The LOVING Dead Dolls, Part 2, Part 1: The Bride of Valentine

Alright, so this post is actually part one of part two because I had a second custom doll in the works for this who I could not finish in time due to dye for customizing the dang doll not arriving in time. I figured I'd best just get the half of the project that I could out to satisfy my urge to be timely for Valentine's! I guess it's going to be obvious who the custom character is, but I couldn't sacrifice the body color I wanted to finish him up faster. January and February have not been kind to my project scheduling, but enough of that. Let's look at what I have!

While Rose and Violet were the only official Valentine holiday-themed Living Dead Dolls, there was one doll who had the festive name right in her own title: the Bride of Valentine from Series 3.

This doll was LDD's original-character tribute to the Frankenstein mythos, and was a loose visual homage to the Elsa Lanchester Bride of Frankenstein. Her name comes from the fact that she holds a human heart as an accessory: the one piece she was built without. The Bride was one of two classic-horror homages in Series 3, alongside Lilith repping the Dracula sphere. The Bride is also my third Series 3 doll, with Lottie being the other previous entry I've reviewed. This isn't the character's first appearance on the blog, either. I'd been thinking about using this LDD character for a loosely Valentine-themed seasonal feature last year, but I was only able to get her Oz doll as the Tin Man, the edition I wanted at the time, after the holiday had passed. I wasn't willing to wait and just got her after the holiday. 

I feel like the Series 3 doll is a fairly iconic LDD in the brand, and she had a fairly good run in getting a Mini, a Resurrection, and an Oz doll. Apparently, she was up to appear in the Fashion Victims, which makes sense. I don't know if that means she would have been cut from the porno-style lineup of wave 1, or if she was considered for a wave 3 that never arrived, with the retooled style. After wave 1, the dolls were significantly toned-down and less vulgar and sexual, so that Fashion Victim design could have been pretty good if it was for the second style.

The Bride's coffin chipboard is in the original Series 1-4 style, and her illustrated portrait has no notable detail discrepancies with the doll.

The poem here says:

She holds for you

In her hand

a Broken Heart

that has been damned.

And a rewrite.

A broken damnèd heart she holds

To grant thee miseries untold.

Her death certificate doubles down on the holiday association--she's another Valentine's Day death, on February 14, 1929.

However, this isn't just a holiday reference--the specific year places her deathdate as a reference to the Valentine's Day Massacre, a murder of seven related to Chicago gangster politics, with Al Capone suspected as the man pulling the strings on the killing of his rivals. I'd have probably placed her deathdate as a reference to something Frankenstein, like Valentine's Day 1935 to incorporate the year Bride of Frankenstein released. The massacre date would make more sense on Rose and Violet, honestly.

The certificate poem says:

This cold unloved bride

Was stitched together with spare parts

The only thing they left out of her

Was a warm still-beating heart

And a rewrite.

Cold upon her wedding bed

Created from spare parts

With everything a girl could need

Except a beating heart

The Bride of Valentine was actually one of the very first LDD character designs by Damien Glonek and Ed Long, and a picture of her original handmade custom doll is on the LDD website.

It took a wait of two series for her to get made officially, but she's virtually unchanged--her manufacturing is just different with the official LDD sculpts and doll-hair fiber instead of brushed yarn, and she wears boots instead of Mary Janes. LDD having this design locked down for longer probably explains why the chipboard drawing is a perfect match while Lottie and Lilith's weren't. The Bride was already prototyped extremely similarly and the design existed first out of the S3 cast, so the drawing would have matched at any point of her development.

Here she is unboxed and untouched. She seemed a little greasy.

The major pieces of Elsa Lanchester's iconic Bride of Frankenstein design are all present in this doll, but they all manifest in a different manner. It starts with the hair, which is black with white streaks, but here, is not a frizzy beehive. Instead, it's center-parted and very long, coming past her knees at the longest. The white streaks are on top rather than at the sides because she's not wearing an updo.

The hair is supposed to be straighter, so I'll boil it. It's not the thickest-rooted, and the white streaks are cut shorter than the rest. It feels fairly good, though.

It's tremendously unfair and simplistic of me to say every old LDD girl with long dark parted hair reminds me of my younger mom. It's an inherently unflattering comparison, and these dolls are not at all her taste, but there's something about the Bride's energy that has a similarity to some ways my mom looked as a younger woman, perhaps even moreso than I saw with Sadie. She never looked dead or pieced-together and creepy, of course, but she sometimes carried herself with an intensity and looked a bit similar in older photos I've seen of her. 

The Bride of Valentine's face is the most striking part of the doll. Elsa Lanchester's Bride had scars on her jawline around her ears...

...but the Bride of Valentine has cuts all around her face as if her head is multiple panels of flesh. Her face and right ear are outlined as one piece, while her forehead is another piece and her left cheek, temple and ear are a third, while the neck and back of the head are thus made as a fourth. The absence of stitches or staples really works here.

All of this detail is purely painted, with pinkish-red lines surrounded by paler shading for dimension and gory eeriness.

Calico in Series 6 afterward would also invoke Frankenstein  but in cartoonier fashion, and amplified the segmented-face motif with visual elements of patchwork fabric, featuring tri-colored stitched skin patches painted around most of her face and head and all around her body.

Interestingly, the Resurrection Bride of Valentine leans fully into the Universal Studios/Halloween iconography, kind of adapting both classic movie Frankenstein monsters in one, and also co-opts Calico's paint gimmick.

Res. I like her less than the variant, but she's moved onto the table of potential future purchases since she's still cute and novel enough to experience and show off.

Res variant. She's still my most impossible grail doll. I've abandoned sense for less, but her scarcity and resale prices are well beyond my threshold and means and ethics. If I'm ever able to afford this doll, you better not catch me buying her with that money.

The Beast from the Scary Tales line reads as the opposite stylistic fusion of the Bride and Calico by being more Gothic-colored and visceral, but copying the face-segmenting map used for Calico and having sculpted staples holding the pieces together.

Beauty and the Beast.

The Series 3 Bride's face has heterochromic LDD oval eyes, with brown on her right and blue on her left, and both eyes are surrounded by heavy grey smudging. Her irises have slight rings of lighter shading around the pupils, and the eyes have heavy dark rings around them inside the lighter smudging. Her eyebrows are harsh but completely straight in keeping with Lanchester's look, and her lips are red.

The Bride's skintone is greyish with maybe a hint of a whisper of green, but she reads far more as a drab pale corpse color than a fantasy monster color. Next to blue Lilith in the same series, it's clear which monster is going for pop and which is going for goth.

Her outfit is just a one-piece nightie, with lace trim at the top and two thin shoulder straps. The dress hangs above the knee with minimal detail besides what's on top, and has no horizontal seams shaping it. The dress has red staining dripping down over her chest where the heart is stereotyped to be in cartoons, as if she's pulled her heart out of her chest to offer it to you. I'm assuming her two poems, if telling one unified story, would indicate that she started without a heart, got one, and then decided to give it to her love.

Here's the nightdress removed.

It's not exactly costuming, but the Bride also has bandages around her forearms and lower legs, also in imitation of the Bride of Frankenstein.

These bandages are made from actual stiff saturated gauze with adhesive, meaning they're not coming off. The palm piercings for her to hold accessories with do go through the gauze. This material creates a lot of friction, making it harder to undress and redress her and requiring some care to do so. You could pop out her arms and then reattach them inside the sleeves, but the dress will have to slide up and down the legs. Popping them out and reattaching them inside the tight dress, if even possible, would not be easier than using the dress normally. Gauze like this would also be used for the head bandage on scalpless Purdy and her Resurrection, Jeepers seems to use the same technique for her face, and Vanity has plastic-surgery bandages around her head, though I've seen copies with them coming loose or absent, suggesting those weren't as firm or secure on her. Oddly, Series 4 Lulu's broken-arm cast is a soft removable sleeve, not applied gauze. The After in Series 29 has softer fabric bandages which are glued to his left arm, and subjugated ventriloquist GreGORY in Series 14 has a fabric mouth gag secured between his lips and reportedly adhered to the vinyl of his face. Despite all of this, LDD has somehow never made a bandaged mummy character.

The Bride's shoes are the round-toed boots with brown brushing. She has no socks.

These are an odd choice, since her dress seems more suited to slippers, sandals, or just bare feet, but stompy boots are classic Frankenstein and I think they're just the right touch to pull the doll together.

Under the dress, there is no wound or scar painted on the Bride's chest, and the red dots seem to be pigment transfer from the bloodstain on the dress. A chest wound under the blood on the dress is an incredibly obvious detail and I wish they had done it. I guess Lilith only had that detail because her wound was a functional slit to push her stake into, but Lilith being in the same series compounds the feeling of missing an opportunity for the Bride.

The Bride's feet are not covered by the bandages. While the boots wobble a little thanks to no socks, I think the gauze fills them out enough above the feet for her not to feel unstable in them.

The Bride's heart is the first appearance of the LDD heart piece, and is an orange-red tone with purple paint on the sculpted veins.

Like Lilith's stake, the accessory peg is too big to easily fit in the palm holes, and the peg being so flexible also hinders it. 

I need to widen the palm holes.

The copy of the LDD heart I have from the Dr. Dedwin Wizard of Oz (designed to then be given to the Bride-as-the-Tin-Man doll) is redder and has no extra paint for the veins.

I feel like there had to be at least one other LDD release with the heart, but maybe there wasn't and it was only used for those two editions of the Bride and I now have a complete collection of the LDD heart piece. If so, I'm slightly surprised the mold was kept for so long between Brides, because the Resurrection Bride didn't use the heart and keep the mold in use in the time before the Oz set. Maybe they still had the base sculpt and made a new mold of it the second time they needed the heart. I can't say.

Here she is tidied up a little. Some of her ends are fried on the hair, but it's overall okay, and she holds the heart really well with just a bit of widening on the palm holes.

Here's the Bride with Calico.

And with her S3 fellow classic-horror tribute Lilith.

Here's all three of my Series 3 dolls now.

Here's the two Brides of Valentine I have. 

I'd previously concluded that the Tin Man's only shared signifiers with her original doll were the heart and boots, but now I'm seeing more subtle relations. The split crack painted on the Tin Man's face feels like an interpretation of the Bride's cuts, and the ribbed texture of the bodysuit which covers the legs mimics the bandaged gauze in a more metallic manner. You could also argue the red lips are a shared touch. So I do see more of the Bride in the Tin Man now, but I still argue that without the motif of missing a heart, none of these traits are clear enough inheritances to be able to identify which LDD character was cast in the role of the Tin Man.

And the Bride with her most direct Monster High counterpart: the Skullector licensed Universal Bride of Frankenstein.

My copy of the MH Bride was swapped onto the Create-a-Monster Mummy body when I needed the Bride's for someone else. The bandages suit her.

LDD did their own licensed Bride and Monster, and the Bride is very pretty, but I still don't feel especially compelled by LDD Presents and the Monster High doll is more fabulous.

LDD Presents' Bride of Frankenstein. Looks like applied gauze for the arms here, too.

I appreciate the Series 3 doll for the season because she demands a different Valentine aesthetic. While Rose and Violet pushed me into retro midcentury kitsch, the Bride needs contrast and drama and a Gothic visual style, which is really fun to use for Valentine's.

For a few photos, I set up the "metal" table outside and laid her on it near a trellis with some candlesticks and roses brought in for romantic Gothic scenery, and let her sit there and get covered in the falling snow. 

I then put her hair up and put a sheet around her for more direct Universal homage.

I got a couple more photos in a laboratory setting with the table.

Here she is on a night walk.

I used a fancy cutout Valentine placemat for a couple of photos.

And Valentine's night brought another round of snow, fluffy and in big flakes that I wanted to take advantage of.

I like the Bride. She references an iconic character in her own iconic way. She doesn't improve on the Elsa Lanchester look (and really, such a goal is flatly impossible), but she's got her own dingier, more bloody Gothic feel. She's not classically festive for Valentine's in the way Rose and Violet aim to be, and would likely be better as a Halloween decoration, but I liked what I got with her for the holiday theme so far, and will get more work with her soon once she gets her match!