was reporting him being run over before it took place! To be fair to the sellers, most Isaiahs on the low end of eBay lack their newspapers, explaining the markdown, but I've seen sealed listings (which would be complete) at the same level.

Isaiah has a really cool and off-the-wall Resurrection that has an entirely modern cyber-theme in green with circuit designs and camera eyes. I don't fully get the link unless it's like online news and hacking or something, but he's one of the few Res dolls that might hit that combination of being relatively in-reach and appealing to me.

Back to Hollywood. The most ghoulish and surprising thing about her gore is a sinister creative use of the doll format: the left side of Hollywood's scalp has been painted pink and red before her hair was rooted, so it looks like her scalp has cracked open and is bleeding under the right side of her hair, or else that blood is seeping in from the side of her head.

Typically, the scalp will be painted the same color as the hair to make the coverage look its best, and this holds true for the left side...

...but on the right, the scalp deliberately contradicts the hair for the purposes of showcasing more gore! Maybe the pink section should be unrooted because hair wouldn't be growing out of a peeled gap in the scalp or a brain, but it's a unique idea and I like that her hair is full.

Half-and-half gore is also a trait of S23 doll Jennocide, who has the upper right half of her face eaten away by acid.

Jenn's gore is more outlandish and unreal and fun. Both dolls utilize the hair or scalp in the gore design--Hollywood with a painted scalp, and Jenn with an unusual hairline exposing more of her head than normal.

I think I had initially believed Hollywood was a flesh-toned doll and that did nothing for me, but realizing she was white-toned rocketed her in my estimation. The color makes her much more stylized and makes the gore less nasty and real. Of the S5 mains, Hollywood is the closest to the fully black-and-white film look of the variant set, and I think it serves her very well. The green and red pop really well against the black and white, and I think it suits her as a star actress to look the most black-and-white of the mains. Jezebel is the only S5 character to have flesh-toned skin, and maybe she shouldn't have. It'd work well for all of the S5 mains to be partially desaturated. 

I don't care as much for variant Hollywood because her color contrast has only very partially reversed with the hair and feathers, and while black hair isn't at all bad or inappropriate for a classic star, it's a big change and the rest of her doesn't flip much to white in order to balance it. A white dress would do wonders here.

I also think the blood loses a lot of pop when the hair is the same color as it. Main Hollywood is white of skin and of hair so her blood really stands out, and I think the variant keeping her hair white would make for a great look against the black blood. In fact, I'm beginning to think I was only so tempted by a variant copy I saw on eBay because her frizzy hair had gone vertical, giving her blood room to pop because none of her hair was backdropping it!

Hollywood's outfit consists of a long puffy black feather boa that simply drapes over her however you please, and a strapped body-hugging black velvet dress with lace trim and more fluffy feathers around the hem, which near reaches the floor. The cut of the dress gives it some bunches over her torso, which feel purposeful enough to look good. The dress is very tight and takes some effort to pull off and on, likely because the material is thicker and less flexible. She still moves in her clothes, but she can't bend her hips far enough forward to sit fully upright.

The boa is the first of two--we've already seen the other on Betsy from Series 23.

Hollywood's boa looks more glamorous and it's puffier when dry. Betsy's is deliberately gaudy to reflect a child playing dress-up.

I found a fun Fciway for Hollywood to wear the boa was over one shoulder, spread out to give her maximum presence.

The boa can also be used to give her some flirtatious mystery...or just to censor her gore for polite company.

The boa is so big and the swivel LDD body has limited enough posing that I didn't find it looking quite right around her neck and tucked under her arms. It can still work, particularly if shrugged off her shoulders.

Hollywood's body is stained by her dress precisely where the bunches were.

Hollywood wears black LDD sandals, and her fingernails and toenails are painted black. 

S4 introduced the platform sandal sculpt to LDD on Ms. Eerie, and S5 cashed in hard with most of its dolls having them. This being an earlier appearance of the shoe might be why Hollywood's feel so loose. The pins on her ankle strap don't really pop in, they just slide in, making the attachment very insecure, and Hollywood's shoes are able to fall off if the doll is shaken. It looks like after S5, LDD made some quick tweaks to the sandals so they'd be more secure by the release of S6's Dottie Rose and Calico.

Hollywood didn't have a Resurrection doll, but she did get an adaptation in the second and final wave of LDD Fashion Victims fashion dolls. The line was very short-lived (only eight dolls) and the first wave was grotesquely caricatured and objectified with tiny vinyl outfits, balloon boobs, and an overall porny aesthetic..so yuck. But wave 2 toned it down a bit with a new body and face design, inset eyes, and less aggresively sexual theming. Hollywood was reimagined with a short blonde bob parted the opposite way and she has blue-blushed skin that makes her look very different from the S5 original.

Official photo of outfit 1, recreating the S5 dress.

Official photo of outfit 2, a twenties flapper number with the boa, which should probably  be on the first outfit.

The Fashion Victims are an interesting and bizarre (and regrettable) curiosity, but if I investigate them, I'm not picking Hollywood. I do like that her face sculpt has the swollen eye built in, though.

To tackle S5 Hollywood's hair, I tried a little brushing, boiling, and trimming. The hair still needs a lot of manual laying and squeezing down and arranging and might still be too curly, especially behind her, but this is better.

After that, I did an even more aggressive run on her hair and completed a successful peroxide whitening on top. Her hair ended up still huge but not as frizzy, and the silhouette better matched the official LDD photo of her. The curls out of box had their own merit, but classic film divas were all about wavy hair.

If an English-French language barrier isn't present between them, Hollywood and Carotte Morts could probably get along well, with both being performers who died after trauma to the right side of their heads. 

And my three LDD entertainers, with my preferred variant copy of Vincent Vaude standing in for the both of them.

Then I had my first photo idea--what if, in the LDD universe, Hollywood crashed, died, got up and went to an event, and invented the red carpet?

Sadie and Chloe (in the hat) weren't dead in 1967, but Sadie would have been still alive then. Chloe wouldn't have been born or dead by this point, but she filled out the scene.

It took two tries to make a stained fabric piece that looked just right.

And I shot another photo with yellow light to put together a news piece for Hollywood, and this time only used dolls that were dead before she was. I took the aesthetic of the document forward a few decades from Vincent's classic newspaper, making for a more colorful magazine page inspired by the look of 1960s Variety, but written in a more informal tabloid tone. I referenced two other dolls who would be relevant--Hayze because she died the same year and her name is a Jimi Hendrix reference that fits the entertainment sphere, and GreGORY because he's a performer. (I might get him sometime, and he'd work as an extra "honorary" character with the S5 crew.)

I had a lot of fun with this news piece!

I took some other photos on the "staircase" setup there too.

I tried some pictures with the stained fabric over her like a sheet. That gave me a fun composite image doing a half-and-half of full grisliness and full glam.

And on its side, it looks like Hollywood's spirit looking over her corpse on the road.

This also gave me her movie poster.

I don't know why, but I feel like Hollywood would do something morally dubious liker tackily exploit her own murder in a depraved film she stars in. In the foul world of LDD, it probably wouldn't fall under the scope of "iconic empowering reclamation". Maybe Hollywood is the kind of actor who sees herself as prestige while being very vapid and trashy in actual substance.

Here's an autographed studio headshot. Hers was the first I made for this series.

And then I set up a screening. I took a picture outside on the patio and spilled water next to her for the shot of the film she's in.

And then with a projection effect edited in.

I built the "theater" under my desk and used stacked cardboard LDD coffin lids for the seating. The screen is my laptop folded into tablet mode, though I had to use the version of the photo without the projection effect for the best pictures. 

I wasn't satisfied with this setup, so I tried again the next night and threw in a popcorn bucket for her.

While the addition of  both Agatha to thicken the audience and the popcorn accessory for Hollywood improved the scene, I still wasn't happy with the proportions and placement of the movie screen. The screen is too high and too small. To fix this, I edited this photo more to darken the shadows and painted over the screen entirely to create a blank black background corner. I then imported a second copy of the first take, cut out the screen from the photo and tweaked its shading and contrast and resized it for the darkened scene to look more realistic. Here, I faked the glow around the edge to sell it better. I think this composition looks more believable.

I wouldn't have been able to make this without the practical in-camera shot being made first, though, so I was glad I went to the trouble to do the screen in-camera. It gave me the right snippet to edit into a more plausible layout.

Here's Hollywood looking her very zombie-est.

Here, the screen position/size looks fine because the indistinct staging can read as her walking out of the theater toward the door, where the screen would fit this position.

Is there a metaphor here for the pursuit of relevance and the spotlight? There are many celebrities today you might consider zombies, trying to bring their careers back into prominence after they're old hat (or just old). Is there something tragic here too? What determines an expiration date on cultural presence and acclaim? Or perhaps, is there a celebrity zombie metaphor about losing your soul after getting fame and money? Or just losing your options, trapped in what made you famous and not knowing what else to do? Is LDD Hollywood a queen for coming back undead, is she tragic for it, or is she garbage?

You decide.

I then made a Grauman's Theater cement slab with Hollywood's signature and footprints. For her, I decided to make an imprint of her face in the clay for personalized detail. I used Calico to make the imprint because I thought her yarn hair was less likely to get in the way, but I used the wrong side so the imprint would be the right side of the face. I thought that was good, but it bothered me more over time that the imprint wouldn't be the side of her face that actually hit the ground. I did like the crack over the face to allude to the impact to the person.

My first attempt.

 I wasn't in love with the look of this piece, so I resolved to make and bake another after I got more clay to do it with.

Here's the second attempt. I faked the hair with the yarn being pressed in from Calico, as well as some pipe cleaners. I like the wild shape here. Unfortunately, Calico's yarn got tiny purple fibers pressed into the clay all over!

Because you have to turn the head and press really hard to get a profile effect, some tweaking had to be done before baking to ensure it read as side-face, meaning the nose and lips needed some nudging, as well as the forehead, and I had to wipe out the ear to make the silhouette of the hair look more present.

Then, I added blood paint to finish it, as if Hollywood could have created this celebrity slab by falling dead right into the cement that had been poured for her scheduled ceremony.

I made this slab before the "autograph" photo or the doll's arrival, so this was what established what Hollywood's signature was and I had to cite it when "signing" the photo so they matched up! The same went for the other autograph pictures--I copied the signatures I drew into the slabs.

When pre-making he slabs for the other three, I arranged it so Hollywood is the only one with her footprints in the middle facing forward, while two dolls are angled to the left, and two are angled to the right. Hollywood is the center of the series and the focal point in a row when I complete the set. See how Vincent is turned diagonal? One other doll will be in the same position on his side, and the last two will mirror on her left, with two on each diagonal framing her.

The footprints aren't precise or deep enough to plug the feet in securely and make these slabs function as sturdy doll stands, so there's no mechanical assistance here. It just looks nice.

I also made a slab in advance for GreGORY because what the heck, he'll be here someday or other. The ventriloquist he takes some inspiration from had one in real life, too. To even out a possible row of the dolls with him included as an extra, his footprints (done by the Wizard of Oz) are in the middle like Hollywood's so both will face forward in the center of the row. 

Here she is with my other movie-themed horror dolls-- L.O.L. O.M.G. Movie Magic Spirit Queen, and Frights, Camera, Action! Operetta.

So that's Hollywood!

I think this doll was a mixed experience, but ultimately came out for the best. I certainly got a lot of work with her, but the lady's obviously a great friend of the camera. I was disappointed her hair was so difficult and that she needed so much maintenance to clean her up, and I do think the gory half of her face is harder to get past than I expected it to be. Her hair is still too puffy and airy for my tastes. But in the end, I was able to find a lot of artistic inspiration with her and got some very fun dramatic and ghoulish photographs. I love that Hollywood has such a big presence as a doll. I mean, just look at her on the shelf!

[I'm now past this point where all of my LDDs could fit with their coffins in my closet shelves!]

I also think her design's high drama and pop work really well for a classic actress, and her gore is shocking and effective. It's still distasteful how close she comes to the real death of Jayne Mansfield, but she's just far enough removed for me not to condemn her. I also had the freedom to distance her in my own ways, and avoided participating in overly grotesque exploitative imagery as such. (I could have pursued a doll car that would fit her, but ultimately chose not to risk my money on an unsure fit and thought it would be too abhorrent to bring in in any way.) I don't know. Hollywood's shock factor is definitely effective because it never quite subsided all the way for me. But if you're willing to lean in, she can be oddly stunning.

BONUS CUSTOM DOLL: Tinselton Stitches

This is a custom-doll art project I made for this series, and it's not entirely an original character--it's the unseen coroner of the series! He has no character design or dolls or canon about him, and I was intrigued. All we know is that he examined the five dolls over several decades.

It's an unusual thing for LDD to create a character without a doll, and the name was surely a throwaway gag, but the fact that the repeated use of the name implies this one coroner was on-duty from the 1920s to the 1990s was fascinating, and I thought he'd be a fun bonus addition to the cast, like a doll who would be exclusive to the variant set or else released as a throwback bonus character after the fact. He's getting the original faulty ball-joint body from my Chloe, and a face sculpt that didn't exist in the era of Series 5, so maybe the latter hypothetical release as a retroactive throwback makes more sense. I won't play him as anything but a throwback doll because that allows for the later elements to not be clashing.

My concept for Tinselton was that he'd have had extensive plastic surgeries to have such a long tenure before he joined the dead himself. I also figured he probably died during his long career and continued his work thereafter, ageless the whole time. I think I'm going to end up placing him so his last S5 case while he was alive was Hollywood, the third chronological S5 death. I think Siren and Jezebel after her would have been examined by a zombie Stitches. 

With the idea of plastic surgery and cosmetic undertaking being mixed together, I wanted him to have a stretched grin as a result. There is an LDD grinning sculpt which featured twice in the main line and several more times on licensed dolls. The cheapest aftermarket doll with the face sculpt is LDD Presents Annabelle (from The Conjuring), but she's tan-colored and would clash with the S5 aesthetic. LDD Presents The Crow is white-faced, but pale flesh-toned besides, so he's no good. LDD Presents' con-exclusive unmasked Harley Quinn has red and black-cast arms, plus she's expensive. None of the dolls with all-pale bodies and grins (S25 Beelzebub, S31 Bea Neath, and LDD Presents Showtime Betelgeuse) are cheap. Bea would be the best bet and her arms would likely have less issues with staining, but I want her proper in my collection and don't need her right now. The S31 project will probably be a 2025 blog event and is not going to enter any work until then. Two copies of Bea would be far too pricey, besides. LDD Presents Chucky and Tiffany have had the grin, but I'd prefer a stark white doll for the stylized old-movies look. The LDD Presents Batman Joker's unique grinning face sculpt is intriguing, but it's also quite removed from the LDD face shape. I eventually found a listing of just unmasked Harley's head on AliExpress for a small fraction of the price the full doll would fetch, so I chose that to attach to Chloe's body. 

In the meantime, I did some preliminary work. I took the outfit from my spare Vincent Vaude and dyed it as black as I could get it, since I thought the structure of the outfit was good for a "celebrity coroner" reflecting classic Hollywood. (The spare Vincent doll's new form will need to be completed by a dress I order soon, so that character doesn't make it into this post.) I had to use paint to make the straps black because the plaid was still showing, and I painted the bowtie white. I painted black blood splatter onto the hands, shoes, and clothes. Tinselton probably won't be fully black-and-white because the shoes and apron are brown, but evoking the black-and-white look is good, and black blood lets him bridge the main set and variants, of which my set of five S5 dolls will ultimately mix both. With his base coloration, Tinselton looks like the variants, but the brown apron and shoes pull him out of that set's look and let him fit into the mains.

Then Harley's head arrived. It's kind of strange for me to be first obtaining this LDD sculpt as a loose part for a custom. I'll eventually have an official complete LDD with this sculpt to have it more officially represented in my collection, but for now, it's here as a custom part!

It's rooted with blonde hair in pigtails and has bangs and side locks that frame the face. The hair feels pretty nice, but I wasn't able to boil out the pigtails to flatten them and I didn't want this color for Tinselton, so I removed all of the hair with the aim of replacing it. 

This face mold is in the LDD style but features an open-mouthed grin (with individually-defined teeth to look creepier). As mentioned above, LDD Presents dolls with this face sculpt far outnumber LDD original characters with it, so I wonder if the sculpt was even designed for the main line or if it was just adopted for a couple of original characters after being made for the benefit of licensed dolls? I thinks the first dolls with this face might have been Chucky and Tiffany if the face wasn't debuted in the main line (where the first doll would be Beelzebub). Harley's faceup doesn't feature anything I want to preserve for the purposes of a S5-like design, so I endeavored to wipe it all. I ran out of nail polish remover to get it quite as clean as I wanted, so I moved onto next steps. 

I popped the head onto the dressed body and replaced the straps of Butcher Boop's apron with new strips of leather which are not ideal, but better than nothing. The strips are shorter than is needed for a good single knot to stay tied, so I used a velcro closure on the waist straps so it doesn't have to tie, and the neck can either tie loosely or the straps can tuck under the suspenders in back. 

I then got to work on replacing the hair. I first thought I could work the rooted Harley hair into a slicked formal men's style, but the color and rooting and shape weren't cooperating. I had a doll wig lying around, but it was too boyish and bowl-cut for a snazzy mortician. I decided to give him a head of brushed yarn hair, and decided he'd have a half-combed frizzy salt-and-pepper hairstyle to look eccentric and older than he seems, but also flashy and put-together, leaning into some mad-scientist vintage charm. 

Brushed yarn hair is not easy to make. It's recommended you have a wire brush and a stick to wrap hair around and create brushed lines (wefts) with that you can glue at the ends to form strips to layer over the head or wig cap, but I mostly improvised, taking some notes from a failed attempt to do the same with my first copy of G3 Abbey. What I ended up doing as my process for creating hair tufts was taking my blended black-and-grey yarn, combing out the end of it, then wetting the end and saturating it in Mod Podge glue. I then cut the yarn off, and left the string to dry, and repeated with the new end of the yarn--comb, glue, cut, dry. Once the ends were dry and sealed, I unwound the yarn and combed it out. This always sheds a ton of fiber and thins the piece, regardless of how glued the end is, but you get a stable amount of yarn per chunk after combing. I then trimmed the excess flat glued portion of the yarn.

Two pieces of prepared yarn--the top before trimming the glued end and combing it out.

To glue the hair on, I learned my lesson from the Abbey disaster and had it so the flat end of the glued yarn got folded under the loose fibers--so on one side of the part, I glued the solid part to the scalp, and then swept the fibers backward over it so the full head of hair wouldn't have the squares of flat glued yarn showing and the part was formed. With Abbey, I had a horrible clumsy mess where the hair wasn't covering the flat ends at all and it looked as stuck-on as it was. I'm glad I just got a new copy and worked with what she had.

Green square is the flat piece glued down, and the hair is swept backward over it.

It was tricky doing this with the perimeter hairline and the part at the same time, but I just felt it out. Of course I ran out of glue, too, so I shifted to producing pieces of hair ready to be glued before that was restocked too. 

Once I restocked my supplies, I finished wiping the face. I was frustrated that I couldn't quite get out the residual pink from Harley Quinn's blush, but it was good enough. The wiping from the nail polish remover also left the face shinier than it started, which I didn't notice until all my work was done. Oops. I guess it suits the plastic-surgery idea.

I started by painting subtle light grey scars from the mouth extending out to make it look like his face was stitched into the expression, but I wasn't sure of the result. The scarring was good, but I didn't know how forced or fixed the grin felt. I probably should have made the scars turn up more dramatically, but the way they are, they remind me of the Bride of Frankenstein's jaw scars in a nice way. I then added a scar on the right side of his head. I want Tinselton to feel a little like a summation of the other S5 dolls, where he has echoes of their injuries, so this scar reflects Hollywood's massive head wound. For his eyes, I knew I wanted him to have heterochromia to suggest he replaced one of his eyes in a cosmetic procedure, and decided that would be his left. On his right, he has a brown eye with a white pupil done in a classic LDD style, while on the left, his eye is narrower and surrounded with bruising, like Hollywood's swollen right eye, and the iris is greyish. Scars reach out from both eyes in asymmetric patterns that meet on the nose, suggesting some dodgy facial pulling and sculpting to fix his expression or de-age him. At this point, Tinselton wasn't looking like my first concept of him, which was to be a brighter, more youthful-looking doll with a more clean and creepily stretched-looking plastic surgery face:

I didn't work off this sketch or draw it before working on the doll, but I had to draw what was in my head initially. The Harley head's vertical eye makeup being similar to this vision is a coincidence.

The hair color and texture being so different from my first idea was probably a big factor in pushing him out of this polished LA-plastic look. It makes sense, anyway, for Tinselton to reflect a clumsier kind of surgery and an older fashion style if he was pioneering plastics decades back.

So since the look was going the way it wanted to anyway, I also added thick eyebrows broken by one of his scars and a pencil mustache. The only LDD with a mustache is Gomez Addams based on the MGM CGI movies, but I think it works for Tinselton. He's vintage-dapper in that way, and without it, the look didn't come together right. There was also room for a blood splatter by his right eye.

Here's the face. The hair is in progress and it's wild.

I'm not fully happy with my rendering here. The paint for the scars was hard to control to make it both smooth and visible, so it's a little rough, and the eyes are thicker than I wanted them to be. They look more like brushed-on paint than I'd like. But I think the composition of the face is great. It was one of those situations where I kept adding more and more but it wasn't wrong or excessive. And I think a postscript bonus character for a complete series deserves a little extra. Maybe his face doesn't look pulled or frozen by surgeries, but the face does look good. I like his expression not being harsh, and this is the right look for a gentleman doctor who became famous and rebuilt himself to maintain it. All things considered, he looks really good for all the time and reassembly he's gone through! I don't think the eye transplant fully took, but he makes it work.

Then I continued with the hair. For the right side, which I wanted neatly combed, I just filled in the opposite side at the top to complete the parting, then spread glue on the scalp and pulled the hair down to cover it, then saturated the top with glue so the "combed" side would stay intact.

I just pulled the one row of hair down over this glue and dabbed more in to have a permanent half-tidy comb.

I then trimmed down the excess. On the loose side of the hair, I filled in more rows to give it more volume and evenness, and then trimmed down the hair a lot and used a quick boil to tame it a bit and make the hair feel more proportional.

With the apron, in addition to gluing on new straps, I also painted over the red bloodstains in black and glued on a black pocket for some tools-- a Playmobil blade and shears. I could have given him scissors, too, but he already looked enough like Sweeney Todd and he didn't need to be mistaken for a barber. Lastly, he got a Playmobil knife with a trimmed nail pin inserted as an accessory peg so he can hold it as a scalpel.

Here's the finished doll.

Oh, yeah. I customized the spare S5 coffin for him. I don't expect to repeat this step unless I make more dolls as bonus characters to existing sets? Series 5's chipboards, with the flat graphic and lack of character imagery, are probably the easiest to alter at home within the style, though, so Tin might be a one-off in getting this honor.

I had to repaint the chipboard to black out the text and paint my own, which was a nightmare. It's obviously painted and not evenly opaque, but with the tiny brush and text size I needed, it was either controlled and thin or thick and illegible. Here's his chipboard.

The poem I wrote for him is as follows:

Documenting famous deaths

In Tinsel Town made him a star

He looked undead while still alive

From every plastic facial scar

I can't be bothered to work up a coroner's report mockup for him, but rest assured, he was his own coroner and reported on himself. Here's some details that would be there:

Time of death: October 2, 1970, 3:23 PM

Last known occupation: County medical examiner/coroner. No intentions to stop.

Cause of death: Very advanced age (102 yrs.)

Notes: Displays several scars from cosmetic procedures to extend youth. Looks very good despite it all.

I chose to make Tinselton's death date earlier in the exact same week as Siren's so his death can be a smaller feature on the 1970s magazine cover I plan to make for her news piece. Their stories are sharing a magazine issue. I had initially thought I'd be getting Siren before Tinselton and that I'd be teasing his doll design with the design of her cover, but it still works the other way.

And another poem for the road. He wouldn't have actually had a second were he in S5, though.

Working from beyond the grave

His star, it ever rose

He can tell you honestly 

How every big-shot goes

And next to the coffin.

To set his coffin apart a little and suit his unique look that belongs to neither full S5 set, I splattered the tissue with black.

Here's some looks at his hair. It's not perfect, but the look is overall good and it works. And the way I made it, it won't need any fussing beyond a bit of finger-fluffing on the loose half.

Here's the outfit.

And the pocket with the tools. The scalpel can fit in the pocket as long as the pin to put it in his hand is facing outward.

Here he is holding the scalpel. His hands, per the Chloe body, were already pierced, but the holes being factory-made meant I needed to find a nail that fit the factory piercing properly to create the peg for the accessory. With Arden, adding an accessory hole just required a needle and a smaller pin to fit it--none of the searching for something sized right.

And here are the other two tools that stay in his pocket for texture.

Here's the back of the apron with the neck straps tucked into the suspenders.

The extra layer of leather on the waist strap is patching up a thin part underneath.

And the velcro open on the waist. 

Another detail I added to Tinselton was a scar on the side of his arm with real staples across it. 

The scar was carved out and filled in with black, and I poked holes in across the scar and bent in office staples. The stapled scar is derived from Dahlia, and the placement on the arm alludes to Jezebel, whose wounds are a lot more grim. Both are up for discussion in the uncomfortable roundup I have planned. Really, the only doll not being referenced with Tinselton is Vincent, because the stitches on the face can relate to Siren. Vincent has vein theming I could reference, but that'd be the tipping point in his busy faceup where I'd be doing too much. Besides, Vincent is the only S5 doll whose wasn't mutilated or injured in his death, so he gets to be the exception. 

Here's Tinselton without the apron. This makes him almost completely greyscale.

I prefer him with the apron on, of course.

And I made him a celebrity sidewalk slab. His is styled after his own coroner's reports, including the seal in the corner. Like many male graduates of medical school, his signature is nigh-illegible.

I ought to have pushed even harder on the footprints. Oh well. If it really bothers me after too long, I can make another take.

Tinselton's footprints are centered so he can stand in the middle next to Hollywood while the other four S5 dolls flank them in pairs. This allows a symmetrical display, and it will stay even once I bring in GreGORY from S14, who also got a centered slab made for him. When that doll joins my collection someday, then GreGORY and Tinselton can stand on either side of Hollywood in the middle so she's in the full center.

Here's some portraits.

Tinselton's autograph.

And here's Tinselton at the autopsies of the S5 dolls whose reviews have already featured here. For Vincent, he needed to cut some bindings with scissors.

And Hollywood arrived wrapped in a sheet, but still quite glammed with the feathers.

I was also able to take pictures of Dahlia's autopsy, but those would be spoilers and devoid of some relevant context if shared at this point.

Here's Tinselton at his own self-autopsy, waking up on his table!

Here's Tinselton's celebrity news piece. He's going to be sharing the same magazine issue as Siren, but the article is framed as a report on his death that was written before Siren died and he worked with her. Her news piece, when I get her, will be the cover story of the same issue, and the end of this article references that Siren's death story has taken place since this piece was written in-universe.

And a poster for an ethically-dubious coroner's demonstration.

I put a ton of work into this doll. The only elements not to be modified are the socks and the torso and legs. For this doll, I made a head of hair, painted a busy faceup, dyed a costume, painted the arms and clothing, added and modified accessories, created a slab, and customized a coffin. I put in all the love for making this doll, and I'm glad I did. For a throwaway name on five pieces of paper to capture my interest and passion to such an extent surprised me, and I didn't think I'd genuinely find the resultant doll of my version of Tinselton to turn out so good. He's genuinely interesting and appealing and layered as a design, the color palette and value balance is strong, and the doll feels a little deluxe and higher-level due to the accessories removable apron, and complex faceup. 

You can tell this is a custom doll. It can't be mistaken for a factory piece...but it doesn't require that much distance to read just as nicely as one. This character design was an interesting mix of guided and improvised, such that I knew what I wanted, ended up with something really different from that, and yet got something that rings very true to me for a Series 5 Living Dead Doll--better even than my first ideas. Tinselton is also just useful to have. He provides more photo-ops for the S5 characters just by being a known character who's interacted with them all, and it's useful to have another doctor type on hand for other ideas. Dedwin as the Wizard is more fantasy sci-fi, while Tinselton is fully horror, and his more muted vintage gentleman look suits other possible scenes and settings. He promises to be a versatile "actor" for future LDD photoshoots, and the way I've written his concept, he's able to slide into some settings from before his actual death without being out of place. 

[Since he'd have been born in 1868, that year would definitely be too early, and I decided that 1905 would probably be the earliest time period I could use him in, since he'd have been 37 then and that seems like a plausible age for him to have started modifying himself. And if I decide 1905 was just when he started getting work done and I don't use him around then, that gives him enough time to reach the face he has now by the time Vincent Vaude arrived in his morgue in 1926, and allows the autopsy photo to make sense with Tin looking like he does. So maybe Tinselton's starting point for viable use in historical LDD photos would be 1920 at the earliest instead?

What? Who's overthinking? (And worldbuilding typically gives me a headache!)

The two doctors together. I might also seek out modern OG Dedwin for his utility in newer scenes.

I'm just generally very proud of Dr. Tinselton Stitches. I'm just a fan artist, but it feels good to have given him a face and concept beyond a name on a document. I like what I did with the character and he's a triumph of a custom project. Bedford and Arden were fun improvisations with doll parts, but Tinselton was a project with purpose and he's certain to stay in a place of honor in my collection as a semi-canonical deluxe custom. 

Aria Pianissimo: Siren

[This review was first published in Living Dead Dolls Roundup 5. ]

Siren is my fourth Series 5 doll, but the third to be published on the blog. Dahlia arrived and got worked with behind-the-scenes beforehand because she went into a separate project. Siren's grown on me for having a dramatic spooky charm. She was a famous singer whose voice was muted by her lips being stitched shut, and her celebrity status visually appears to be that of an opera diva, given her luxurious hooded cape. While her death date references a popular rock musician, she's giving more Phantom of the Opera in her appearance, so I think that would have been her entertainment sphere.

Siren is a simple doll and I wasn't in love with her to start with, but her purple/yellow/black/white color palette struck me more over time and I wanted to see if her simplicity was an asset. I always knew I was getting her full-color main doll for my mixed set of S5 dolls. Of the Series 5 variants, Siren's is the doll I never looked twice at because her greyscale rendition is fairly low-contrast (less dramatic than the original, even) and the colors of the main doll formed a lot of appeal.

I got my Siren opened but complete. There was a cheaper option for her, but I caught that her box didn't have the clear lid, so I moved up a bit in price to secure that.

Here's her chipboard.

The poem reads:

Siren was an untimely singer

Whose voice it was said sure could linger

Until the night she was sewn into silence

Her song abruptly ended with a fierce act of violence.

The second line is clumsy grammar, and the first couplet makes the mistake of forcing a rhyme based on spelling when the words do not rhyme audibly. "Singer" and "linger" have a different cadence on the "ng" sound that prevents the two from rhyming. Here's an alternate poem, since I don't think the bones of the original suit a rewrite.

She lost her song, she had no coda

Her voice was frozen in the air

Her lips were sewn, her throat was choked

Her last note rang in deep despair

Siren's name is, of course, a reference to the Greek mythological Sirens, who were either supernatural women or bird/woman hybrid monsters whose voices had an enchanting compelling quality that drove men sailing past their island mad with a desire to reach them. Because their island was in dangerous seas and the Sirens were predators, the men would drown or get eaten by the beings. The Sirens feature in a part of the Odyssey, where clever hero Odysseus survives the Sirens by having his men tie him tight to the mast of the ship so he can't leave and makes the crew plug their ears with wax so none of them will hear the song he can. As such, "Siren song" has become an idiom to refer to an alluring dangerous prospect, and the Greek Sirens have been often conflated with mermaids as sea-ladies who sing. It's not uncommon to see fish-tailed women called sirens, but as a mythology nerd, I don't participate. Siren seems like she was a perfectly harmless person who was totally victimized, so it's likely her name alludes to her killer being driven mad with some obsession over her and her voice.

I also wonder, though, if Siren's name is meant to be a partial pun on "silent" or "silence". 

Siren's coroner's report sheds a little more light on her death, but not a lot.

She died on October 4, 1970 at 10:05 PM. This day was the day rock singer Janis Joplin died at a young age. Siren has nothing in common with Joplin otherwise. I think this death reference is one of the reminders of the Gen X background of the LDD creators. While Joplin's death remains sad and impactful, I don't think she'd have been the first musical-tragedy reference coming to mind for later generations. For millennials or older Gen Z, I think the reference would be to Kurt Cobain or Amy Winehouse, later famous untimely musical deaths.  

Siren's time of death creates an interesting 10/04 10:05 pattern numerically. She's identified just as a vocalist, and her frightened look is attributed to her lips likely being stitched while she was alive. The biggest detail dropped by the certificate (which I referenced in my poem rewrite) is that her actual cause of death was strangulation, meaning she was tortured and then murdered, with both attacks clearly being symbolic assaults on her ability to sing--shut the mouth and disable the throat. I wonder why someone did this to her. Obviously, it was unjustified no matter the reason. Her crime scene photo has blood below her, which doesn't make a ton of sense because this isn't a bloody doll.

Here she is out of the box.

Siren's hair is a pale unrealistic yellow that leans greenish. It's evidently not supposed to look natural, but I wish its hue were yellower. It's less saturated than I expected (or wanted) it to be, but it contrasts well against her purple tones and mixes with the black and white to give her a very classically spooky palette. 

The hair is long and wavy and parted toward her right, and feels like the most classic retro-starlet hairstyle of the four S5 ladies. It suits her, though I think I'd expect a famous opera singer to have a more formal look with a bun or updo myself.

Siren is a stark-white doll with a simple faceup. Her eyes are black with small yellow irises and black pupils, and have upper and lower lashes and purple rings and slight grey shading around them. The irises have subtle purple outlines. Her eyebrows match her hair and are turned far upward to make her look miserable or frightened. This feels like one of the more tragic LDD fates given her evident reaction, but an unhappy toy can be very endearing from time to time. 

Siren was the first doll to use this stitched-mouth face sculpt, and Isaac in the very next series was the second and last. Clearly, the sculpt wasn't adapted and modified to live on after the ball joint body was introduced. Another stitched-mouth sculpt was debuted late in the ball-joint era with Ella von Terra, but her crossed stitches looked too thick and the bloody mouth paint didn't let the sculpt shine. If a loose Ella ever showed up, I'd be down to try remaking her base to see what the sculpt could do with another look. I prefer Siren's sculpt, though. Her lip laces are painted in a pale off-white color and have less contrast against her skin than Isaac's black stitching, and her lips underneath are painted black, though the effect can make the lips look like an open mouth instead. Maybe purple would have been the better color. It is impressive to have painted the stitches and lips each in their own color.

Here's the two (and only) LDD faces with this sculpt. 

Siren's signature costume piece is her opera cape, which is black crushed velvet lined with purple cotton(?) fabric. The cape has a pointed hood that falls down Siren's back, but she can wear it up.

One side of the cape had a stitch holding the front to the back, which would have been for packaging, so I took it out to let it spread. I assume the other side had such a stitch too,  but the other undone and this one somehow never was. It's possible the cape only ever had one stitch, though.

The cape ties around Siren's neck with a ribbon, which is not my preference. I'd have loved if this closed with a hook or snap instead.

Here's Siren trying the hood on. She's a very spooky doll.

Under the cape, Siren is wearing a very simple dress, with a ribbon-strapped plain black top and a skirt with some pleated panels that have purple sections between them. This detail wraps around the whole skirt.

I've mentioned before how some early LDD costumes, after felt fabric was phased out, shifted the "crutch" material to satiny fabric which created an effect I found really cheap. Siren is one of those dolls. The material isn't bad, but it's not all that special and, applied this way, it looks like a party-store costume rather than something truly elegant or quality. It feels like her cape took all the budget out of the rest of the clothes. I can't tell you which fabrics would suit this costume better, but there had to be something. I'm not impressed, but it looks alright.

Siren's nails are painted, like the other ladies in the series, and hers are purple. She wears the sandal sculpt in black, just like Hollywood and Jezebel.

I made an error discussing Hollywood when I said Series 5 introduced the sandal sculpt. The shoe actually debuted on Ms. Eerie in Series 4, who was the only doll in the series to wear it, but Series 5 went ham on the new sculpt by putting all of its ladies in the sandal right afterward. I've corrected the information in Hollywood's review. 

Siren's right sandal has a particularly loose peg-and-loop connection on the ankle strap. As mentioned previously, I didn't notice this issue with later sandals, with them evidently improving as early as Series 6 with Calico. Calico and Betsy's shoe straps close more securely.

Even though Siren's dress looks like one piece, for some reason, it isn't--the top is a velcro piece, while the skirt is separate and uses only waist elastic to secure it. The top is cut to securely cover the waist so it doesn't ever look like a separate piece or create a gap.

Siren's stains weren't what I expected. I thought I'd see a lot of black on her, but as if in mockery, it's the purple lining of her cape that got her the worst. Her hand has some stains, as does her jaw and neck. 

I then took her down for a good hair wash and comb, and a rinse to clear up any manageable spots on her. Her hair isn't super silky, but while there are some frazzled ends, it didn't feel super catchy on a comb either.

While her dress is simple, her cape does afford her a lot of drama and presence...

...or it can be used to minimize her presence, wrapping around her more meekly.

The cut and drape and hood are all wonderful...the ribbon tie was untenable, though. I'm very bad at tying bows, particularly tiny ones, and getting the ribbon tight around her neck without tying a double knot that would be hell to undo was proving frustrating for me, so I decided to replace the closure for my own ease of use and enjoyment. I tried out a hook-and-eye closure, but while I could successfully attach one with glue, the length of the clasp messed up the look of the cape and didn't let the top close together properly around the neck. I also found it too fiddly and tricky to maneuver. I then tried a plastic snap, but that looked too obtrusive and it showed too clearly in the fold of the collar, so I then switched to black velcro harvested from a doll top. That allowed the cape to close at the right spot without the closure being too jarring--and that's actually the system in use in the very previous photo. This tight velcro closure does preclude the hood being worn up at the same time, so I would probably have to add the hook closure back as a second way for the cape to close that would allow her hood to be worn up...but I can also just put the cape on her head and drape it over her for display, and I don't favor the hood-up look for her. It's fine not being prioritized.

I had a cruelly funny idea for an accessory for her, and I decided to pursue it--a microphone. I had the L.O.L. O.M.G. Spirit Queen boom mic that I thought could be converted to an LDD accessory. Cutting the handle let it slide over the LDD fingers (though no LDD's arms are suited to hold it well), and using a Shadow High mic stand with the socket bored out wider let the boom mic fit in so Siren can be paired with it hands-free. 

The boom mic shape isn't quite right, but I think it passes for a metal grille microphone stand from the older days pretty well.

For Siren's news media piece, I made a very simple magazine cover patterned on a 1970s edition of Life magazine. This is the same fictional magazine issue that my interpretation of Tinselton Stitches is also featured in, as I chose for him to die just before Siren so both of their stories would be printed in the same edition. Siren, in my lore, was Tinselton's first high-profile autopsy after he became undead himself (if we're not counting his autopsy on himself!)

I didn't intend for this meta aspect, but the fact that I only made the cover and not the article accidentally aligns well with Siren being forced into silence. Her story can't get out!

And to put them together, here's Tinselton's story inside the issue, which I've previously shown. I wrote it as if it were finished prior to Siren's death becoming breaking news, so there's an editorial note at the end adding that update.

And here's Siren at her autopsy. Everything looked normal to Dr. Stitches until he fully uncovered her face...

Then I set up a theater for her, with my chest of drawers being pulled open to put a couple of dolls in a coffin-lid "box seat". I'm not totally happy with this setup as far as looking like a believable theater, but what am I gonna do? That'd be very difficult to achieve.

Siren didn't know why she was onstage after she came back from the dead. She couldn't speak or sing, and this new world of ghouls and monsters was frightening to her. Still, she had been pushed into the theater, mobbed by fans desperate to see her next show.

She felt like a joke as the audience silently watched in anticipation, and her head began to swim in anxiety. It was bad enough that she expected, and even hoped, to hear a cricket chirp.

Siren stood in internal anguish, and would be sweating were she still alive, but the audience was rapt at her every motion.  People were responding with awe and emotion despite the lack of any sound in her performance. Was...was she somehow singing?

She began to work it. It was impossible, but it appeared she was performing in dead quiet. Perhaps if she just acted like she used to when she sang--and that's when the crowd truly became affected. She was stunning the crowd with an aria that didn't exist. She could feel it. All her pain and her fear and a newfound elation swelled in the air, but you could still hear a pin drop.

Without even trying, she had created a masterwork of a show.

Siren's Grauman's Theater slab was made for her well in advance once I got Isaac, because he, having the same face sculpt, was able to create the impression of her lips in the clay. I put her name on a musical staff, and her footprints will have her standing on the right side of the full S5 lineup.

And here's an autograph piece. I like making these, and it's a fun way to strengthen my take on the Series 5 worldbuilding by using the signatures I established for the characters in the slabs. Siren's is the first color signed portrait in this group.

Siren isn't the most spectacular doll, and of Series 5, I understand why she's a bit lower-end. Her charm is her spooky colors and high contrast, and I love the volume of her hair and the drama of her cape, but the cape itself isn't very easy to use as-produced due to the ribbon tie around the neck, and the costume and colors can end up making her look a little cheap as well. I think there's real appeal in her aesthetic and tragic design, and the cape really does a lot of lifting for the doll. She has real presence and drama, and that might be worth more than her deficits. I had fun with her, but she's not objectively super special.

May her song find its way somewhere in the shadows.

Boulevard of Stapled Dreams: Dahlia

[This review and the next one were both initially published in An Uncomfortable Living Dead Dolls Discussion, Part 1. I repeat the 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 the longer-term side project of discussing uncomfortable LDDs, 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.

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.

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. 

Freshly baked.

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 Tinselton.

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!

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.

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 street

Saddened by the sound of her own heartbeat

With a razor in hand it was all just too much

Her 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 street

Her heart felt like breaking, it struggled to beat

She ended her life, there was no one to blame

She 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.

Overview

[This section was initially published as Death in The City of Devils-My Living Dead Dolls Series 5 Collection Overview.]

This will not be the most proper "completed series" LDD overview because I did not complete this series in the most standard way. I got both editions of one doll, and I got all five characters, but my complete set as I like it consists of three mains and two variants, so it's not a fully representative set of Series 5 either way. As such, I can't be as objective about the ranking because I did select dolls to serve my appeal.

Because these dolls come from successive decades and reference old media eras, I had a lot of fun exploring a slice of LDD "history" through these dolls, all from one sphere of the world, dying across multiple decades, and being overseen by one mortician. I loved creating news media pieces about the celebrities' performances and deaths from their eras of entertainment history, and it was fun paying attention to the LDD death chronology to figure out who could have logically been around in the scene during each celebrity's time. The mysterious Dr. Stitches named on each death certificate also inspired me to fan-design the unseen coroner and turn him into a custom doll with his own more defined story, since I thought it was compelling that he'd been tenured for long enough to see "patients" from the 1920s to the late 1990s. From this, I created the story of a man who rebuilt himself cosmetically for a long time, and died and returned from the dead during this long career, continuing onward in his role as one of the living dead. 

In effect, my work with Series 5 became so focused on internal facts, thematic repetition, and consistency within an alternate history timeline that this series turned into a fanfiction worldbuilding project for me, built on the crumbs of canon available to me! Truly, most of what I got from this series was what I put into it!

I did not collect the dolls fully linearly regarding their death order--Dahlia would have had to come before Hollywood for that to be the case, but Vincent, Hollywood, Siren, and Jezebel were obtained in linear order. My custom Tinselton Stitches, with where I decided to place his death in headcanon (the same month of 1970 as Siren, days just before her) also fits into the mostly linear structure, because with him according to my concept, the order would be Vincent, Dahlia, Hollywood, Tinselton, Siren, and Jezebel.

The way I picked the dolls, when lined up in the death order, happens to create the perfect visual of a gradual transition to color, reflective of developing visual media and truer-to-life imagery!

It feels like that old gag claiming the past really was in black-and-white before color came to the world, and I think this could have been a fun gimmick for the official design, where the dolls officially transitioned into full color according to their spot on the timeline.

This even works when I throw in Tinselton!

With this series, as with Series 23 (read that project in one go here if you like, or search through my post list at the top bar for the original non-linear edition), I ended up creating formulaic art concepts to explore and return to with each doll. I had several more series of pictures for Series 5-- the celebrity news item(s), the performance advertisement, the professional appearance, the autographed picture, the physical signed footprinted slabs, and the autopsy photos with Tinselton.

Here's the news pieces I made for each, in LDD timeline order:

A 1920s classic newspaper.

Inner page of a 1940s rag.

Hollywood's piece, imitating a 1960s Variety magazine front page.

Magazine cover styled after 1970s Life.

Vile imitation of a vile National Enquirer edition--this is entirely character voice for the purpose of emulating nasty trash, and not reflective of any of my approach or beliefs.

Jezebel got a second news piece just because I wanted to be fairer to her character--here, she has a magazine interview.

For every news piece, all extraneous characters appearing on the pages were selected to fall within the timeline based on their official death dates--every doll depicted in these news pieces was dead by the time the corresponding S5 character made news. No time travelers! That accuracy mattered to me!

Here's all of the posters I made for the stars' shows.

Vincent's vaudeville-theater poster.

Movie poster for Dahlia's angry edgy autobiographical film.

Movie poster for Hollywood's tasteless autobiographical drama film.

Opera poster for Siren.

Opera isn't the same as Broadway, but I couldn't resist making her a second piece for a playbill.

Poster for Jezebel's burlesque show.

Here's my favorite photos of each in their element:

And all of the autograph pieces. I had just done them for Hollywood and Dahlia before deciding each S5 celeb deserved one, and made some for the others after the fact.

My favorite idea was making a sidewalk slab with footprints and signatures for each character, based on the celebrity slabs on the walkway of Grauman's Chinese Theater. Personalizing each was a fun idea, and it makes a fun display.

Vincent's slab, impressed with chains and desperate banging hands on glass.

Dahlia's slab, cut apart and stapled back together like she is.

Hollywood's slab, blood-splattered and impressed with the wounded side of her head.

Siren's slab, impressed with her stitched lips.

Jezebel's slab, signed with a doodle of a rose and vines like her tattoo and costume.

All of these slabs were designed before the autograph photos, which was helpful because I could copy the signatures I drew into the claw to ensure consistency on the signed photos. That made everything feel all the more tied-together and real.

Because the dolls at autopsy relied upon the non-canon design of my Tinselton Stitches, I put this series on its own here despite each of these pictures' events ostensibly occurring before each star's news piece was published.

Stitches cuts the bindings on Vincent.

Stitches staples together Dahlia.

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Hollywood arrives at the morgue in a bloody sheet, but still wrapped in her feathers.

Stitches is about to discover some stitches on Siren.

Stitches tries to bandage Jezebel.

And here's Tinselton's own set of these recurring photos, also set aside because he's not canon. This series would take place between Hollywood and Siren.

Waking up on his own table to perform self-autopsy.

Tinselton's news piece--a magazine article in the very same issue as Siren's story, but written before she became front-page news.

A poster for an ethically-dubious public autopsy show.

Tinselton relishing in the morgue.

Tinselton's illegible autograph photo, themed on X-ray imagery.

Tinselton's slab, styled off his own coroner's reports.

I put together a lot of recurring unifying work with these themed pieces for each character, and it was fun creating a world out of this slice of LDD from the historical crumbs the dolls provided.

The footprint positions of the slabs were chosen so Hollywood would stand centered while the other four surrounded her at an angle.

Tinselton's slab is also centered so he can join Hollywood in the middle, and a slab I made for extraneous character GreGORY the ventriloquist is also centered so he and Tinselton can surround Hollywood in the event I get him. The Great Zombini and Viv could also join this roundup if I get their pack to have the canon dolls.

Now for my ranking lineups--left to right is best to least. Tinselton is not in contention, though I'm very proud of my work with him. First, the character designs:

I'm not the most comfortable saying it given her very real dark and fairly disrespectful basis in true-crime history, but variant Dahlia is one of the most appealing dolls in the series. She looks edgy, strong, confident, and glamorous, and the silhouette of her costume and her black-and-white coloration is great. She also has some very impressive creepy gore sculpts and her outfit has polish. Main Dahlia would be lower for me due to lacking the color appeal with her less stylized and more grounded palette. If main Dahlia was blonde or platinum, she'd have a stronger look.

Jezebel manages to muscle through her deeply upsetting imagery into my second-favorite design. Her look combines plausible vintage styling with absolute camp, and she's got very strong cartoony LDD appeal and a whole ton of presence on the shelf. Her colors and silhouette and over-the-top burlesque look are very charming, and this is high praise for a doll who includes potentially triggering imagery that even made me squeamish. I'm surprised that didn't knock her down more.

Variant Vincent Vaude is above Hollywood. His color palette and minor detail changes make him look more haunting and theatrical than dead and mothball-scented, and there's a real spooky vintage drama in his look. He sells the escape-act gone wrong beautifully and completely trounces the main doll and his ugly, drab visual by changing just a few things. Part of why I like him so much might well be how impressive the effect of his changes are in improving on the main doll. Without that contrast, would he strike me as much? I also just think the variant-series concept of black-and-white dolls was very good, but only Vincent and Dahlia really felt just right within that set. It was a very difficult question whether Jezebel or variant Vincent was my second favorite, and there's an argument that Jezebel's design includes such an upsetting feature she deserves to be lower next to Vincent. But while Jezebel is too much, it's not in your face...and Vincent feels like just a bit too little. Neither Vincent doll feels like an escape artist--just like a dead vaudevillian. Had LDD included chains or bindings or locks and keys on the doll's person to dress his role more, he'd easily move up a slot. I had to do that myself as it is.

Hollywood is in the middle. Her look is campy and glam, but the gore gets a little too grim to fully feel elevated and silly, though I do appreciate the half-and-half facial contrast and the wicked use of scalp paint in her gore design. Her hair is also hard to arrange into the best look.

Main Vincent Vaude is on the bottom. He's a purely ugly doll who looks dead and decayed and elderly by accident, and his color palette was workable but didn't come out right in practice. While variant Vincent gets by with no accessories or escape trappings because his look is formal and dramatic enough to stand alone, the main doll as released especially seems lacking for ropes or chains or locks because you don't get the stage-performer vibe from him. He's just a dead four-year-old grandpa, and that's why I added his bindings.

If I was reviewing a full set of mains, I think Jezebel might end up as the number-one, Hollywood or Dahlia as the number two, Siren as the number four, and Vincent as the number five. 

If I was reviewing a whole set of variants, I think Dahlia would be number one, and Vincent number two. Jezebel would be number three because her look, while not altering any color values, does have a good black-and-white film look. Hollywood would be number four because her black blood and black hair are striking in the new color palette, but the outfit color swapping is disjointed, with only the feathers inverting to white. Had Hollywood's full dress flipped to white alongside the feather accents, she'd be stunning. Siren is the number five of the variant designs, when ranked as a distant observer, because her palette seems the lowest-contrast and loses some contrast and drama of the main doll.

Ranking the dolls for quality:

My variant Dahlia is very nice.. Her hair looks good, her stapled sculpts are well-made and nicely painted, and her costume strikes me as very polished with its embroidery and fringe and texture. She also stands very easily and solidly. 

Vincent Vaude in either version (neither superior) comes in the middle. Nothing wrong with him, nothing spectacular. His hair shaping isn't the best and gel helped out a lot, and his clothes are incredibly tight-tailored and hard to take off or put on, but the doll is okay and succeeds in its aims in either variant.

Hollywood is after. Her dress is nice, but stained a lot, and her hair is a bit of a puffy mess. I think LDD made it a bit more voluminous and curly than it was supposed to be, and it can't really be fully tamed into the more glamorous wavy silhouette. Her shedding feathers also get annoying.

Jezebel is just below. Her feathered epaulettes and rose headband are lovely, and the extra details of her tattoo and garter are nice, but her hair gets a little flyaway, and her left hand didn't get any of the red paint detail on her fingernails that it was supposed to. Her dress is also not spectacular, and the cut of the bodice around the shoulders doesn't feel symmetrical.

Siren is lowest, but it's very subjective. Her two-part dress feels very cheap and simple, but her cape is pretty grand and successful. I think the cape would have been the saving grace and placed her higher, though, had it not fastened with a ribbon tie around her neck, which I found so frustrating to use that I replaced it with velcro instead. As it is, it was the most promising piece that still flopped on the basis of its closure mechanic.

And overall ranking for my broad experience with each:

I'm shocked to see variant Dahlia at the top of every category, but despite her extremely questionable concept, the doll itself is very well-made, has a lot of design appeal, and worked nicely for art inspiration. She's a good toy even if she's a really bad idea. Some of this credit must be awarded to her being the variant doll. Main Dahlia wouldn't be quite as high up there.

Hollywood comes after. Her design doesn't quite click for me with her half-gory face being a little too real, and her hair is a nightmare and her boa is fiddly. She wasn't an easy doll to work with and her concept is similarly tasteless to Dahlia's, but she got great results in the photo department and I have to respect that. She's also the best exemplar of the series concept.

The Vincents come after Hollywood. While the main doll is one of the ugliest ever made by LDD, the fact remains that neither doll had any notable issues and I got good photo work with each edition that I'm quite proud of. They benefit from extra trimmings to sell the escape-artist look, but they're perfectly fine.

Jezebel is a weird case of a doll I quite like who had good photo work, but I don't really want to reward her because of her graphic suicide imagery putting me off and her burlesque theme toeing the line of taste. While her painted cuts don't torpedo her character design, they do still lower her as a doll in general. Her quality is also delicate and flawed enough for me to put her lower. Her low place in this ranking doesn't mean she's a bad doll, though.

Siren is at the bottom again. I was just overall the least impressed by her doll. She's a cute spooky design, and she did debut a great face sculpt, but she doesn't feel especially polished to me. Her cape is the only part of her that feels really quality, and the deliberate simplicity of the visual design doesn't really flatter her when the hair and dress don't feel that great. It can feel like she was simple because she had to be to fall within budget...or it can feel like a cheap execution even for a deliberately simple design. And even with the cape being fancy, it tied around the neck with a ribbon, making for a very frustrating and disappointing system that I had to replace. Siren might be the closest I've gotten to not being happy with an LDD acquisition, and she's the only doll in the series I can come away calling outright disappointing. There's actually a big gulf between Jezebel and Siren in this personal ranking.

Clearly, fame isn't all it's cut (and choked and suffocated and crashed) out to be. 

LDD Series 5 asks what one should be famous for, but does cross the line of taste in multiple ways in doing so. But I can't help but be charmed by the old-Hollywood concept and the variety within the series. Series 23 definitely had a more consistent caliber of designs, though Series 5 didn't offer any drastic frustrations or quality failures like I encountered in review and handling of S23. And again, much of the appeal of the series for me came in choosing variants over mains when I saw fit, because there was less appeal in main Dahlia and Vincent.