A CUTE Radiation Sickness?: Living Dead Dolls Series 9 Variant Toxic Molly by Mezco Toyz

Let me impress upon you that this doll acquisition is entirely unreasonable and is likely to be the biggest grail in my LDD collection. Sit up. Take notice. She's significant.

Toxic Molly is a Series 9 Living Dead Dolls character, and she probably fits in the club of "designated fandom darlings"/"guaranteed murder on the aftermarket", such as Chloe and Frozen Charlotte and Rain, Cuddles, Maggot and The Lost. Will I sweep this whole category in time? Probably. Call me basic, but these fan darlings do appeal to me too, and there's something I value in identifying and analyzing the impact of an "essential text" of a doll brand. I won't extend that far for Resurrections or their variants (god no) because those are too scarce and expensive most of the time, but the wider releases are pretty much all on the table if I think I can do something good with them and enjoy them. 

As for Molly, I'd probably place her alongside Series 12 Cuddles in the abstract ranking of fan favorites, in that I think Charlotte, Chloe, Maggot, and The Lost rank a bit higher than Cuddles and Molly, but such conjecture is also entirely subjective and nonsense and can be disregarded as soon as you finish this sentence.

Here's Toxic Molly:

I'd neglected to mention her in the group of LDD darlings in previous discussions of this abstract, nebulous fan category, but if I were to throw out an excuse, I'd offer that Molly is likely prized and highly-priced due to fragility, with that being a big factor in her heavily inflated value, not just pure design appeal. Her concept as a frilly-dressed young girl in a jarring vintage gas mask is immediately memorable and edgy, but that mask is also the factor making Molly so precious: the eye lenses are notoriously fragile, and you're reportedly screwed if they pop out. I was also concerned about the mask's material deteriorating. The mask was worn by the later mass release of War (the Horseman of the Apocalpyse), allowing you to replace Molly's with his since he's a cheaper doll, but such an action wouldn't mean never worrying about those problems again. 

While the adjective-proper name pairing of Molly's name makes her like Frozen Charlotte in that they both sound more like Garbage Pail Kids than Living Dead Dolls, Molly is the one who looks more like a GPK concept to me as well. 

My obsession with Molly only started midway through last year, and it was never with her main edition. It was always her variant, and it only happened when I very belatedly realized I'd never seen the variant's face. For several masked dolls, LDD typically offered two photos on the archive so you could see the hidden faces, and Molly's face was shown and I didn't care for it...but the variant only had the masked picture. Well, I was curious. How did her colors and paint change things? So I looked up variant Molly without her mask, and I loved it incurably and was doomed. Even more so when I recognized that in this moment while discovering I liked her a lot, nobody was selling her. And there is nothing like inaccessibility to cause an obsession. Variant Molly not showing up at all made her irresistible. It made her elite. It made her a cool doll that was objectively special to have. The doll captivated me so feverishly that the obsession to get her remained in the background after that first day. So I saved a search for her. 

It turned out I just had kind of bad timing then, because variant Mollys were selling sporadically in the time since I set my search alert, and while the timing was never right to get her in 2024, I was at least relieved to see she wasn't at the level of $500 in the price range. I had assumed that would be a lowball estimate for her, but fortunately she wasn't quite as horrendously bad as that and I was able to get other things done in February after finding myself able to commit to the latest copy that showed up. Because this is a flighty doll on the aftermarket, I had to decide quickly to get her in February lest I not be able to get her during March as a birthday treat. With this, I also decided the birthday-themed dolls could likely be reliably acquired as early March buys. As with the DEADvent dolls, I did open her and photograph the first pass and tidying process before wrapping her up to wait for my birthday and photo art. I needed to be able to enjoy Molly a little immediately. 

I was very excited to have her arriving, and when she did, I beheld her with the honor of a mythical presence. 

Series 9 was the second LDD numbered series with a full variant set after Series 5, and the variants were ordered direct from Mezco rather than being distributed randomly within the main dolls for half of their copies. The aesthetic concept of the S9 variant set doesn't easily describe beyond "starker contrast and surprise glow skin"? LDD describes it as a "black-and-white" themed set, and while the two initially flesh-toned dolls got desaturated, color is still prominent, and each character's color palette is different. Variant Dawn is the only S9 doll to have gone full greyscale, while variant Blue has blue tones, variant Molly has prominent green and some red and purple on her face, and variant Purdy and Elisa are black, white, and red in different ways. I do really appreciate that it's not a singular color palette for all of the variants like so often happens in LDD. Alternate colorations are far more intriguing when they're more character-by-character. 

All of the S9 variant dolls glow in the dark without being cast in obvious translucent yellowish luminous plastic, which intrigued me. I wanted to see how these dolls worked. Most glow LDDs are just cast in obvious glow plastic which gives them a fun feature but, with exceptions, typically detracts significantly from the doll's visual. Revenant and the Wicked Witch of the West rock their glow plastics, and variant Kreek and Umbral have atypical plastics in whitish and peach tones that glow blue and pink respectively, but far too many LDD glow dolls look pretty ugly thanks to their vinyl color. Glow dolls that don't look it should be the standard. Elsewhere, I've only heard this was done for the variant of Resurrection Lilith, whose likeness too easily tricked me into buying a knockoff.

Molly is my third LDD variant obtained without the main being in my collection. Previous cases are Walpurgis as the Wicked Witch (incomplete Emerald City edition) and variant Dahlia.

Toxic Molly is my first Series 9 doll, and I'm not thrilled to see yet another red tissue. I feel like a darker blue color would have been good for the S9 collection, at least to make things a little more different. S10 right after also had red, and it's one of the most common LDD tissue colors. Series 24, 25, 26, and 27 were even all red all in a row.

Here's the lid off.

Uh, oh...camera failing...

No, I'm joking. This doll is not actually radioactive. Can you imagine?

Wednesday Addams would get out her Geiger counter and be immensely disappointed not to see this doll setting it off.

The Series 9 chipboards have a jagged edge and, evidently, indirectly-lit shadowy photo portraits of the dolls as their imagery. The series number is not marked.

This variant set doesn't change any packaging from the main set, and I'm pretty sure no LDD variants have ever had modified or unique chipboards for their benefit. The furthest variant packaging got from the mains was Series 5 changing the tissue color and the print of the coroner's reports inside to greyscale the doll photos used on the papers...and even then, it was the same photo as the main edition turned black-and-white, which only actually visually matched one of the five variant dolls, Jezebel. The other S5 variants were not just "the main doll, greyscaled" and made more changes in color value or detail. After them, a few variant releases changed the tissue color, but the death certificates and chipboards remained identical to the mains.

Molly's chipboard poem says:

With all the pollutants that she sucked in

Toxic Molly gave herself a vow

She would continue to breathe in the life that she loved

But not even her gas mask can save her now.

And a rewrite.

She knew the pollutants that she had sucked in

Were rapidly sealing her fate

Little Molly hid under her gas mask and sighed

But she knew it was far far too late.

Toxic Molly died on April 25, 1986, when Reactor 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant had a runaway chain reaction and exploded and melted down and caused the biggest nuclear disaster in history, giving many people acute radiation sickness and poisoning the surrounding territory and making it uninhabitable.

Chernobyl is a dire example of the devastation that arises from ego-based failures of government and insufficient safety regulations. While I'm pro-nuclear power inasmuch as it's our easiest option for eliminating carbon fuels, Chernobyl shows how badly it can go under the wrong leadership, and in some horrible way, I'm very glad right now that it is not embraced by the United States in the face of the widespread eradication of professional oversight disingenuously done in the name of "financial efficiency". 

I think you could very easily and fairly call Molly's invocation of the Chernobyl disaster sensationalist and disrespectful, but at the same time, there is little more horrific, incomprehensible, and supernatural-feeling than the phenomenon of ionizing radiation, and the disaster had huge societal and global impact. Molly's name is fairly Anglo, so I don't think she's meant to be Ukrainian or Soviet. She might exist in an alternate history where the disaster was far worse and further-reaching globally than it already was, or else her apocalypse is a totally fictional event with no in-universe ties to Chernobyl. Or perhaps "Toxic Molly" is fully a nickname given to the undead zombie discovered in the abandoned city and her living given name was entirely different. She could have been Maria or Maryna if she was Ukrainian, and nicknamed Molly off of that. I am 100% certain LDD did not think nearly as far as I just did regarding this doll's character-building.

Maybe "Molly" is short for "molybdenum"? The element has isotopes which are the product of uranium fission reactions. I can't expect that to be intentional, but it would work.

The certificate poem says:

After the mass cremation

Bringing about man's damnation

Toxic Molly survived the devastation

And is reborn again through radiation.

Next to the death date, this the only concrete reference to radiation and nuclear damage, while the rest of the doll seems more themed on chemical poisoning and casualties. I think the radiation angle works well with the variant edition in particular. Here's a rewrite.

A massive wave of radiation

Spread through mankind's mass cremation

One was spared the devastation

With pure undead determination.

Molly's doll tray has two additional twist wires holding down her pigtails, which are thinner and black.

Here's the doll unboxed.

!!!

Molly's hairstyle is center-parted long pigtails in all black, tied off with very desaturated green ribbons that don't quite match her dress. These are red on her main doll to match the main's dress, and I have to wonder if the main's ribbon was the same as the ones always used on the death certificates. 

The elastics tying them looked okay, but I didn't trust that they were, and I advance-prepared some black fiber-elastic bands to retie her hair when I fixed her up.

Molly's hair is rooted only for her specific hairstyle, just around the edges and parting line. A very similar hairstyle would be seen four series later on alt-goth Morgana, just with longer hair, some blue streaks, and no hair bows. 

Molly's gas mask is her primary feature. While a nuclear disaster isn't quite the same as toxic chemical disasters, wearing a mask is still worthwhile protection in a hazardous radiation field, particularly one driven by a flaming wrecked power plant and all its burning materials. This character would be nobody without the mask, anyway, especially if we're discussing the main edition.

The mask only covers the front, and has a pretty simple construction. In addition to knowing I should fear for the lenses, I was also massively concerned about the material of the mask itself, because it looked like faux-leather and that stuff inevitably peels and that would make the doll far less worthwhile. Fortunately, this is another Nurse Necro scenario where I was pleasantly surprised to find the material to be durable waterproof plastic of some kind rather than a fragile applied layer over another fabric. This mask material feels like it could be used for a sturdy waterproof glove or raincoat. The snoot does have some cracking, but not in a way that worries me too badly right now, and it's not a sticky peeling layer.

The only real details are the lenses and the filter canister, hanging from a flexible ribbed hose below the mouth. Molly's left lens is closer to the middle seam than the right. The canister is pretty dense heavy soft plastic and the hose is flexible. At rest, the canister comes down to about her fingertips when her arms are lowered.

Here's the point where the hose emerges.

The eyeholes can rest over the doll's eyes to show them through, though the mask has to be fiddled with a bit and the mask is going to be tented out a bit in front of her face no matter what you do.

Old gas masks have such an iconic weird look with their expressionless round eyeholes and proboscis-like canisters, making them like a more modern uncanny equivalent to old plague doctors. LDD did evoke plague doctors with the Pestilence Horseman, but his mask reused a masquerade jester piece from Series 18 Jingles and didn't fully capture the plague doctor's energy. I'd have loved a more proper mask for him.

I like that Molly's lenses end up looking blank from most distances and that you need to get up close and illuminate her to see her eyes through the lenses. You want the eyeholes to be dark and inhuman for a creepy gas mask, so this is just the right balance--letting you see through the lenses but not most of the time.

The mask has two straps that go behind the head, above and below the ear like some PPE face masks (including LDD Dr. Dedwin's), while another fiber elastic band connects to both and arcs over the top center of her head, leaving gaps for the pigtails on either side.

Now, I misunderstood the nature of the concern about Molly's gas mask lenses and why they were impossible to deal with if they came out. My assumption had been that they were shaped as grommets where the fabric of the mask slotted between a gap in the lens pieces:

A grommet slipping out of the mask would be very hard to pop back in, but...uh, that's...not what's going on.

I didn't even have to mess with the doll to notice the lens on her right was loose, and it turns out the pieces are actually double-layered lenses, with the two discs sandwiching the fabric and having pins that are meant to fit into six pinholes in the fabric and stay together with...the power of faith? I honestly have no clue how these were meant to work. Did the two discs snap together with the fabric between them? Were they glued? 

Well, whatever it was, it wasn't holding. The other lens soon followed in the problem, with the interior half of the assembly also coming loose alongside the outer half. I couldn't reasonably fit the discs together precisely in the holes, so it's true that these masks pretty much can't be reset to original state. This design is foolish....but it's not as hopeless and impossible and "doll ruined!" as I'd been led to believe, because glue exists and easily lets you put these back darn close to how they were factory-assembled. You just have to get real about the problem, and that's what I did. I glued the discs to the fabric without stressing too much about the pinholes. The repair looks good and promises to be more handling-safe than the factory effort ever was. I feel like the two lens discs were probably overengineering at its finest, because the pieces didn't hold together, the precision of the pinholes was punishment in the event of failure, and the mask probably only needed the outside half of the lens to be glued around the hole in the fabric for the mask to be complete and functional. Oh, well. It's dumb, but also not the nightmare I had prepared for. Poorly made, but eminently fixable if you don't get hung up on the way the factory made it. I say, suck it up and glue the thing.

This mask not being a massive problem is very nice for me. I'd hate to feel stung by such a big grail.

Besides Molly and War, the Resurrection editions of Lust also wore this gas mask, but they would not be an expendable source to steal the mask from to replace Molly's with. Besides, as long as your Molly mask arrived complete, repair is an option. Only getting one secondhand with a lens absent from your copy would make a scenario where you'd want to go out for a new mask. I would hope the subsequent LDDs with gas masks changed or reinforced the assembly of the lenses to avert Molly's problem. Word would have to have reached Mezco about how fragile the Molly lenses were. 

Even though Molly infected my wishlist because of her variant face, I do have to admit I love her with her mask on, too. It's such a cool costume piece and it's a perfect note of the bizarre, industrial, and intimidating when set against her frilly cutesy dress and pigtails. 

Main Toxic Molly is a pale flesh-toned doll with a fairly ill, irritated screaming face:

This is creepy and unpleasant, but if you take the blue tongue and screaming shape out of consideration, it's really just a whole lot like Series 4 Lulu's face. This isn't a doll who offers a super drastic surprise or standout look sans mask, nor do I think her concept is at all retained without that costume piece. You would never read apocalyptic retro sci-fi from this doll displayed this way. She's not grievously ill as LDD goes, nor cartoonishly mutated.

Variant Molly doesn't change any details, but thanks to her coloring, she is haunting, striking, and gorgeously freaky under her mask.

Wait for it.

Bam.

Obviously, the inhuman pale skintone helps elevate her weird vibe, but look at those colors. Bright red and green and purple all contrasting with each other in a beautiful unreal way. Her expression looks glassy and vacant, horrified as a zombie puppeted by this invisible corruptive phenomenon that is radiation. This is a scary, weird, beautiful doll and I think the colors and faceup massively push the design toward retaining its concept without the gas mask. That's fantastic. My biggest thing with fantasy dolls is that I want the design to be able to convey itself even with zero costume on the body. A fantasy doll's base coloring, paint, face, and hair alone should point you in the direction of the fictional concept it's depicting. I think variant Molly does that.

The variant face has green sclerae and a matching tongue, with painterly brushed purple shading around the eyes and some slight purple lining in the mouth. Molly's irises are bright red ringed by white, and pop exquisitely against her green and the other unique tone of purple in this faceup. Pale grey is used for the irritated shading around her mouth and her "bare" lip color. Her eyebrows are thin and angry. I don't know exactly what it is, but this is just one of the most striking, beautiful LDD faceups out there--artistically. I wouldn't change a thing. This is also vastly more compelling than main Molly.

There's some commonality with Carotte Morts later on in the brand, who also uses bold purple, stark white skin, and an unreal visual style.

They're different art styles, but they fall under the same genre of appeal to me. They're both incredible faces.

Molly's face is still pretty tame for what she is, with the biggest shock factor coming from her facial expression more than her paint detail. She doesn't come across as a dramatic victim of acute radiation sickness, even considering that the HBO Chernobyl miniseries makeup for end-stage victims was debunked by a nurse who saw the real thing and found it exaggerated. I'm okay with Molly as she is; certainly--I love this face...but I'd almost have expected the bumpy-skin sculpt or the torn-cheek sculpt to expound on her illness and make her more gruesome, if not a wacky new sculpt with a third eye or something. It's shocking this doll never got Resurrected, but perhaps a hypothetical Res (either of the two variants) would have gone there. We've gotten Res dolls with one inset eye and two removable inset eyeballs, so one with three inset eyes could have really been a treat.

Molly's dress is fairly frilly with lots of lace trim and a sumptuous dark green velvet material that works great with her sclerae and tongue. It's a stunning color.

On the main doll, her red costume was highly similar to the conjoined dresses of Hazel and Hattie...

Review upcoming!

...and even had some comparison to the later doll Jennocide despite different materials--Jenn's is satiny, not velvet, and leans a bit purplish.

Variant Molly's dress stands apart much more from the crowd with its beautiful green color. 

The dress also reminds me of toxic green pigments made with arsenic that were prevalent in the Victorian era, including beautiful dresses that could damage your health. Scheele's Green was more yellow, while Paris green was more blue:

Scheele's green dress, photo from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Toxic Paris green footwear. Photo from the Bata Shoe Museum.

Variant Molly's dress isn't definitively close to either toxic green hue, so there may be no intentional invocation of this phenomenon. Would it be impossible to match Molly's dress with arsenic pigment? Maybe not? Accident or not, though, a rich green tone does feel like a canny choice for the variant doll due to this pigment phenomenon, as opposed to, say, a more sci-fi lime tone. Green is associated with toxins and LDD basically just flipped the color of the main's dress here, so that could be all there was to it, but the doll still lines up nicely with the history of poisonous couture.

Problematic Series 15 doll Gypsy (I cite the doll's name, but that name is a very inadvisable word to use outside of analytical quotation) has a dress with bluish teal tones that would successfully invoke toxic Paris green. Molly's dress is more of a Christmas green in comparison. I think the lovely color of Gypsy's dress is one of the most redeeming aspects of the iffy doll (who I have gotten and fully written up/photographed already as part of my next uncomfortable roundup, whenever that can be finished), but I'm glad this is the color she has and the greener green is what Molly has. I wouldn't like either doll more with traded costume colors.

Molly's dress has a high waist and short bell sleeves, and the piece is very lacy, with a wide two-lobed lace collar, three lines of lace down the front, and three lines of lace across the skirt as well as lace trimming the hem and sleeves. 

It's a very pretty dress, and I think it could lend Molly a Soviet aesthetic if you wanted to read that in her. It velcros in back, but her arms are a bit of a squeeze when pulling it off and on.

Hazel and Hattie had some issues with excess dress pigment and very minor body stains, but Molly's body looked untouched.

Main Molly probably would have knocked my socks off like her variant does if she had leaned into hazard-yellow instead. Maybe something like this crappy color photo edit, but with a more bright yellow on her costume than I was able to get here. LDD was thinking goth and going for red and black as usual, but yellow and black would set her apart and push the main's theme better.

Both versions of Molly have standard LDD white socks and black Mary  Jane shoes. Her shoes are quite loose. I wish they weren't, but she's fine and less tippy than she ought to be. Her right hip was stuck, but I heated it to pop the leg off the peg and trimmed the joint just a tad to get it mobile without the peg breaking. Molly's joint actually had a more milky translucent white peg rather than the brittle yellow of Series 12, so maybe S12's pegs were a shift for the worse after the S9 dolls debuted ball joints with a different peg plastic. I wasn't going to test if the S9 pegs were sturdier than the S12 ones, but I'd assumed the S12 brittle ones had been in use since S9.

Molly's skin looks like stark white opaque cast vinyl, but it does indeed glow. I usually don't care much whether a doll glows or not--I'll use it for photos, but it's not a big draw. Not so here. Here, it's essential. For this particular doll, a glow feature is absolutely an elevation of the character concept, and I think this makes her the definitive edition of Molly for sure. She looks perfectly radium or uranium-green!

She does not hold the glow for very long at all, which could mean the doll glow is a paint layer like I'd thought, rather than a cast in a glowing vinyl. It would make sense just because all dolls I know to have been cast in glow vinyl are translucent, and if Mezco could cast it opaque, then they probably would have. There's a certain kitsch appeal to the classic glow plastic coloring, but not enough for it to have been a desired aesthetic choice for most LDDs who had it. With variant Molly, the body being painted all over might have also protected it from fabric stains since the pigment wouldn't be seeping directly into vinyl? It's just a perfectly inconspicuous paint job if that's how it was done. Maybe Molly really is cast in white and the glow is a thin invisible layer over the top. LDD has used invisible glow paint on other dolls.

Photos seem to indicate the rest of the S9 variants all glow this same color despite each variant's body color being different, further supporting the "invisible glow paint layer" hypothesis. The dolls could be cast in whatever color vinyl if invisible glow paint was used. The green glow doesn't work for any of the other S9 variant dolls nearly as well as it does for Molly. I'd say Blue's variant feels especially insulted by this because she'd be incredible if she glowed blue as her namesake and palette. Variant Kreek had its skin cast in a translucent glow vinyl that glowed blue in a color that would be great for S9 Blue...but I understand that non-green glow colors still remain rare in luminous toy manufacturing, and Kreek, as mentioned, had its skin cast in a glow vinyl while the S9 variants had glow paint. When Blue was released, there was probably no question her glow doll would be anything but the typical green color. Not much has changed since. I do have my eyes on variant Blue for the future (her insensitive emo stereotypes are a worthy discussion, the variant is more appealing than the main, and learning she has bangs has improved her design for me). I could color-edit pictures of Blue glowing to create the, well, the blue glow I'd want, so it wouldn't be a huge letdown. And for Molly, the glow is a draw. For Blue, it's just an extra.

Series 9 dolls have palm holes for accessories. Elisa would have used them for her rose and/or her rock. Nobody else in S9 had anything to hold.

For the birthday post, I wrapped her up. Wrapping coffins remains no easier, and no prettier from the back view, than last time with Resurrection Sadie, but I personalized the wrapping again. Res Sadie's package wss classic LDD pink and black, while I started for Molly with a ribbon constructed in the shape of a the trefoil symbol used as a warning for radiation. I used four loops of black ribbon glued together because this construct couldn't be tied for real, and I got yellow wrapping paper for a hazard-warning color. I trimmed the package with some green ribbon matching variant Molly's colors and diluting the more obvious connotations of just the bow and paper alone. The green throws off the more direct imagery in a way I liked.

To fix Molly up, I had to replace her hair elastics, though the black loops I made for her were too thick when tied and doubled over, so I instead took the same elastic fiber band and tied it in a double knot and trimmed the ends to gather her pigtails so the tie would be sturdier while the size was comparable to before. I then retied her green bows. I also made the aforementioned repairs to her lenses, and I boiled her pigtails and adjusted their position so her mask could slide a little further back on her head and get a bit closer to her face. The hairstyle is really cute, but it does make the mask more annoying to use!

To photograph her, I played with yellows and greens that connoted grungy Soviet sci-fi radiation.

She looked really good near the boiler.

I constructed a hospital set for Molly. Dr. Dedwin and Nurse Necro began to earn their rent by guesting in the first review where they have a patient--after all, I got them for the purpose of staging future dolls in their care! They suited up for the job, with Dedwin wearing the gas mask and a plastic-bag smock and Necro wearing a human plastic glove over her body because I thought that was ridiculous and very her. Both are wearing glove fingers as arm sleeves. I used binder sheets as plastic curtains and had to build the frame to hold the curtains up. Radiation patients have been cordoned off by plastic like this and I thought it was worth creating as scenery.

Molly is so radioactive, she burned a silhouette into the sheet she was laid upon.

Done with paint, of course.

I kind of love taking photos of dolls that aren't photos of them. It's a fun challenge to encapsulate a character with the doll themselves being absent.

Here are a couple of pictures of Molly in lighting I liked.

And I used a a green silk scarf as a backdrop that complemented her dress and face.

Then I made the cover photo. The foreground with Molly on rubble and dead grass is my photography, but the rest is digital compositing of assets found online and color editing. The idea for this piece motivated me to get a free photo-editing program alternative to Photoshop because what I'd run on so far was for vector graphics and wasn't sufficient. Let's say...I'm glad I did, because I just unlocked my next evolution.

The elements I shot in-camera.

The composition.

I then leaned full BioShock (or at least, the aesthetic that comes to mind when I think of the games, which I've never actually played or watched) by using a circular lantern flap as a porthole to photograph her through, imposing that on a background of riveted copper and tweaking the light and adding gas for a really atmospheric picture.

The last idea I had for Molly was to craft a feature a la the "elephant's foot" formation in the ruins of Chernobyl. 

The elephant's foot is named for its rough visual appearance and is part of the remnants of the melted reactor core that flowed into the basement of the plant, with the amalgamate of materials that melted into the radioactive lava being dubbed "corium". Being made from the reactor core itself, the elephant's foot is an extremely radioactive relic of the disaster which was capable of delivering lethal ionizing radiation exposure within three minutes when newly formed. As can be seen in the famous photo above, the rads also really messed with the camera, creating a ghosted time-lapse exposure effect with light and the man in the picture. I had just enough clay to make such a formation for Molly to hang out with, and the nice thing about a lump of flowing rock is that it's really easy to sculpt!

I set the blob and Molly at the foot of the boiler and used gel smeared on my camera lens to blur the quality of the photos, and used a lot of editing effects to adjust the lighting and color and add the ghosting artifacts. I didn't shoot the layout 1:1 with the old picture, nor was there water involved, so it's a loose adaptation.

I took another picture of her sitting on it with more "Molly" lighting and the blurred camera.

And one more shot with the modern radiation-grain camera effect.

I'd say this doll was pretty rewarding despite the wait and inaccessibility in getting her. Sure, the mask was made in a really poor fashion, but repair with glue was easy as that and once the lenses are attached better than the factory did it, the mask itself is no problem. And her colors are fantastic, her face is one of the most striking in the brand, and her display options (with the mask or no) are both compelling. 

Molly's appeal is that she's weird and edgy and a little unapproachable. Neither her gas mask nor her real face give her a genuinely darling element. She's just not sweet, but she's so haunting and bizarre. All of this, though, is massively amplified by the variant edition, and part of me feels a little bad spotlighting it because I worry I'll have created an obsession in more people who didn't realize how much cooler (IMO) this version of Molly is. Her green dress is standout, far more so than the main's version, her face is much more unusual and striking, and her glow feature seriously elevates her for the concept. She feels stylized and sci-fi in a good way, and I like her more for being so unreal. She does loosely reflect a very realistic, terrifying fear, but I think it's best that she winds up more pulpy and caricatured. She's an iconic character either way, but the variant is just a delight in many ways I feel the main is not. As my current most significant "prize LDD", she earns her status. She's not just cool because she's hard to obtain. She's a genuine treasure.

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