Let's just say existing in my country right now is incredibly demoralizing and frightening, so November has become significantly grimmer. But I don't want that to shut me down, and my hobbies and creative passions are all the more vital to me in the face of this huge concerning uncertainty. Content will proceed as planned. Be safe and stay strong.
Now to the doll intro proper.
The vibes are strange with this one. At time of writing and publication, it's that liminal empty period after Halloween and before Thanksgiving, I'm entirely ready to just get into Christmas, and here I am, playing at Easter! Blame Mezco's release schedule! I was not waiting until this doll was in season!
Eggzorcist (commonly unofficially nicknamed Eggy by fans) is the second doll sold in the Return of the Living Dead Dolls revival, with her preorder going up at the proper spring timing in 2024, but her shipment beginning in autumn--mine arrived in the back half of October. Return Damien and Sin have been revealed and added to the shop page in the time since I preordered Eggy, and after them, only Posey is left to complete the Series 1 cast...and who the hell knows what happens with the brand after them. Eggzorcist could have made an awesome springtime release to tie into her Easter theme, but oh, well. I received my Eggzorcist before Halloween, but delayed her review since the Living Dead Dolloween project was my focus for October and I was thinking about doing more for Eggy, sourcing one or another of her original dolls for comparison.
But first...
Downer Preface--More Context on Return LDD
I have to address the fact that the Return LDDs exist under less happy and more uncertain circumstances than I had assumed. I expressed awe at Sadie (if you haven't, please read that post; it's one of my best) as a symbol of the culmination of a creative friendship...but it seems she's actually just the opposite. I'm not in on any insider LDD fan spaces, so I've never known any behind-the-scenes stuff that didn't get listed on the fan wiki, but Flying Purple Monkfish's own review of Sadie added valuable context by discussing what seems to have happened with the soft-hiatus state of the brand--the lack of LDD non-licensed content for several years between 2018 and 2023 seems to have been due to the fracturing of the creative team.
Apparently, one of the creators (alleged elsewhere to be brand co-founder Ed Long) got ousted from LDD/Mezco for fraudulent intake of commission money without delivering on promised work. So it seems a key originator is out, explaining the lack of new original content for all these years as the result of the creative team no longer working together. I assume Mez Markowitz, owner of Mezco and the third classic LDD creative partner/designer (he joined the design team after taking in the LDD concept) is still on the brand, and perhaps the other originator, Damien Glonek, has stuck by him.
I actually noticed the LDD product itself appearing to confirm that last point--in the Super Fun Pack supplemental accessory set for Return LDDs, there's a fake book prop "written by" Damien Glonek and Damien Glonek alone.
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| Seeming confirmation of the current LDD staffing dynamic. (Photo owned by Mezco, from their shop listing for the LDD Super Fun Pack.) |
Here we enter the realm of total speculation, but perhaps the LDD rebrand was thus forced by rights or patents or contracts or settlements or something mandating that, with this split in the creative team, the older style of doll designs can no longer be used if the characters must still be retained? We still don't really know about that because no new classic-style LDD original characters have been announced since the reveal of the Return line. They still could be on the table, but this shift to a high-end slow-release format might have been for the lack of other options to run the brand on, or perhaps as a way to close the book on a past that isn't so rosy anymore and remake LDD in a way to wash hands of the guy who got booted.
Come to think of it, nowhere on Return Sadie's packaging or instruction sheet did the everpresent phrase "Based on the creepy doll series of Ed Long and Damien Glonek" ever appear. That was always there during LDD "G1" to my knowledge. While semantically, the phrase doesn't actually cease to be true for the Return dolls under these alleged unhappy circumstances, its omission may signify that the duo and their story really is over. At least Glonek is still on board?
Whatever happened behind the scenes and however it influenced this revival, it's sad to hear things have changed under negative circumstances, and it does make a difference to hear that these spectacular dolls apparently would not have been the product of both founders. A sweet origin story has turned sour, and the "end of the era" I perceived was not just in the classic toys after all, but, it seems, in the creative team as well. I wanted to think of these dolls as a pure triumph, not a compromise or recovery. If I'm understanding the rumors right, Mezco and the other LDD staff weren't wrong to make their choices at all, and I wish the best to Damien Glonek and anyone else who stayed on the brand and I hope they still enjoy the creative work with the IP. It's just melancholy to think of.
Monkfish also posited the grim prospect that the Return dolls could be a grand finale, but I'm hoping that won't be the case. I don't think the word choice in the branding would make sense if that were true, but it's true that both of us were independently left with the same question of what next? Nobody yet knows where LDD will go after finishing the Series 1 cast in this new style because doing a nostalgia set of S1 makes the future ambiguous. Had this new doll engineering debuted with brand-new characters, it'd be obvious as a full replacement for the brand to be carried on. Rebooting with older characters is a much safer market move and a great display of the "upgrade", but I personally dislike the uncertainty it creates. Sure, if the line doesn't work for Mezco, LDD could close up shop with some grace after the S1 remakes are finished. But I'd love to see the line go beyond nostalgia baggage and I worry it might not get that chance this way. I'd have tried releasing something fully new alongside the old to really test if this rebrand had potential to carry the future of LDD...and to give at least one new character to the brand after so many years! I wish the brand the best, but where's it going?
We do have a slight idea now that new LDD Presents licensed dolls have been announced since the Return series, and they seem like they might be built on the classic body, as they're cheaper and listed as having five points of articulation like classic LDD, though the Presents dolls' more recent state of all having more screen-accurate custom character head sculpts might put any recognizable classic heads in the past. As such, we still haven't fully seen a post-Return LDD with the classic look. The older body might still be in contention even if the older face design is slipping away. Even though I prefer LDD originals, the Presents line has a lot I'm curious about investigating, production-wise.
Return Damien has also since been revealed.
He has a lot of stuff, including two wig scalps for different haircuts, and two pairs of eyes in addition to the two faces, as well as two cloth caps and a coat, a separate necktie, and several accessories...but I've never cared all that much about LDD Damien and I don't like the moral perspective of The Omen at all, giving the movie reference behind the character no appeal to me. The Return Damien doll seems to be outstanding value and might be the Return doll that got the most love put in so far, and he should be a wonderful treat for his fans, but it's not an immediate "yes" for me.
We've also seen Sin.
She looks less like Return Sadie than I'd expect based on the consistent visual "twinning" pairing of the characters throughout the brand, though she does still clearly match. Her similar dress is a warmer-weather cut (appropriate for Hell) and has no brooch and her hairstyle is different. Sin has a more grotesque demonic look to both head sculpts, with a wrinkled heavy brow on the tamer head and a caricatured cartoony grin on the other. I'm reminded of 1980s prosthetic creature makeup in a fun way. Both faceplates have the horns on the forehead, not the scalp, so each offers a different horn design. I like the look of Sin and her energy, but her accessories, bar the pitchfork, compel me the least and I'm leery about the visual device of her center-parted gelled hair locks wrapping around her horns in front. That seems very fiddly and unlikely to hold up well, and I don't know how well her faceplate seam would be disguised if those locks were combed out and swept behind the horns instead. Interestingly, Return Sin has another new Mary Jane shoe mold that more closely matches the original LDD shoe than Return Sadie's did. I hope it fits tighter. I am also very curious as to what they did to create Sin's devil tail this time.
Posey has been publicly shown but not yet listed on preorder. She is beautifully terrifying and captivating, with the absolute perfect creepy dirty doll look that entirely maintains an eerie sweetness for a girl buried alive. I am shocked by how amazing she turned out, and did not expect her to appeal so much to me. This is the only one of the five Return LDDs to instantly strike me and click as a perfectly compelling design. This picture doesn't show her extras, but who even cares about that when this is your base???
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| I can't wait for her to be listed! |
Posey may very well run away with the crown at the end of this series, but she'll be a ways off into next year at the shortest likely timeframe, so let's focus on our doll of the hour.
Return Eggzorcist
Eggzorcist was a clear yes, though, because her vibe is so unusual.
Eggzorcist was a Series 1 character, and was a girl dressed up for Easter in a bunny suit and got strangled by the strings of her hood, which are usually styled tied into a noose. The original noose was a solid plastic loop stuck around the the neck of the doll unless you cut it or popped out her head.
Eggy's name doesn't make a whole lot of grammatical sense (an exorcist is the person who gets rid of the demon, not the possessed person, nor is it a term for the whole possession situation) but it generally puts a spooky spin on Easter.
This character can be called mildly blasphemous even though she's ostensibly based on springtime Easter celebrations that have no religious derivation. An undead evil girl based on the holiday could ruffle some pious feathers, particularly because, despite Eggy never being referred to in such ways, it wouldn't be too hard to make a reach and view her Easter zombie theming as a mockery of the holy Resurrection. I'm not shocked or upset by the doll at all, and LDD has been much more explicitly demonic with other characters to explore that sphere of horror (also doesn't upset me)...but let's just say there's a whole audience these dolls alienate. Then again, that's kind of the point. LDD is subcultural by definition.
Eggzorcist is one of the most merchandised characters in the brand, with one of the highest totals of different releases. Thus, it makes sense for her Return doll to come second. Damien is third, though, and he has the fewest doll editions of the Series 1 characters. Eggzorcist's Series 1 doll had a convention-exclusive reimagining with a blue costume and wavier white bangs, and I find this doll absolutely darling. I think this is the first Eggzorcist with a fiber tie around her neck, but this doesn't look like a noose...nor does it look very sturdy.
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| She also looks to have yarn ties around her ankles which the S1 doll does not. |
She was also remade for the 13th anniversary, though the remake dolls had very subtle changes and I couldn't pin down what changed for Eggzorcist's visual design.
Maybe it's just in the sew of the outfit, or possibly changing her noose to real rope? I really can't see a difference, though I know the produced doll had a gripping hand while the variant replicating S1 more closely likely did not. Unfortunately for Sin, that pattern meant her anniversary variant had a flat hand that can't hold her pitchfork, just like the original. If I want the best classic Sin, I'm going to have to steal the gripping hand from the main anniversary doll and swap it over to the S1-based variant. I don't know if remake Eggzorcist went back to a plastic noose, but it kind of looks like both variants did.
Eggy was also, naturally, cast as the White Rabbit in the Living Dead Dolls in Wonderland collection. I think the white body color suits her.
She also appeared in the LDD Minis and Living Dead Dollies spinoffs. Shockingly, she did not appear in the Fashion Victims line, even though bunny costuming is ripe for the naughty (and grossly objectified) adult tone of the first wave in particular. Perhaps LDD felt they'd be risking litigation from Playboy if they tried. For Eggy's sake, I'm glad she escaped that doll line.
More on the last of Eggzorcist's classic editions shortly.
Easter is one of the least exciting holidays to me, and of all the holiday aesthetics, it's at the bottom. I can thrive with Valentine's, Christmas, and especially Halloween. I can work with Thanksgiving to a degree just because I love autumn and most of the foood and companionship even though I'm no turkey nut and find nothing to celebrate in the foundational myth of the holiday. But while a perfect cool spring day is one of my favorite environments, the pastel bunnies-and-chicks secular Easter iconography just does nothing for me. I like cute, but Easter cute often feels a little one-dimensional to me. There's not a lot of grandeur or romance to latch onto like you can with Valentine's themes, nor does it feel as fantastical or charming to me as Christmas theming. I guess vintage Easter and more naturalistic rabbits and chicks are more palatable to me, but the vibe is still of little interest. So it's fairly remarkable that Return Eggzorcist pushes through that for me. Maybe it's because she turns it so grotesque. I might just require a subversive element to pierce through the fluffy purity of the typical decor.
Eggy's preorder window overlapped with Easter, but she was shipped in fall. When her box arrived, I noticed it felt lighter to me than Sadie's, and I wondered why...and then I remembered Eggzorcist doesn't have a solid resin gravestone like Sadie did. Unless Posey has one too, Sadie might prove the weightiest package of her S1 Return collection.
Eggzorcist's box design is in the same formula as Return Sadie's. The lid is identical save for the text.
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| Shown sealed in the cling wrap here. |
The back also follows suit with a photo portrait covering the back.
Eggzorcist's doll tray is the same style, just shaped to her. Like Sadie, she's under a contoured clear lid that keeps her in the red tray. I took the clear lid off for this photo.
Sadie had her bouquet accessory taped to the clear lid of her doll tray to make like flowers laid on her for burial. All of Eggy's accessories are in the tray under the doll's.
Here's the doll removed.
Eggzorcist strikes me as a looser visual adaptation of her Series 1 counterpart than Sadie does, with the biggest changes being in aesthetic tone moreso than the physical details. She's not quite a Resurrection doll in terms of differences, but she might as well be considered one because Eggy was the only Series 1 character not to get a release in the Resurrection line. It's possible, but not confirmed, that this was deliberate per concerns of blasphemy above and that Mezco might not have wanted to associate the undead possessed Easter character with the word "Resurrection". Eggy did get an exclusive release with multiple global variants, and that had the Res glass eyes but wasn't classed as a Resurrection doll.
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| USA 10th Anniversary Eggzorcist. |
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| Japan 10th Anniversary Eggzorcist. I'm in love with the weird colors! |
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| UK 10th Anniversary Eggzorcist. I...get it, but blah. |
She also got a glass-eyed Resurrection-esque redesign alongside the other Series 1 characters as one of the six random mystery dolls included within the greater Series 35, but those dolls weren't classed as Resurrections either.
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| Series 35 Eggzorcist. |
The Series 35 doll was the only Eggzorcist not in a onesie suit, instead going for more of a classic "Sunday best" dress and a hood. You could read some Alice tones into this doll too.
I think you can probably say that Eggzorcist did get her Resurrection release through the multinational 10th anniversary drop, because the manufacturing format with the eyes and the overall design effect is the same as a Res doll, but perhaps it was deliberate that she wasn't functionally Resurrected under the name "Resurrection". LDD doesn't seem concerned with Christian sensibilities overall, but it feels deliberate that this character's glass-eye remakes were outside of the Res line. Or maybe not. Perhaps LDD just did the 10th anniversary doll as a solo release with the consequence that it counted as her Res and barred her from the Res line proper, and had no qualms about that.
What was so encouraging about Return Eggzorcist to me is that she immediately demonstrates that the new era of LDD, if it continues, might embrace just as much aesthetic variety as the older line. In contrast to Sadie being a high-end clean fancy doll aesthetic, Eggzorcist aims for a really grimy antique doll look and pushes much harder on scary, uncomfortable imagery. This is the freakier doll by far, and I think making Eggy the second release was a smart choice to show range and variety. While Sin, Damien, or Posey might have been the characters I'd default to for the second rollout of the Series 1 crew, Eggzorcist is a great hook to show that not everybody in the new editions will follow one approach, and she's even been significantly reinterpreted for this effect.
Eggzorcist's bunny suit here is done like a pajama onesie with simulated buttons down the front. This styling is subtly unique, with the front-opening design being new to the character's costume look. The suit is made from velour fabric. The body is cream while the interior of the ears and chest are pink, and brown staining outlines certain features and adds visual texture to make her look old and dirty. The hood has bunny ears on the top, of course.
I think the spacing of the ears is just right. Original Eggy's ears were too close together for a hood on a human head even though rabbit ears are quite close on the animal. Return Eggy's ears are also great because they're fully outlined with sewn-in wire, allowing them to stand up easier, and giving you the freedom to shape them however!
The edge of the hood around the face also has wire sewn in to shape it, though it's easier to appreciate when Eggzorcist is scalped and the hood is roomier.
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| Hood shaped by wire. |
Wired hoods like this were previously featured on Series 31's Umbral and S32's Ye Ole Wraith. On both of them, the hoods were proportionally larger around the head and shaping them had more of a pronounced display utility. I think the Wraith could have done with ears on her hood, because it would be a closer imitation of the Halloween art she was based upon than the devil horns molded on her head.
Because Eggzorcist always had straight-cut bangs, her purple bob hairstyle is essentially unchanged and was already well-suited to hide the Return dolls' faceplate system.
There have been dolls with hoods that completely hide their hair, like Series 23's Quack and Teddy, but Eggy's hair has always been visible due to her haircut. The hair color choice has always been striking and not too vintage. I think it works, but I've liked the more natural hair colors for Eggy more. The platinum wispy bangs on the blue-suit doll are the main reason she's so endearing to me, and the black hair and white skin on her main Wonderland doll makes her look like a traditional Asian doll in a pretty way.
Eggzorcist came packaged with a slip of cylindrical plastic holding her hair down to her head, just like Return Sadie. I had wondered if she would forego that piece since her hood keeps her hair tidy...but then I realized that duh, the plastic tidied the hair for the hood to go up cleanly in the first place! She wouldn't have neat hair if the plastic wasn't put around her! Once you pull her hood down once, every time you pull it back up, you'll be stuffing and poking her bob back inside hoping to get it tidy again. If Eggy had a separate hood piece you could pull down over her like a hat, then her hair would be less at odds with it. I think the original Eggy's hood was a separate piece that could theoretically do so, given its collar or capelet-style lower edge...her plastic noose just trapped it on her head.
Return Eggzorcist's hair is pretty nice saran, but the wig rooting isn't stellar. This is likely a consequence of having to make her hair manageable with her hood.
I did find some success tying a string around her head at the front to keep her hair more controlled when pulling the hood up, then untying and pulling the string out.
With an un-knotted piece, it could be even better.
Best results were found, however, by simply reusing the plastic she came with and cutting a gap, holding it shut with tape while I pulled it over her head and put her hood up.
Once the hood was up, I opened the closure and pulled the plastic from one end, behind her head and out the hood. Flawless. There was still some poking-in on the ends, but this was the cleanest, best way to put her hood up, and it takes all of seconds. Part of me wishes they had manufactured something more intentional for this utilitarian purpose--like a similar plastic (or fabric) strip but with a closure built in just for the function of putting her hood back on. As it is, though, this retaped plastic sleeve became a very simple and efficient tool for tidying her hair when putting her hood up, and I've thrown it back in her coffin as a piece of her kit to keep on standby.
Eggzorcist's face is very pale and has a glossy antique porcelain look to it, which is very different from Return Sadie's clean matte flesh. It's also kind of a first for the brand, as gloss finishes and cracked-doll designs have only been separate features before.
Her plastic color is really hard to describe due to it changing in different contexts. She's a pale off-white tone with hints of red or cream hues, but in some lighting, she can look white and washed-out, while she can look dark and grimy in others.
She can even look pearly with her color tones and gloss finish combined. In lots of lighting, her skin color blends with her suit in a really creepy way.
I was scared when seeing images of the production doll because I thought she looked far too bright and colorful and poppy and fake for the images I saw on the shop page. In reality, she's entirely capable of the look they advertised, and she looks compelling in all lighting, regardless of the shifting tone. Her pale color, inset eyes, and gloss factor add a creepy mask-like effect to her head that perfectly captures the uncanny of porcelain dolls and suits the facial sculpt aesthetic of the Return dolls.
It feels like nuanced, captivating plastic color and finish are going to be a theme with these Return dolls. Sadie's plastic perfectly captured light and shadow and had corpse-like grey notes despite ostensibly being a single-color matte cast. Her material was just really nicely made and made her look startlingly lifelike along with her sculpt. Here, with Eggzorcist, she mimics porcelain and her color shifts across lighting to take on multiple creepy-antique tones. To have the basic body cast of a doll be so compelling is great.
Eggzorcist's glossy finish and level of articulation would almost certainly be mutually-exclusive traits if you tried to craft her from actual ceramic, though. The logistics of glossing pieces with such complex joints would be a nightmare and making the pieces stay together and have meaningful posing friction...let's just say this doll design is a fantasy best rendered in plastic, much like the gloss-porcelain highly-jointed China Girl from Oz: The Great and Powerful, also rendered as an articulated physical toy through plastic.
Eggy's face has no painted eyebrows and features intense pink shading around her eyes which pair with her wide stare and pale face to make her look expressionless and highly unnerving. The brows are well-defined in the sculpt and make her eyes look sunken and tired and not quite right. Her lips are painted teal and have a slightly frowning pursed look that can make her look very sinister and threatening with her big eyes, heavy brows, and small pupils, though I think she's also capable of looking endearing. She also has sculpted dimensional cracks on the sides of her head creeping onto her face to make her look like an old broken doll, and most of the cracking is washed in and highlighted with purple.
The cracks are fairly low-relief so they don't feel super prominent to the touch. The wash color is fairly fantastical and I'd probably prefer a browner tone for it myself.
LDD has invoked this kind of cracked-doll look before (stylized and fused with a broken-ice theme for Frozen Charlotte in Series 12, chunks carved out and filled with simulated (painted) mirror shards underneath for S13's Evangeline, and done most directly with S23's Agatha), but Return Eggy's gloss finish and sculpted dimension without the surrealism of mirror shards make her the most realistic cracked-doll design of the brand so far. While cracks and a porcelain look are an abrupt new interpretation for the character with no precedent in her previous dolls, I think it makes perfect sense--it likens Eggzorcist to a cracked Easter egg, an item which she not-coincidentally includes in quintuplicate! While the doll isn't meant to be egg in any form, having allusions to a broken egg through a broken Easter doll make perfect sense given her long-standing theme. With the overall grody look of the cracked doll and the horrible egg pieces she includes, there's a strong design motif of rotten eggs throughout this rendition that's totally new to Eggzorcist and yet entirely appropriate.
On another tack, the porcelain look also feels appropriate to her design. Rabbit-suited cherubic children are fairly common vintage imagery and there are even real porcelain dolls in rabbit costumes, so this aids the parody element that many LDDs have where they put a horror spin on real toy aesthetics. Here's my proof--this isn't porcelain, but I found a real vintage fabric bunny-suit doll in my mom's childhood collection.
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| This would pair exceptionally well with blue-suit classic Eggzorcist. |
Return Eggzorcist being "porcelain" helps put her further into context with vintage aesthetics that used this bunny-suit imagery, though her costume may feel less old-timey this go around.
Her forehead has the X-shaped scar the character has always had, but this rendition is sculpted dimensionally and looks extra nasty with its clotted bloody paint. This scar is the deepest relief of her etched face details.
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| I won't ask how a ceramic doll can be cut and bloodied. Maybe she was crafted like this in-universe. Or demon stuff did it. |
The scar is a reference to Rob Zombie concert stage makeup and/or the cuts cult leader Charles Manson and his murderer followers wore, which Zombie himself was referencing. I don't think the originating connotation in specific can be at all in good fun, and both are rotten since it stems from the murdering cult, but it's something I have to take with the rest of the doll. For better or worse, the scar is one of Eggy's most consistent visual signifiers, with only her US 10th-anniversary doll having something different by marking her with the sulfur symbol. The Return doll had to have this scar. Sadie, who is actually partially influenced by a Manson cultist, had the scar on two dolls (Schooltime Sadie and Sweet 16 Sadie) and had a variant when appearing as Bedtime Sadie--that design had a sleepy "Z"-shaped scar. The X scar was also worn by the variant releases of Resurrections Lottie and Blue, and Series 35's two variants of Candy Rotten, a character designed in the starting days but never produced. If the unnamed alt-girl handmade doll in the LDD website photo gallery was the original Candy Rotten, then pretty much everything changed by the time of S35, and the older Candy did not have the scar.
Previously, LDDs with dimensional forehead scars had holy cross shapes--Haemon the Series 19 vampire had a burn wound from a cross being pressed into him (only on his main; the variant used the standard head sculpt), and Resurrection Angus Litilrott had a cross-shaped gash in both editions' heads, with the sack hood of his variant even having a hole cutout to precisely outline it. His regular Res doll's hood just had the eyehole. His original doll's scar was purely painted-on and his bag hood did not show it off.
Eggy's eyes are also quite different from precedent, being rendered with red streaky sclerae to make them look more demonic or flooded with blood.
The irises are pale purple with a strong black cartoony outline. Eggzorcist has never had eyes like this before, and it's very striking and perfect for the "evil-doll" visual. The closest she had before was the U.S. edition of her 10th anniversary doll, which is coming up a lot in this discussion!
Of course, the eyes and their linkage allow their gaze to be shifted in unison--one of the Return dolls' greatest novelties and appeals!
I discovered later on that Eggy's face gains multiple factors of appeal when her eyes are moved off-center. There's something about her centered gaze that feels so creepy and hostile and unapproachable in a way I didn't feel with Sadie, and it's probably because her face is so inexpressive and less cartooned. Her staring face mildly activates the animal repulsion in me in a way Sadie's can't because her brows are so caricatured and both of her faces feel more alive. Shifting Eggy's eyes to have direction, however, makes her look more personable and innocent and endearing, and taking photos of her with a directed gaze later on marked the moments I genuinely started to love the doll.
On the left side of her mouth, there's a green gunky paint detail (no sculpted dimension) that has vague significance. It could be slime or muck or mold or mossy goo from the earth, it could be vomit, or chewed-up greens like she tried to eat like a rabbit and couldn't tolerate it? The shape of the mess looks more like she smeared herself in ooze and less like it could be vomit. Which, like, good. I'm not a full-on emetophobe, but I don't dwell on that imagery willingly and find the vomiting LDDs to be among th-- oh, geez. I was gonna say "among the hardest to swallow!"
There's quite a contrast with Sadie. Eggzorcist's finish, color, and expression and detail give her such a different tone despite the two dolls clearly following the same basic modeling style.
Eggy's expression is more similar to Sadie's second face, but is obviously a totally different sculpt:
I knew going in that Eggzorcist's second face was entirely different from her main one, rather than being simple change of expression like Sadie's two faces. This is where her scariest imagery comes in--be warned, this is the real stuff horror-wise.
So I knew the second face was a shriveled, mummified corpse head in grey with wrinkles and teeth and paint that looks like a very realistic dehydrated zombie and not remotely like an antique doll. Very out of left field for LDD and the character.
But perhaps the biggest surprise for me personally was that Mezco went all the way to give Eggy an entire second head to create this face!!!
She has another head base and mostly-bald scalp to connect this face to so it's entirely seamless and she can wear the zombie face without her hood! I respect that. I thought they'd just change the face and expect you to keep her wig and hood up while using it.
The zombie head features the first Return scalp not rooted with a hairstyle that conceals the seams of the head, but I don't find it too distracting here. I'm perhaps less certain how Damien and Sin's no-bangs wig scalps will pan out.
Right now, I'm saying this face sculpt just isn't for me and isn't going to get much use. But I do appreciate it, at the very least just for the statement it makes about the brand. It's very detailed and clearly imagines a reality where Eggzorcist was a flesh-and-blood girl who arose after lengthy decay, losing her blood and lips and one eye, as well as most of her hair. And it is personalized to her specifically thanks to the X scar. Sure, other characters could reuse this sculpt since others have worn the scar...but why would this be reused?
The scalp is rooted in eight asymmetrical plugs of long purple hair in the same fiber as the "porcelain" head, and the only previous LDD with a similar rooting style was Honey of the Hemlock and Honey duo. Her hair plugs were cut very short and all in the middle back of the scalp, while zombie Eggy's plugs are around the edge.
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| The back of Honey's head. Note that the longer hair is all rooted into the mask she's wearing. |
Eggzorcist's zombie hair hangs a bit longer than the porcelain head's hair. Either this is an inconsistency or stylistic choice...or it's a reference to the phenomenon of hair and nails appearing to grow after death as the flesh recedes.
The zombie Eggy head is ghoulishly detailed, very textured, and thoroughly washed to look as scary as possible, though the paint stops at the back and top of the head, and the sculpted detail does not feature on the head base at all, suggesting it's the same mold as any other Return doll head base. While this could be considered lazy, I can appreciate the visual information provided by the cutoff, since the paint and texture being only on the front of the scalp immediately tells me which side faces forward. Without an indicative hairstyle, it could be harder to get it right without the uneven detailing as a visual marker.
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| The lighting makes this look yellow-brown, but it's really grey. |
The left eye socket is sculpted closed off so Eggy will appear one-eyed when the eye bracket is placed into this head. I'll get into that later, since I didn't swap heads at this point of my exploration.
Before I connected the scalp to the zombie head, I was reminded of the LDD characters with sliced-off domes and exposed brains. In the Return style, would they have a custom-sculpted brain-shaped scalp that snapped in and depicted the top half of the exposed brain through a hollow form?
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| Would a Return Purdy be built like this? |
A full-form brain piece like the classic dolls used would get in the way of the eye mechanics and would be harder to fit into the cavity of this head design, plus squeezing it in would risk the head halves splitting apart. It would be a loss of the fun removable-body-part feature to adapt those brain zombies into the Return style, but the visual could be maintained with a custom scalp element.
While Eggzorcist's instruction sheet is personalized to a degree, it doesn't perfectly reflect her. You're told to pull the hair back when putting her scalp on, but the illustration is still of Sadie and there really isn't much to grab on Eggy's bob at all--her hair is far fiddlier to work with when assembling the head. There's nothing for it, but it is trickier.
LDD refers to the changing faces of the Return dolls as "death masks", but Eggy's instructions are written to acknowledge that her zombie death mask is its own separate head, and the illustration is unique here.
The zombie head assembles just like the porcelain head, but it's not fully compatible with mix-and-match between the two. The porcelain head can wear the zombie scalp securely, but few would really want to do that. What some might want to do is the opposite, to give the zombie the full bob, but this is not viable. The porcelain scalp fits into the zombie head, but not securely at all. It'll fall out if the head is tipped. The prongs on the porcelain scalp just aren't far enough apart to resist and stay snug in the zombie head cavity. There must be some sculpt/mold differences that changed the dimensions enough to make a swap non-functional, and I'm guessing it's in the faceplate because the head bases look to be the same mold. I suppose as long as the hood is up, the bob scalp can't fall off the zombie head, but it wouldn't be intentional design to pair them. To LDD's credit, they never implied that swapping scalps between these two heads was meant to be done. I just wanted to see for myself, and do consider it a missed opportunity.
Both heads did go together more gently to my mind than I felt with Sadie, though I wasn't sure any engineering adjustments were made between the two dolls' production runs. I didn't feel as worried about breaking them or frustrated with the mechanics when handling the scalp connections here. I still maintain that a magnet connection in front and back would be most ideal for ease of use. It's not like the heads don't come apart already when the dolls fall, and with magnets, there would no prongs at risk of breaking when that happened.
Since it's been a while since I played with Sadie, I didn't notice any changes, but when I took Sadie's head apart to try mix-and-match, I found that the head had definitely been re-engineered. Subtly but surely, the entirety of the mechanics were reworked.
The most significant change, which I ought to have noticed easily, is that Sadie's wig prongs are on her head, while Eggy's are on her scalps. As such, the tabs plug in downward on Eggy into slots, and this might be why her wigs feel less fiddly to attach to their matching heads. With Sadie, taking the face out left the wig attached on the back half of her head and it had to be pulled up and out of the tab slot, while Eggy's wig isn't stuck in its place. That's because with Sadie, the wig tabs were pinched between a wall and the edge of her head, which probably made the tabs more susceptible to fracturing if the doll was to fall. On Eggy, the scalp would just pop out in one piece safely since the piece isn't as stuck in. Making the scalp less firmly attached on Eggy doesn't reduce its functionality and may well protect it.
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| Sadie's wig attached to the back half. Eggzorcist's tab slots in the same spots are not enclosed between two walls. |
I belatedly realized, after all my work with Sadie, the purpose of the semicircular notch in the bottom of the eye bracket-- a pole from the back half of the head pushes against that notch so the bracket is pinned in place between the halves of the head and cannot come out until the faceplate is removed. That should have been obvious to me, and it's a great system to prevent the eyes from falling apart and getting fiddly when you remove the scalp solely to adjust the doll's gaze. When you only want to change the gaze, that's the only thing that'll happen!
There are other differences. Along with the wig tab being on the opposite place, Sadie's head base is otherwise a different mold because the post that pins the eye bracket in place is cross-shaped rather than a tube, and the eye bracket attachment is different. Eggy can wear Sadie's eye bracket, but it won't press in tight enough to keep the eyes firmly posed. They'll stay in pose, but not nearly as tightly as either eye pair in their own characters' heads. Eggy's eye bracket, meanwhile, cannot push into place on Sadie's face properly. The eye linkages themselves can swap out of the brackets, though, since they are separate parts. When each doll is wearing her own bracket, there's no significant feeling of the opposite eyes fitting poorly.
Return Sadie's head looks notably larger and more oversized, though I really can't say how much of this is a true proportional shift and how much is optical illusion. Sadie is definitely taller, but her shoes can't be adding that much, so her head must be larger. I absolutely prefer the way Eggy's figure looks next to Sadie. Exaggerated head sizes aren't ever favorable to me unless it's entirely extreme and otherworldly like a Pullip doll, and I think the classic LDD proportions are just about perfect. If Eggzorcist is closer to that, I'm happy.
Bringing the two Return dolls in conversation makes them feel much more different than I would have expected. Now I'm very curious to see Damien and Sin and Posey lined up with them and to see what their builds are like. How much of Eggzorcist is the new standard and how much is a one-off? I'm fine with the Return dolls looking more disparate if that's where they want to go, but if they're more unified going forward, that's cool too.
On the one hand, hooray for Eggzorcist. LDD tightened up the head design (in ways that even included loosening it), all for the ease of use and possible protection of parts, and if there was a conscious proportional shrink, I approve. I imagine Damien and Sin are going forward with the revised head template Eggy debuted and their head-base pieces may be the same mold. On the other hand, poor Sadie. She had to be the guinea pig with a more frustrating and potentially fragile design, and it's not fair to her to be doomed with the worst engineering. She's not un-functional, but I'd love to see Mezco do a second revised run with her or offer an updated head pack with the newer engineering for any who wanted that. I don't want there to be a Return LDD with a worse build than the others.
Back to the zombie face. The sculpt clearly indicates that LDD isn't restricting itself in terms of aesthetic range in this new generation, and that's heartening because the varied art styles of classic LDD are so compelling. The face also says any of these dolls could go truly wild with the two faces and that raises anticipation significantly for each doll reveal. While alternate faces that merely change the expression have their value and application, faces that transform the character or alter the tone and allow you to choose how extreme you want them are also very cool. I think this can broaden the accessibility of several dolls who might be too much or too little for someone with one of the options, but are just right with the other, and it can make some designs modular in ways that required variant releases before. Countess Bathory is a good example. Her main doll was drenched in blood, but her variant was bloodless and closer to the portrait she was based on. In this new style, Bathory could just have a bloody face and a clean face on one doll to achieve a similar effect. (Here's hoping I can do a post dedicated to her dolls someday!)
I'm somewhat expecting Return Posey's alternate face to be a similar decayed zombie head to Eggy's, since Posey's whole concept is rising undead after initially being buried alive. It may not be long before she's fully revealed on a shop listing, but Mezco could probably ride out 2024 on just the Damien and Sin preorders.
And back to the outfit.
S1 Eggzorcist's noose was molded as a single piece of plastic in a closed loop, making her the first Living Dead Doll with a costume that wasn't designed to be removable. You could only take the noose off if you popped her head out or cut the loop. Taking out the head would be pretty easy and safe, but not intended to be done. On the Return doll, it's a real working fiber noose tied from a rope cord.
As noted, previous Eggies before this doll have also had working fiber nooses, but this one looks perhaps the hardiest. The cord is similar to the one used to tie Scarecrow Purdy's sack mask (which I was surprised was not a noose!), but Purdy's cord is flatter, while this one is round.
The noose can be loosened and pulled off over Eggzorcist's head, but there's almost no allowance and by the point it's wide enough to pull over the head, the end is almost pulled out of the knot. It's a little easier to just pop her head out and pull the noose over the empty hood. If the tail of the noose was just a bit longer, then it'd be less delicate to use.
The rest of Eggzorcist's bunny suit is in line with the hood. The majority of the front torso is styled as a pink belly matching the ears, and the front velcros down from the base of the hood to the waist. Decorative buttons are sewn on the outside of the seam to imply they're the real closure. The ankles are gathered, and the footies are soled with pink vinyl fabric that leans closer to the faux-leather side.
This is very cute, but the soles cracking and peeling off feels like an inevitability to me. I can never trust this style of fabric to age well, and I consider the soles of Eggy's feet to have numbered days by default. I'll still be careful, of course, but I'd strike this kind of fabric from the list of materials to use for anything if I made dolls myself.
The back of the suit naturally has a round rabbit tail, which is a stuffed ball of the same velour fabric.
This iteration and build of the onesie reminds me a lot of Ralphie Parker's humiliating gift from his Aunt Clara in A Christmas Story, just due to the pajama-style construction.
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| The only LDD character with bunny slippers is Purdy, though. |
I'm shocked no Eggzorcist before has ever cashed in on homage to this iconography with a Christmas doll edition. Perhaps that would be too legally risky, or else maybe it's still on the table for the future. I think a blonde pink-suited Eggzorcist could qualify as parody were she sufficiently horrific, and the Return design template could get her in that safe zone. Mezco could even hedge their bets by not releasing such a design as a Christmas edition and letting the buyers make the connection.
Return Eggzorcist's hands have a dirty effect on the fingertips.
All of her body is glossy and matches, but only her head and hands are painted.
This plastic feels more rigid than Sadie's matte material. Like with glossy Series 8 Faith, I found the head to feel slightly less smooth and shiny and reflective than all other body parts. I wonder if this is true for the Hopping Vampire in Series 27 as well, and if so...why is the head a bit less glossy smooth than the rest on all of these?
Return Sadie had a pair of fabric underwear that had no finished edges and honestly felt like a waste of resources due to being so cheap compared to the rest, and so inconsequential. It was the only part of Sadie that clashed with the quality standard of the rest. Eggy has no underwear, which feels sensible in terms of maintaining resource efficiency and polish. A bit piece done poorly is completely unnecessary. I do wonder if Damien and Sin will expend on underwear or not.
Sadie also had plastic sleeves on her torso and arms as stain insurance, but Eggzorcist does not due to her light non-stainy fabric. I don't think Sadie really needed her plastic given that her dress had a full lining inside as its own protection, but I'm guessing Damien and Sin might have plastic protecting them.
Eggzorcist's outfit is overall very good quality. The wire in the ears and the hood are the "next-level" detail here. However, despite the complex sew of the rabbit suit, I think Sadie's dress with its full interior lining and working back zipper, felt more atypically high-end and impressive to me. I also don't love the fabric of Eggy's soles because that kind of material is a loss waiting to happen. The sew of her limbs also provides some resistance when trying to achieve some poses, which might be why the warning on these doll's instructions about not stressing the clothing past its limits exists. I didn't find limits with Sadie's dress, but Eggzorcist's suit has some.
Eggzorcist's first major accessory is her Easter basket. Eggy has always had one, but the original LDD basket is quite a different shape. I've encountered the older sculpt just recently with Red Riding Hood.
The Return basket shape is more classic and generic and looks ideal for egg-collecting with its wide shape. The piece is softer plastic with a good paint job that sells the wicker weave more realistically than the "waffle cone" design of the original. There are no actual gaps in the weave of either basket. The Return basket is stuffed with green paper Easter-basket grass, and that is held in by a plastic lid that slots between the sides of the handle. I'll keep that piece in her coffin for whenever I feel I need to pack the basket back up.
Eggzorcist's original basket treat in her Series 1 doll was a cockroach, which held true for future classic dolls in different colors or paint jobs. S1 Eggy's roach was huge compared to her, and painted like an Easter egg on its carapace. Return Eggy pays homage with a horde of creepy-crawlies that are more to scale, featuring six cockroaches that are basically identical, and two separate earthworm sculpts.
For the first time ever, though, Eggzorcist has actual eggs, too! There are five, each a unique sculpt, and they all look damaged and spoiled yellow, and they have no festive springtime paint or cheer. The eggs each have a different level of damage, and three show that Eggzorcist's supply is hatching demonic creatures!
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| So...blasphemy concerns, if you had them, have not been assuaged. |
The most normal egg is merely cracked, the next one has maggots, and then the last three show red, skeletal, tongued, horned humanoids hatching. You can even arrange a multi-stage sequence with the five eggs to imply the story of one egg gradually hatching.
This idea doesn't work perfectly because the cracks are different and the "most-emerged demon" egg is not also the egg that's the most broken open. Still fun that there's a scale of horror with these five pieces. I prefer the two tamest eggs myself. The demon eggs are fun and absurd, but they're more outlandish and edgy than I need. I like Eggzorcist most as a quietly creepy antique.
Without the grass, Eggy can easily put all of her eggs in one basket.
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| But don't count your demons 'til they're hatched. |
This feels more authentic to an egg hunt, anyway. Decorative plastic or paper grass is usually just used for prepared Easter gift baskets, not used to line a child's egg-hunt basket.
While I was alert to the possibility of the eggs opening and hiding Eggzorcist's poem slip after Sadie's was hidden in her gravestone, the eggs are all solid pieces, and they're too small for the slip. I discovered quite late that, duh, the poem is just tucked inside the Easter grass in her basket! Not as spectacular as the hidden compartment of Sadie's stone, but still delightful. And to be fair to myself, I never guessed the poem would be hidden in the basket because Eggy's promo shots didn't include the grass stuffing it.
Eggzorcist's poem slip follows the visual aesthetic of Sadie's, and continues the narrative of the cast in this world of the doll shop.
The red scribble on Eggy's poem looks darker/redder, and the figure art doesn't quite match the rendering style of Sadie's. I wonder what Damien and Sin's (and Posey's) pieces will look like. If each doll has their own art style for the portrait, that works fine, but if the others are consistent with one or the other of the first two's portraits, then that may look sloppy.
Now I wonder about where the other poems will be. My best guess for Damien is that his poem will be hidden in a pocket of one of his jackets? Otherwise, it could be put inside one of his two hats, or maybe somewhere in the book stack he has? The books wouldn't open, though. Sin's poem doesn't look like it would have anywhere to hide in her stock. Perhaps taped to the bottom of the circular demon-circle platform she includes, if the piece doesn't have a compartment or opening somewhere. I also wonder if Eggzorcist's Bunny of Doom variant will have a poem. She has a wooden sign and a rabbit blanket as accessories instead, so they couldn't do the basket hideaway.
Eggzorcist's extra hands include a gripping hand for either side, like Sadie, while the other shapes are unique. The hands are harder to pop onto her wrist ball joints as a result of the plastic being more rigid, and it makes me nervous but it works fine. All of the hands carry over the dirty-finger paint detail, and all of them match the "porcelain" head. I'm fine with that myself, but objectively, there should have been one pair to suit the zombie head. Or else mittens should have been included as optional costume pieces?
The gripping hands hold the basket well, and the handle flexes to fit into the hands, rather than the hands flexing to clip onto the basket.
The other hand shapes are more unusual. On the left, there's a hand with close-together fingers in a down-angled shape like a scoop or a paw.
This shape is kind of okay at holding the basket handle upward, but clearly isn't sculpted for that.
It's a little better at holding a worm.
The shop photos suggest this shape is literally meant to be a paw shape, as in pawing through the Easter basket--Eggy can hold it with her left hand while her right sifts through the contents. If there was a matching shape on the left, you could have her posed like she's doing hopping bunny-paws.
I found that this hand was actually quite good at cupping an egg close to her chest, but the egg has to be wedged between both hand and body.
On Eggy's left, there's a hand with a more bowl-like rounded cupping shape, and the purpose was immediately obvious--it's to face upward for holding an egg up!
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| Love it. |
This is not a stable connection. The hand must be positioned right, and the egg can tip out and fall very easily, but it works fine for static display without disturbance, and I greatly appreciate that a sculpt was included to interact with an egg as such. And a dot of putty would work wonders to secure the egg for stable display. The cupped hand immediately earned "default" status.
Sadie had two flat hands, two gripping hands, and an odd-out fifth "pointer finger" hand for her right side, but Eggzorcist has an even six hands, with three left and three right--the two flat hands, the two gripping hands, and the paw hand and cup hand.
Here's the doll using both gripping hands on the basket. It's slightly awkward in this pose since the long end of the basket is pressed against her body, but it works.
Her articulation and the basket's shape don't especially suit her holding it sideways between two hands, though.
Eggzorcist's extra costuming is a really creepy vintage rabbit mask, done perfectly in that style of "trying to be cute but coming off as really unnerving". I feel like that could even be easier for Easter bunnies than other mascot types; there are tons of accidentally horrifying Easter bunny-suit photos around. Apparently, bunny suits with faces are really hard to make endearing. The mask is a top-half face mask with ears and is made from a sturdy vinyl, which I love. The strap is white elastic band.
I love the defined outline ridges on the edge of the mask and around the eyes making it look more fake and weird.
The mask is great, but I really don't think it should have had its own ears. The doll's hood already has them, and it would make more visual sense to complete the design of the rabbit-person if there were no ears on the mask...though conversely, the mask would make no sense without ears if Eggzorcist had her hood down. Still, she's always going to have rabbit ears of some form thanks to her hood, so putting them on the mask is strange. Here she is with the hood down, mask on.
The teeth on the mask change the doll's face a lot in a great way.
And with the hood up.
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| Excess ears. |
It wouldn't be right to damage the mask and cut the ears off, and I won't, but just know I do want to, deep down. I think this mask will be a better accessory for the zombie head, disembodied as a prop, rather than as a piece on the costumed doll. I know I would have used this mask a lot more if it were earless. As is, she looks better with just her hood up.
She can actually hold the mask pretty well even one-handed.
Then I noticed I completely missed two pieces in the tray--Eggzorcist has even more bugs in the form of two curled centipedes!
It only took me a few seconds to figure out why they're shaped this way--they're meant to wrap around the eggs!
This is very fiddly too, so if you have an egg wrapped in a centipede balancing in Eggy's cupped palm, then the whole thing is subject to falling apart. When the egg tumbles, the centipede pops off and gets some good distance. Still a cool feature.
Now to try the zombie head. This is the inside of the face plate, with the closed left socket.
To fit the eye bracket in, you're told to only insert the right eye in the bracket and socket, and to turn the left eye backward.
Turning it counterclockwise does not allow the eye to reach this position, and the eye needs to be tucked in like this. This is how it had to turn.
The linkage still works to position the right eye, but it's more fiddly to move and feels more fragile this way.
While I discovered that Return Sadie's head popped off and on her ball joint pretty safely, you never had to do so for her, and it wasn't part of her design. For Eggzorcist, however, swapping heads is an intended mechanic and must be done to change her faces to best effect. As with her hands, it's more of a push and pull due to her plastic type.
Here's the zombie head on. It's a striking effect, since the eye looks so much brighter and more cartoony than the flesh, and I like the stylistic contrast. The vivid hair and eye sync up well as oddly bright features. Maybe I appreciate this head more than I thought I would. It's clearly not just gritty horror. There's a bit of absurd caricature too.
The lack of hands to match this face is disappointing even as someone who wholeheartedly favors the porcelain classic look. I wouldn't take out any of the existing six for the benefit of zombie hands, but I think you could probably just have two more--one flat hand and one gripping hand for a zombie pair, or even one gripping hand and one cupping hand.
Here's the zombie head with the mask. With this hair being only on the top of the scalp, you can have the hair all flowing free without being pinned down by the elastic. I think the mask enhances the goofy side this head can display and aligns well with previous LDD horror corpses obscuring their faces with a jaunty mask design. Those were all Halloween dolls, though!
Here's the mask and hood together.
Sadie had another small plastic tray under the main accessory tray, which held her sleeveless coat piece. Eggzorcist has no extra soft goods, so she has no third tray layer in her coffin.
Return Eggzorcist debuts the first LDD variant doll since the end of the classic era, with her having an alternate release called the "Bunny of Doom". This Eggy has a black suit, blue hair, glowing skin, and different accessories but the same set of hand sculpts...for some reason. The paw hand and cup hand have no purpose without eggs and a basket. I think she's inessential at best and I won't get her, but I appreciate her existing. This Eggzorcist is not directly based upon a pre-existing Eggzorcist release from the classic era. It's a new addition to her many palettes thus far. These following three photos are all owned by Mezco and are found on their shop page. I'm showing them just to illustrate what this doll is.
I can't help but feel like you're paying more to get less with this release, even if the sign is so huge it takes up most of the accessory tray space inside the coffin. With so few accessories compared to main Return Eggy and Return Sadie, novelty hands that are wasted with the accessory set here, and a flatter all-black costume, the doll feels less fancy and cohesive and there's no reason for the price to be higher except the manufactured exclusivity. Mezco has generally seemed fair about their pricing, so I don't like this. This doll is also reportedly wrapped head-to-toe in plastic under her costume to protect her. Her bunny blanket is held in a third tray layer under the accessory tray, just like Sadie's coat was.
I am curious now about who else will receive variants, and why. Sadie didn't get one, but Eggy did, so is this case-by-case or will more of the S1 Return collection have alternate releases by the end? Perhaps it's a case of ideas overflowing and the Bunny of Doom was every concept for Eggy they couldn't fit into the main doll who had to be more classic. Maybe Return Sadie didn't have any rejected concepts to repurpose into a second doll.
I also have to wonder if there's a slight note of Donnie Darko behind this design. A black rabbit costume foretelling the end and all...it could be tangential, but I don't know.
LDD also released a generic accessory add-on pack for the Return doll line, featuring a book, a functional LDD skull backpack, a devil-horned cape, a doll-scale long LDD logo shirt, a chainsaw, and a comb for the owner to use on the dolls. I don't really want or need this pack, but it's a fun extra. I appreciate that it's deliberately designed to be generic so it doesn't feel like it has "missing pieces" of any of the characters. It feels fully optional by intent. This photo is also owned by Mezco.
For my first staged photos, I put together an Easter basket where her eyeless porcelain head was one of the "eggs" she collected, and put bugs in her eyes, holding her out of frame to keep her arm on her basket as it's getting scooped up.
I then put her zombie head, eye in, wearing the mask and stuck in the dirt like it's emerging from burial. Tilting the mask added a lot of goofy charm.
Then I hanged her from a tree, swapping her chopped costume noose for a full one I tied myself.
I previously showed a hint of this in my review of the Series 27 Banshee.
I kinda wish a long noose had been provided as an extra piece for her to be hanged with, but I can understand Mezco not wanting to encourage risky display behaviors with these more delicate dolls.
Then I put her in the crook of another tree, making damn sure she was sturdy there, holding the end of the noose that was looped around the branch, as if about to tumble or having climbed up after death.
And one hanging photo.
Here's some moody lighting making her super pale.
And a front view in darkness.
Then I slid her body into a black sock to take pictures of her head and noose in isolation, trying both directions for the noose and trying one eyeless.
This head doesn't have total interior darkness when assembled without eyes in the way Sadie's did, but lower lighting creates the effect of dark holes.
I bought a pink floral wrapping paper months ago to use as a backdrop for this doll, and I found a nice pose cupping an egg between the "paw" hand and "cup" hand. She looks rather darling this way.
And some shots in darker lighting.
I liked some lonely-looking bird's-eye shots of her sitting on the carpet.
Then I found a great display for her cross-legged holding an egg up almost like a ritual practitioner, and I got stuck on this composition and did several variants. The backdrop is above my bed. The doll suits dark and moldy lighting as much as rosier or more clear light, and changes with different levels of saturation and exposure.
Return Eggy could come from a disgusting condemned waterlogged old house or a dry musty attic, but she also slides into pastel easily.
I also took some pictures with the vintage bunny doll.
Then I put the zombie form together, giving her the bob cut and using the hood to keep it on. To cover her hands, I pulled some Rainbow High socks over them to be mittens.
I put her up in a tree, but this is a different third tree.
Then I played on the scary horror face reveal by photographing her from the back before her head turns.
While she was still wearing the bob, I assembled an Easter tableau, popping her into the basket to provide a horror double-take where the image is innocent until, wait, what the hell is that?!?
Then I put her zombie scalp on and hanged her from the same first tree.
I then tried the porcelain head with the zombie scalp, hiding the top under the hood. I rolled her eyes way up, and combined with the bright lighting turning her head super pale, she became very cute and appealing and I had my eureka that maybe posing her eyes was actually a really good idea.
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| Careful amateur at work. Do not try with your delicate doll at home. |
Then I put her original hair back on and staged her collecting eggs on the lawn. Much like Isaac's dodgy summer-for-autumn photography, Eggy is a scenario where I had to shoot autumn-for-spring, which amounted to getting as many leaves out of the way as I could. To stabilize her pose, I had to lower her basket arm to touch the basket to the ground and brace her so she couldn't fall to her right.
And doing bunny-paws on an iron bench.
Return Sadie has a little teddy bear with her eye colors, and a plush friend makes just as much sense for a bunny theme, so I wanted to give Eggy a comparable piece. I was partially inspired by the Bunny of Doom's rabbit-headed cozy blanket which shares her X scar, but I prefer a full plush character. I got a couple of plush rabbit jewelry charms, since I wanted to modify a second for my Series 12 Chloe and replace the plush bunny I had lent to her. Before I did that, it served as a nice "control" to compare with the one I finished for Eggy.
The bunny charms are very small and have stubbier limbs than I'd personally like. The limbs are sewn as separate pieces, almost like you'd see on an old-fashioned jointed plush, but they're not designed to swivel. To modify the bunny, I cut out the embroidery for its smiling mouth and I stitched red thread in an X on the forehead. The eyes looked too small and hard to see, so I used glue and cut-short pins with red bead heads to push in and secure some new big red eyes. I then painted brown stains on like the ones on Eggzorcist's suit and used that to shade the inside of the ears and the undersides of the eyes. I really like the result:
I also made Eggzorcist a couple of carrot accessories out of oven-bake clay and plastic plant sprigs. I wanted her to have one "eaten" to match her messy mouth. In a similar setup to her eggs, while you could read the separate pieces as depictions of one object in multiple states, the design is such that they're meant to be two separate carrots rather than one undergoing change.
The pieces just slide upward and sideways into her gripping hands and are pretty secure without stressing either the carrots or hands.
"Eh....*nibble crunch crunh* What's up, doll?"
Eggzorcist brings a whole other meaning to "Bugs Bunny!"
And on that note, I tried out a Looney Tunes-styled drawn rendition of her, deliberately done like more modern renders of the characters in terms of linework and coloring to suit her reimagined concept.
I think a complete animal-onesie collection from LDD would have to consist of any Eggzorcist (though her 10th Anniversary edition(s) would be the fluffiest), S23 Teddy, Quack, Beelzebub (in a housefly suit!), Teddy as the Cowardly Lion from "The Lost in Oz", and Resurrection-variant Hush (rat suit). A comprehensive collection would have to include every Eggzorcist edition and variant except her S35 doll. I think even the Flying Monkeys from the Oz line have to count, even though they're built on LDD Minis dolls. They have furry costumes with attached hoods.
There are "almost" entries in the animal costume category that don't quite count. "Living Dead Dolls in Wonderland" Jinx is dressed as the Cheshire Cat, though she's made to look like she's in a hoodie and leggings and doesn't have a one-piece suit. Squeak in Series 16 has a pajama suit as part of her cheap pig costume, but it has no head covering, her mittens are separate, and she's wearing a plastic front-facemask. Krampus has a body-covering furry suit and hood, but he's wearing a plastic mask too and isn't really imitating a child's onesie as much as a full-on dress-up costume to depict the holiday monster (the Krampus doll itself, despite the billing on the box, is actually depicted as a boy named Hugo Dollfuss who put on a full-cover Krampus suit.)
So that's Return Eggzorcist. What a fascinating doll. It's really all in the face. She's a nasty little doll, but also a haunting antique. That porcelain head design is grotesque and beautiful, eerie and pretty all in one. The shifting color that can be white to cream, pristine to grimy all based on the lighting is so cool, and the ability to look threatening and blank or more active and sweet just by moving the eyes is quite a shift. I wonder if Damien's browless face plate will have a similar effect when paired with his detailed eye option.
Eggzorcist's costume and accessories are also great, and I appreciate her set of hands more because I got better use out of all of them, whereas Sadie's pointer hand was inessential to me. The egg-cupping hand here is especially welcome.
Eggzorcist is fiddly and flawed in unique ways. Her more rigid-feeling plastic cast makes the ball-joint system less easy to use for swapping hands and heads, and her hair requires ingenuity to keep it tidily tucked inside her hood when putting the hood back up. Her bob cut is also harder to pull back out of the way when clicking her scalp on, but that was unavoidable. I also think her noose could have been a bit longer on the tail to make it less risky to open it and pull it off. It was a missed opportunity for her scalps not to be fully interchangeable between head sculpts, and no zombie hands feels like an oversight. The eggs don't sit firmly in her cupped hand, and I worry about the bugs being too easy to lose. I lost a centipede. The paper grass in her basket is a bit tricky to tidy or keep in order, but it is easily replaceable as well and adds some verisimilitude. Eggzorcist is an adult collector doll, so it's fine, but there were still opportunities for more quality-of-life design.
However, Eggzorcist is mechanically superior to Sadie with her revised head engineering making her head and scalp assembly much smoother, and her proportions seem pleasantly adjusted. Unless Damien makes further iteration upon the design, I expect Eggy's build will be the new standard that Return LDDs will follow. Perhaps then more parts compatibility between characters will become possible.
At the end of it all, she's killer, and for me to have found so much fun and appeal in a nasty-horror doll who's also based on my least favorite holiday aesthetic is a huge feat.
I was debating whether to bring the S1 original in for comparison for this character too, and was nearly entirely discouraged from doing so by aftermarket prices until I found a listing I could swallow. I thought it was worthwhile. I'm aware this sets me on a trend for these Return reviews, but I think it's valuable discussion.
This Eggy was sealed like my S1 Sadie, and came to about the same price.
Here's the chipboard. I don't know if it's due to art style or design changes, but the color value of Eggzorcist's hair in this illustration appears far darker than the hair on the doll. Her hood strings look to be tied in a bow rather than a noose, which matches the LDD archive photo of the blue Eggy.
Her poem says:
This little bunny
Is digging for sweets
Roaches in Baskets
are her favorite Treats.
I don't know if they're going for Victorian-style capitalization of proper nouns or if this is just an odd quirk. The poem scans okay, but the phrasing is awkward. How about:
This dead little bunny
Is searching for sweets
A roach in her basket's
Her favorite treat.
Like with Sadie's packaging, removing the doll tray from the coffin resulted in mostly mangling the tissue due to the senseless decision to tape it to the inner walls of the box.
Eggzorcist's death certificate discloses her death date as July 15, 1967. I'm shocked she isn't an Easter death date, though because Easter hops around from year to year, that could be annoying to calculate. I don't know what relevance Eggy's death date may have to her concept, but most of Series 1 died within this general time range.
Her poem is a simple couplet--
A drawstring used to fasten ears of a rabbit
Put this little bunny in a Kiddie Casket
And a rewrite.
A piece of cord tied her rabbit hood snug
And choked her blue 'til she laid with the bugs.
Here's the doll unboxed. Apologies for the ears cutting off at the top.
Those ears on the hood are directly next to each other, just like on a rabbit's head, though the effect looks strange on a human's costume. I think it still works okay. The ears stand up pretty well and curl forward just a bit, but are not wired inside. The pink interiors are stained on, while the ears are sewn with good structure outlining them.
The hood is made of a white stretch knit and has a capelet-style lower edge that recalls very old-fashioned styles of head garb, like a medieval dress, a riding hood, or even a nun's clothing. The lower edge of the hood is unfinished but the edge of the face and the gap in the front are.
This style of flared hood with rabbit ears reminds me precisely of an illustration from a picture book folklore anthology I grew up with--Tales of Wisdom and Wonder by Hugh Lupton, illustrated by Niamh Sharkey.
In context, this illustration refers metaphorically to the woman being referred to as "mad as a March hare" rather than being literal, but the egg basket and hood are oddly similar....and it makes me think I'd like Eggzorcist exponentially more if she was not in a rabbit onesie, but instead had this hood and a more formal dress or even a robe. Heck with it. Go there and make her a full Satanist rabbit nun, or else go with the antiquated peasant-garb look to make her a much older Easter bunny. That'd be a lot of fun. It would also likely be a pretty feasible restyle if I fetched her a gown or robe, though I think her purple hair would threaten to throw off the cohesion if her dress was not matching.
Speaking of which; Eggzorcist's hair color here is a pale lavender, while the Return doll has a more saturated purple. You wouldn't notice much difference from the LDD website photo of S1 Eggy, but in person, it's quite clear. She has straight bangs like Return Eggzorcist, though hers have a slightly rounder shape and curve out more from the forehead. They're slightly floaty, but for the first-ever set of LDD straight bangs in the brand, they're not at all bad, and several later dolls have had worse.
Eggzorcist's face is similar to S1 Sadie's, though it has stylistic differences. She has almond-shaped eyes rather than ovals, and her irises are mostly white with blue edges to make them look very pale. I've previously seen LDD eyes done with color only on the iris outline with Betsy, who has two different pale eye colors!
Eggzorcist has lots of lashes and brown shading around her eyes, as well as neutral short arc-shaped eyebrows. Her defining X scar is painted in two shades to give it depth, and her lips are a very desaturated dark blue.
Eggzorcist also has pink streaky paint around her face that makes her look a bit beat-up and bruised. I never noticed this on her before seeing her in-person, and I think this helps explain where the grody vibe of the Return doll is coming from.
Here's the two Eggys' faces compared. The S1 doll is a lot cuter and more feminine, and lacks the antique-porcelain effect. She looks less like a festering demon vessel--she's just starting to fester, perhaps, but the sweet little girl she began as hasn't slipped far away.
It's also clear that Return Eggzorcist's head is still proportionally larger than a classic LDD, even if it's less so than Return Sadie's.
When I tried to take down S1 Eggy's hood to look at her hair, I was briefly stopped, because the hood is actually sewn to the top of her head!
I cut this stitch to take the hood down. Her bob is similar to the Return doll's, though the rooting is even thinner.
This was actually my first time seeing OG Eggzorcist's full hairdo clearly.
The top of her head is a sparse wasteland after washing and boiling it, but the silhouette is good. I trimmed some of the lower edge on her left because it was overly long.
Eggzorcist's hood is kept on by a vinyl noose tight around her neck, and the doll would have been assembled with the piece around her neck and hood before her head was popped in.
I know it was early days, but this noose feels like real amateur hour here, and I don't like how it restricts her costume and floats off her body. I will keep this piece safe in her coffin, but I knew I would be replacing it with a functional cord noose.
I wondered what the deal with her Mini was, since the character having a noose was coinciding with a release format where every doll got a noose by way of the keychain system of the Minis. It looks like, from photos, Minis Eggy has no noose by default and the keychain, with its working fiber noose, thus completes her when it's worn. Makes sense, honestly.
Eggzorcist's rabbit suit is pretty simple. It has flaring oversized arms like Sadie and Sin and Posey's dresses, giving some unity to Series 1, and the material seems about the same as the hood. More pink staining gives the belly some color, though the effect is rather weak. The back has a bunny pom-pom tail, and there's some slight gather around the ankles.
Eggzorcist was the first LDD without shoe pieces, given her footie suit. I expected the feet to be fully white fabric, but I was very pleasantly surprised to find pink soles here too--and moreso because of how they were done!
S1 Eggy's soles are very thin pieces of solid vinyl plastic, which is a brilliant solution that has clearly aged better than Return Eggy's faux-leather soles have any hope of. I like this technique a lot. It doesn't make Eggy much more stable on her feet, but it's an idea with good longevity.
Eggzorcist debuted the classic LDD basket in white. It came in the death certificate packet already stuffed, and the Easter grass is finer and more blue-toned than the Return doll's. This grass packs more densely and doesn't threaten to shed as much. A roach painted like an Easter egg is the basket's quarry.
Here's the two baskets compared.
S1 Eggzorcist must hang the basket around her wrist or forearm to carry it.
Her anniversary remake doll (but maybe not its S1-replica variant) gives her a gripping hand, but I doubt it would be a meaningfully more stable display. I had to test on a doll with one.
Yeah...I don't know. The gripping hand can kind of work with the handle, but it's very clearly not designed for it. This is why the Return basket's handle is a cylinder and not a flat strip.
I don't know if the roach is the right shape for this basket; the fit is a little awkward. But see what I mean about this one making Eggy look more like a literal doll because the bug is more life-size? It's ironically the cracked porcelain take of the character who is framed less like a toy interacting with real-world bugs!
To put on that noose in the above photos, I popped Eggzorcist's head out. Her hood is separate.
The rest of the suit fastens with velcro in the back, using both a hook and a loop strip.
With the plastic noose out, Eggy's hood can pull down over her head easily without having to bind her hair down or tuck it in. It's a much tidier system than pulling up the hood from her shoulders up around her head. The hood is sewn closed in front above the capelet gap so the face is always framed.
And with a cord noose tightening it. The long tail needed to be longer than the tails of the plastic noose to let it loosen enough to fit over the head.
I guess you lose part of the macabre gag that way when you have a noose functionally slipped over the head rather than looking like drawstrings that were retied into a choking knot, but I think the functionality of the costume is far more worth it than the logic of the death story, which doesn't honestly make the most sense, anyway.
Here's the two together.
As with the Sadies, the Return doll is obviously the more impressive piece of art while the S1 doll is more effortlessly endearing and has a classic retro charm.
Here's the two Series 1 dolls.
Sadie is still cuter to me, though Eggzorcist is sure to bring me Easter charm during the spring and there is something iconic and authentically vintage about her. Eggy's accessories are also a bit better at interacting with the doll than Sadie's, of which the knife and bouquet are not designed to be held.
Here's the four together.
I might lean toward liking Sadie's S1 more than the Return and Eggy's Return more than the S1, but that's an overly broad simplification of the dolls' merits. I like Sadie's S1 for being so charming, though her Return is very polished and dynamic and compelling. I like Eggy's Return for being so strange and capturing my interest for a character I overlooked before, though her S1 is very sweet and classic in her own right and needs less to look endearing. All four dolls are good. I think S1 Sadie has the most of my heart out of all of them.
I still had some fun with S1 Eggy.
Here she is hanged.
And I played with the grassy backdrop. Here's the rabbit mask from the Return doll tested.
And some more pictures on the grass.
And some outdoor shots, color-edited to make the autumn yellows, oranges, and browns more green.
Here's S1 Eggy rendered in a Looney Tunes style, done more old-school for the cartoon's aesthetic to match the doll's place in the brand.
And here she is rendered in the same fashion as the portrait I made for S1 Sadie.
To set up the cover photo, I took a beat-up wire basket which was perfect for the creepy-Easter vibe and played with the two dolls in it, having the Return doll oppressively sitting on the body of the S1. My Sadie cover photo implied she had just murdered her S1 counterpart, obscured on the lower part of the frame, but I didn't need to be so secretive about the S1 being involved with Eggzorcist since I'd already done that trick for Sadie.
This was Sadie's cover:
And this was the first composition with the Eggys. I took the longer prop noose and tied it around the Return doll's neck and the basket handle, and used Return Eggy's noose to hang the plush bunny. S1 is mostly buried with legs kicking, and Return is holding the basket edge and peering backward. In the background, the S1 plastic noose is tacked to the wall.
I liked this composition, but the arrangement was such to de-emphasize Eggzorcist as the subject, as if you're looking at the tableau before you notice that doll is alive. It wasn't quite right for the cover. The S1 doll also felt a little too showcased for the purpose of the cover photo.
Another take was more like Sadie's in the idea--Eggy is standing up and framed in the act of murder as she chokes the S1 doll with the rope.
Like the last photo, the S1 doll felt too prominent, and the Return doll feels too sidelined. The winning composition had Return sitting in the middle of the basket, staring down the camera with an egg in hand, while the S1 doll peeks through the tissue in the basket and her rabbit ear sticks out of the basket. I liked the brownest color take of the shot the most, but I got others I liked.
 |
| Winning image. |
I think that's a wrap!
I feel much the same about Return LDD as I did before--these dolls are pieces of art and they are an experience. The sculpting and paint and clothing are well-crafted and demonstrate a refined vision and they feel very impressive. Even though their articulation is not the highest in the industry, I think the Return LDDs are uniquely photogenic and rewarding models due to their imaginative, functional accessories, interchangeable visages, and their unique moveable eyes offering a lot of creative inspiration and freedom that leads to incredible pictures and displays. Return LDD has the aesthetics and accessories to tell the story, and all the ability to play within that story due to their gazes and articulation letting you do basically anything you want, so if you're a horror-based artist, these are an absolute dream.
A Return LDD is an event. You can tell because they're my longest solo doll reviews, and that's before the second shoe drops and I add the S1 dolls! Both Return dolls I've met have had lots to inspect and explore and savor, and each has provided persistent inspiration for picture upon picture, with me never feeling like I can't achieve the image I have in mind for them. If I can't, it's the fault of my scenery, but not the doll itself. The amount of time I've spent with each Return LDD's review and photo sessions makes them feel entirely worth the collector price and spaced-apart release times. I like the event of it all so much, and am so impressed by the first two, that I think I'm on the ride to continue.
After just two, I'm feeling like Return LDDs may actually be my favorite review and photo subjects and form my best blog posts, even if they're not also my favorite toys of all time (they're still great). Eggzorcist was the deadly reminder of how great these dolls are...so now I'm on track for the rest of the Series 1 collection. I don't want to miss out.
This doll, and further Return reveals, also put more perspective on this design model. I can appreciate how each Return doll loosely follows a structural formula but breaks it to their own purposes. Eggzorcist is the only one so far confirmed to have two full heads. Damien is the only one so far to have two interchangeable wigs and eye sets. Some dolls have scenery, some have more clothing, some have more accessories. The dolls thus feel more personalized and surprising due to their looser rules, and that can breed creativity too. It's genuinely exciting to wonder what the next unrevealed Return doll will feature for a second face and accessories. I also love the idea of hiding the poem slips as another little thing to discover and wonder about. I wonder how far that can be kept going.
My concern still remains that the advanced Return doll design will end up shutting out a lot of potential characters from being adapted due to more divergent and gory sculpts and gimmicks that were easier to implement on a simpler six-piece hollow vinyl body structure. And if those dolls do get adapted, they might have to take some semantic/functional hits to fit the visual into the new build structure, like Purdy (as I posited above) possibly having to turn a previous full brain element into a hollow scalp-dome imitation.
It's still very sad to me to know the happy story of LDD's rise and creation has been said to have hit such a nasty bump, with the founding creative team evidently breaking apart and the original partnership now being absent from the brand identity. But Living Dead Dolls is still interesting and delightfully dark and exciting. I'm not sure yet where I'll start to sit the new dolls out, and I'm very very interested to know what the actual future of the brand is beyond this high-end Series 1 collection, because we have nothing to really go on. And I'm ultimately unsure how much further I truly want the brand to go. Sentimentally, it might feel poetic for this S1 remake collection to be a last hurrah, a bittersweet ending but an acknowledgment that the best was done. However, triumph with increased creativity, new characters and creatives and overall new blood in the LDD canon, plus future stellar toys would also be heartening, showing that the dissolution of the origin wasn't the death of the rotten soul in the brand. I guess I don't want to see LDD bogged down by melancholy, nostalgia and remakes forever, because that could feel like a sad reminder of the old days, no matter how cool the remakes are. I also, again, don't see how long the brand can sustain itself with nostalgia and this doll model. I just hope, for whoever is still attached to the brand creatively, that a great new era is here and that this is enjoyable for them. The dolls certainly feel like labors of love.
And darn it, I'm hooked. I think Return Damien is in my future after all. And even if I wasn't getting anybody else, I'd still be getting that awesome Posey. Call me Alice for chasing a rabbit down a hole, but I'm following hippety-hopping Eggy down the Return LDD path.
Wow, return Eggy is such a thought out, well executed piece. She's absolutely a horror art piece, there's no real cutesy kisch Easter trappings left there, it's so corrupted and ugly. Both faces are fantastic, though ironically it's the mummified and dedicated one I find more sympathetic. She looks so sad, where the fleshed face looks threatening.
ReplyDeleteIt was very nice to compliment her with the Og too, who's so much softer and genuinely cute, I see why she's popular!