Living Dead Dolls Roundup 11

Oh, how I'd have liked for this to have been Roundup 10, but I think it all worked out okay even though Ms. Tina Black mocked me so. She was late and arrived r i g h t after I locked in the birthday post as Roundup 10. I'd wanted to have the two Tinas reviewed in release order, but so be it. The birthday being the 10 milestone roundup was more fitting anyway. But the first two dolls here were acquired before all three of the birthday-roundup stars if that record is important to you. This will probably be the only time I end up publishing two roundups consecutively as a result!

Warning for scary, gross, and gory horror imagery.

Kitchen Staph: Gretchen

I briefly mentioned this doll when talking about Agatha because she fits into Agatha's niche, and while while more organic and gory than antique and ceramic, Gretchen does look like an old doll in the same way. Agatha is designed to look like a domestic servant in a manor house, and her austere mature look gives her an air of seniority, like the housekeeper in charge of female staff or the sole maid of a smaller setup. Gretchen, meanwhile, is a doll depicting a classic white-capped scullery maid who died of plague. She'd work easily as Agatha's subordinate and has a fairly classic dolly look to her.

Now, Gretchen was originally one of my major "never" dolls. I thought she looked too realistic and gruesome for her to ever appeal to me, but seeing in-hand photos of the produced doll started to sway me. Her skintone is actually stark white rather than flesh-colored, lending her a more caricatured and potentially porcelain look, and her nasty sores are gross...but I've come around to more shocking dolls recently.

None of Series 25 seems to be very easy to get on the aftermarket, and I was surprised to see Gretchen so expensive. She was held off until I found a cheaper opened but complete copy who I recognized was not to be passed up. I was originally thinking of doing a sequel project to Series 23 where I gathered the dolls who "missed the tea party" and could easily be added into the S23 cast due to toylike or other theming that suited the series, and Gretchen would have been in that group, but if I give myself too many themed concepts, I'll have no freedom on when I can review any given doll, and I can always assemble Series 23 expansion contenders in an isolated topic post and photoshoot after they feature on their own. I make the rules here...and lord knows I have enough rigid plans for this year's blogging.

S25 is the lonely unthemed "variety" Living Dead Dolls set within the section of the brand timeline that was thoroughly devoted to themed series. Previously, every series from 15 to 24 had a theme or unifying gimmick, and every series from 26 to 34 was themed as well. Series theming actually started from  Series 5-7 before dropping off again until S13. S14 was not themed, but S15 was (though more with a gimmick uniting the characters than the characters themselves being unified). The last classic series (S35) had the anniversary gimmick with six mystery dolls in Resurrection style, but the four new characters in the main set of S34 were an "assortment" style with at least two of the four (Eve and Galeras) having no obvious anniversary significance. 

S25 arguably has three witches thanks to Asa and Sospirare and Luna, if you think Luna can be described as such (it's really not clear), but witchcraft is not a full theme of the series and would be the actual theme of Series 26 right after. The other two S25 characters are Gretchen here and Cracked Jack, a sailor-boy doll with a really incohesive paint job. I think Jack is maybe one of the most disappointing dolls because I'd adore his concept if he looked more like a broken doll without confusing gore or cartoony paint like he has. I heard someone say he'd have been a great place to reuse the Evangeline head sculpt, and absolutely. That would make him an incredible doll.

S25 has silver coffin packaging to celebrate the milestone of twenty-five series, though it falls a little flat for me because this color has been seen for all of Series 5 previously and some novelty is lost. You could argue it's a recurring milestone design, but other multiples of five (S10, S25, S20, S30, and S35) had different designs. S10 had black coffins but red metallic print on the clear lids to celebrate its own milestone. I wish S25 had done something else different. Gold coffins? Either this series or Captain Bonney would have been obvious places to do such a thing, but Mezco never did it. I was still curious to see if there was any meaningful difference between S5's silver coffins and S25's.

I'd suspected from a photo of a Series 25 coffin that the opaque lid had a black logo instead of a reflective silver one, but I wasn't sure if the picture was just reflecting something black to create that illusion. In person, I can confirm: the S25 lids have black print while S5's were silver.

S5 on the left.

The S5 coffin also looks a bit yellower, but that could be aging.

The Series 25 coffin backs are also much cleaner without the repetition of the sketch art from inside the lid. That was a messy choice back in the older LDD days. The interior of the opaque lids look pretty much the same.

Series 25's tissue color is red, again. It's part of a solid streak of red tissues from Series 24 to Series 27, and I'd never have allowed that to happen. Break it up a little, LDD! For Series 25 myself, I think the other rehash, a pink color for classic vibes to mark the anniversary, could have been fair, or else maybe a black/grey or yellow? For a variety series, it's a little harder to pick a theme color. 

The chipboard has a bumpy edge and features a portrait of the doll surrounded by hellish flames. The image appears to have a deliberate "snowy" decayed effect like an old or dirty photograph. 

The chipboard poem says:

A plague claimed her life

But still, she could not lie

This poor little peasant girl

Was just too busy to die.

And a loose rewrite.

A festering illness laid claim to her life

But yet, the poor girl could not rest

Her tasks were too many, her loyalty fierce

Of the serving girls, she was the best

Gretchen died on April 12, 1665, the burial date of Margaret Porteous. Porteous was the first recorded fatality of the Great Plague of London, a bubonic plague outbreak in England. 

The name Gretchen is also a reference, with "Margaret" being the origin "Gretchen" derives from. This is quite a lesser-known historical event to root a character in. Where did they pull that from?

While Gretchen's design may ring more "Victorian" to the eye, it doesn't appear impossible for her look to be associated with the seventeenth century. The use of the word "peasant" in her poems is slightly odd because I'd expect her class to be referred to as "the poor" in her time. England wasn't a feudal country by the time of Gretchen's death...though only narrowly, as feudalism was only officially abolished five years prior in 1660. Despite Gretchen fitting right in with Agatha as a subordinate, she actually died before Agatha did and arguably has seniority in the abstract LDD world of the dead.

The chipboard poem says: 

First came the cough

Next a fever, and open sores

Then this pint sized peasant died

Attempting to do her chores.

And a rewrite:

First was the cough, then the fever, then sores

A servant expired amidst all her chores

Both poems reference Gretchen diligently working through and beyond her illness. This could be taken as a stark class commentary about the disenfranchisement of poorer classes who cannot afford to stop their labor even as it destroys them, though it could just as easily be period-typical vile romanticism of the "good little servant", a fairly common lens in old stories. I can't say what LDD were framing this story as. Gretchen is both a socialist's nightmare and a patrician's fantasy, and whether her portrayal is political, emulating period narratives, or simply not that deep is unclear.

Here she is out of the box. She's an extremely creepy doll, especially with her head tilted this way while catching your gaze.

Up top, Gretchen has a classic puffed white maid's cap in the shape I always associate with the character Strawberry Shortcake. The piece is cotton with lacy trim, and came held on with an elastic like it would have been for factory-packing. I believe it's the original packing band.

It was instantly apparent that the fabric elastic inside the cap had loosened a lot, leaving the cap shapeless and overlarge, laying over her head more than sitting around it.

Elastic loosening is such a disheartening thing and it makes doll costumes harder to keep up. The cap looks fine, sort of, but it really makes me want to try re-tightening it somehow.

One of my concerns with Gretchen was her hair, which was reportedly not executed as well as her photo, with looser, less structured curling and apparently sparse rooting.

With my copy, at least, her official photo doesn't seem far removed from what we got. Her hair is ginger and center-parted without bangs and is styled in big rolled curls. The back of the hair is shorter than the front and sides, and the rooting is quite thin on top, though her cap mitigates this problem.

Red hair in the seventeenth century would be far more distinct to Irish people and is still very common in Ireland, though Gretchen doesn't necessarily have to be profiled as Irish, and her name certainly isn't--it's a German derivative of "Margaret". Her historical death reference indicates she resided in England for sure. If LDD wanted her to be Irish, she'd likely be named Nora or Erin or something, or if they wanted to go one step deeper, Siobhan or Aisling or Aoife or Niamh? I wouldn't trust most Americans to know or spell those names, though, and LDD's worldliness is fairly low.

Gretchen's hair shape is a little awkward and the curls gather the hair together in spots and make the rooting look worse, so I tried combing them out. Here's the shape and volume I got.

In back, there's a section of thinner, longer hair that falls below the thicker bulk, so I used that line of thicker hair as the base length to carefully trim to.

Here she is with her hair trimmed and arranged, coming back closer to original intended shape but less clunky.

I like how she looks without the cap. The hairline and wavy curls suit her.

Gretchen's face is fascinating. It's cute, it's repellent, and the expression seems to always change. 

She has stark white skin and her face is covered in sores. The sores have dark purplish-red centers and sponged paler shading around them, and some of the sores look opened. This shading also surrounds her eyes with some greyish bruise tones as well, and she has two stressed undereye creases on each eye. Her brows are solid orange matching her hair and have a textured shape and neutral placement, while her eyes are almond-shaped with dark rings around them. Her sclerae and irises are outlined in thin red while bloodshot red lines enter her sclerae, and the irises are orange with yellow centers and tiny pupils. Her eye color and hair color react together in a very intense manner.

Gretchen's mouth is shaded with the lighter pink, including a line streaking down from the corner of her mouth, and the middle of her mouth is shaded dark, making her lips look slightly open.

I'd heard the sores were textured, so I prepared for her to be yet another doll I wasn't aware was using the typical LDD bumpy-face sculpt (after also not realizing Captain Bonney, Quack, and Isaiah had the sculpt until I got them). I was correct that this was the sculpt being used.

Gretchen's face is icky, but it's also extremely haunting. Her gaze looks both vacant and piercing. Maybe her eyes are subtly misaligned, but it actually really works for her if so. Her expression can look innocent and sweet and cute, completely absent and mindless, or knowing and accusatory. And her paint job is so artfully distinct and clear while still looking shaded and gross and dimensional. I think this doll's stark white skintone is the secret she rides upon, though. I don't know if I'd be so grotesquely captivated by her if she was a flesh color. It's the right touch of stylization and also allows my favorite angle of the doll being a perverse antique gone wrong. She has an almost frosty quality. Am I really going on record saying this is one of the most beautiful, artful LDD paintjobs? Dang, I guess so. This is genuine horror artistry.

The Silent One in Series 29 afterward would have some stylistic similarities to Gretchen, with a similar ill-looking white face with the bumpy skin and trailing reddish paint.

I think Gretchen's coloring and eye shape also liken her a bit to Betsy two series prior despite their different artistic styles and time periods.

You could play an atrocious classist "rich sister, poor sister" storyline with these two. Since I've already framed Agatha as Betsy's servant, would Gretchen be Betsy's sister who was forced to be her lowest serving staff out of pure cruelty? I know Betsy could be a horribly selfish monster, but making her sister a neglected Cinderella to her own nasty head maid could be another depth of evil. Of course, this wouldn't make sense with the chronology since Betsy died much later and would more likely be a descendant of Gretchen, if anything, making for a cruel irony of the poor maid giving rise to the cruel estate owner mistreating her own staff. Gretchen's age is likely young, but I don't know if she'd have died old enough to have descendants. There's no actual implicit link between these two characters, to be clear. 

Gretchen's outfit is a simple black dress and a white apron, and the two are separate pieces. The apron has lace trim down the sides of the straps and the hem, and this same trim is on the cuffs of the dress. All of the lace is the same on this outfit, and the dress, cap, and apron are all the same type of cotton.

Coincidence or not, this lace looks a lot like what Agatha's dress features in the "blouse" section around the neck.

There were some snags on the front of the apron.

While Gretchen is pestilent, it only shows in her face. Her body and costume are spotless.

In the back, the apron straps cross in an X and the waist has a tie. The back of the straps and waist tie are satin ribbon.

This apron is very closely fitted to the doll, and pulling it down and up her body is a nightmare due to the crossed straps, even when popping her arms out inside her sleeves to put the apron back on. I wouldn't recommend taking this costume off the doll. I don't even know how she was assembled initially. Gretchen's arm joints are pretty tight and squeaky and didn't disconnect from her shoulders super easily. Her joint pegs were all fine, but the fit of the arms was just tight. I suppose it's better than the few later LDD copies I've encountered whose arms dislocate with simple posing. 

Under the apron, her dress is exceptionally simple, only having a rounded shirt collar at the top and the lace trim at the cuffs. The dress is otherwise not embellished and hangs past her knee. Gretchen cannot fully sit with her hips at 90 degrees from her torso due to the narrow shape of the costume.

Gretchen has typical black Mary Janes and full white footie tights from her hips to her toes, making her look very smart and proper.

The fit of her shoes isn't the tightest, but she doesn't wobble badly.

To fix her cap without sewing, I tried a new technique. I glued together a band of elastic and stretched it around a matryoshka, then took the cap and glued it and gathered it slowly, elastic-to-elastic, to encircle the new band and fit around it while it was stretched on the wooden doll. I weaponized the fact that elastic strips bond extremely quickly and securely to themselves, as well as the fact that gluing elastic to elastic meant the glue wouldn't be seeping into the cotton cap...and the black elastic (the only color I had on hand) wasn't going to show through the cap because it was glued to the white band! Then the band came off the matryoshka, and the cap was re-tightened!

I felt like kind of a rockstar for engineering this repair without sewing. The difference is subtle but meaningful. A maid's cap shouldn't feel draped over her head. The cap is actually a little fussy now and liable to try tightening up and off the doll's head, but it works properly now.

Briefly during my Series 23 photo story, I showed Agatha bustling around preparing the party while holding a copper kettle shaped like a skull with a snake coming out of the nose:

This was hand-sculpted and painted, and I made it in the first place because I thought such a piece would be the accessory I'd give to Gretchen in the hypothetical roundup group of "not-quite-Series 23" contenders. It fit for her to have kettle for the tea's hot water, used in the downstairs quarters of the house before getting poured into the pot brought upstairs to the tea room. Gretchen would not appear upstairs at the party, but Agatha would make her boil the water in the kitchen. All of this was conceived well before I ever thought I would ever be actually getting Gretchen, but the whole idea of this prop was, from the start, to serve as this doll's custom accessory and complete the doll better in the future. I just made it for the photo story without having Gretchen yet because I thought it would add flavor. Now that Gretchen was coming, I wanted to follow through with my concept...but I was also pretty unhappy with how this piece turned out. It looks too lumpy and unfinished, the skull-and-snake theming doesn't look as good as I wanted it to, nor does it work well with the look of a traditional copper kettle, and the color for the finish was mixed and mixed until it had no luster. I needed to have kept more metallic paint in the base tone, but also, I don't think I had the right color of paint at the time. So I elected to rework this concept to do right by Gretchen and make a fully new kettle.

I decided to try making a removable lid like Betsy's teapot, sculpting in some bubbles in a surface inside the pot, and the pot itself is now round and smooth and tapers upward, with the detail now being carved instead of contoured. I kept the snake-shaped spout and kept it sculpted as a separate piece, but now to be applied flat to the surface with glue rather than glued into a nasal cavity. The face on the kettle is now based on medieval takes on the Devil, with pointy ears, sharp teeth, and a nose that is a snake, and the kettle has a defined rim at the base that pulls the piece together. 

After baking, I sanded the carved lines to clean up the design and painted it with pure copper metallic paint, making the piece much more vibrant and lustrous--and the perfect complement to Gretchen's hair. I think it was subconscious to make the kettle copper at first, but I must have been responding to the doll's color scheme in making that choice, and on this second pass, I was intentionally aiming for it. The tip of the spout/snake head was still painted black like before, while I planned for the wire I used for the handle to be copper and to get a black bead threaded on for a grip at the top. To keep the lid on, I glued a small plastic ring to the bottom which I hoped and prayed would fit inside. The liquid and bubbles inside are pure black and mysterious and concerning. To protect and seal the paint job, which wasn't adhering beautifully to the surface of the baked clay, I put some polyurethane coating on, which would also gloss the kettle up a bit, add a warmer tone, and improve the physical texture.

To make the handle, I cut a segment of a dowel and bored holes in both ends to glue copper wire into (I couldn't bore it out completely to thread a single piece through) and bent the other ends into the holes bored into the kettle so the handle works. This follows the principle of the older kettle, but that one had wonkier placement and a less smooth handle rotation, and my attempt to make a grip for it by sculpting air-dry clay around the wire just crumbled apart. The grip on the newer kettle got painted black and glossed.

I realized with the handle the way it was, the lid I had made for the kettle was too tall and that a LDD hand couldn't rest between the handle and the lid, so I made a second lid. The old lid wasn't fitting securely, anyway, so this time, I didn't sculpt it flat and instead mashed the clay into the top of the pot and sculpted the dome before pulling the clay piece out and baking it so I knew the lid was exactly fitted. 

I set to painting this piece, too, but I needed to replenish my polyurethane supply. The material is liquid in a mini paint can with a pry-off lid, and the lid on mine wouldn't fit back on and let me re-seal the can, leading to the liquid slowly drying, thickening, and crusting on top like a crème brulée for these past couple of months. I've been dutifully breaking the crust with a screwdriver and dipping back in for coats, and by the time I made this kettle, I've had to resort to using splashes of acetone to thin it enough to brush on so it wasn't a gel, but then I tried mixing in acetone with a brush that clouded up the material from residual paint, and that messed up the finish of the second lid and I had to wipe it off. I'd gone far enough with this can of gloss and I put it out of its misery. It was okay. Gretchen wasn't due for a few days yet, anyway. This second kettle was made in advance too!

Here's the finished new kettle next to the original. There could hardly be more difference in finesse. While take 2 still isn't as strong as an official factory doll prop, I'm really happy with it.

Gretchen doesn't have a gripping hand and I'm not sure I'd go out to acquire one for her (to say nothing of the nightmare that swapping arms would create with this tight costume), so her holding the kettle is tricky. She can hold it on the back of her fingers, but it's not the most stable and does look a little wrong.

This pose needs a gripping hand.

She fares better holding her hand vertically within the handle as her thumb braces on the top bar.

I also cut her a piece of a glasses polishing cloth for a hand towel or cleaning rag she'd use in her chores, which just drapes on her arm.

Here's Gretchen next to Agatha. They easily fit together in one household's serving hierarchy.

And with Grace of the Grave, victim of Europe's prior famous plague (the Black Death).

You could also frame Gretchen as the conceptual intersection of two Series 8 dolls--Grace of the Grave and Hollow. Grace is plague, while Hollow is a white-skinned doll with the recurring bumpy face sculpt and a black-and-white vintage outfit that fits with the costume aesthetics of Gretchen and Agatha.

 

To photograph Gretchen, I emptied out a dish cabinet and rearranged it with white ceramic, copper, and other antique-looking and reasonably humble pieces to hide her among the shelves of an old servant's-quarters kitchen supply.

I then put her by the fireplace, which easily played the role of a cellar, with a stand of tools and a copper bucket filling in the background nicely.

And some portraits against the wall. I like how the shadows in the darker second photo distort her face alongside her sores.

Here's Gretchen against a black backdrop to complement an earlier portrait of Agatha.

This really is her best angle, turned away with her eyes catching you.

I did a version with just the head and wild hair, too.

I took more pictures of copperware on a shelf and played with Gretchen reflecting in the tankard.

I took some photos with lighting chosen to try highlighting her uncomfortable eerie deathly ill face.

Gretchen's vinyl, despite being stark white, is not a cast that pops blue-white under UV purple, so blacklit photos of her didn't happen. It's a shame because her creepy face would look awesome glowing under blacklight.

And then I set a scene of Gretchen being made to clean the servants' quarters. I set it inside a basement cupboard for the right wall texture, and used a shelf liner as the floor due to the vintage pattern, and filled the space with a few props and put Agatha as the taskmaster making Gretchen clean up. Since I don't have kitchen props at LDD scale and didn't try attaching anything to the walls here, this space is more likely to be a storage area or Agatha's office or something.

I also staged Gretchen dead under the table.

This is an odd and compelling doll. Her hair is a little awkward and may need loosening and some trimming, and her cap is subject to badly deflating with its elastic losing its spring, but if she's cleaned up, she's a haunting doll with a grotesque but chilling and artistic face of sores. Her face is eerie in a special way, and while I found her a bit hard to pose and engage the camera with because her face is so specific, when she hits right, it's very effective. I found Gretchen to be a better doll with some added accessories, but many LDDs are. She's not as bad as some dolls who feel outright incomplete or lack a piece they're described using in their poems. Gretchen is a classic maid doll who converses well with other dolls in the brand while still holding her own aesthetically. Just don't try undressing her because her apron is snug.

I'm still shocked LDD never gave us a cook or a chef.

Slow-Rolling Fast Food: Peggy Goo

This doll was a bit of a surprise, and I hadn't expected to get her so soon. $100 is the minimum I've seen for her complete and untouched, and she'd make more sense for the summer with her theme, but an auction listing popped up for pretty low when I stumbled onto it, and it included Minis Isabel...and I was interested. I bid once, got outbid once (by a single dollar), and checked back in right at closing, where no activity on the auction had occurred since that outbid...and I sniped it right with a two-dollar increase bid at the closing fifteen seconds, for $53 plus shipping. I don't play the auction game much at all, but I'm very glad to have gotten Peggy Goo plus a pretty desirable bonus Mini for a better deal this way. Mini Isabel has already been discussed.

Series 22 is entirely zombies, as discussed with Menard, my first doll from the series, and its cast members provide their identities by tapping into genre or archetype. Menard is a voodoo-themed zombie from exploitation cinema, while Peggy Goo is a tribute to B-movies. She's a roller-skating 1950s/60s waitress you'd find at a drive-in theater or diner that might host screenings of sub-prestige horror films, and I thought she was interesting...with one drawback that required modification.

Peggy Goo's chipboard follows the Dawn of the Dead poster homage, and unlike Menard, this time, you can really see the striking visual of the dolls being rendered bald to match the head on the movie poster. Menard was bald as a doll already, so there was no change, but Peggy Goo (and Roxie and Ava and Patience Xero) appear hairless on their chipboards. (Goria, the sixth character, is also hairless as a doll by way of having a sliced-off dome and exposed brain like Purdy.)

There's a gritty filter over the head in this image and the skintone is yellower than the doll's. Romero's movie poster had a much flatter graphic style. 

The chipboard poem says: 

Over to your car

Peggy Goo will skate

Serving her favorite dish

Your brains on a plate.

And a rewrite.

You hear her wheels a-rolling

To your car miss Peggy skates

She's just taken an order

For your brains served on a plate.

Her name is a visceral pun on the fifties-style name Peggy Sue (or perhaps, Peggy Lou?), with the "Goo" invoking guts and bodily fluids. She joins Dottie Rose in a 1950s-themed aesthetic and a two-word fifties name. Peggy is also the second doll in this very roundup to have a name derived from "Margaret", as "Gretchen" is also related to the name. The two are also in serving positions of different eras and cultures and have fairly analogous uniforms, which brings them an interesting synergy.

Peggy Goo's death date is July 22, 1959, the premiere of Plan 9 From Outer Space, the "magnum opus", if you will, of famously bad director Ed Wood, whose life is dramatized in Tim Burton's sympathetic biopic that shares his name. 

Plan 9 features a convoluted plot focused on a highly advanced civilization from another planet. These people wanted to ally with Earth and set humans on a less self-destructive path (they are afraid of humans developing technology that explodes sunlight itself and destroys the whole universe), but their attempts at contact got stonewalled by world governments refusing to acknowledge aliens' existence or communicate. To combat this, the aliens decide their best shot at being acknowledged is to do something that cannot be ignored...which, for some reason, is to begin remote-controlling corpses with their wavelength technology and directing them to kill. The tech-puppeted ghouls are an unusual take on zombies, though still reflecting the older Haitian concept of a corpse enslaved by some force. This was before "zombie" or "ghoul" meant a flesh-eating autonomous undead creature with an infectious spread. The sci-fi/zombie fusion of Plan 9 is novel as it is confusing and makes for a fun (very loose) entry in the zombie canon. Plan 9 used to be known as one of the worst movies ever, but it's far from unwatchable and is mostly charming in its ineptitude, poor production and god-awful writing, especially for the narration. The film still achieves some atmosphere at points and has okay acting, and camp horror host Vampira has the easiest film role of all time in her role as a puppet corpse, as she spends her whole time just walking around silently and looking great in her full glam. (She refused to speak any dialogue written for her--smart.)

The certificate poem says:

Peggy Goo served all the cars on the lot

Customers thought she was alive, but she was not

Other waitresses wanted some tips for their pains

All Peggy Goo wants is your tasty brains

And a full rewrite. 

How does a waitress turn into fast food?

To find out the answer, just ask Peggy Goo

She once served a ghoul and despite shrieks and squeals

The poor girl was eaten, a true meal on wheels.

With her hat, Peggy's roller skates make her too tall for the coffin, so they're wired down on either side of her next to her ankles. One side of each skate wire loops through the usual plastic bracket on the back while the other just goes right through the cardboard and tissue.

Series 4 Lulu, who originated the skates, doesn't have hers packaged off her feet, and she has vertical pigtails, but she seemed to fit in her coffin fine. S12 Frozen Charlotte has ice skates that make her pretty tall, but she was fit into her coffin fully-dressed. I did test with Peggy, though, and Mezco weren't BSing. She really doesn't go into the tray with her skates and cap on simultaneously. The cap is too rigid and trying to put her in the coffin with everything on would push the cap forward and push the chinstrap off her head.

Here she is unboxed and in her skates.

Peggy Goo's look is fairly typical for gory undead modern zombies, and not stylistically anchored very far to fifties B-movies beyond her being a drive-in waitress. Her face isn't gore-free and doesn't have a particularly retro or campy paint style that might be expected from the era of horror she invokes. She feels more like a zombie from the real-world 1950s rather than the 1950s filtered through the time's mass media and retro nostalgia, though her colors do still allude vaguely to pastels of the time. My immediate instinct would have been to elevate that and color her like this:

This would feel more pastel and campy and sci-fi and make the gore more heightened. I do still enjoy the doll we got, and it's not fair to demand highly unreal design for everything fifties-themed, but I like my retro pop and camp. I'd have loved a Resurrection Peggy Goo with more of that tone.

Carhops, or servers who would bring your food to your car, were used in fast food establishments prior to the solidification of major chains and the codified drive-thru system where you roll up to a window in the restaurant and your order is passed through. For a time during the 1950s and 1960s, carhops would be young women who used roller skates for efficient deliveries, or even rolled over to take the order to begin with. It's a very specific niche of American culture that's nonetheless well-remembered and frequently referenced, and it feels just like the sort of thing a retro dolly would depict.

Part of what I love about LDD is the various niches of society and culture and history that have been depicted, resulting in doll costume pieces of a type not often seen in toys. There's the dickey shirt front on Maitre des Morts, the newsboy costume of Isaiah, and now, the little fast-food worker's cap worn by Peggy Goo. 

Known as the soda jerk hat, this style of cap has to share some lineage with both food workers like butchers, and with older domestic servants like Gretchen above. These diner caps were usually paper or card, but I gather they could be fabric, and Peggy Goo's is made of a fairly stiff cotton that holds its shape well. It's sewn into a vague triangular shape and is fairly tall--perhaps taller proportionally than it should be, but it's effective and charming. All of the light fabric on Peggy Goo comes across as a faintly pink off-white rather than a brilliant white base fabric, thought there's smeary pinkish staining on it that also makes it look pinker. It's subtle enough to appear that the pink tone is purely from the staining, but that doesn't appear to be the case. The base fabric does still look pink...in a way I don't necessarily love. Bright white fabric and starker red stains would be more poppy. I think I just need to get over my hangups and embrace this dingy aesthetic, though. Peggy Goo's cap has black applied staining that isn't on the rest of her pale fabric. The piece came held on by a flat clear band of plastic as a chinstrap, but it very quickly broke.

Guess I'm replacing that somehow.

Her hair is ostensibly a wavy short hairstyle with bangs and a flip wave at the bottom, but out of the box, it was obeying no shape.

The hair is pretty voluminous if not the most dense ever. The bangs are above the brow and their shape and color are reminiscent of Bettie Page, a famous pinup model of the same time as Peggy Goo. While they're one rooted row at the front, they lay far better than bangs like Chloe's or Dottie Rose's did and don't badly gap apart at any point.

There had to be one green zombie in Series 22, and Peggy Goo is the right choice for that role given her roots in an inept campy B-movie. I still would prefer turquoise, but this is fun. Peggy is preceded by Series 14's Dee K. and Series 18's Gabriella in a green zombie category, and Dee could be a very similar color. I'm always partial to a green zombie myself. It makes them more fun.

Here's some similar green tones--Gabriella, Faith, and Calico.

Only Faith's head is cast in green vinyl, while her body is cast white with mottled paint, but she looks pretty close to Peggy. Peggy could be a whisper bluer, perhaps. I'd describe her tone as "pistachio", and it feels appropriately pastel and colorful for the fifties, if not quite what I'd prefer. Calico and Gabriella are more yellow and olive-toned, and while they're very close, it's possible Gabi is slightly yellower or less saturated by a hair.

Peggy Goo does not glow in the dark, and her vinyl color does not pop under blacklight.

Peggy Goo's face paint is elaborate. She has lost one eye and has a gash around the socket, with two branched curs above the socket and blood or the cut itself continuing down to the left side of her mouth. 

She joins Hemlock, the "burned face" variant of Angus Litilrott, and Pestilence in the group of one-eyed LDDs whose surviving eye is on the right rather than the left. Jeepers, Jennocide, Captain Bonney, Onyx, and Larmes de Sang lost their right eyes. (Iris, using the same head as Larmes, has an evil eye, not a missing one.) The Dark is an odder one-eyed doll. She has two empty recessed bleeding sockets, but is a one-eyed doll on account of still having one inside her open mouth!

Peggy's empty socket is blacked out with paint and gore. Her surviving eye is vibrant turquoise with a tiny pupil and an upward gaze similar to other LDD zombies like Purdy, Gabriella, and Ava. The sclera is not outlined in full, but a red water line detail is used on the bottom, like Gabriella. The socket is airbrushed. Airbrushing also features on the sides of her face to sink in her contours and make her look decayed, though moreso on her right.

Lighter pink dribble is painted down her chin like she's eaten some brains, and this kind of staining continues onto her dress, while the darkest red is just used for the gore on her face. 

The last detail is lime green vein lines on her face, including a possible Schrödinger's eyebrow with one painted horizontally above her eye.

I personally don't think these veins do a thing for her faceup and they feel like they're from a separate art style because they're so solid and feel so bright. A more airbrushed look to the veins might make them work, but she doesn't even need them--less is more for retro zombies. I appreciate that they're so subtle and don't stand out, though.

Peggy Goo's face is also made to look like she's wearing no makeup, with unpainted lips and no eyelashes glamming her up. It's a little spare for a fifties aesthetic, perhaps, but doesn't suit her poorly. She does have a stark childlike look through her gore that does invoke a retro doll in her own charming, haunting way. She works for the idea of an old toy gone wrong. I also see a little smile in her face.

She has the same 13th-anniversary emblem on the back of her head as the other S22 dolls and most other LDDs released during that year.

Peggy Goo's waitress dress is one piece, with more of the pale fabric for her rounded collar, sleeve trim, and waist apron. The rest of the dress is a fairly thin black cotton, and simulated golden buttons form a vertical row of four down the bodice. The sleeves are pretty puffed, and the apron can lift up.

The cut of the dress with the shirt-style collar and wide skirt are very classically 1950s. The skirt hangs above the knee and light passes through it fairly easily, but not enough to feel indecent.

Peggy Goo's roller skates are the same pieces introduced for Lulu in Series 4, and it's a little surprising, though welcome, that we ever saw them on a second character. They were previously revived only for Lulu's Resurrection dolls. (Peggy Goo marks their last appearance.)  A separate platform with the attachment was added onto the regular cast round-toed boots, even fitting between the heel gap.

The wheels can turn, and clip into the bottom. The clip isn't loose or stable enough for the skates to let Peggy free-roll if pushed or placed on a gentle incline, but that's probably for the best since that would make her much harder to display and stabilize. The wheels already make her a bit trickier to balance.

The laces and wheels of the boots are a greyish pink off-white tone that's as frustratingly nonspecific as the color of the light parts of her uniform. 

When LDD made Lulu's Mini doll, they created the skate modification in the same fashion, just with the add-on platform for the Minis boots having the wheels molded as the same part. The Minis skates don't have functional wheels.

I love how the Minis dolls took the craft and construction so literally when downsizing the dolls and replicating them in tiny form. The costumes and hair are typically built as close as possible to the way they were constructed on the big dolls.

Charlotte's ice skates were created a different way, with a boot that had a different platform with a slot in the bottom where the blade was affixed.

Frozen Charlotte was going to be in the seventh Minis series before the set was cancelled, but with the finished doll we saw, LDD didn't go to the trouble of adapting her skates like they did for Lulu. Charlotte was evidently set to wear the Mary Jane shoe in the Minis line.

The LDD ice skates and roller skates both increase the dolls' heights quite a lot due to the platform of the boots and the pieces on the bottom compounding and raising the dolls up in two ways. Peggy Goo and Charlotte are pretty close in height, but Peggy is raised a bit higher by the roller skates.

The height disparity of the skaters is lesser next to a LDD wearing regular boots (round boots of either platform height or pointy boots) or sandals, since those shoes lift the dolls up above the height of a LDD in bare feet or flat shoes.

Both skate boots, in addition to the pieces on the bottom, already have a higher lift on the base boot than the typical LDD round-toed boot. Many LDD boots copies are shorter than the Bride of Valentine's or the skaters', so there's actually two round-toed boot options in the brand--tall and less tall.

The Bride's boot height next to the height of most other copies of the round-toed boots in the brand. Peggy Goo's base boots match the Bride's height before the wheel platform comes in.

Peggy Goo has black socks which make her skates perfectly snug, and they sit above the top of the boot when pulled on. The socks are a godsend because this doll could not afford to wobble inside her boots. 

The doll has two accessories, which are almost perfect--a vinyl brain and a plastic dinner plate. 

The brain is the same mold used for Purdy's dolls, and Goria in this same series (who shares Purdy's gimmick), and Peggy Goo's brain accessory could be popped into their heads. I believe both S22 brains are identical, and the variant S22 brains share a design as well--they're each changed to pure grey. Peggy Goo is the only LDD who has the brain without a hollow head to put it in. The Wizard of Oz is the other LDD whose brain piece can't be worn by the doll who has it, but it is made to pop into someone else--the empty-headed Scarecrow Purdy dolls in the same collection. Goria has her own brain, so Peggy Goo's brain won't be completing anyone's head unless you have 1. multiple copies of Scarecrow Purdy you want to complete and 2. only one Wizard. 

Here's the Peggy brain next to the Wizard/Scarecrow Purdy brain. Peggy's brain is less poppy in color, and is also significantly squishier. 

Both brains are vinyl, but the Oz edition is firm and not really compressible. Peggy Goo's brain could be used as a stress toy. I knew I'd gotten the impression the LDD brains were squishy! I wasn't wrong, nor misled; my first LDD brain encounter was just not one produced to be squishy! With the colors and texture and even the slightly "deflated" shape of Peggy's brain, hers feels a lot grosser and it matches her design well. All it needed was a gloss finish for maximum ick.

Here's my Scarecrow Purdy wearing Peggy Goo's brain.

The plate is a pretty basic piece. 

I can't be sure if fifties/sixties carhops actually would give you ceramic pieces to eat on, and it could make more sense for her to have an oval serving tray instead. I'd expect to be served china only inside the restaurant, but maybe not? Regardless, it's very cute.

These are great pieces for Peggy Goo to include, especially since accessories are so rare for LDD after Series 4...

Except you can't display her holding them that well. Two-armed, sure...but I don't love it. This means of serving is less "wait staff" and more "Mom's house".

Because I saw this late, I have a picture with her tidied up to demonstrate: other people have adapted to having Peggy Goo hold the plate one-handed by spinning the arms all the way up and to the side.

 

This is also...fine. It does have that infuriating "duh" obvious quality where I wish I'd realized this was possible earlier, and that counts for something, but it forces the plate to be only up and to the side, and the bend of the arm clearly isn't sculpted for this pose with the plate. The elbow is bending behind her. I wasn't settling for this.

The moment I began entertaining getting Peggy Goo and started thinking about this problem (and this was a fair amount of time before I ever expected to get her), I did a test on a dummy LDD that never went anywhere (the spare copy of Agatha I bought for a fourth Series 23 table leg). I severed the left hand in as clean of a line as I could and then glued it back on at rotation so the palm faced upward, sanding down the irregular edges.

The surgery is more visible than tangible. The hand ended up perfectly positioned for the tray when I tested the arm on Peggy.

I felt okay proceeding and replicating these steps on Peggy Goo. On her, the cut wasn't as clean to tidy when reattaching it, to the point where I briefly tried reattaching her hand how it was and making a lower cut to rotate the wrist, but that worked even worse, so I reattached that and used first the hand cut again, turned it again, and tidied it. That left me with two visible scar lines when I could have had just the one, but sanding blended the hand better so it doesn't feel like it was removed. 

To make the plate even more useful, I glued on a strap of fabric elastic for her fingers to slide into like some waiters' trays have. While this is more of a plate to eat from than a tray full of dishes, I wanted a way to keep it in her hand. I tried a white band at first, but then switched to a black one, which, while objectively more conspicuous, looked far more natural in this context. The black band looks fine around her hand, but the white band, to me, looked very distracting and out-of-place. Here's the hand and plate together now.

The fingers slide into the strap pretty easily, and it keeps the tray right where it should be, letting me pose her arm while she's still holding it. She can still hold it with the strap tucked under for more naturalistic photos.

But for display, this strap and hand modification are a dream and give her so much character and ease. This pose is much more natural than the arm windmilling behind her so her palm is up.

Being able to hold the plate forward also lets Peggy be a more conscientious member of the shelf display so her plate isn't swung in front of someone else's face or taking up too much room.

The strap does allow her to more easily do the windmill pose on her untouched arm, if I wanted to.

This pose for the plate is growing on me. While the elbow still doesn't make sense, it's not that bad and I think it's a valid option with its own display nuance. Not enough to make me regret my modification; not at all. It's a more-is-more thing. Each hand having a different dynamic that lets her hold the plate is a good thing! 

The brain sits very comfortably on the plate and it falling off isn't a big concern. I don't feel like I'd need to tack it down with putty. It sits there fine, the soft vinyl gives it a bit of grip, and it's very easily replaced if it falls. I'd get mad if I didn't add the strap and the dish and brain were both constantly falling down, but because the plate has a perfect way to stay in place, the brain isn't a hassle.

She can still sorta hold the plate two-handed, but it did look better before. It's a fair trade-off for the more classic waitress's carry, which I much prefer.

She can even hold the pieces in two separate hands now!

I get a real kick out of Peggy Goo and her accessories after making these modifications, even though I know they're collector heresy. Her holding the brain plate is super fun and dynamic and charming, and I'll pat myself on the back and say the elastic band on the plate is a wonderful system to make the accessory easy to use and display with no frustrations.

I'd considered contriving Peggy an elastic bracelet of some kind to cover her wrist surgery scar, but I realized that would come between her hand and the plate while she uses the strap there unless the bracelet was very flat. I could also try painting down her hand with blood detail, but it wouldn't likely stay very well without proper sealant and I wouldn't want to risk damaging it. I'm okay leaving the doll as she is. The scars are hard not to see, and the fact that I made two cuts makes it worse, but they're also an honest statement that the doll was modified and that I had a reason to do so. It makes her my Peggy Goo.

I'd also combed and trimmed her hair to get it in a better shape and used fabric softener, but it still has a lot of flyaways. I also heated her left leg to get it mobile because it was stuck on the joint. The last issue to address was her cap. I tried gluing a string elastic band on, but navigating it around her hair was a hassle and I really didn't want a visible chinstrap on this doll, so I decided to try a black arced wire headband mount like had worked so well for me with Rose and Violet. That would blend into her hair and I wouldn't have to do any tucking and primping of the hairdo because it wasn't a loop. As for how to attach the hat to the headband, I decided to make tiny string-elastic loops inside the hat for the band to thread through.

And complete. That was a lot of work, but this is the doll giving full diner roller-girl!

Peggy Goo's variant doll has more stark colors and feels keyed into a 1950s black-and-white horror-movie aesthetic despite her details being the same. This palette and increased blood were features of the Series 22 variant set at large, but I think variant Peggy has a tone that authentically invokes the horror media of her time if it were also gory.

Her cap is there, just changed to black.

I could be in the market for the variant doll too. 

Here she is with Gretchen--two separate generations of "not-Margaret" serving archetypes with some observable visual lineage in history. Both with caps that needed fixing.

Here's a couple of basic portraits of Peggy, which could conceivably be wall art in her own diner.

For scenery, I was fairly sure building a whole LDD-scale diner playset and façade was well beyond me, but I did know for sure I could do a diner sign. I realized there was an easy gag with two of the letters fallen off so the remaining ones spell "DIE". To do this, I bought an oval wood plaque and some wooden letters that fit the look I wanted. I mapped the letters on a curve and then glued the D, I, and E on while keeping the N and R loose. I painted the sign a greyish tone with the "lost" letters taken off, and painted the glued letters red as well as the trim of the sign. The wood had some feathery sections that wouldn't sand smooth, and those were harder to paint. Then, I put the "fallen" letters in place and held them down while I used black dye to outline the letters and smear the board so it would look dingy and abandoned and let the letters that were missing be outlined so the original word was clear. 

I bored a hole in the bottom of the sign to let a Tinker Toy stick prop it up as a pole for wherever I used the sign, and painted a wavy sulfur symbol below the word to add more decoration and suit a fifties vibe.

I wasn't totally happy with the sulfur symbol's rendering and I was distracted by the D being spaced too far from the I, so I broke it off and sanded off some paint to get the sulfur symbol out and remove the dark grimy outline on the D which was now misplaced. While the letter was ruined by breaking it off the glue, each pack of the letters had two copies of the piece, so I easily replaced it. This was all a fortunate discovery, because sanding the board and bringing back some of the wood had a really soft blended color effect that perfectly hit the "aged grimy sign" visual I really wanted and wasn't quite getting before. I repainted the sulfur symbol and sanded more areas, and was very happy with the result.

I took this out to the patio at night to stage Peggy Goo on the lot with the sign in stark lighting, which I thought would be suitable for building a poster around.

I naturally designed this shot for black-and-white to bring in full old-movie horror.

It also looked good with just red.

I digitally added cheesy implausible atmospheric fog to both pictures and text to the latter to make it a poster.

I was slightly despairing on creating an interior set because they don't make LDD-proportioned mini diner furniture, but I finally found an old metal tin that was just the right look for a Streamline Moderne diner counter, and dinged up enough to suit Peggy Goo's aesthetic. I set that up on a checkered mat against a red wall, and brought in a Shadow High speaker. For the main wall dressing, I decided to ape the classic Brown Derby Hollywood joint where celebrity caricatures cover the walls. I love vintage-style caricatures with elegant linework and minimalist stylization (I despise caricatures with big heads and excessive detail that seem designed only to make someone ugly) and wanted to emulate some. I picked LDD characters who suited either celebrity or a 1950s aesthetic--variant Dahlia, Vincent Vaude, GreGORY, Arachne, and Nurse Necro. These are all brush pen freehanded on card, so they're not all perfect, but they do the job.

My favorite is Dahlia. I really nailed the fifties-caricature stylized minimalism with her and impressed myself for landing that kind of simple elegance and character. I'm so guided by precise vision as an artist that it's hard for me to flow and loosen and find a more abstract look, but Dahlia hit exactly right. I also like GreGORY's. His is a different art style that's closer to "The New Yorker", but I think it's an effective composition framing him and his possessive dummy. Nurse Necro's piece is the most interpretive by changing her face into a pharmaceutical "Rx" logo, removing the sleeves, and putting stripes on an elbow glove in lieu of showing her legs. I think Arachne's piece has a good idea, exaggerating the girl's ponytail to end in a line coming from the spider, foregrounding the spider to play on the doll being named for the ancient spider living in the body of a 1950s girl. Arachne is the spider painted on the doll's face. We don't actually know the girl's name! I just regret the way I drew the web pattern on the girl's face because it's not composed well.

Here's the three models I have to compare to their caricatures directly.

And here's the diner counter. I added an arm from Madame La Mort and hung the speaker on the wall, put G3 Deuce Gorgon's cupcake into Peggy's rotated hand, added other food props, and placed Dottie Rose as a fifties-style diner customer. I also threw in a G3 menu sign shaped like a coffin, painted over with colored pencil "chalk". This is framed as a night scene because I wanted to play with lighting and because Dottie Rose couldn't safely go to the diner in sunlight.

For such minimal scenery, I think it worked out. Here's some closer portraits of just Peggy.

I thought it would be funny just to photograph the brain, wearing the L.O.L. Tough Dude 3D glasses as a goofy bit of anthropomorphism.

Adorable.

It also looked good with red and blue lighting to lean into the glasses.

I then took a picture of Peggy Goo's legs skating on the floor.

To stand her up like this without holding her, I actually used her plate as a counterbalance on her opposite arm, putting my desk light on her plate and bracing the head against the wall. 

I tried out the plate on her other arm, holding a head--pencil sharpener Sadie. I hadn't thought of the sharpeners as severed-head props for photoshoots, but they're perfect for it because they have no necks and they don't require me to take apart a doll! This was a trickier pose to balance, so I had to lean Peggy's hips forward more.

And she tried on the glasses, too.

I really liked the fifties-style illustration I made for Dottie Rose:

I wanted to dip back in for Peggy Goo. I built off the head I drew for Dottie but changed the details. I wasn't initially happy with the flat color, so I made an outlined cartoon instead--an approach I wasn't liking as much for Dottie Rose. I was thinking of a bigger scene, but then changed to making a diner logo instead.

I did go back to a flat look for a simpler poem composition in the earlier style.

And here's a recreation of the Plan 9 movie poster themed around this doll. I wanted a more period-accurate poster, but kept the same title for the film.

This piece took a while, but I'm glad I made it! I was originally going to have Dottie Rose as the figure in the foreground, seeing as my palette for the poster was green and pink for Peggy and Dottie Rose suited that:

...but I realized she had no analogue to the Plan 9 poster characters. Peggy herself is a zombie with black hair, so she fit best in the spot occupied by Vampira, while the man in the foreground is either Eros, one of the lead aliens, or the commander of them all...or a hero? I can't tell; no such spacesuit appears in the film. I subbed in Wizard Dr. Dedwin in his place as a sci-fi mastermind. The inset image of the Bela Lugosi ghoul (actually played for most of the film by a young man holding a cape over his face to poorly disguise that Lugosi was recast after his death) attacking Eros got cast in my poster with Macumba, a Haitian zombie, leering over Nurse Necro, Dedwin's partner in crime. 

I then used an online filter on a photo of Peggy that creates a retro-painted effect for a diner ad.

The filter is based on a limited pool of aesthetic parameters and likes to impose a rosy smiling pretty look on these horror dolls, so I had to put a lot of my own manual editing touches on it to make it look like Peggy Goo--which is the way I think these tools should be restricted and applied. Imprecision tidied by the human hand is the most harmonious this could be.

The original, normative filter interpretation.

As a jumping-off point overseen by humans who actually creatively care and can put their hands back on to make it better, it can unlock huge possibilities.

An authentic-looking vintage painted poster. I put on the text and red eyeshadow, and had to cover up a warped right shoulder.

Of course, this is still modern AI, and while it's rigid (and encouragingly flawed) filtering and these filters are generic and limited enough that they feel less sinister than full generative art taking distinct personal styles, I still did become spooked and guilty after making a few pieces I liked. (The filtered images were screenshotted, though; I'm certainly not paying for them.) 

Ostensibly, a resource like this for transformative photo effects would be wonderful, but you just don't know where it's coming from or what the cost is. When you have ideas but not a lot of money or time or resources, learning a new art practice or commissioning an artist for ideas like this can feel disproportionately demanding or unreasonable, and with an human eye and artist's instinct to edit what a computer did and polish it up, the result won't be slop. As someone very heavily directed by vision, it's also easier for me to work alone on a project and find the execution how I want it rather than having to direct someone else with a skill I need. I'd never pass what the computer spit out directly because it wouldn't be flawless or just right for my vision. This should be the ideal way to balance a throwaway idea, in terms of having low production demand that's proportional to the low-stakes concept, and actual creative input in the refinement and edit means there's purpose in the piece. I just got too uncomfortable even being there after a bit and bowed out. The argument that one should be learning new art practices or paying artists is strong against ethically dubious shortcuts like this, and the shame was hard to ignore. I'd never do this if I was making a film. But these are silly toy reviews...and yet. If an idea is out of reach, maybe it's too grand for the moment and isn't necessary, or is the inspiration to climb up to that level and commit even harder. Maybe I'm overly nervous, and I can still see uses for the filtering tool where it's a piece to push me where I need to go on a project I still heavily control and edit with my own instincts. I'll never do full generative prompting theft where I'm asking for real work to be blended together from nothing, and if I need to imitate a recognizable drawn art style, I'll do that with my own damn hands because I know how and like to do it. Painting style imitation is my weakness at the moment. It was good for me to experience the tools and come into this debate with curiosity rather than moralizing as a total spectator, and I naturally still land heavily on an active artist input being paramount. I'd just feel more sure of things with disclosures of exactly the functionality behind the filters was. 

So that's Peggy Goo!

I'm pretty sure many would agree this doll was not designed to her potential, either because her look may fall short of retro stylization you'd prefer to see or just because she was given accessories she was not sculpted to hold with ease. At this stage of LDD's timeline, this lack of accessory functionality is a massive outlier and it's totally inexcusable. Series 12 introduced the gripping hand. Series 17 demonstrated a character-specific arm sculpt for the Vanishing Hitchhiker and her stuck-out thumb. Series 23 right after had awesome holdable skull teacups and a holdable skull teapot with a separately-holdable lid! 

An alternate arm sculpt needed to be produced for Peggy Goo with a flat upward palm that could interact with her tray, and a handle or strap underneath would have been very helpful, too. I was able to make these modifications myself, and I love her...but my moves could be considered heresy to collectors and shouldn't have been required to fully realize this doll's display.

All that said? I can gripe about the doll being a mess or too visually grimy or needing work...but she's really cute and by no means is she unsuccessful at delivering retro charm. While she's not as sweetsy pastel or flat and campy as one might think for a fifties homage, whoever said she had to be? She's still styled in a charming retro costume and haircut and the doll has a spare innocence and childlike quality that pieces through her elaborate gory paint job to make her feel like a cute little dolly from her own time period. And I do get that B-movie charm that makes her special. She has a very strong aesthetic and multiple defined reference points which made creative work easy and interesting.

As of Passions Oft Forgot: Tina Black

Tina Black was one of those dolls that I really needed to look closer at, because she first felt a little unspecial to me, but more evaluation had really caught my eye. She's a vintage Gothic-styled character with a scowling shriek and a top hat, and over time, her visual texture and really pretty haunting face paint has stuck with me and gotten my attention. 

Tina Black's specific concept is the Romantic goth subculture, emphasizing vintage Victorian-era fashion and drama from the Romantic movement of literature (think of Lord Byron or Percy Bysshe Shelley). This is the era of culture from which some of the classics of modern horror emerged, like Mary Shelley's immortal Frankenstein. As such, Tina Black lives in the world of lords and vampires and grandiose terror and operatic doom. However, I think, textually, she's a more modern person living a lifestyle of the past, if her deathdate is to be taken literally.

It would have been a lot harder to notice that Tina Black had any basis in a real person if she wasn't one of two dolls made in this person's honor--Series 28 features a deliberate echo in a separate, aesthetically-distant character named Tina Pink who has the same death date and a different color surname. Pink being part of my birthday roundup had bumped Black up to high priority because I wanted the Tinas reviewed in release order on the blog. Black arrived the day I gave up and published the birthday roundup with Pink after Black was delayed in the mail. So over here, Tina Pink got discussed first.

If Tina Pink is also deliberately spotlighting a subculture, she's pastel goth all the way. The Tinas make up their own odd little mini-collection as such because they're each evidently based on the real Gen X person Tina that the creators knew. They do technically share a black, white, and pink palette and stark white skin, but their paint styles and coloring are drastically different in execution. 

Who knows what other Tinas could have been. Cybergoth Tina Green? Alt-goth Tina Red? Frilly Gothic Lolita Tina White? Blue, grey, and brown are also monosyllabic colors future Tinas could have been named after. Any of these hypothetical Tinas would likely need stark white skin and hair the same color as their name if the two Tinas that are can be taken as a pattern.

 
Tina Black is my first Series 10 doll. Series 10 uses red tissue, which I give LDD a hard time about because it's so common, but S10 puts it to great use with a fully red-themed series branding. Because ten series marks a milestone, it's very red, down to the logo print on the clear coffin lids being metallic red!

The chipboard art is beautiful, featuring red photo portraits of the dolls and an oil-ripple texture to the rippling red background as well as elegant sharp script for text. Tina Black is Gothic horror and suits red beautifully already, so this design is great for her. She has very little of red about her, and none so vibrant, but a vibrant red is nonetheless perfect for her. Arachne is a case of being all poppy red and black and fitting the series packaging more directly, though her aesthetic is different. I'd love to do a double-feature of Arachne dolls setting her against Monster High's Wydowna Spider someday. 

The series 10 number is not noted on the chipboard despite the whole milestone thing. I hadn't been tracking that very carefully before, and went back to edit older posts to note when a number or title for a series was absent from the packaging. While most themed series have the number on the board and more unthemed series don't, Gretchen has the number while Series 33 dolls have the subtitle of the series but not the actual number on their chipboards.

Tina here is all red except her eyes and mouth.

The chipboard poem says:

A Romantic Ghoul
With bats in the hat
She fancies cannibalism, verse,
And her thirteen cats

The meter isn't strong, but I love the content of this poem. It indicates she's a supernatural ghoul who eats flesh, discusses her hobbies and lifestyle as a Gothic Romantic, says she has lots of cats, and uses the phrase "bats in the hat!" The poem is concise, descriptive, and charming all at once. Tweaking the poem required some expansion, but this rewrite flows more.

A Romantic ghoul shrieking
With bats in the hat
The muse of all sinister verse
Dining on flesh
With her thirteen black cats
She knows that to live is a curse.

Tina Black's deathdate is November 24, 1966, which is shared with Tina Pink. 

From this, I assume the date was the real Tina's birthday and both LDDs have it to tie back to her. Literally, this date would make Tina Black a more modern person instead of a ghoul from the Romantic period, but the date might not be literal. Maybe she's a goth who's committed hard to the Victorian life, or maybe she's the real deal and the date is nothing more than a tie to her inspiration.

The certificate poem says:

Maggots growing in her belly
Her poems upon the page.

They say that Tina Black

Died of hidden rage.

Well, it certainly ain't hidden anymore! How about:

As maggots festered in her gut 

A poem for the damned

A corpse with inner rage awoke

And soon began to stand.

Here she is unboxed.

The doll starts on top with a top hat, which looked about the same as Doom and Macumba's pieces before her. This made me nervous, because this was before the dolls used hybrid doll trays with plastic cradles for hats to be held snug in, and Macumba's box, with a slit cut in the tray to hold the hat brim, failed me--it just wasn't slotted in, and the hat came cracked.

Only hair coming out of the gap for Macumba, not the hat brim--this doll was sealed, too.

Macumba's pre-cracked hat, which worsened with time.

I was encouraged to see that, while Tina's coffin used the same trick, her hat was slotted in properly.

And indeed, Tina's hat was gloriously unscathed. So The theory of this method can work sometimes.

The hat is flocked plastic and just has a satin ribbon trimming it, and is slightly taller and less tapered than Macumba's piece, with a less curved-up brim.

The top hat rests snug on Tina's head and simply lifts off with no chinstrap, like the Series 23 hats but not the Series 33 ones. I wonder why LDD flip-flopped on the idea, but I think the hats without chinstraps are easier to use and much less fiddly when hair is involved. As for Tina, I love the silhouette of a top hat paired with a long dress. Top hats on women in general are great, but with a dress like this...I don't know; it's just good.

 
Tina Black's hair is black, center-parted, and very curly, about the same texture and look as Alison Crux or Umbral after her. Tina and Demonique simultaneously debuted this kind of texture for LDD hair, both in Series 10. As with any other doll with this curly texture, the hair is rooted thinly to manage the volume and make the hair feel proportional. 

Alison's hair.

I've heard Tina Black compared to the musician Slash thanks to her hair/hat combo, and I see it, but it's not overpowering. I think there's an argument for calling her "Mrs. Babadook", actually, but she precedes that monster design by several years.

To those who didn't catch it from the film: this monster's name rhymes with "look". Not "nuke". It's spoken aloud clearly. This is a pet peeve of mine. 

What made me really appreciate Tina Black and want her was a better look at her face.

 

She has stark white skin and harsh thin upturned LDD brows, and her eyes are so interesting, with grey irises of subtle concentric rings that shade the iris to look more spherical and dimensional, as if the black sclerae are actually hollow space shadowing the iris. Her eyes are surrounded by blended maroon rings and pink smudge shading that also forms stress lines underneath, and her lips are black while her tongue is grey with faint pink upon it as if to suggest blood. The doll looks nearly greyscale save for the red and pink accents, and I think the coloring is just right and perfectly balanced.

 

Tina is a screaming doll, and while I know it's a relatively divisive or off-putting sculpt, I think she could be the singular doll who justifies the existence of the screaming mold. She wouldn't be the same character without it. Also, I never knew for the longest time, but Tina Black has a unique upper tooth mold where her gums are exposed and all of her teeth are sharp points! No other LDD used these teeth.

You can't see this detail in her low-res official archive photo, and it was never brought up in Joshua Lee's Series 10 review. The rending monster teeth help support the claim that she's a flesh-eating ghoul. I think this might also be intended to liken her to the Man in the Beaver Hat, a vampiric character portrayed by monster-makeup legend Lon Chaney Sr. in the lost Tod Browning film London After Midnight. He's defined by a top hat and all-sharp teeth and he directly influenced the Babadook. I think the Babadook and Tina might just have a common ancestor, though Tina ends up resembling the character who came after her more!

The Man in the Beaver Hat. This character also influenced the Hatbox Ghost from Disney's Haunted Mansion attraction.

London After Midnight was a pseudo-Dracula with details and names changed and was essentially Browning playing with the genre before he made the defining Universal Dracula afterward. While visuals and plot from the film survived and have become influential in their own right, footage has not.

Tina's dress is very fancy. While I'd assumed it was grey, it's actually faintly blue and covered in strips of black lace. 

The neckline has no collar and falls in a V, while the sleeves are long and the dress has a high waist and falls to the floor with a puff at the waist. Black lace forms a Classical-style wrap-dress accent around the bodice but stops at the top of the shoulders without wrapping behind, and horizontal lines of lace trim the arms and skirt as well as the edges of the sleeves and hem. An asymmetrically-knotted cord accent appears around her waist, with long strings trailing to her right. The exterior of Tina Black's dress is all a sheer pale blue material, but the skirt has an additional layer of pale blue satin inside for modesty.

The skirt velcros in back down to the waist.  There's not a lot I can say except...the dress is perfect. I wouldn't change a thing. Sure, the dress isn't as grim and dark and austere as it could be, and maybe she'd look cool with a black dress to suit her hair and name...but I really love her as she is. I think this less "obvious" costume makes her ring much truer in the Gothic aesthetic. She feels authentic to old horror rather than just invoking it.

Tina's fingernails are painted black. Her palms are pierced for accessory pegs, indicating this was true for all of Series 10, and since I've made over a Wolfgang who also had palm holes, I can confirm as much. Nobody in Series 10 had anything to hold, though. Pierced palms appear to have been the default from Series 9 (the first use of the ball-joint arms) through Series 16, despite Series 16 having only one flat hand per doll (they all had gripping hands for pumpkin buckets). Series 17 doesn't have palm holes by default, judging by Bloody Mary, nor Series 18, so 17 broke the chain and seemed to start the practice of palm holes being more case-by-case.

Tina Black wears pointy boots with no socks. No socks is annoying, but it's fine.

Here are the two Tinas together. Their palettes are broadly similar, but they're super different dolls.

Here's Tina Black with Bloody Mary as another Gothic-horror screaming doll.

It's striking how much more "glam" Tina is in comparison. Mary is really full dishevelment while Tina is still made-up and put together through her shrieking.

And of course, Lottie's parasol continues to be an extremely versatile piece.

I took Tina down for some gentle finger-combing with wet hair to make her less matted, the result of which you've already seen, but going for tidy combed order wasn't really the mission. I discovered that the doll looks incredibly scary with some hair pulled in front of her torso.

I also found she worked well with blacklight, as it popped her skin and when the photos were grayscaled, she looked very high-contrast like an old movie monster.

I also had fun taking blurry greyscale photos of her stark face to emulate a very old indistinct film shot.

My Tina has really good range in her neck joint, allowing her to roll her head vacantly like a ghoul would, and I wanted to show a scene from a Gothic story where she returns from the dead and turns a blessing into a nightmare. Exploring zombies in this historical/aesthetic frame is very compelling to me.

Click to read the pages.

The poor dismembered "husband" is made of dummy parts and clothing so as not to have to cast a real LDD character in the role.

I then took some photos against a red Gothic sky on my computer.

I then half-buried Tina behind Return Sadie's tombstone and used the computer screen as a digital matte backdrop with red light on Tina coming from the front as well.

And I discovered she looked great leaning over the tombstone, so I worked with that and ultimately composed a scene with a digitally-added background and mist.

So.

I'm obsessed with Tina Black. I think she's a perfect Living Dead Doll.

She's one of those dolls I feel like I could photograph forever, and every time I arranged her this way or that, it felt like the result could be her permanent display option. It all looked good. I don't get that feeling of configurability or constantly photogenic display from most classic LDDs, even when I love them--I'm more used to it for Return Living Dead Dolls. The last time I felt this overwhelmingly positive toward a doll might have been Monster High G3 signature Venus--lofty company to be in!

Tina Black's design is about the most spot-on execution for a Gothic-horror original character that's possible. Her face is actually beautiful while being really scary, her wild curls are dynamic, and her top hat and dress are terrific. She also has a lot of character versatility. Is she a ferocious intelligent lady or a hungry shell? Well, she can look alert and billowing like a thinking dangerous monster.

But she can also look inert, mindless, and messy.

She's super fun to display regardless and her aesthetic is flawless. Her costume and hair and face are all drama and give her tons of presence no matter how she's arranged. Her hair and dress also let her enjoy some extra visual motion and animation when posed that aids her when her joints may stand to limit her dynamism. And the visuals...I love them. She feels like the best of black-and-white horror iconography, while having color and suiting Gothic horror to a T. Even so, she's not cliché. Her all-sharp teeth and description as a ghoul do set her apart from familiar, played-out Gothic archetypes to make her a flesh-eating undead who nonetheless suits her genre impeccably, and her dress is perfectly colored to not be so on-the-nose Gothic that it feels trite. Yes, this doll is a killer Halloween vibe, but she doesn't feel like she's a Halloween character, and I really appreciate that. She has personality in her poems, too! Where was I? How did I sleep on this doll for so long?

It also helps that Tina Black gave me no quality problems or repairs. I'm so glad her hat was undamaged!

Collecting the "two Tinas" has far more merit than just having a gimmick duo, because each doll is a perfect character design for her purpose, and both are immensely compelling for very different reasons. I think, for all I loved Tina Pink, Tina Black might be even better. She's just an incredible visual and she's one of my new favorite LDDs. I'm surprised she's not mentioned much where I've floated around. The aftermarket shows that she hasn't been dismissed by collectors, but she's clearly not in "grail" tier. Lucky me, then. If there's nobody screaming praises for Tina Black, then let me in. I'll be that person.

Of these three dolls, Tina Black is the clear winner and was well worth the waiting shenanigans...and the cheeky arrival at just the wrong time.

I do still appreciate Gretchen and Peggy Goo. Each of them has a super specific niche while Tina Black is a bit broader in application, and of the three, Tina is the one whose design I passionately love the most. I don't think Gretchen and Peggy are bad dolls, but they needed some work and they're acquired tastes in some ways. Gretchen's faceup is gorgeous but it's also off-putting and weird. Peggy Goo is cute, but is more grimy and gory than most associations with her retro aesthetic. It's unfair to have set them against Tina the way I did, because Tina Black would be on my shortlist of dolls to rescue during a disaster and Peggy and Gretchen probably wouldn't be. I still appreciate the chance to have explored them and love the work I got with them. I fixed up Gretchen, improved Peggy Goo, and got good results from all three.