Onward to the next spooky series!
Living Dead Dolls Series 18, as mentioned, has basically the same formula as Series 16, featuring spooks dressed up like trick-or-treaters and having a yellow/orange/black variant recolor set.
S18 consists of Jingles (an undefined but very spooky boy in a jester suit); Gabriella the Ghoul (wearing a deliberately cheap printed vinyl costume); Calavera, a Dia de Muertos skeleton costume; Ingrid, a girl who died from a rabid bat and who is dressed as a vampire; and Ember, a witch trick-or-treater who was burned to death. There are close parallels between the two trick-or-treat series in this lineup--Squeak and Gabriella both reflect shoddy costumes, Isabel and Jingles both have domino masks, and Pumpkin and Calavera both have full costume face paint under their masks. Ingrid and Ember don't map up with much specificity to Eleanor and Mishka, though. I guess Ember and Eleanor could correspond for having nonstandard face sculpts, and Mishka and Ingrid both have a bit of a Munsters thing going on?
I feel like I ought to like S18 more than I do, and maybe I will next year. Those dolls just didn't pull at me this time. Jingles is so stylistically similar to Chloe with his colors and face paint that the jester appeal doesn't put him over the top for me, and his variant is more original with the orange colors, but I don't know if the face paint looks right with the changes that it got. Calavera is fun enough, but the hoodie makes her a bit more modern than my favorite Halloween imagery. She has a very impressive full-face Dia de Muertos-style paint design under her mask, though, and her variant is very striking and hits more vintage in its coloration. And Ingrid just has nothing going for her, in my opinion. She's based on an old-school vampire with a touch of Lily Munster, but her mask is about the only part of her that really appeals to me. The costume looks like another case of satin clothing feeling cheap and basic, and her face paint doesn't grab me. Of these dolls, I could see myself looking into Jingles or Calavera another time, though not being able to decide which variant I would like more kept them out of consideration this time. My wallet actually wasn't able to decide for me with the pragmatic answer of "get the cheaper variant of either" because their variants tore me that much!
Series 18 holds the unique distinction of being the latest numbered series that the Resurrection line ever drew from. Calavera got Resurrected in Resurrection VIII, which featured four variant sets, though in practice, it amounted to two versions of the main and two versions of the secondary variant. No later LDD series' cast members ever got Resurrected before we saw the last of the classic dolls to date.
A Life at Stake: Ember
Warning for extreme semi-real burn damage imagery.
I don't know why I don't like Series 18 more than I do, but Ember has always been an easy favorite within the series as a doll I appreciate. Go figure; she's repping the witch archetype, and she's actually LDD's first portrayal of such. Ember was on my original illustrated wishlist when I was a teenager, and then and now was the only S18 doll to be a serious want.
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| My teenage fan drawing of Ember. I decided not to make a double-sided piece with her masked on the other side. I might have been tired. Let this drawn rendition prepare you for the real doll's face! |
LDD's Ember is a thoroughly burned little girl in a trick-or-treat witch costume, which displays a Roald Dahl-esque level of extreme darkness given her chipboard poem states she was a human girl just dressing up. She's based on the enduring historical misconception that is witch-burning, with burning at the stake commonly believed to be the punishment for victims of witchcraft hysteria in the time of witch trials.
This doll tore me between her main release and her variant, but I decided her main was the better choice...to start with.
While I saw a good deal on a listing of both Embers sold with chipboards, certificates, and full parts, I couldn't get past the listing having no coffins. I could get by with just one having her coffin. I only really need one, especially because, unlike Series 5, most LDD variants have nothing unique about their packaging. But having no coffin for either Ember wasn't acceptable.
The seller of my main Ember had tossed in a pretty good-condition screwdriver set in the package, and either it was a bizarre mistake or they were offloading an unwanted item under the pretense of giving a freebie, so...thanks?
I don't think it's generally good practice to put an extra item in a package on purpose to offload it, but I can actually use this.
Nothing at all on Ember is electronic or at all related to screws, so this is an arbitrary thing. Ember came sealed, but here she is repacked in costume.
The Series 18 boxes are basic black coffins with orange tissue again. The photoshoot theme for the chipboards this time is a pumpkin patch with a dark blue spooky sky, and a huge full moon forms a curved protrusion in the chipboard shape, as well as a backdrop for the doll's name and poem.
This chipboard doll in the photo shows signs of being a prototype. Her collar area and visible hand are lacking the burn paint on the produced doll, and there's far less red on the mask while the red itself looks more bright and opaque and looks like it was applied by paintbrush.
The chipboard poem says:
Branding her as a witch was their mistake
Only Ember knew her costume was fake
But the townspeople accused her
Bloodied and bruised her
And in the end she was burned at the stake
The poem is set up like a limerick, but doesn't flow like one. Try this:
She was labeled a witch by mistake
Only Ember knew she was a fake
She was caught and accused
And bloodied and bruised
And in the end, burned at the stake.
Like the other dolls in S16 and S18, Ember isn't packaged with her mask on, but her witch hat is also separate and placed in the back of the box. Ember's hat was totally loose in the back, while her mask, bucket, and certificate were each in their own plastic packets taped to the back of the doll tray.
Leaving the hat off appears to be a very good move, because the hat has been known as a risk for staining Ember's forehead, and I was glad to have the chance to soak and squeeze the piece in warm water and detergent to hopefully leach out excess dye before it could harm her. This is a magically simple way to get out dye that could otherwise exit into a doll's skin, and I'm grateful to have learned about it. Had she been packed in the box, it'd be a disaster. Makes me wish Quack had been wired into her box with her hood down off her head.
When I did the soak with Ember's hat, this is how dark the water got at first!
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| Geez, Mezco... |
I alternated between soaking and squeezing it out in the water over several rounds until the water did not darken significantly. This is a fairly lengthy process to reach a point where the fabric seems safe. I'll still be careful and avoid putting the hat on her sans mask for too long, but I think I did a world of good in making it better for Ember. I'm so glad I was forewarned. Joshua Lee got a preview copy of Ember who had been packaged wearing her hat, so his video review of Series 18 scared me into washing mine. While Joshua made the reassurance that most Embers weren't endangered because they weren't packed with the hat on, I did not trust that and I feel my hesitance was entirely justified. To any reading who may be thinking about getting this doll---wash and squeeze out the hat in warm water and detergent diligently before letting her wear it!
Here's Ember's death certificate.
Despite her relatively timeless-skewing-modern look, Ember died in 1647--the era of the original Salem witch panic. Real Salem "witches" were executed by hanging, not burning at the stake. One of the odd appeals of the Disney film Hocus Pocus is how, despite its abundance of goofy, awkward, cheesy camp, its portrayal of the witches feels relatively authentic to Salem-era beliefs, down to the Sanderson Sisters being hanged to death in their own time. Ember died well outside of Halloween, instead being a May 26 death. I couldn't find any relevant reference this may have. There's no holidays or festivals related to burning or witchcraft that I could find, nor any historical events or celebrity deaths that seem related. Odd that this is her month and date.
The poem here offers a significantly different backstory:
A-trick-or-treating our Ember did go
Flying on a broom with her black cat in tow
Getting her candy by casting a spell
"A witch!" from below the children did yell
She was captured and brought to a judge
Who with Halloween he did hold a grudge
"Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live!" he declared
And consumed by flames is how poor Ember fared.
Lots of clumsy phrasing her.
At trick-or-treat Ember the witch loved to fly
And bounteous treats down below she espied
Candies and fruits flew right up with a spell
Frightening children, who started to yell
She was locked up and thrown down before the old judge
Who with young girls and mischief he bore a great grudge
Quoth he, "Suffer not any witch in this town!"
And with those words, our Ember did burn with a frown.
It's strange that this poem directly contradicts the chipboard, since this telling states that Ember was an actual witch, and not an innocent human girl dressing up as one. In some sense, this better suits her death date, since a Salem victim would very likely not have willingly played at being a witch in innocence, but Ember being killed by hysteria is much truer to history, as witches are entirely unproven and we know the Salem panic now as unwarranted violence, misogyny, and mania. It's possible the truth is that Ember was a normal girl who didn't realize her mistakes and died unjustly, but history was rewritten in the moment to the second version of events where she was an actual witch who was "justifiably" killed.
Here she is unboxed and assembled.
Ember's dangerously-dyed hat is made of a sturdy slightly canvas-like black fabric and has a green ribbon strap with a silver metal buckle decoration.
The hat tip is sewn down in a crooked sideways bend to the right. There is no wire in the hat to adjust it, and it has no chin strap. It just pulls down over Ember's head, and is snug once you get it down over the mask forehead.
This is my first Halloween doll where I get to discuss the typical costume masks! These pieces were used on Pumpkin, Squeak, Mishka, Ember, Ingrid, Gabriella, Calavera, technically also Jingles because the material is the same but not the shape, Ernest Lee Rotten, Nicholas, and Butcher Boop. All of these masks are a thin fragile plastic like most LDD formal hats and held on with black elastic cord. The masks are delicate, but they're a delightful miniaturization of the real kind of classic cheap mask you'd see during Halloween, and there's something so pleasing about the material and function of the pieces being the same as the human pieces. I also like the way the dolls really get two faces as a result, and the masks break from the LDD style in different ways.
Ember's mask is an ugly, warty green witch.
The skin has lighter green tones with airbrushed wrinkles on the forehead, while the middle of the face is dark and muddier-toned with blended red tones highlighting the nose, cheeks and lips while the eyes are shaded with black. The mask has two symmetrical white teeth which are sculpted in a way that they don't seem to come from either jaw and kind of float between the outlined clownish lips. The nose is lumpy, probably to emphasize its size without projecting too far outward. The witch face has thick downturned eyebrows and center-parted hair, painted white. This does not match Ember's real hair, which bothers me a little. Ingrid's mask has similar hair in its sculpt and paint, but that blends with the hair on the doll. The witch mask's chin has a small cleft.
This muddy paint job is most evocative to me of a cheap rubber mask, not a plastic one, so maybe that's the intent? The prototype mask, with the unblended, crisper red and painterly rendering of the color might say otherwise. I know not every Halloween LDD's plastic mask imitates a piece that would be plastic at human scale--Butcher Boop's mask would be papier-mache for sure, and Nicholas's could be as well.
I think this witch face, or at least this muddled paint for it, is a little too ugly for my tastes. I generally respect and adore the Halloween witch as a character, and this is just a nasty boogeyman image. Still very classic.
The masks beyond Hemlock and Honey, to my knowledge, do not feature a full loop of cord threaded through both holes of the mask, and instead have one line which is knotted inside at both ends. See the comparison:
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| Hemlock's mask. |
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| Ember's mask. |
The mask is very thin fragile plastic and the elastic is surprisingly sturdy and tight, which is good for the doll but potentially hazardous for the mask. Cracks occur in LDD mask and hat pieces commonly. While this feels authentic to old cheap masks, I bet they could have afforded something hardier. I think if the cord was looped in parallel lines like the (vinyl) Hemlock and Honey pieces, you could easily end up cracking the piece in an attempt to put both lines behind the doll's head...so maybe it's best that wasn't made an option. The witch mask has a small curve on the bottom that contours around Ember's throat and makes the mask harder to misalign.
Ember could have had one of those retro plastic witch masks that included the hat as well as the face, but I'm glad she didn't and has a real hat instead.
Ember's hair is extremely sparse to reflect her severe burn damage, and is rooted in a single vertical line down the middle of her head, which also cuts off before going very low, all to make it look thin and nearly entirely destroyed by fire and scalp damage. The hair falls in both directions from the single line and can fan out in a very loose approximation of what would be a bob silhouette on a much fuller head of hair.
The hair is a little flyaway and messy, but boiling it would improve very little, and I don't really know if any attempt at yassifying this would achieve anything or suit her concept!
Because the hair doesn't match the hair on the mask, I'm fine letting the mask's elastic band pin it down and tuck it all behind Ember's head while the mask is on.
The minimal hair gives her a lot of forehead. All the better to show off burns with.
Ember uses the torn-cheek face and has a burn theme (like Honey, unconfirmed, might). Ember's paint job is ghoulishly realistic, with irritated patches of pink and orange and darker shading that looks more like real severely burned skin. I think the only thing it's missing is an application of light gloss in points to make it look more irritated and shiny...but that could be too far.
If I had to determine C.O.D. more specifically, I'd say Ember looks like she died of burn complications, but not full immolation--she seems like she might have been taken out of the fire and lived for some time before it was too much. I might believe Honey was burned at the stake a little more than I do Ember, because Honey's fully browned zombie coloring looks more like somebody who never left the flames and burned completely. Maybe Ember died quickly before she was more damaged, and resurrected and escaped just as fast, explaining how she could look more like a severe burn survivor than a direct burn fatality. Or maybe she's actually magic and it takes more to destroy a witch. It sounds really condescending and bizarre to say, but this paint job really is beautiful in its grotesque effect. There's a real artistry in the paint blending together into this mesmerizing uncomfortable visual.
Ember's plastic cast is the palest visible color of her mottled skin, with the rest of the tones being paint. A good portion of her natural head cast is obscured because the paint is so extensive! The paint continues down her collar and features on her exposed hands, but most of her body is unpainted.
Ember unsurprisingly lacks eyebrows and her eyes have wide white sclerae with small grey irises and red pupils and airbrushed grey rings around them. My copy's eyes are a little uneven, with her right sclera spilling past the sculpted eye a little. The lips on the intact half of her mouth are painted black in a slightly smudgy way that isn't very precise, presumably for effect. Her face isn't particularly emotive in any direction, but she falls in the range of stunned or endearingly sad about her fate. There is a pitiable charm to her, but she can look like she's smiling sometimes, too.
Here's Honey compared to Ember. Both dolls have very sparse hair and torn cheeks and Honey could have been burned. If she was, the approach is very different between the two. As mentioned, Honey could be a cartoon crisp, while Ember could be a real patient in Dr. Dedwin's trauma bay.
I hadn't noticed a difference between swivel and ball-joint LDD sizes before, but on these dolls, there does seem to be a subtle difference. They have the same shoes, but Ember looks a bit taller and her head seems a little larger. That could be an illusion on account of her huge forehead, but Honey's got one too and her head somehow feels smaller. Maybe Ember's big eyes are throwing her off that way too, or else the ball-joint mold of this head is less similar to the swivel original. It looks like the ball-joint LDDs might actually have taller necks; all the better for their articulation.
Ember's dress is all one piece, but is sewn to look like an open long-sleeve jacket over a strapless dress.
The black fabric matches her hat, and the green elements match its band. All this time, until just recently before getting her, I'd thought Ember's costume was felt! The jacket portion is very simple, with no cuffs, collar, lapels, or simulated buttons or closures. The dress section features green ribbon "lacing" across the bodice to make it look more old-fashioned, and the skirt has triangular pleats opened over green satiny fabric, in much the same effect as the skirt on Siren in S5. Unlike Siren, there's only the two pleats and green gaps in front. Siren's pleats and purple gaps encircled her whole skirt.
Ember's tights are classically Halloween-witchy with a horizontal striped pattern, and are much like any other LDD's stripy tights. I first got a pair on my Chloe, and Ember's are made the same way, just with the colored stripes being green.
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| Chloe on the left. |
The first LDD with this effect, Nurse Necro, had painted plastic legs rather than a fabric piece, and I believe the switch point to this superior effect with real tights was Jill, of the "Jack and" nursery rhyme exclusive duo. I think Nurse Necro was the only doll to suffer the literally painted-on tights.
Ember's shoes are the black Mary Janes, and I think it's a shame she wasn't put in the pointy witchy boots, but it makes sense with the idea of her being a trick-or-treating kid. The boots would make her taller and are typically used for "adult-coded" LDDs rather than dolls depicting child characters.
I was very pleasantly surprised to find Ember to be very solid on her feet. Typically, the Mary Janes are too loose and the doll can wobble inside her shoes, making her hard to stand properly. Ember lacks that problem--her shoes are snug! Perhaps the mold was adjusted to make the fit on a foot tighter? That must be what's happening. The only other Mary Jane-wearing doll I have post-Series 16 is Jennocide, and she stands well too. The shoes tightening must be why I've seen LDDs like a couple of Resurrection Alison Crux variants who wear the Mary Janes with no socks. That'd be completely unthinkable and horrible design if the shoes were wobbly even on socked dolls. But for shoes as snug as Ember's, I can definitely see a sockless doll doing okay in them.
Ember's shoes are more snug than Return Sadie's. While that Sadie's shoes are tight to pull on, she can wobble inside them, which is why I now default to sitting her on her tombstone for shelf display. Wobbly feet are a dangerous thing for a heavy, fragile doll. I hope Return Sin's shoes will have been made tighter.
For a second I thought Ember had introduced a new question of when the Mary Janes became properly fit...but no. The shoes had to have tightened in Series 18. Since I had already looked at wobbly Eleanor in Series 16, the range of series I hadn't checked was tiny. Because I knew what Series 16's shoes were like, it had to be either Series 17 or 18 where the change could have happened...and there was nothing to check, anyway, since it happens that Series 17 featured no Mary Janes! Bloody Mary has pointy boots, The Hook and Spider Bite have round-toed boots, and the Vanishing Hitchhiker and Unwilling Donor are both barefoot. Series 18 (or whatever non-series dolls released between S16 and 18) would be the point where the Mary Janes started fitting better.
I know for certain Ember's shoes make previous Mary Jane dolls stand way better than their own pairs. There was a night and day difference when I put Ember's shoes onto Evangeline. Evangeline positively swam in her Mary Janes and was difficult to stand, but her feet fit snug in Ember's.
Not all older LDD Mary Janes have been criminally loose. My sealed Series 6 Jinx turned out rock-solid in her own shoes, and they're a good push to get onto her. I wonder where the variance and looseness came from.
Ember's pumpkin bucket returns to the lighter color and shading used on Hemlock and Honey's, though there are subtle differences in execution. There's an even more prominent circle on her bucket handle (where the palm peg was placed on the first buckets), suggesting this is indeed an artifact of modifying the first bucket handle mold.
Left to right, here's a bucket from the Hemlock and Honey set, Series 16, and Series 18 next to each other.
Ember is the answer to another production mystery, one that arose ever since I noticed my Series 12 Chloe's left-hip ball-joint was broken due to its inherently brittler translucent plastic. I had checked other series between Series 12 and Series 23 to see where the switch to more suitable opaque plastic was instated for the ball joints--and I can now tell you. Series 18 marks the switch for the brand, at least in within the numbered series. I've checked Series 17 with Bloody Mary, and she has the translucent white joints that followed the translucent yellow joints. (The switch between those two would have to be between Series 12 and 16.) Ember, meanwhile, has opaque black!
Ember can, of course, wear her hat without the mask, and this is a strong look. I just cannot recommend it without some serious warm rinse and detergent treatments to make the hat safer for extended contact with her vinyl. And even then, I have doubts.
I believe Ember is the only LDD with the torn-cheek sculpt and the gripping hand together, making another copy of her a potential body base candidate for a Series 31 custom insert boogeyman character I have in mind. Series 12's Cuddles, who actually debuted the gripping hand, has a torn face and a good body color for such a custom character, but her head appears to be a modified one-off sculpt which includes a clown nose, and is not the normal torn sculpt. Reportedly, the Cuddles nose is not glued on as a separate piece, which would make her head mold the only detail variant of the torn-cheek design. And Cuddles is way too expensive to use for custom fodder.
Here's a simple re-creation of the old drawing I made of Ember, because I was onto something there.
Here's some pictures with her masked, disguising the fact that it's a mask.
And playing with red and green light, using red to catch out her burns.
With a head-on bareheaded angle and very yellow and dark lighting, she can create an imitation of a ghoulish oil portrait that would hang in a haunted house.
I also wanted to explore her paint and texture on its own, so I made a painted backdrop of her skintones. To create the heavy texture, I glopped on paint mixed with flour.
The obvious main thing to do, however, was to burn Ember at the stake! I selected a piece of firewood that was the right size and was able to stand up and tied her to it. I set it on my fake grass in front of a black backdrop, and added some floral arrangement grass to make some kindling, as well as some sticks to prop up a bonfire shape. I hung her mask on one stick and put her hat on the ground.
I then lit the scene with orange light and digitally added flame effects in post. It's not perfect, but it works.
I think Ember is a really compelling doll. As a witch, I don't know how special she is, but as a burned zombie, she's very interesting. Her skin has an oddly fascinating painterly effect that inspired me to push her into classic painted portrait themes for photos, her sparse hair is unusual, and she has a lot of endearing personality thanks to her horrific end. Her costume is very classic for a witch theme, but I don't love the paint job on the mask and my favorite photos of Ember de-emphasized her Halloween outfit in favor of exploring her death and burns. Despite her witch theme, it's kind of what I like least about her in execution. Her poems are of two minds about it, but I see Ember as the unfortunate little girl first and foremost, not as a supernatural being.
Exactly What It Says on the Costume: Gabriella the Ghoul
Gabriella is a really interesting idea because she reflects a singular specific niche of old Halloween kitsch: the Ben Cooper costumes.
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| Page from a 1988 Ben Cooper catalog. |
The Ben Cooper company was known for making very cheap Halloween costumes that would pair a character half-mask with a printed plastic smock or shirt/pants piece that depicted the very same character on the front, often with their name. It was a bizarre mix of first-person with the mask and third-person with the costume, and wasn't any better than buying a graphic tee of a character and then wearing a mask of that same character. Far from a convincing effort, and the Ben Cooper costumes weren't even proper clothes like a tee would be! Of course, though, this gives them a very unique weird charm, and the costumes do have a function as a display of fandom toward a character. If you don't interpret the costume as a depiction of them, but rather as a tribute to them, it works better. For someone like Gabi dressing as a generic archetype, the costume looks weirder and more endearingly odd, but the Ben Cooper company certainly did things in her vein.
Gabriella, as such, is rocking the Ben Cooper formula in her costume as "the Ghoul", which is to say, the proto-zombie before that word transferred over from the Haitian legend. Gabi is retro enough that it makes sense she'd be called by an earlier name for an undead corpse. I didn't know how I felt about Gabriella, but I liked the specific target of her concept and she was growing on me enough to earn the role of the second Series 18 showcase. I don't typically resonate a ton with the zombie archetype on its own merits, but Gabriella is poppy and kitschy in a very appealing way.
My copy came sealed and packaged sans mask, as usual. Her plastic cling wrap was torn, though.
Here's her chipboard. This also has signs of depicting a prototype--while the mask may or may not be greener than the produced piece, the print on the costume is certainly different. White coloring is used in the graphic, whereas on the final costume, those areas are left as yellow negative space to shade the same highlights, and the ghoul character's skin looks much more saturated.
The chipboard poem says:
Little Gabriella
Dressed up as Cinderella
And thought that she was so cool
Until she got eaten alive
When Halloween arrived
And was christened Gabriella the Ghoul
This poem may be the only one to outright confirm a doll's costume is not what they were wearing when they died. Gabi is described as wearing a Cinderella costume on her fateful Halloween, but is now wearing a ghoul costume that matches her undead nature. The doll design, with her costume and face paint combined, strikes me as less of a girly girl than someone who would have dressed as Cinderella, so I don't know how well it fits. Probably just done for the rhyme. Or else Gabriella was always a girly girl, but now wears a ghoul costume as a disguise. You could take it either way: she's chosen the worst possible costume because she's outright labeling herself directly for what she is, or she's chosen the perfect costume because she blends seamlessly into it and nobody would expect her ghoul appearance to be anything but performative for Halloween's sake.
Here's a rewrite.
Poor young Gabriella
Wasn't Cinderella
She was more attuned to death and gloom
But she became a queen
That wicked Halloween
When hungry ghouls arose and sealed her doom.
Gabriella died on November 23, 1933
Like Ember, her death date has nothing to do with Halloween, nor, really, with much else. Ember's death year at least suited her concept, but nothing about Gabi's date seems evidently relevant to her, and it precedes the Ben Cooper company and the period in which it became an icon.
Her certificate uses her full moniker, and this confirms that "Gabriella the Ghoul" is the proper full address for her. Of course it is. The costume itself says so! Her first name is capitalized, but not her epithet. It's so inconsistent whether the names on the certificates are all caps or mixed-case, and there's no apparent rhyme or reason for why X or Y doll or series renders them one way or another.
Her certificate poem says:
Tricks and treats on Halloween
Are guaranteed to stir up a fright
But when Gabriella knocks
It's best to not undo your locks
Or you will end up with a bite
And an alternate poem (this one wasn't giving me much inspiration to rewrite it).
See the little trick-or-treaters
Happy little candy-eaters
But Gabriella joined the league
Of hungry, ghoulish maggot-feeders
And unboxed.
I really love Gabriella's color palette.
Gabriella had a red ribbon headband with a white-dotted red bow on top. This piece has a small elasticated section and slides around the back of her head, with her hair meant to thread through it. It's a fiddly piece to put on with her hairstyle and it's tricky to adjust into the right spot, but it's really cute when it's working and reminds me of an old childhood classmate of mine who had dark long hair and wore hair accessories like this.
Gabriella's ghoul mask is a paler green than she is (it's nearly white, and looked greener in photos by Mezco), and has a characterful glum zombie face with stitches, shaded forehead wrinkles, sad lips, and an open forehead gash showing brains. Ears feature on the sides, and the elastic cord goes through them.
The face looks masculine and matches the illustration printed on the costume. I like that she's not wearing a girly zombie costume, and the tomboy vibe works well against her longer hair and red bow. She feels dimensional.
This mask is special and so notably pale because it's cast in luminous plastic!
I don't believe any of the other S18 dolls have glow-in-the-dark elements, and I have to assume this special feature is actually lost with Gabriella's variant doll, whose mask is yellow.
I think the only other Halloween LDD with a glowing feature is the white United States edition of Jack O Lantern.
The cord on my Gabriella's mask may not be tight enough by just a small margin, as I find myself having to shift the band around the back of her head to keep it in tension and make sure it's aligned high enough over her eyes.
One cool side merch thing LDD did was rerelease three Halloween dolls packed in boxes with a printed T-shirt and a human-size replica of their costume masks. Pumpkin, Gabriella, and Calavera all got this release treatment, and it's really cool seeing the doll masks scaled up. The masks would be a fun niche home decoration to have where nobody would know it was from something but you'd know....and these masks could be invaluable pieces for cosplays of these characters seeing as they're very accurate upscales.
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| The dolls were packed perpendicular to the masks, wired against the front left side walls of the boxes, hidden behind the character art of Pumpkin and Calavera. |
Gabriella's hair is very fiddly. She's got mid-length straight black hair that doesn't reach her waist, which is proportionally shorter than most loose-haired girl dolls. The style has a leftward part that's meant to go across her forehead and tie down secured to hair in the back. This section was fully out of her face as she arrived, and retying it was very annoying. Then there's her headband, which is a loop around the back of her head that's hard to pull up the head without mussing the hair. It's easiest to push it down around her neck like a collar and then pull it back up her face until it's on top of her head, but that risks pushing the tied part up off her forehead and out of her face. It's hard to find the right position to keep the band taut and secure. It's very fiddly, and when you add the mask over all of it, it's not very user-friendly. The hair is really cute, but I wish the part had been gelled down firmly in place before tying. This was my best result without gel.
The hair feels like typical saran and isn't fried.
Gabriella's hair cannot really flow free when she's wearing the mask because it obviously isn't rooted all above where the band rests like Ember's. Pulling the pinned-down hair sideways does allow you to give it more presence in her masked silhouette.
Gabriella's face has a unique rendering style, with airbrushed shading in more linear shapes to create wrinkles and shadows on her face. Solid outlines are only used around her irises. The irises are yellow with small white dot reflections and her pupils are black. A red water line defines the lower edge, and she has an empty upward gaze similar to Purdy.
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| Purdy better keep that brain covered, lest Gabi get hungry... |
I've never been sure how to describe the aesthetic of Gabriella's face paint, but it's entirely her own. It works for an older-time version of a zombie, and it gives her a lot of character as a slightly awkward girl who likes monsters and became one herself. I did notice that in lower lighting, you lose some of the tonal and color nuance of the paint, which makes it look more 2D and flat, and I'm assuming that's the intent--for her face to blend a more realistic rendering with a flatter 2D contour that matches the comic-art look of her costume graphic. Her glowing zombie mask is cool, but I like her so much better bare-faced. Her skintone is a very pale muted olive green.
Gabriella's plastic smock is as awful as it should be. The one-piece cut is designed to look like a shirt/pants set with a baseball-tee design. The torso of the shirt section is yellow and printed with an illustration of her costume archetype, helpfully labeled "the Ghoul" for any who were confused. The whole costume graphic is very much in the style of comic-book art and recalls pulp horror comics of the retro era. The sleeves and legs of the smock are a tealy green. The green costume limbs are fully glossy and smooth, while the torso is a bit less shiny.
This costume is 100% plastic and it's fairly thick, so I have no worries about it aging poorly, unlike fabric coated with a vinyl layer that can crack and peel off. I'm vaguely reminded of the LDD Tin Man's coat, which also used a thick and shiny plastic fabric that doesn't worry me--though the Tin Man's coat has fiber fabric on the inside. I'd wager Gabi's costume is actually substantially hardier than the Ben Cooper human-size smocks. Even if scaled up to human proportions, her costume plastic may be stronger.
There's something interesting, isn't there, about a zombie in this costume. You have walking decay dressed in something that will functionally never decompose, and a rotting corpse who will be nothing but bone well before her costume ever looks worn. Something something metaphor commentary, perhaps.
I think the red, yellow, green, and black tones form a perfect color palette on Gabriella. All of her colors work so well together for her kitschy purpose, her monster type, and for general aesthetic value. I might also just be responding well to Gabi being a Living Dead Doll with more than a minor presence of yellow. It's very rare for the shade to be especially saturated or prominent in the LDD catalog.
The really cool thing about the smock is that it also goes on just like the real thing--the Ben Cooper pieces were open-backed and tied behind the neck, drawing an unflattering comparison to hospital gowns, and Gabi's costume works in just this way. No velcro, snaps or buttons--just the tie at the back of the neck and the whole thing slides off down her body when that's undone.
The tie strings can stretch and deform when pulled too hard, so it's recommended you be gentle pulling her strings in the tying and untying. I also get nervous about combing her hair and snagging a tie by accident.
Gabriella has the dress shoes in black and wears white socks. Like Ember, the shoes fit her nicely.
Gabriella's variant doll is cool because her saturated skin led to that being included in the color palette overhaul, in the same way green Mishka in Series 16 got a skintone change too.
Her skin in more neutral light is more yellow-orange in tone, and not as solidly yellow as variant Mishka's. I think the variant's body color is more saturated than the main's.
I think Gabi's specific flavor is better suited by her main design, though. The variant doll also includes green accents in her costume print and eyes, and I'm not sure about those. It looks like most of the print colors on the costume graphic are simply unchanged, and they should have been changed in order to suit the new palette. The problem with both Mishka and Gabi's variants is that they're nice designs, but the colors also take something away from their concepts. Like, I love variant Mishka and was seriously considering her, but I couldn't ignore that the werewolf costume made more sense to me with the main doll's colors of dull blue-grey plaid and denim. The variant would work great as a goblin or something, but her spooky autumnal palette only really suited her unmasked, and half the fun of the Halloween dolls is in their costume. And a classic poppy family-friendly zombie like Gabriella simply must be green. Orange doesn't suit the idea as well.
I really wanted to render the image on Gabriella's shirt with Gabi herself in the role of the ghoul, which would also create a fun bizarre nested picture where the image is replicated within her costume. I used a photo of Gabi and put a trace overlay on, just because tracing the graphic on her costume would make a fully-drawn image too difficult. I had to use the real photo. I did put a bluish layer over her mask to make her more vibrant and match the ghoul on her costume, while I traded the sulfur symbol on the scene's gravestone for her series denotation. Since the costume says "The Ghoul", I used "Gabriella" on the piece, which matches the style of the text but also completes the doll's full name when you read the text on the background and then read closer and read her costume too. I think this piece came out really well and I love how meta it is.
For the composition, I prioritized Gabriella's pose and placement matching the graphic on her costume, at the expense of being able to show more of the graphic and more of a mirroring. I had an earlier version where more of her torso was out of the ground, letting you see that the ghoul's arms on the costume are doing the same broad pose as the doll's arms, but having her so far "unburied" didn't let her fully match the posing and layout of the graphic. I think the gag of nested imagery is still clear without seeing the bottom of the costume graphic, but putting her torso in the ground a little deeper for accuracy was a small sacrifice I had to make.
Here's a poster with her mask glowing and illuminating her.
And because this was already so similar, I went for a full graphical imitation of the poster for George A. Romero's original Dawn of the Dead, itself imitated by LDD for the Series 22 chipboards.
This isn't a fully-staged portrait, but I thought she looked really interesting under blacklight.
And a simple phone filter in a comic-ish style.
Gabriella's poppy, artificial costume aesthetic doesn't lend her super great to natural scenery, in my mind.
Overall, I think I like Gabriella the Ghoul more than I thought I would, but not necessarily much more. I think she's a fantastic tribute to colorful, poppy Halloween kitsch and a specific manufacturer's iconic baffling costumes, and I love how faithful in design and even attachment her smock is to the Ben Cooper style. Her mask is also very characterful and the glow is awesome. I prefer the doll unmasked, with her unusual, awkward endearing face paint. I think Gabriella is just a little too fiddly. Her hairstyle, headband, and mask are each their own thing to fiddle around into the right look, and when they're all going on simultaneously, it can be delicate. I also found myself a little bereft of photo inspiration for her due to her very specific look not aligning a lot with scenery and props I have. That's by no means a condemnation. Sometimes I just don't have it all. And good lord, I'm fine with a few of these Dolloween dolls having lighter sessions because there's still so many more I have to work up!
Like with my Series 16 post, I matched the vibe of the chipboard for my cover photo, which suits the theme of these Dolloween spotlights being set later and later in one night--Ember and Gabriella have tricked and treated and are now exploring town and visiting the pumpkin patch late in the night. I grabbed a bunch of decor pumpkins, set them and the dolls up at night in a patch of leafy plants outside, and put a black backdrop behind to light blue, and used some dead branches for the tree scenery. The only part of this photo that was done with my computer software was adding the moon.
I'm really happy with the emulation here.
Thus concludes my look at Series 18! Next up, Series 32!
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