A Deathday Party Celebration (LDD Roundup #10)

It's my birthday time, and I wanted to put on a little production for it since I had so much fun pushing out Christmas spirit this past December. My actual birthday was on the 20th, but the logistics of one doll arriving led me to allow this project to be flexible on time, and then I took some extra work hours during the week that also got in the way, so it happened later. I'm fine with it; I just really wanted the time to set up and enjoy this. This was intended to be LDD Roundup 11 because I had 10 all purchased and ready to put out before this one, but delays ended up making this one Roundup 10 instead, despite most of the dolls joining my collection after the dolls that will be in Roundup 11. Oh, well. It certainly fits the milestone number better for this to be a big event!

It started with a doll passing a note under the door.

The party was being held in another room, with a birthday table covered in gifts, a cake, and LDD's premiere birthday girl herself!

For She's A Jolly Good Devil: Jubilee

Jubilee comes from LDD Series 11, and she's the brand's birthday-themed character. It's actually a little surprising LDD did one at all! What makes Jubilee extra special is that she comes with a birthday present for the buyer, with a cardboard gift box that can be opened for a small treat. I know what she has already, but I'll leave that to the opening. 

Dolls with opening presents in their scale have existed before, most notably for holiday and birthday Barbie dolls until their boxes started to become purely decorative and empty props in a move that could only disappoint and jade the poor children who got them. Read this Toy Box Philosopher review here to see what kind of dolls with gifts have been out there. I'll hazard to say that Jubilee might be the best doll with a present I've seen, though. Her box is a bit nicer and her gift is very simple, but more substantial, I think, than what some Barbies have done. I guess, to some degree, it helps that LDDs aren't made for little girls, so it ended up that I genuinely wanted and could use what Jubilee wrapped up for me. Costume jewelry is all well and good for the right kid, but has no home with me personally. 

It's kind of a shame that LDD items are by a rule so limited in release, because Jubilee could have been a good item to keep around as a constant release, or even just to have as an exclusive outside of series, to serve as a birthday gift for people to get for fans. She never came back as an anniversary edition or a Resurrection, either, which screams of wasted opportunities to me. A birthday character is one you'd want to have as a recurring release somehow. LDD kept Halloween and Christmas material in circulation with multiple dolls over multiple years, but birthday material was more spotty and less consistent.

Of course, the gift gimmick meant Jubilee had to be complete to ensure her present was intact.

On the aftermarket right now, Jubilee is painfully expensive, far more than I think she has any right to be, and enough for me to have considered postponing this feature to Sadie's deathday on April 26 just to make sure I could put together the project in time. Fortunately, February was a good month for me. Even with being able to get Jubilee, I still resented her aftermarket position and was still almost scared away from bringing her into the discussion, but I relented under the feeling that she was mandatory for this concept...and that I really liked her. I know I'll be hurting someday when she comes up cheaper, but that's how the game goes. My copy of Jubilee is sealed and untouched, but she's also Australian and her delivery window maximum eked just past my actual birthday. As luck would have it, she came on the very day itself and completed my roster! I welcomed her as a timely present, and worked with her on the day, but held off on staging the whole party post until I had a full free day to relax in. I was still holding out hope that this project could be Roundup 11, as well, but no dice. Straggler is still straggling.

Jubilee is my second Series 11 doll after Isaiah in the previous roundup. I think she works well with the green tissue color given some of her green coloring.

Her chipboard poem plays on the classic schoolyard "you look like a monkey" version of the birthday rhyme:

The hat strap isn't tucked fully behind her bangs in this photo.

Happy birthday to you

Happy birthday to you

You look like a ghoul

And you smell like one, too

LDD. Scansion. Please. Why make this joke this way? "Zombie" was right there and fills the the same pattern as "monkey!

Happy birthday to you

Happy birthday to you

You look like a zombie

And you smell like one, too

Come on, guys.

I hadn't realized that Series 11 doesn't declare its series number anywhere in the packaging.

Opening the coffin showed me several concerning things, however. Jubilee looked dusty and her costume looked stained by poor conditions, not LDD artistic effect. I was not super surprised to see her gift box in the front, but I was unhappy to see her hat was in the front, in a plastic packet, taped to the tissue on Jubilee's right. Ugh. That's guaranteed damage. Thanks, Mezco.

Her curls were also as loose and lengthened as I expected.

No Living Dead Doll's birthday has ever been disclosed, and this holds true for Jubilee too--her date is her date of death, as always: June 27, 1893. 

Still, I'd like to assume in my personal headcanon that we do actually partially know Jubilee's birthday, and that it's the very same calendar date, just in an earlier year. It would only make sense for a morbid birthday doll to have died on her own birthday! The significance of this specific date is that 1893 was the year the classic "Happy Birthday" melody was composed (but not the lyrics), and June 27 was the birthday of Mildred J. Hill, one of the sisters credited with the tune. Thank goodness the stupid frivolous copyright on that song ended.

Jubilee's name is a great choice because it connotes a celebration. In certain contexts, it can also be used as a milestone anniversary word (honestly, maybe this should have been a 13th-anniversary doll), but a jubilee wouldn't describe a person's birthday per se. Still a good choice. 

The certificate poem says:

Wrapped up inside this present

A gift for you awaits

By opening it you have condemned yourself

And sealed your own fate

So hopefully your birthday goes off without a hitch

And Jubilee is not around

For if you invite this ghoul to your celebration,

Evil will surely abound

Joke's on her; I welcome it! And a rewrite that's more readable as verse.

She brings for you a gift

With your soul tied in a bow

Accept it and to evil then

Your life will surely go

Your birthday's better lonely

Than with Jubilee around

For if she comes, it's ending

With you deep beneath the ground

Here she is unboxed and looking a state.

Jubilee's party hat is felt in a cone shape, printed with a black color and a skull design (but not one of the skulls in the LDD logo). I think the felt is a good choice for longevity's sake, even though it's not realistic.

The hat is mounted on an elastic band like the real thing, but Jubilee's is proportionally thicker than chinstraps I've seen on LDD thus far, being a pretty big elastic cord more akin to a human hair tie band.

I'm not sure if the band was ever tighter, but it might feel a little too lenient at present and I could shorten it a bit for more tension. The hat itself kind of pinches flat on itself and sits awkwardly on Jubilee's head, so I might stuff a little tissue inside the cone to widen and shape it better. 

Jubilee's hair is auburn, but an auburn that feels closer to brown than red in certain lighting. Next to true brown, it feels glaringly orange. The hair is styled with bangs and pigtails separated into large ringlet curls, a style very similar to Resurrection Inferno, Series 19 Orchid, and Series 26 Lamenta afterward. LDD always paired this curl type with a bang, even on the unreleased/cancelled Miss Muffet doll they had shown. Lamenta taught me that the curls relax and lengthen with time, and it's happened here, too. I find this more detrimental to Jubilee than I found it on Lamenta. Lamenta's veil is longer than her relaxed curls so the silhouette isn't disrupted. Jubilee's curls are all supposed to be above the shoulder, so her look is changed significantly by this. The hair elastics have also disintegrated.

Despite the impressive volume of curls, the hair isn't rooted any denser than another LDD's with tied hair. It's still just around the edge of the scalp and parting line and couldn't let down into a full head of hair.

I wasn't able to re-tighten Lamenta's curls with a boil, but I heard alternating dunks in hot and cold water could help set the shape better. I'd dismissed this "alternation wash" method as hooey when working with dolls in my teenage collecting era because I didn't see it as helping much, but there is a grain of truth to the idea that fast cooling can set something reshaped--I've had some success bending warped vinyl and setting the new shape with an ice bath. I think my course of action is going to just be cutting the ringlets to their original length rather than tightening the hair, because I don't trust that tightening the hair would be very successful and I don't really want the problem to recur.

Jubilee's bangs will need a boil to sit evenly on her forehead.

I appreciate every Living Dead Doll who has more colorful hair paired with a black-and-white austere dress, because it always makes the dolls look a little more dimensional and less stylized. I know, I love unreal aesthetics, but in horror, I can easily find all black-and-white, or all black, white, and red to feel on-the nose or indistinct if not done right. If all of these black-and-white costumed dolls also had black or white or grey hair, they'd look more goth and caricatured in a way that could reduce some of their plausibility as believable old dolls or blend them more into the crowd. Agatha, Hollow, Gretchen, and Jubilee would all be a little too on-the-nose "horror" for me if they had unsaturated hair colors. I think it also helps Jubilee in particular because her dress is uncharacteristically grim for a little girl's party dress, and the hair color and green tones in her face paint do just enough to push against that so she's not just miss Morbidetta Gothikskull Spiderweave or whatever. Might I prefer Jubilee more if she were blonde rather than ginger? Perhaps. But there's something correct about her hair color all the same.

Jubilee's skin is grey, but her face paint has enough green to leave the lingering impression that she's actually a green doll, and I'm entirely fine with that. The green has a pretty high impact on her palette for how little there is, possibly also helped by her series being coded green in the tissue. I really like her face.

Jubilee has simple harsh black brows. Her eyes are outlined to the sculpted oval contour and are looking slightly up with small irises in two green tones with red pupils. She has bold lashes on the lower edge in addition to her upper lashes and has green airbrushing around the eyes. Her lips are green with a corpse-style lined effect and pale green dribble is coming out of her mouth on the right side, going under her chin and continuing in paint on her collar.

The implication, confirmed separately by a passage in Isaiah's newspaper, is that she gorged herself on birthday sweets and cake (and potentially got hyperactive and energetic with enthusiastic celebrating) and started throwing up. 

Jubilee was Isaiah's only series-mate to be referenced in his newspaper. While his paper references several dolls who would have died well after him, Jubilee is the only Series 11 doll dead by Isaiah's time, so her inclusion makes more sense than any of the other three S11 doll's would have.

That's about what I'd expect LDD to do with this character, and it's not the most repulsive upsetting vomit imagery in the dolls. It's a bit more Exorcist pea soup than realistic bile, and I wouldn't be surprised if that was on the designers' mind. I think the face is just right.

Jubilee's dress is plausible for her 1890s death period, though she might be a bit less covered than expected. I might expect tights on her. The top features a white rectangular bib collar and lace trim, and with the black color and close neck, it adds to a more austere, conservative look. I don't think it's wrong for when she died, but I'm not an expert. The bib collar has been stained with gross yellow splotching from some poor conditions where the box was.  It's supposed to be white except for the puke splat on the side.

The shoulders have very small lace trim but the skirt does not. The dress looks dusty and dirty. Washing is badly needed.

Typical socks and black Mary Janes. Socks are discolored too.

As with Isaiah, I found no issues with her hip joints. Maybe Series 11 was fine but Series 12 was just the nadir for the brand's joints.

One thing I learned about the doll is that she has rings of grey blushing on her elbows and wrists to shade them, as well as some green airbrushing on her fingers, and yellow nail polish!

I rushed Jubilee downstairs to see if I could fix her up in time to stage the party on the day I got her, but daylight didn't last long enough at all. Nightmare incoming.

It started fine with retying her hair by knotting fiber elastics around the pigtails and cutting them to the above-the-shoulder length they needed to be. Her bangs still have some asymmetric sway I don't like, but I can keep working on them.

I then used some soap and bleach to tidy the dress and socks...but when I dried the dress, the bleach took out the black color too and I began to panic.

It was Resurrection Sadie all over again. 

What was I supposed to have done? Would vinegar have cleaned the stains? A cycle in the washing machine? I guess patience will get you everywhere if so, and I will try one of those things next time because clearly bleaching is too risky with LDD clothes. But now how do I fix what I have here?

Evil comes on the birthday, indeed.

I looked up possible spot-dyeing techniques to restore the color and eventually found a promising process--heat up dye like normal, apply it in spots to the fabric, blot and rub it to remove excess, and let it set for about 20 minutes. After that, you can iron the piece between paper towels to lock it in further. This completely blew my daylight hours, but it was imperative to try. I was exceptionally grateful now for the lack of lace trim on the skirt, which would have made controlling the spot dye much harder. Ibalso kearned that blow-drying the dress initially could have been a factor in the color fading, but I do think bleach had its hand. I just discovered that blow-drying what I had re-dyed definitely faded it brown so I learned about ways to make the color bind more to the fabric and let the dress air-dry for the next passes.

I also shortened her hat's elastic band and because I wasn't sure if the felt had bleached, I darkened it with acrylic paint just to make it look more polished.

Since I accepted my fixes on the dress would always be insufficient, I did act quickly to purchase a loose incomplete Jubilee I knew was on the aftermarket because she has a clean dress I could just swap in for best results. For timeliness and convenience, though (I moved a table upstairs against my normal interests and had a cake on standby!), I couldn't wait for the nice dress. I had to do this project now and color-repair the dress I had as well as I could to get the project published. Once I have the clean dress, I might actually deliberately bleach the first dress out again to see how light it gets and use whatever comes out and the second Jubilee for a custom LDD project. 

Getting the spare doll was entirely the right call, because after all my efforts, spot dye failed. I heated the dye and pressed it on the dress. I tried ironing the color in. I tried salt and vinegar as fixatives. I let it air-dry. It always dried back to faded brown. There had been improvement on the skirt, but not enough and working on the rest was dyeing the white parts better than the parts that needed to be black, while cleaning the dye out was yellowing the area. I ultimately had to fake the dye job for the photo session by dabbing diluted dye at room temperature into the dress and letting it dry that way so I could shoot Jubilee with a darker costume. I taped over her torso to minimize dye stains while I staged the party, but took her right out of the dress after photos and washed her off.

This is all very discouraging, and spoilers: it makes Jubilee the dud of this post and she doesn't get a full shoot here. However, I intend to stage a redemption for her and give her her dues once she's in top condition with the new dress. Sadie has a deathday coming up in April, and while I'd dismissed the idea of building a project for it because it could be redundant and take away from other objectives this year, I think such a post would be the perfect place to truly give Jubilee her due as she comes back out for Sadie's deathday. I have ideas lined up for that party already, and Jubilee needing a second chance because she's a bit held back right now sealed my commitment. Look out for her shining hour in the future.

I didn't want to open Jubilee's gift until she was presentable and staged on the party table, because that's where all of the gifts are, so I did so on the table.

Jubilee's gift box is black cardboard that's white on the other side, with ribbon in a bow around it. It isn't the same as the ribbon on all death certificates. It's a thicker, more flexible ribbon in a different, brighter color. The box isn't the sturdiest cardboard, but I deeply appreciate that it has a separate lid rather than a flap opening. The lid feels more classy and proper for a gift box. The box is a little larger and a little heavier than I expected for what I knew was in it, which made me wonder if the item inside was just a bit nicer than I was led to believe.

Inside the box is the thing I was excited for--a LDD button badge for the owner wrapped in plastic! But...uh...was I supposed to get two?

It has been reported that you get two in the box, so maybe this is normal, but LDD's website doesn't say there are two. I still took it as a pleasant surprise after all that rigamarole with the dress. It almost felt like Jubilee's apology to scrape back some goodwill. 

The buttons are just typical lightweight printed metal discs with a pin and a catch and are quite small, but I like them a lot and can use them, since I have a casual collection of fun buttons and pins. I only unwrapped the one to use and put the other one back in the present and tied the bow again. 

If two buttons was the standard distribution per Jubilee gift box, then I think it's a smart idea because a spare can compensate for losing a copy or you can keep something in her box and use the other pin for yourself.

There was no variable surprise gimmick here--every Jubille had the same gift contents. It could have beem smart to have at least three different potential gift variants for the doll so you'd never know what was inside your copy's present, but I like what she has. 

I think Jubilee and variant Nohell are the only solo LDDs with a "for you!" item gimmick. (Nohell, only with her variant edition, has a pretty decent human-scale Christmas stocking in her coffin). I think this is fitting, since both dolls are associated with occasions for gifts. Other pack-in items designed as swag for the collector were all collect-them-all gimmicks for Series 13 (a metal sulfur-symbol charm to build and put on a chain of your own), Series 15 (a spirit board mat in cling-decal quadrants and a planchette pointer) and the Twisted Love duo (metal necklaces that combine). 

Jubilee is the only Series 11 doll not to have been Resurrected.

I think this doll has a really cute design, but I had quite bad luck with her condition, having a dirty costume that sent me on a color-fixing odyssey that failed when my cleaning ruined it. The doll also has multiple aspects of manufacturing that didn't hold up well. Her hair elastics decayed, her curls collapsed as they seem wont to do, and the hat is flimsy and the band seemed to have loosened, in addition to the packet being taped to tissue in a very poor move. Part of my difficulty with this doll was entirely my own fault through a poor choice of dress cleaning, so that hurts her for now. Look out for April so I can enjoy her more properly in top condition. Alas, in this current moment, she's not quite there. Even if her dress was clean, it'd be very hard to call her worth seeking out right now because she was nice in 2006 and has issues come 2025, but if I had only needed the one pass with the doll, I'd be feeling rosier about her. She'll be on the bench until she's ready to shine.

Well, Jubilee's all ready to run this party, but one guest isn't enough. Fortunately, she brought more. She directed me to the box in the corner that looks like a cake. Naturally, someone jumped out!

Treat 13: Celebrating Sadie

The only other dolls in the brand to be classically and overtly birthday-themed in design besides Jubilee were the releases of Celebrating Sadie and Sin. These were dolls released during the 13th anniversary of the brand with a birthday-party appearance to mark the 13th "birthday" of the brand. I know Sadie was distributed to contest winners (the game was guessing the number of doll heads in a jar) as a prize, and Sin was produced in honor of (and distributed at?) a LDD anniversary party event. I don't know if either had a Mezco-direct purchase option or if their exclusivity was so circumstantial that you had to win the contest or be at the venue to get each. I guess it depends on how many people Mezco allowed to win the contest. Was only the first correct guesser given the prize package, or were a larger number of correct guesses for the jar of heads rewarded? I know that I don't own the only copy of Celebrating Sadie ever produced--can you imagine? There were definitely more.

Sadie and Sin were the only Series 1 characters in the "Celebrating" release, and their pairing holds true to the characters always being styled in a duo with an unexplained matching costume aesthetic. (Every Sin has a matching Sadie doll, though not every Sadie doll has a matching Sin. Schooltime Sadie, Bedtime Sadie, Sweet 16 Sadie, and Wonderland Sadie have no Sin twins.) 

I decided just to get Sadie because I've talked about and acquired so many of her editions already this past Christmas, and she's got some sentimentality to her for being the character at the root of my decision to start collecting LDD in 2024. I don't care as much for Celebrating Sin, and it wouldn't be right to debut the character in my collection with that release--not when the Return and Series 1 dolls call for a discussion.

The coffin is the typical 13th-anniversary print, and the tissue is tired old red. The chipboard loosely mimics the original Series 1-4 graphic style, though the illustrated portrait is a tracing of the doll rather than a freehand drawing.

Celebrating Sadie's chipboard poem says:

Buried deep down below

From their coffins they crawl

They are the undying force

Known as Living Dead Dolls

From apparitions to zombies

And all the evils in-between

Come along and join us

In celebrating our lucky thirteen

And a rewrite:

Deep down below

From coffins they crawl

The undying horde:

Our Living Dead Dolls

From spirits to zombies

And all ills between

Lend us your soul

This lucky thirteen

The chipboard poem could have been used for both Celebrating dolls, but Sin got a separate one.

Sadie's certificate gives her the same deathdate as original Sadie rather than a different one for this different edition (Schooltime and Series 7 had new dates, while Series 28's date isn't mentioned at all, leaving hers ambiguous). Her name is also just regular old "Sadie" rather than the certificate naming her specific edition, making it very easy to confuse for a copy of the Series 1 certificate. I briefly got the two certs mixed up when organizing my new binder for them. The Celebrating doll does get a new poem, though:

The first one to arise from her tomb

Our little mascot of doom and gloom

Sadie has arrived to spread along fear

All throughout our thirteenth year

And rewritten.

The first of the dead to break from the tomb

For years she's provided us sweet doom and gloom

At Sadie's sick party, you'll meet with real fear

She'll slaughter her way through this grand thirteenth year

Besides the different poems, Series 1's certificate has much bigger and differently-rendered text for the name.

The back of the coffin contained the party hat alongside the certificate.

Here she is unboxed.

Celebrating Sadie is highly similar to Series 1 Sadie in hair and face, but she has a definitely more grown feel--an older child, if not even an adult. Series 1 Sadie has long overlarge sleeves that make her look closer to three or four years old.

The doll starts with the party hat, which is glossy card like the real thing. The piece is printed with the 13th-anniversary symbol and has a black string elastic band which works well. The hat sits most naturally at a side angle.

This could tear and it shouldn't be gotten wet, but with care, it should hold up well. 

Sadie can't fit into the coffin with her tall stiff hat on, so I was glad I'd already decided to "wrap" her in the "cake" as her debut moment!

Sadie's hair is a lot like S1's, but the fiber feels nicer (S1's started glossy and great when boiled, but it's since become catchy and harder to comb) and it's more thickly rooted. It's just disobedient and untamed out of the box.

I was not interested in Celebrating Sadie from her LDD website photos, which made her face look drab and heavily airbrushed in a way I didn't think suited her:

Hairline wasn't doing her any favors, either.

Learning that the produced doll had an extremely light touch on the airbrushing and very closely matched the cartoon simplicity of S1 rocketed her up in my estimation. She looks way better than the archive photo. The two Sadie faces (S1 and Celebrating) are very similar, but the pale eye here is colored a bright minty blue, the pink eyeshadow was replaced by the faint black airbrushing, the brows are a les steep and more fluid shape, and the lips are painted a bit fuller and more mature.

I'm as captivated by Celebrating Sadie's face as I was with S1's. Series 1 struck me by her pure cartoon charm and impish cuteness, while Celebrating, with the same rendering style, instead strikes me for being oddly beautiful and classy. Rather than a wicked toddler, she looks really poised and confident, and that eye color is fantastic. It's striking how similar and yet how distinct their faces read to me. So little changed, and the appeal is exactly the same, but the tone of the two feels pretty different.

It's possible Celebrating Sadie was consciously designed to look older as a reflection of LDD having its thirteenth birthday and the doll herself "aging" to reflect the longevity of the brand. If Sadie was a toddler in Series 1, then the real-world years elapsed would suggest Celebrating Sadie is past the age of thirteen, and would likely either be sixteen or seventeen or eighteen, depending on if Series 1 Sadie strikes you as three, four, or even five. Most LDDs are fairly versatile in terms of the age they portray, so Celebrating Sadie could potentially be any year that's older than whatever Series 1 was.

Sadie's next two new anniversary designs (Sweet 16 and Series 35) don't really look any older than Celebrating, though. I'd even place S35 as younger. It kind of makes less sense that dead Sadie would age, actually. She'd reasonably be stuck at the age she died. 

Sadie does have one design as a grown woman, but it's as a kinky booby Fashion Victim that's more caricatured and modern alt-goth than glamorous and retro. I think Sadie would be more like Morticia as an adult, given how she's practically Wednesday as a child. 

Celebrating Sadie is a bit greyer and paler than S1, and is fairly close to the pencil-sharpener head rendition.

Celebrating Sadie has the expected 13th-anniversary emblem on the back of her neck.

Sadie's dress has a fairly retro silhouette, save for the absence of a shirt-style collar which would be expected for the 1950s and 60s. She has a round neckline, puffed sleeves, and a bell skirt above the knee, and polka-dot trim goes into bows on her waist and her hemline--the hem has a rounded gap on the side the waist bow is in, topped by another bow. Her sleeves are not trimmed in a separate color or fabric.

I think the bows resonate with the iconography of birthday presents in an elegant way that doesn't go into kitsch where Sadie looks like she's literally wearing gift wrap. I think this is a classy, cute design for the birthday theme.

The dress velcros down the back to the waist. The fabric did stain her arms, making her less amenable to different poses because the stains will show when the sleeves pull up, and the sleeves cannot pull over the stains when the arms are lifted. I opted to hide the arm discoloration with her hair pulled forward for photos where her arms were raised.

This is Sadie's only doll with patterned fabric (Resurrection tried out lace accents, while her other dolls' costumes are just color-blocked) and I don't know if I'd have envisioned her as a polka-dot girl, but it works really well and adds the perfect birthday touch while remaining in her usual color palette.

Sadie's shoes and socks are the old LDD standbys--white ankle socks with no extra detail and black Mary Janes.

Sadie's costume and faceup here would later be imitated by Series 35 Sadie, who was one of the Resurrection-style mystery dolls that filled the fifth slot in a purchased set of five. S35 Sadie has a blue left eye and a very similar dress cut, down to the bow on the left hip, and is also framed as an anniversary edition, though S35 has the classic Sadie accessories and no explicit party theming. 

LDD introduced an accessory depicting a trio of balloons that could be held with a palm-peg connection for Series 3's clown, Schitzo...so I'm surprised not one of the three birthday LDDs followed up and reused the piece. 

I boiled Sadie's hair straight and combed out her hair through the hat elastic to let her hair frame her face tidily and obscure the chinstrap.

All of this Sadie comes together to a more mature, but just as striking, take on the character. To be sure, being on the slightly larger ball-joint body inherently grows her a bit, but her faceup and costume cut also age her a little in a way that works for her. I really love her face. I also just like subtle doll comparisons like this, where so much is similar. It reminds me of the design evolution and variants of classic Barbies when they were growing into themselves, or even, more cynically, of simple changes to give a doll a new run--"Malibu Stacy has a new hat!" I don't think Celebrating Sadie is cynical, though. She stands apart quite elegantly while inheriting and changing the S1 doll traits in little ways that make her a fascinating study. 

Celebrating Sin doesn't grab me as much. I think my favorite Sins (a smaller pool to pick from than Sadie's editions) are Series 1 and Series 35.

I like that Celebrating Sin has a different hat (the date seems to be the date of the party she was made for), but the lack of pattern on her dress trim makes her costume altogether too much like Twisted Love Rose's--and Rose was already a doll I think could have been an edition of Sin just by dyeing her hair black and adding horns and a tail. I get what they're doing--Sadie's dress is all matte cotton and Sin's is all satin, but satin can be a crutch fabric for LDD and Sadie's costume is more appealing to me. Sin has the same silhouette as Sadie, but her lips look smaller and more youthful in the way they're painted, so maybe there's no intent for the Celebrating dolls to look more grown.

Sadie's minty eye made the pattern of that mysterious gift bag into the perfect backdrop for her. Good thing I had two copies to work with!

Minis Sadie made a good dolly present prop for Sadie to unwrap. This isn't Sadie's birthday (as far as I know) or her deathday (yet), but her doll asks to be framed as the birthday girl, so she got a bit of time to enjoy that.

The cake box itself was made of stacked glued-together papier-maché boxes with the lids and bottoms of the lower two layers cut out in circles to make a hollow shape big enough for a Living Dead Doll to stand in. 

Once determining that Sadie was to be the one in the cake box, I decorated it to match her with paint thickened by cornstarch slathered on and polka-dots. My intention was to do a better job and make a more convincing fake cake, but seeing the result, I decided to embrace it more as a novelty box that wasn't pretending to be much otherwise. I think the classic "jumping out of the cake" gag is still retained, and it works for the box not to be so convincing when there's a real cake at hand. It was a lot of work for all of a few photos, but I liked it. I'm not keeping it around, though.

If this Sadie was only distributed to contest winners and not also for purchase through Mezco direct, then she's about as fair a design as can be expected for that type of exclusivity--she has a distinct look and a charm and a purpose that make her desirable and worth having, but she's simultaneously not so extravagant or divergent that it would be exceptionally painful not to be in the club of her owners. Given that LDD reissued the S1 dolls with subtle tweaks, and then variants even closer to the S1 originals in the same year as Celebrating Sadie, I think Mezco covered their bases well so classic Sadie and Sin were available in other ways, and that made the anniversary birthday dolls a fun little "nice to have it" rather than an irritating holy grail for the masses. And let's be real: her exclusivity and commemoration does count for something and she's not on the low end of the aftermarket. But I've seen bigger aftermarket price hurdles from wider releases.

For such an ostensibly grim doll, this Sadie makes me very cheerful, and I'm obsessed with the mint dropped into her color palette and how building on it suits the character so well. She gives me birthday spirit and she's another Sadie I adore.

I think she might give "birthday" better than Jubilee does, and if I knew in advance how Jubilee would challenge me, I might have saved her for Sadie's deathday and just had Celebrating Sadie as the birthday-hat girl of this post. She's sufficient birthday-mascot material on her own. I suppose I could have kept Jubilee out of this post altogether and postponed the review I made until I had the new dress, but what's done is done and I want to be honest about my collection--besides, Jubilee is the first LDD birthday doll and fits better here than later, and I wouldn't have a third for this roundup without her.

Two's company, but three makes a party...who's in that stripy gift?

Hey...Sadie...I came from your other party. If you don't mind.

Exquisite Corpse: Tina Pink

This is Tina Pink from Series 28, a pastel pink ghoul in a pretty dress. She's interesting on her own, but she's actually based on a real person the LDD guys knew from their personal circle. (I think the word is that this person would have been a fan who befriended them?) She's also the second doll with this origin and makes the second of the "two Tinas" LDD. Tina Pink's predecessor was Tina Black in Series 10, who spotlights the Romantic Goth subculture. Both Tinas are named for a color and their hair matches it, and both seem themed on a subculture, because Pink looks very pastel-goth. 

I really wanted to have Tina Black in my collection and published before the birthday post so the two Tinas would be in conversation on the blog in chronological order, and I purchased her with full hopes that would align, but Tina Black has been long delayed in the mail, so she comes second around here. Oh, well.

Series 28 is Sadie's "Sweet 16" party celebrating the brand's 16th anniversary, and of the group of dolls, Tina is the one who feels the most "birthday party" in design to me with her girlish pastel fancy costume. 

My Tina Pink was unsealed but untouched otherwise, all wired in for packaging as new.

Tina Pink and Tina Black aren't textually connected to each other beyond sharing a death date and real-person inspiration, and Pink is a little harder to pin down in terms of her story. Still, her pastel look and dreary face make her a striking mix of cute and weird.

Series 28 has pink tissue, but it's not the classic LDD pink tissue color--it's darker.

"Classic LDD pink" tissue on the left--from a Series 6 coffin.

The chipboards lean into the color scheme, with an irregular cut outlining the graphic of presents and LDD balloons and branding the series as the Sweet 16 Party. While the celebration is in Sadie's honor, her name isn't in the series title on the chipboard. Still, both the series number and a version of the series title are featured.

Her chipboard poem says:

Tina Pink is a dainty dead girl

She does not have a care in the world

The fact that she is dead fills her with glee

'Cause being alive is not all it is cracked up to be.

This poem feels pretty generic to me. How about:

Tina, Tina, pink and pale

Sulking in her dainty veil

Is she glum, this Reaper's child? 

She thinks not--she's sewn a smile

I was excited to see a blatantly different certificate design on the back of the tray.

These pieces are pink and black invitation slips to the party, all depicting the doll of honor, Sadie, while featuring a personalized poem and a "[doll included] invites you" tag. Because these are not mortician's certificates but the dolls do have death dates, that information is disclosed by being written into the verse for everybody in S28 except Sweet 16 Sadie, who thus has no confirmed death date.

Tina's poem here says:

She loved the night, she adored the moon

And hoped one day she could visit it soon

On the twenty-fourth of November in nineteen sixty-six 

Tina Pink died underneath the shadow of a lunar eclipse.

November 4, 1966 is the same death date as Tina Black, which is likely also the birthday of the real Tina who inspired both LDDs. Because LDD does deathdates instead of birthdays, the two LDD Tinas aren't necessarily implied to be related. They could just be two people with no connection who never knew each other, but had similar names and died at the same time. If the date was a birthday the two shared, then maybe you could take them as twins...but they're very far from identical and nobody reasonable would name twin daughters this way. 

This poem needs a little reading into, but it sounds like it's saying Tina Pink was so obsessed with the moon that seeing an eclipse made her think it was vanishing for good, and she died of panic at the sight or just because she thought her dream was over. It's possible she acted to end her own life, though I would err on assuming it was an emotional panic-based shutdown and death instead. Fun story, but a strange one, and not particularly related to the doll visually. 

Here's a rewrite, handled as if the deathdate was disclosed elsewhere.

Each night her eyes widened, full up with the moon

The only escape from the unceasing gloom

She hoped and she prayed she could visit its surface

But when it eclipsed, she had lost all her purpose

This does have a resonance of sort with Dottie Rose, though--both are pastel pink, black, and white dolls and Dottie died from the presence of the sun while Tina died from the absence of the moon! (Though the absence of moon and presence of sun could mean the same thing, they don't here.) It's very likely not intentional that the two dolls compare this way, though.

Here's the doll unboxed. 

Tina Pink starts with a veil piece, which I think is very cute. It's pale pink mesh with a frilled band on top and a white elastic fabric chinstrap.

It's similar to Lamenta's veil from Series 26, though hers had rosettes on the top band, a spider-web pattern, and a different hang shape with more weight pulling it down.

Tina looks better with her hair combed partially through the front of the chinstrap to frame her face.

I've heard this veil being compared to a bridal look, but I don't think the rest of her is, and I think it works for a girly dress-up party theme. I can see this as birthday fancy--that's why I picked her!

The veil can flip over her face and hang okay with a bit of adjusting.

Tina Pink's hair is center-parted and about the same pink as Dottie Rose's hair, and the fiber feels like good quality though the cut isn't fully even, the rooting isn't super thick, and the hair will need a boil to assume the straight silhouette it's meant to.

Tina Pink's skin is stark white and her face paint is very simple. 

She had solid yellow-grey rings of shading around her eyes, which are painted to look half-lidded in grey. The eyes have small pink irises and black outlines run around the perimeter of the eye. Tina's mouth is overpainted with stark black lines that shape her lips and extend her mouth with a stitch or tooth pattern of vertical lines as if she has been slashed and sewn, or else reflects a corpse-like skeletal withering. 

This mouth is very much the style of something aiming to mimic Tim Burton art, though to be an art snob who's studied Burton illustration to try imitating it, his actual rendering technique in illustration is not all that much like this and her eyes don't match how he'd do it. There's a difference between "Burtonesque" and "Burton chameleon", and Tina is the former. Still, she does bring immediate comparisons to Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas, and it makes her very goth. I was never fully sure where I landed on this face paint, but I think I land more now on it being enjoyably weird. It's expressionless and grim, but also very simple and stark and cute and suits her aesthetic. With her dull eyes, lack of brows, and large forehead, she feels very corpselike in a fun stylized way that clashes with the pink cutesy, but it doesn't feel at all repulsive or ill-matched to the rest of the doll. Tina is a great encapsulation of the phrase "Living Dead Dolls", because she's all the goth, cute, grotesque, and classic-dolly the brand excels at.

It's not clear how old this character is meant to be, but I tend to see her as a young woman more than a little girl. Her lifeless face and outlined lips don't make her seem too childish, even if the veil might...and her costume, while fit for a birthday, is not a kid's party dress to me.

Tina Pink's outfit colors and styling make it feel textbook 1950s to me, but glamor 1950s--couture 1950s. This is a dress such as a woman of the decade would wear to a fine nightclub or a formal party or celebrity affair. This isn't a little girl's tutu. Black and pink are a classic chic fifties color combo, and the flared skirt with the tulle and the big rosette on the hip also feel very fifties to me, in an aesthetic LDD hadn't tapped previously. I've seen several dresses with elements like this being ogled at by Lucy Ricardo and Ethel Mertz! Dottie Rose is also blatantly fifties in look and shares a color palette, but she's less formal. Arachne and Resurrection-variant Dottie are also fifties, but they're both very sock-hop in aesthetic with different takes on the classic blouse and poodle skirt. Tina Pink is reflecting the fanciest fashion of the decade, and I like it.

The bodice has a flat line below the shoulders and ribbon straps, all in pale pink satin, while the skirt is more of the same, but overlaid with a black soft tulle (not a stiff one) that falls in a tidy line just above the hem, creating a stripe of just the pale pink. The mesh is not sewn down except for in a vertical line down the back of the skirt.

The waist has a rosette accent on the right hip formed of the same mesh, and is trimmed with a black ribbon. The ribbon is not tacked down all the way around, so it can slip up and need adjusting to pull it to the edge of the skirt, which is annoying.

The dress velcros down the back like normal.

Tina Pink has fancier lace-trimmed ankle socks in white and Mary Jane shoes in pink. I think the only other LDD with pink Mary Janes was Honey.

Honey's shoes.

Tina Pink's shoes were just normal black-cast Mary Janes taken off the line and sprayed pink with paint, which is an imperfect effect and a visibly cheap move.

Honey's shoes were cast in pink and I wish Tina's were, too. I mean, if you're gonna do it this way, at least make sure the tops of the shoes are fully blasted.

The paint job does make these Mary Janes more rigid, and there is an element of retro authenticity to them as far as portraying Tina Pink like she could be a doll from the fifties, so maybe I can make that excuse for them. I shouldn't, though.

The shoe type is the most "child-coded" thing about the doll. LDD sandals might suit a more grown character, but I don't think the shoes invalidate readings that she's a young woman.

Tina's legs were unevenly molded, making her a little harder to stand.

While this is likely just my copy's issue, the sprayed-on shoe color and the slippery waist trim are poor manufacturing choices. 

Here's Tina Pink and Dottie Rose next to each other--two pink, black, and white fifties gals of different flavors...and neither of whom died during the 1950s.

Series 28 had a variant set where the dolls were all cast in glow-in-the-dark yellow-green vinyl and their costume/hair color values were made stark black and white with several elements inverting the color value from the original doll:

I like the stark flattening of the palette with this high-contrast greyscale and inversion of values, but the glow skin kills it for me. These would have been a beautiful variant set worth collecting if they were all the same stark white opaque color as the mains.

I had a lot of fun playing with Tina's veil, lighting, and my desk lamp as the moon in the sky she pines for.

The white circle of the moon is digital here, though--I got a perfect shot of Tina, but the angle on the lamp warped the circle just a bit, so I covered it but kept the real light effects.

And it just so happened that a real lunar eclipse was coming right after I got Tina, the night/morning of March 13/14! What luck...for me.

She wasn't so thrilled, and resented holding the reminder sign.

I took the best pictures of the eclipsing moon that I possibly could with my phone camera because my proper photo camera doesn't have a telephoto lens for the task. I shot with settings that tinted it pink for Tina, getting a good crescent and a pretty good shot of the near full-eclipsed "blood moon" phase. Clearly, Tina expired before the eclipse ended, because she'd have realized that the peak of the eclipse didn't black out the moon entirely. Waiting even longer would have shown her it was coming right back. If the eclipse was so devastating, I wonder how she ever handled a new moon. Maybe it affected her so badly because eclipses disrupt the schedule and make the "vanishing" seem more catastrophic and final?

I took some photos of Tina outside on the lawn, and composited in the eclipsing moon and some cloud and fog effects for a couple of pieces.

I love playing with the veil. This is a doll that suits lying down dead and shrouded.

Despite her fifties vibe, the doll has enough morbid and spooky about her to suit really moody deathly photography. Her face does a lot of heavy lifting, but perfectly brings out the goth in "pastel goth".

I'm really glad Tina and the March 2025 lunar eclipse lined up so well. I love the opportunity to have documented the event through this doll review, and it means a lot to me that I used my own live photos of the eclipse as a memento. I honestly don't know if I would have stayed up to experience it without Tina Pink by my side. This wasn't my first lunar eclipse experience--I saw the one around this time a few years ago in my last year of college, and I only realized it was happening when the bright light shone right through my window and woke me up. I stayed in bed and watched the eclipse progress, but this experience with Tina gave me a better view and better photos. 

Of course, I still needed to explore the "pastel" side of things, and selected some powder-pink paper to hang over a towel as fluffy carpet to build a chic fifties bedroom of toys. Dottie Rose and dead poodle Hun came over to join, and Minis Sadie again plays a toy doll for the big dolls.

I also worked with a pink velvet pillow.

And here she is rendered in full Tim Burton style with pen and watercolor.

Tina Pink has such an unusual charm, but I just love her. She's cute, she's chic, she's haggard. She's morbid and dour, and bright and beautiful. Her aesthetic is very clean and retro with its fifties influence and bold linework, and she makes a gloomy weary corpse very oddly chic and poetic. She's one of those oddballs like Daisy Slae who I regard as an extremely captivating and perfectly-executed niche character design. I wish she was manufactured a little better, but I had a very nice experience with the doll regardless.

There were still other gifts on the table, so what could they be? Knowing me, did you already guess they were big ones?

Well, let's look at this one here. What a strange ribbon shape...It's almost...radioactive...

Oh, yes. This is major.

Sour grapes, forbidden fruit, whatever you want to call it...it's true: the sheer inability to get something will grate on you like few other forces. And for me, of late, that had been Toxic Molly. The variant edition. My fastest-formed grail doll, and fortunately I was able to snag her up. 

Just wait until you see her face. Review to come soon!

But, wait. There's more. What about that big bag that looks somehow mirrored? Each tag has one word of "Happy Birthday" on it.

Well, inside is a duo coffin...

...and it's Hazel and Hattie, the conjoined twins.

It says a lot that I was just as delighted by them on second unwrap as I was on the first!

I simply couldn't wait on investigating these dolls for a moment longer after ages of them always being pushed aside for another priority. They'll review after Molly.

And last, something smaller. 

Huh. Well...these aren't Living Dead Dolls at all. Oh, but couldn't they be? 

Well, that's certainly what Ed Long and Damien Glonek thought. This specific doll base model is what I confidently believe was used to build the original Living Dead Dolls handmade customs prior to the brand "going official". If we're talking "LDD birthday", nothing could be more on-theme because these little craft doll bodies are the exact birth of LDD itself. My deductive process and a look at these dolls, and a custom LDD in honor built on one of them, will also come soon!

Phew. That was a lot!

Let me be very clear: only the little bagged dolls were reasonable gifts. This was a very very big-ticket birthday to throw together, and Jubilee cost me two times on account of her dress. Sadie's deathday should be a comparably smaller affair.

Jubilee called everyone to cake. This is just a grocery-store offering in classic birthday theme, which I decorated with candy eyes and a skull candle together. I like the visual aesthetic of colorful classic birthday with horror poking in. I could stage a full "horror birthday" tableau for Sadie's benefit later on.

While I was setting up the table for the shoot, my wonderful and also naughty cat jumped onto the table and ate frosting off the top front, so I had to put the skeleton hand on top for the cover photo!

Hazel had to be off-camera because if both twins were in frame, the cake would be obscured or the roundup dolls in the back would be too far from the camera.

I'm very pleased with the picture. It's not to the style of my usual LDD roundup covers, but I'll shoot that picture (with Tina Pink's coffin) and tag it on the end of the post once Jubilee's in shape for proper photos, just to have the alternative in my usual LDD roundup style. 

...and there she goes again.

Of the three birthday dolls the roundup is built around, I might say Tina Pink is my favorite. She's just one of those oddball designs who's a total 10/10. I love the aesthetic she brings and how it inspired me, and she's just very special. Celebrating Sadie is, at present, my favored birthday-party doll of the two with pointy hats. I hate that her arms are stained by the dress in such a limiting way for display, but she's otherwise beautiful and festive and fun with all the charm of OG Series 1 Sadie. Jubilee is on hold for final evaluation because it's not fair to rate her now while she's technically incomplete. I made the mistake that derailed her and I won't blame LDD. We'll talk about her again when she rolls her wagon over for Sadie's April 26 deathday party.

P.S.

Guess who showed up on my doorstep minutes after I hit "publish" and locked this in as Roundup 10.

I could pull down this post and reorder the roundups for the Tinas' sake, but this is too cruel and too funny not to let stand. You win, Universe.