The DEADvent Calendar: Day 5

Time for Day 5! What could it be?

It's...nothing?

No package? No trinkets? No--oh, wait. No, that's just a scrap of tissue in the corner, right?

Was this some sort of "give someone else a present; use this paper" thing? Sadie didn't like that idea very much. But she unwadded it, and there was a faintly scrawled message!

So she looked, and oh my goodness! How could she have missed it?!?

There were even two things!

The numbers were correct, but Sadie could believe these came too early. This is a big gift!

And, unwrapped...

It's the Living Dead Dolls stationery set...and the Sadie-head pencil sharpener!

I was initially planning to use this set as a big crutch to deal out its components as multiple days' gifts, and have the sharpener be its own day, but I had done enough improvised buffers to buy time that now the schedule now worked out to not be able to fit everything unless I did the whole set and sharpener in one go...almost. There's just something oddly Minis-shaped that's absent, with an IOU note...mysterious. Sadie was beginning to fuss, so I told her I know her Advent imp, and that they told me this set was complete and would be complete and not to worry about it. The Mini's absence is entirely a choice on the "imp's" part. (The set arrived to me sealed and fully-packed.)

Just means there's another gift for another day!

The stationery set was a pretty good deal for today's standards by being basically original price ($28) plus shipping. The sharpener head was absolutely not a good deal, but what the heck.

Here's the back of the box, with the slogan "Enhance your dead-ucation". LDD was making that pun before Monster High! The phrase features one childish backward "e".

This set was made pretty early in the brand, and has a slight motif of a back-to-school set, which seems a little confused about the audience, though I know LDD originally targeted to a minimum of 8 and up. This apparent reach toward children, as well as the set's character iconography only featuring Series 1 and 2 dolls indicates to me that this couldn't have been released after Series 3 wisely bumped up the age rating of the brand to 15 and up for the rest of the classic run. This set likely comes right after S2 and before S3.

The set has everything you'd need for a desk-- a pencil pouch, pencils and a pen, a six-inch ruler, an eraser and pencil sharpener, stationery and envelopes, and stickers for decoration and envelope sealing. The items are all packed in a pink tray that matches the early LDD coffin tissue. Under the stickers, there's a deep square dip in the tray with nothing packed in it. There was no way to fit the head sharpener in this space, even after cutting out the section, because the head is too tall. I wonder why the dip was there, because it looked like a compartment.

The pencil pouch is a proper sturdy leathery material and is very simple but very obviously themed as a body bag, with the zipper being right down the middle, blood splatter designs, and white text saying CORONER to hammer the joke home.

The pouch left black marks on the packaging, but the leathery material seems otherwise good and is not peeling. This can easily hold the writing utensils, ruler, eraser, and sharpener that came in the set.

I love it. The only way this would have been better is if it was large enough to also zip a full-size LDD in. It isn't. 

Massive missed opportunity.

This makes me think of a hypothetical outdoorsy "Campfire Tales Sadie" edition with a body bag as a sleeping bag! Had Addams Family Values not had cabins in its summer camp, I'd have expected them to use that gag for Wednesday. 

The stickers come in two identical sheets. The illustrated chipboard portraits of Series 1 Sin, Damien, Sadie, and Eggzorcist are stickers, as well as the chipboard portraits of Lou Sapphire and Lizzie Borden from Series 2. Posey is the only Series 1 character not depicted, and Sin is depicted twice through another sticker of the actual doll superimposed on a coffin. There's also a tombstone sticker, and four stickers per sheet of drippy red wax seals expressly to use with the envelopes.

I like that Lou is drawn doing the devil horns in his portraits, even though the doll has never gotten my interest. Return of the Living Dead Dolls Sin will debut this hand gesture on a physical LDD, with the ability to do double-handed devil horns like illustrated Lou.

The set has a clear 6.5-inch ruler (strange size) with the LDD logo in black and red blood paint. I haven't used a mini ruler since I was a kid, so that definitely skews the target audience in a very bizarre way.

The stationery itself is beautifully goth. The sheets are black with very faint ghosted LDD text logos in the center, and are topped with the skull scroll from the death certificates. The envelopes have the same ghosted logo on the side with the flap, and both pieces have been uniformly machine-cut with tattering and holes for spooky texture. These pieces are really nicely made, and these seem far too fancy for grade-schoolers.

S1 Sadie's death certificate 

The envelopes have licky glue strips on the flaps, and they're pretty much required since the stickers aren't quite strong enough to hold them closed by themselves--at least not in 2024, they're not.

The pencils and pen are pretty simple--the pencils are black-painted with the LDD logo by the eraser, and the erasers are white. The pencils are normal graphite, which can show up on black paper, but not with high contrast without the light hitting it. The pen has a logo on its cap and is a ballpoint. I'm not surprised to find it mostly dry after so long. The pencil erasers also seem aged and unlikely to work well.

I would have given this set white colored pencils and/or a white ink pen, because these do not suit the paper color. Alternatively, make the paper goods parchment-toned more like the death certificates. The black is beautiful but not as practical.

The eraser is black with a rounded tombstone shape and the logo printed in white on the top, and the sharpener is simple and black. Let's see the better one. 

The Living Dead Dolls pencil sharpener heads have some degree of notoriety in wider spaces, in the sense that I think they may hold claim to the title of LDD merch that most "broke containment" and got on the radar of the most outsiders. I've seen the image of the Sadie sharpener in action passed around online a lot as something to gawk at in horror, which is great, and LDD themselves note that the Posey sharpener is visible during the Brad Pitt/Angelina Jolie film Mr. And Mrs. Smith. I love that for them. I just don't know if the sharpener(s) becoming infamous actually brought many people into LDD. I certainly like it here, but horror is as repulsive as it is attractive when audiences encounter it.

The whole gag of the item is distinctly gruesome--the sharpener is one of the doll head's eye sockets and the shavings are meant to come out of the open mouth! 

This design came in Posey, Bride of Valentine, and Sadie designs, all modeled closely on their debut dolls' heads, and I naturally picked Sadie. S1 Sadie likes it. She always wanted to be decapitated, but she would be snuffed out for good if that happened. She thought it was really cool to imagine herself in this state with such a visceral visual aid!

The presence of a Series 3  likeness (the Bride) in the collection of sharpeners indicates they almost certainly would have been developed and released after the stationery set. Also, just...the fact that one of these heads would very likely have been in the stationery set if they were around.

This was the original packaging for the head--a blister pack on a modest cardboard piece, with a plastic element poking out of the back. I didn't mess with this protruding bit until I removed the piece.

The head is about the same size as a normal LDD's, if not a tad larger, and is obviously a different mold.

The hair is black and has a center part true to the original Sadie, but the fiber doesn't feel like saran and is both gelled and curved inward. It feels more stiff and did not reshape when combed, washed, and boiled. The hair itself is on a fabric wig cap affixed to the top of the head, and the cap is only at the top, leaving the length of the hair to cover the head.

The back of the head has some screw holes, an inset circle that looks like a button or post but does not press, and the strange protrusion. The wig is glued over the seam between the two halves of the head, which would impede disassembly.

The head is hard plastic but is visually close to a regular LDD head, and the faceup is identical to S1 Sadie's in the places where the sculpt matches up, but the circular gouged right eye has blood drips under it and the mouth has a wide open toothless grimace that feels a little distorted since no LDD has ever had this expression. The sharpener is also pinker and greyer in casy than original Sadie. 

The bottom of the head does not have a full neck and ends on a flat disc, though it would be a fun challenge to rig this to connect to a LDD body regardless and build a full Desk Helper Sadie doll. The head can balance upright on this neck disc, but the thing on the back wants to tip the head backward.

The thing to do now is to sharpen one of the LDD pencils in this head! You push a pencil into her gouged eye socket (ouch)...

...and turn like normal, and the shavings pile into her mouth.

I was naturally a little skeptical about the full efficacy of the visual gag, since the shavings vomiting out of the mouth could be unreliable, but seeing the strange plastic protrusion on the back of the head helped solve my confusion--this is actually a button or plunger which extends a red tongue inside the head to push out shavings within...or you can just puppet it to freak people out!

The tongue itself ends and then inelegantly widens to the rest of the beam pushed by the button on the back, leading to a stranger look when the button is fully pushed in.

There might be a mechanical purpose for this shaping, but it's odd. I also can't help but feel like this lever is too visually awkward and that some other solution might have existed, but I appreciate the mechanic. The lever is spring-loaded and the tongue retracts when you stop pressing the lever.

The shavings can really fill the head and the sharpener can feel almost clogged and vomit for a good while, so it might be best to sporadically evacuate them before finishing a single sharpen.

This is pretty sick and upsetting, which is the entire point. I think a huge change would occur if the heads of these sharpeners looked gleeful, and that would be more fun. This isn't the most practical sharpener, but it'd a fun twisted novelty done like only LDD could do.

The falling shavings can get into the hair.

The stationery set is really nice, but I have no idea who it was for. The school motif, stickers, ruler, and the presence of a toy bonus (later, I promise!) in the set indicate this was for pre-teenage children, but the bloody sinister imagery and the delicate paper and envelopes and black paper color all feel more mature in tone, and I can't imagine any child of the aughts taking this stuff to school and not garnering concerned calls to parents from their teachers. You could tell me this set specifically caused issues with the age rating for the brand, and that this is why it was bumped up to "15 and up" starting with Series 3. I'd believe it. 

To have made the stationery set better, I'd have focused the target and marketed to an older crowd. Keep the paper goods, pencil paraphernalia, and drop the exclusive Mini (just put it in the normal Minis line) and ruler. Maybe put one of the head sharpeners in the set instead of the generic one (I know they would have been developed after this set, though). If the sharpeners had been around at this time, you could keep the gimmick of the set's Mini by giving the sharpener face the same doll's likeness and have that sharpener design exclusive to this set. I also would have really loved some form of LDD-branded journal. 

There was one other item in this sphere-- pencil toppers of LDD Minis Sadie, Sybil, and Schitzo's heads. And they look like they could have been literally those Minis' heads, or at least definitely cast from the same mold with more flexible material. I didn't even think of pursuing them because the full Minis are right there and are better.

Now that Sadie had all of this wicked stationery, she had what she needed to write a letter to Satan! She'd been thinking about it for a while.

She wasn't sure how to have it delivered, so I suggested she do what I did during my Advents when I wanted to talk with my elf or give back with my own gifts--leave it in the calendar tonight in tomorrow's drawer so the imp will see it while visiting and take it to Satan. 

Sadie is eager to have her letter answered, and excited to see what she gets in the meantime. DEADvent also appears fully on track now that options arrived yesterday and I was able to fully map out the remainder! I shouldn't have to improvise any further!