Long Overduo: Living Dead Dolls Exclusive Hazel and Hattie by Mezco Toyz

These dolls have been one of my biggest LDD fascinations since early last year and yet there was never room for them. I couldn't wait much further than this! Since they didn't fit the Christmas event, they had to be there for my birthday.

I already made a post about conjoined twin dolls with Peri and Pearl Serpentine, discussing the mixed nature of representing such a small group of atypical people under a horror lens, and I also discussed how I thought the Serpentines did fairly good work to escape the zone of just being a doll gimmick or spooky gag by being a fairly grounded and real representation of conjoined twins in a space where that wouldn't be weird. I can't say the same for the other mass-release conjoined-twin plastic doll offering from Living Dead Dolls. LDD's conjoined twins feel highly stylized at best, and objectified and treated as a novelty at worst, though I'm not qualified to say how harmful or acceptable they may be. I just know they represent an unusual toy item and I've always been curious about multiple aspects of their construction and have never gotten answers. As someone interested in documenting toy novelties, being the one to shed light on the twins' manufacturing was an irresistible prospect. I've wanted these dolls from the start of my LDD collection, ever since I paused to wonder just how they were made, and I couldn't let other things push them out of the way any longer.

Hazel and Hattie were an exclusive duo released outside the main series, and did have one further release in Resurrection IV with an uglier glow-plastic variant of their Res edition as well. The dolls are conjoined twins who stand side-by-side with mostly complete bodies, but they have a fused shoulder area replacing the arms that would be adjacent if they were two-armed singletons stood next to each other. Each sister has just one arm on the opposite side as a result. That's a form of bodily conjunction that I don't think I've ever seen elsewhere in fiction. 

Hazel is the girl on our left, their right, with the gentler face. She was evidently the nicer person, but was killed by her wicked sister Hattie after Hattie died, rose from the dead, and murdered Hazel to bring her over--all while still conjoined to her. 

Hazel and Hattie are LDD's only confirmed twins. Ash Lee and Soot in Series 34 are confirmed to be sisters through both dolls' poems, but their relative ages are not stated and they look nothing alike. Soot is described as the weaker of the two who falsely expected to die first, but this doesn't necessarily mean she was younger. The classic nursery-rhyme duo Jack and Jill are almost certainly siblings and could easily be twins, but that's not confirmed by either of their LDD poems. Scary Tales Hansel and Gretel are certainly siblings and look very similar, but their relative ages are unclear. I think I default to assuming Gretel is the older sister with the fairy tale. Mainstay character Sin is always visually "twinning" with Sadie, but she's a demon and Sadie isn't, and the two characters' connection or reason for matching have never been clarified. The "Three Sisters" witches Tenebre, Sospirare, and Lamenta are three siblings who are similar enough to be triplets, but their separate chipboard poems follow a uniform structure which includes singling out Tenebre as youngest and Lamenta as eldest (thus leaving Sospirare as middle child, which all maps to the dolls being released in the same order). Noting age in a line of a poem wouldn't make as much sense for triplets--if they were triplets, birth order would be nitpicking because seniority is only a technicality without much actual impact for siblings who shared a womb. Still, Hazel and Hattie and the Three Sisters are confirmed sibling units while nobody else in the brand is. (It's been said Series 35's Eve is Sadie's sister, apparently on the authority of one of the brand creators, but that can't be confirmed by me and that never made it into text her collectors would see.)

The other odd case is Edgrr in Series 30. He's a sideshow freak with conjoined faces on one head, and possibly even partially-distinct conjoined brains, indicated by his story of dying by brain tumors and a lump above each face. The second face on Edgrr may be a conscious but incomplete parasitic twin. This isn't clear, however, and it's not indicated the second face is as developed or as much of a person even if it does have a mind, and Edgrr's sole poem refers to him in the singular and doesn't explain any complexity to the dynamic of his faces. 

Sidenote: LDD seems to consciously invoke a lot of symbolism from the ancient superstition that the left hand is evil, or sinister, per the Latin for "left". Every LDD with a prosthetic hook or amputated hand has their left hand surviving, making them left-handed by default. Isaac the scarecrow has both hands sculpted as left hands, and his left left hand has an extra finger, also once considered a sign of evil. And here, with Hazel and Hattie, the evil twin is on the left side from their perspective, and the sisters only have arms on the outer sides of their bodies...so evil Hattie is the one with a left hand, and is thus left-handed by default. I've never been certain if the thoroughness of the left-handed menace in LDD was deliberate, but I feel like it is. I didn't even realize Hazel and Hattie played into it until writing for this post!

My Hazel and Hattie set appeared to be complete but opened and unboxed with the hair elastics at the end of their braids missing or replaced. I'd have loved to experience them sealed, but that bumped the price up too much for me to accept, and I figured there wouldn't be much difference here.

As a duo who would have no choice but to be buried together, Hazel and Hattie come in the wide LDD coffin as designed for two-packs. (Though, as their story suggests, they might have not been buried at all.) Early in the brand and my reviews of LDD, I had gotten the impression that some duos had alternate releases as solos as well as two-packs, but that's not the case. Some duos were sold separate, others were paired, but it was never either/or for those characters. Hazel and Hattie's concept makes them the only LDD duo who are, by nature as well as concept, inseparable, so even if pairs had alternate duo and solo releases, that wouldn't have been an option here. The twins were joined in Res IV by Died and Doom, the wedding couple, who were inseparable by concept but not nature. The tissue in Hazel and Hattie's coffin is green, but looks thin and faded. I gather another, fresher copy's tissue might present more vibrant for better pop against their dresses. 

The chipboard design is in the same transitional design phase as Dr. Dedwin and Nurse Necro's: the graphic design is the same as series 1-4 (and the overall art style continued into Series 5), but the characters are represented by a photo portrait instead of a hand drawing.

Hazel and Hattie were carried by the retailer Tower Records, who...weren't doing so good at the time these dolls would have been released. It's a fairly random choice, because Tower would have been strongly associated with the music market and these dolls have bleep-all to do with music, but again, most LDD exclusives had no particular resonance with their carrier--only Misery and Tragedy do, meshing not only with Hot Topic's alt aesthetic, but also directly adapting the designs of alt rag dolls they also carried. That would be a whole other project but I am bumping that far down the list!

The twins' chipboard poem is hard to read with that typeface, but it says:

Siamese twins inseparable since birth

Terror and dismay is what brings them mirth

Doubling your pain is best what they know

So come to the carnival; it's one hell of a show

While "Siamese twins" is no longer the recommended/accepted terminology, it works under the lens of being period-accurate to the days of sideshow freaks. There are other uses of outdated/offensive language in LDD (Schitzo the evil clown being named after a pejorative for schizophrenic or otherwise mentally ill people, and Series 15's Gypsy being named with an exonymic term that has pejorative connotations and has become more widely considered to be an ethnic slur for Romani people), but I think the language here gets a bit more of a pass both because it's been phased out more for being inaccurate than for being insulting, and because the girls would have been referred to as such in their time. And even when the dolls were released, that was what people called conjoined twins most commonly. 

The sisters are described as carnival performers, making them easy candidates to supplement the cast of the much later Series 30 dolls, who comprise a carnival freak show. LDD's take on sideshow performers is a little spotty and objectifying, but there's enough of a subtext of "mistreated disabled people taking revenge after death" in some of the Series 30 poems that I think I can vibe with some of them, and they're all worth discussing as novelty dolls and a matter of representation. It's possible Series 30 might be bumped up the list as a 2025 topic rather than Series 31, which is a heftier commitment.

Here's a rewrite of the chipboard poem.

Joined at the shoulder, a unit since birth

The grimmest of siblings to walk the fair earth

One may seem meeker, but dare not be fooled

The both of them revel in torture most cruel

The death certificate was floating in the back of the coffin...as well as a rolled poster! Well, that's a surprise!

I flattened it out by using steam from the shower and letting that permeate as I spread it out on the tile wall opposite. Here's the poster.

This is a simple piece to reflect sideshow advertisements, and is done with a tracing or, what looks more likely, a cartoon trace filter over a photograph, but the effect is still fun and it's nice to have a freebie like this. The twins are standing in front of a symbolic mirror which is cracked.

This poster graphic would resurface in the print of the twins' Resurrection box, appearing in weathered form on a wall on the print design.

Yeah...uh. Clearly, I am not getting these dolls anytime soon, even if I did really want them!

Their death certificate marks their shared death date as January 6, 1969, and extends to the rare detail of adding a time--6:13 PM. That last bit seems unlikely to be fully true, however, because the poem goes on to elaborate that they almost certainly died at separate minutes.

Their death date is close to that of conjoined sisters Daisy and Violet Hilton (discovered dead on January 4, 1969). The Hiltons were well-known sideshow performers each with a full body, but connected externally and internally at the hip region. The Hiltons appeared in Tod Browning's 1932 film Freaks, which hired several real disabled actors to form the sympathetic but fierce band of performers threatened by abled schemers in their midst. Freaks will be more relevant to LDD Series 30 discussion later down the line, but it was downright radical for its time and even today, even if it was deemed so shocking it hampered Browning's career (and this was right after he did Dracula!) and got heavily truncated and censored.

Hazel and Hattie don't have much in common with the Hiltons, besides, perhaps, the ability to briefly mistake them for singletons walking side-by-side at first glance. Peri and Pearl, as dicephalous twins on one shared body, don't have that effect because their body is immediately visible as conjoined.

The certificate poem says:

Hazel and Hattie were born one of a kind

Hattie died suddenly before their time

Hazel wasn't ready to accept death with her

So Hattie arose to bond them by murder.

Unless Hattie died, resurrected and killed Hazel all within the same minute, I doubt they'd share a precise time of death. Here's a rewrite.

Hazel and Hattie, born two of a kind

Hattie departed before either's time

Hazel, still living, had wanted cut loose

So Hattie woke up and she slipped her a noose

Neither's cause of death is indicated in the poems or the design, so I figured choking was as good for Hazel as anything. They're not wounded or gory dolls.

In reality, many conjoined twins can die quickly after the other if the dead twin is not separated or cannot be separated. With Hazel and Hattie, Hazel had a good chance of survival after Hattie's death because she and Hattie could have likely been separated fairly easily and safely because their bodies were almost completely unattached and shared no internal organs. Or, at least, Hazel would have had a chance had Hattie not reanimated and killed her sister so quickly. The Hilton sisters died together after they caught flu, with them being found after their deaths. Daisy was reported to have died first, with Violet not seeking help and dying herself within days.

Even if Hattie didn't come back and take Hazel with her in the same minute she died, it does sound like she got it done pretty quickly, because if she'd delayed, her body would likely have been separated from Hazel's to let Hazel continue with her life...or, morbidly and cruelly, they might have buried Hazel alive alongside her dead sister. You never know in LDD-land. Regardless, it's unlikely the two ever reached funeral or burial because one of them was undead before the other even died, indicating they just went up and about their business in the land of the dead after Hattie got the job done. The coffin is just for toy packaging, but the twins probably never had one (save, perhaps, for a prop piece in one of their hypothetical carnival shows?)

The back of their double coffin is unusual, as it's clearly just been printed with the template of a normal one-person LDD coffin of the time, centered in the middle.

My previously-encountered double coffins (Hemlock and Honey, Dr. Dedwin and Nurse Necro) used a template sized to the coffin.

These are all swivel-doll duos, so I wonder if the twins' coffin is earlier or later or an awkward in-between compared to the ones I had before? Died and Doom were the first to use the double coffin, so I wonder how theirs was printed. They came right before Series 2, and I know they were before the twins. 

Here are Hazel and Hattie unboxed. Not much effort because they'd been unpacked before; just lifting them out this time!

They seem to take some significant cues from the iconic Grady sisters in Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of The Shining. (They're not twins in the book, they're described as different ages in the prologue of the film, but they're visually styled as and behave as spooky twins and are played by twins in the film as the apparitions manifested by the hotel, leaving their exact sibling relationship vague.)

Like the Gradys, Hazel and Hattie are identical brunette sisters in matching hairstyles and fancy dresses, they're always standing side-by-side in an unusual symmetry (though the LDD sisters are physically conjoined that way) and there's even a good/evil happy/sad opposites gimmick--the Shining sisters were inspired by a photo of identical twins where one girl was smiling and the other was frowning. 

Diane Arbus, Identical Twins, Roselle, New Jersey, 1967

LDD did the Grady sisters directly much later in the LDD Presents line, and they've got a sound feature like a few LDDs in this era, presumably just playing the audio of their one line in the film. I'd guess only one sister has the sound box because syncing two to play the same simultaneous dialogue would be infeasible.

Just to let a little peeve off my chest--Various wikis and articles cite the Kubrick sisters as being named Alexie and Alexa behind the scenes, but I cannot find any citations legitimizing that claim from a proper source, and it doesn't make sense to me having such such similar names. I can't claim that's true, or that they ever had names given to them, because why would they have? They have no purpose in the film beyond being creepy twins in a brief role. If there's proof these names were assigned to the sisters in the film, let me know, because it smells of widespread misinformation to me as it stands today.

Hazel and Hattie, per the spooky twin gimmick, are two of the most identical characters in the LDD brand, with only their facial expressions and sides of the conjoined connection setting their designs apart. Their hair and dresses and faceup elements are identical otherwise. Only the actual LDD Gradys later on match this level of...well, matching. Because Hazel and Hattie are not intended to be very grounded or realistic portrayals of twins, let alone conjoined ones, they indulge in both the "spooky identical look" and "polar opposite personalities" cliches often seen in fantasy/horror twins--though not always simultaneously.

The dolls have the Dorothy Gale hairstyle, though they're not invoking the character in any way--it's center-parted brown hair in two low braids each. The parallel braids are possibly metaphorical sets of twins themselves, reflecting the imagery of two figures stood side by side. Even the weaving of the braids could reflect bodies being physically connected together. If this wasn't the intention of the hairstyle, it still makes perfect sense, and I'm inclined to give LDD the credit for symbolism because the Res dolls stuck to it and didn't change the hairstyle.

It reminds me a bit of Jordan Peele's Us, which uses frequent images of parallel figures and doppelgängers, down to the number 11 and pairs of scissors playing into the visual metaphor.

The braids are nicely pulled and formed to look good, but the elastic ties holding them have disintegrated and disappeared, and the hair has gotten messy in the time untouched. Only Hattie's left braid (furthest left of the four from this back view) had a replacement elastic still on, and that had also broken down. I got some black fabric elastic and knotted it tight around the braids to seal them. I wasn't going to take down the hair and retie it because the pattern looked too precise to match. I'd settle for closing the braids and trimming the worst of the stray hairs.

It's very subtle, but the girls seem to have slightly different hair colors. Hazel's hair is more red-toned brown, while Hattie's hair is a bit more grey or greenish.

At first, I thought this was a result of both girls using a hair blend that included both tones, with manufacturing arbitrarily giving Hattie more of the duller tone, but after looking closely at Hazel's hair and not seeing any of the color in her head, I'm not sure this is accidental? Even in the photo just above with their braids retied, the color difference is visible. None of their other colors have any disparity that could be explained by uneven sunlight exposure affecting one twin over the other, but whatever happened, Hattie's hair is rooted, at least on top, with a different color mix than Hazel.

On my copies, Hattie's hair falls in more of a "curtain" shape framing her forehead while Hazel's is more pulled back. This wouldn't be intentional and was just how it worked out when their hair was tied up.

The girls have a pretty warm light flesh tone with a slight yellow lean, and their faceups are identical in all but expression. Both girls have bright pale green eyes with normal white sclerae and bold black outlines, and reddish smudging shading around the eyes. Their lips are painted dark maroon and their eyebrows are bold and black. Their lips and brows are different, however. Hazel's brows are even and turn up at the far end but have no malice, and even convey worry despite not slanting up toward the middle of her forehead. Her lips are also a bit flatter in shape. Hattie has unevenly quirked eyebrows and a bigger smile that gives her a wicked smirk, showing she's the evil sister.

The southpaw stereotype is shown.

Hattie was the first LDD with this eyebrow pattern, but it would be closely imitated by others. Series 15's Gypsy and Series 24's Andras would have a very similar eyebrow pattern, and Series 12's Ezekiel and Series 26's Beltane would both have brows like this, only mirrored. It doesn't seem to be the case that a stencil or copied graphic was ever shared precisely between the LDDs with brows like this, but they're all clearly in the same form.

Resurrection Hattie has a much more distinct face from Hazel, as she has the screaming mold and a more menacing evil look next to Hazel, who looks more nervous. I really love the green clothing and white skin of the Res edition of the sisters, but the brown hair color doesn't work for me so well here and I don't know how to feel about the use of the scream head on Hattie. I almost think it should be Hazel screaming in fear, if anything, but I much prefer the original faces of the duo and would probably like the Res dolls more if both were close-mouthed.

This photographed Hattie has a much higher hairline than Hazel, but this doesn't seem to be so much the case for produced copies buyers got in-hand.

Their two editions almost make me wonder if this original release depicts the twins alive while the later one depicts them dead? Between the two, this Hattie looks more like she's plotting to take Hazel with her, while the latter dolls show them pale, with Hattie more monstrous, as if their deaths have transformed them. That's probably not the intention, because these are Living Dead Dolls after all, and none of them have ever been indicated to be depicting a pre-death state. While the Resurrections are billed as "back from the dead" while the original carnival poster is shown decayed, the original poster itself makes it clear the original dolls are already dead.

Hazel and Hattie are wearing soft red velvet dresses with white lace trim and ribbon. Their collars are wide and circular lace, and the sleeves are short and puffed with lace at the end. More lace trims the hems, and the waist seam is accented with a thin ribbon bow. The ribbon stops at the hips and doesn't go around the back. The bows are tacked or secured somehow so their knots don't untie, which I greatly appreciate.

The lace trim on the skirts was not present in their carnival poster.

As mentioned before, Series 9 Toxic Molly's dress ended up pretty similar to these thanks to having the same fabric and a close color and a similar cut and lace, and that's a factor as to why I like the variant more, with her distinct green piece.

Molly's dress has more belled sleeves and a more gathered waist as well as heavier lace in a different pattern with no waist ribbon, and it hangs shorter than the twins' cut. Still, with the standard Molly's dress being the same red velvet, it was awfully close to Hazel and Hattie's dresses.

Hazel and Hattie's dresses are conjoined in an identical mirror image at the shoulder, just the same as the girls wearing them, and this was their greatest source of intrigue for me--how were these dolls assembled, and in this outfit?

Now, having observed divergent LDD design choices that modified doll parts or assemblies without making new sculpts, I had a good guess as to how Hazel and Hattie were actually constructed--I figured their bodies were the standard swivel molds of the time, assembled without the arms on the facing shoulders, and some sort of post or tube was inserted between the shoulders with glue to connect the bodies close.

Like so.

This made the most sense as a cost-effective way to have the dolls physically connect like their torsos were cast as one piece, and seemed to be possible for getting the dolls dressed, as I imagined you could slide them into their sides of the conjoined outfits and then connect the join between their shoulders through the shoulder of the dress. Their dresses each having typical velcro down the back suggested this was how they were dressed, because they certainly didn't seem able to use the velcro to come out of their costumes. 

They went for a construction that shows the twins are well and truly conjoined and not just pretending in a large dress, making for a more puzzling outfit and a more impressive display. Tailoring is a prominent concern for conjoined twins, and on conjoined dolls, it's a good way to display interesting outfit construction...though this dress would be impossible to put on the girls in real life without sewing them into it, and would have to be cut apart to let them undress. Otherwise, the shoulder join of the dress would have to be a separate piece wrapped around the conjoined shoulders and buttoned or pinned to the edges of each girl's separate dress. Either dress would also have to wrap around and button at the top of the inner shoulder as well, before the shoulder wrap was added, similar to this jersey piece:

With the information that LDD hasn't (as far as I know) made an "unremovable" doll costume that couldn't be explained by the doll being assembled inside the clothing, I assumed that's how these two worked.

Unless, perhaps...well, surely they wouldn't...but maybe the dolls aren't joined together at all and the shoulder connection is empty? If the dolls were not connected, sewing a conjoined dress for them would be very easy and they could be removed from the costume since each would truly only be in her own dress.

To have faked the conjoined look by taking out the inner arms and putting them loose in a double dress would be disappointing, but it would be the most logistically easy. There was footage I could find of the dolls being rigidly carried by someone holding only one sister, which suggested they were truly connected, as well as photos where they seemed more loose or uneven, so I couldn't tell. I was dying to know how these dolls were made! Of course, though, this second theory of the dolls not truly being connected was one that I knew would be confirmed or denied from the first moments I handled the dolls outside of the coffin, so I already knew part of the answer to this question before this point of the review.

Handling the dolls confirmed they were connected by a post between them...but it wasn't glued! How did I know? Well...

This is an extreme example, of course, but it was immediately clear that the girls rotated independently at their shoulder join. This allows them to stand at separate degrees of forward/back lean, too. In lieu of ball-jointed necks, this is useful to change the sisters' posture independent of each other.

I like that the twins never look entirely rigid when they're standing due to the subtle variance in stance that their shoulder swivel can create in conjunction with how the girls' hips are posed. Even the angle and tilts of their heads seems more animated than you'd expect for two non-ball-joint LDDs whose necks only swivel.

The dolls are not very difficult to balance or stand. Four feet are better than two, and their shoes aren't wobbling them around.

When I peeked through the conjoined sleeve, I saw a nub connecting them, and realized it could pop out of the shoulders with heat, so...enjoy what might be the first-ever picture taken of these dolls connected outside of their dress!

They have different painted underwear colors, underpinning an innocent/wicked duality with the black and white shades.

Turns out, I was almost exactly right with my first guess about the girls' assembly, save for the connector post not being glued and the piece putting a bit more distance between the torsos than I expected (I'd forgotten the bodies could not lie flush shoulder-to-shoulder; the connector post does have their hips very close as the nearest they can stand to each other). The post is a new symmetrical plastic piece which was made for them, and pops into both shoulder sockets without glue, allowing the rotation. This makes them the only swivel LDDs with a joint peg (of sorts) made of hard plastic! The post is purely utilitarian and not aesthetically designed, and looks more like something from a hardware store (I think it was designed for the girls, though) so these dolls aren't made to display with any other costumes than the conjoined pieces they wear, unless you get two short-sleeved dresses that can meet and disguise the post. The post isn't the same exact tone as their vinyl parts and it has a strange molded surface texture and a sheen to it, and doesn't elegantly transition the bodies together. Here's one of the ends of the post, separated.

Hazel is silently begging me not to connect them back together.

The post is actually pretty easy to push back into the sockets of the dolls, even without heating the torsos, which makes them no real trouble to assemble inside their dresses. Heating is recommended to pull the post out and disconnect them, especially when dressed, because trying to pull them apart inside their costume could stress the fabric and damage the seams. I learned my lesson from Isabel. 

I'd assume Resurrection Hazel and Hattie had something similar connecting them, though their being ball-joint dolls means their torso arm sockets would be different shapes and might have required modified torsos if this same connecting post was used for them too. So there's another mystery to solve, I guess, but I'm not nearly as driven by that one.

If you had two copies of Hazel and Hattie and two copies of main red-dress Toxic Molly, you could build complete singleton versions of the twins with two arms each and very similar dresses to their conjoined pieces...but that endeavor would be hideously expensive and wasteful, and why would you want to do that? The post could also be used to turn any swivel-bodied LDDs into conjoined twins like Hazel and Hattie, though dressing for the conjoined plan remains a challenge.

Phew. The world may now understand these dolls. Someone had to figure it out and document it!

Because the girls both have two legs and are very closely joined, the LDD hip joints prevent them from sitting normally--the cut of the joints splays the legs too wide when they turn and their inner legs get in the way of each other. Even if the legs could swing straight forward, however, they might still get in the way of each other by being so close. The dolls can sit if one of the sisters does a front-to-back split, with either Hattie putting her right leg behind them, or Hazel doing so with her left. The inner two legs of the four in a row must be in opposite directions, but it's a fair solution, so long as there's space behind them for the backward leg.

You can see each sister's hand is pierced for accessories, though they don't have any assigned to them.

This wouldn't be a necessity for the characters--only for the dolls portraying them due to the LDD engineering. If Hazel and Hattie had ever been rendered as LDD Minis (huge missed opportunity), then those dolls would probably sit easily due to the legs swinging straight forward and probably not being likely to push against each other for the inner two.

With the swivel articulation and the shoulder connection, there's not a lot of ways the sisters can be posed interacting with each other. Their arms can't cross in front of them to show them performing tasks in tandem or gesturing to each other, but their heads can face each other. These two would be really elevated by a Return LDD treatment with better arm articulation that made them more dynamic. They're still very cute and present as unique dolls the way they are, though.

This Hazel and Hattie were horrifically grimy and required a really good scrub, moreso than other LDDs I've encountered. Whoever had them previously did not care for them very well or pay attention to them for some amount of years. Poor dolls. I also had to sand Hazel's right cheek to reduce the visibility of a sunken-in purple dot staining her face. This took a while to get to a more clean point where neither the dot nor the sanding was too obvious. 

I also had to wash their dresses to leach out some excess red dye. When they'd gotten splashed by water while I impatiently scrubbed their faces while dressed, dye got into their lace and ribbons, so I took them out of the costume a second time to get out some excess and tidy up.

Here's the two conjoined-twin doll duos I have, with my restyled/repainted Peri and Pearl Serpentine on the right.

While Hazel and Hattie have two more editions per Resurrection, and thus there are two more conjoined-twin doll releases I don't have, I believe these are the only four conjoined-twin characters to ever have been made into mass-market plastic dolls. 

The awkward semantics of conjoined twins as toys and different forms of bodily conjunction create a strange dichotomy where I'm hesitant to call Peri and Pearl, who have a shared body with the only visual separation being their heads, two dolls, while Hazel and Hattie, who have most of two bodies, feel more readily labeled as two dolls. Each is inarguably a pair of two people, but as toys, Peri and Pearl feel more like a singular doll depicting two conjoined people while Hazel and Hattie are designed and built as two dolls who are inseparably connected. It's not really fair to draw the line based on how much body a conjoined twin has, but as toy figures, semantics seem to fall this way. Peri and Pearl were treated as a standard release within Monster High and were not packaged or supplemented or priced like a doll two-pack. They had a one-doll-wide box on account of their body being much like a singular person's and had only one doll diary, written by both of them. Hazel and Hattie are treated as a two-pack and couldn't have been released in any other format because they have most of two distinct doll bodies. They still have only one death certificate, but that's actually just standard practice for LDD duo sets.

I took a page out of the aforementioned Us to play with paper-chain figures as a visual symbol. Us uses them to allude to the Tethered doppelgänger's nationwide demonstration that echoes the Hands Across America event, with the copies of people standing hand-in-hand in chains, but I thought I could shape the figures with a straight join that matched the LDD twins' shoulder connection. To make a chain long enough that both sisters could hold it, I had to cheat and cut two separate chains eight long and discreetly glue them together, but that in a sense added to the symbolism. The ultimate length that fit best between the sisters' hands was actually fourteen figures, with two torn off.

It was fun making the composition symmetrical, and the striped paper, which I got for carnival connotations in the first place, and the doily, both suited them. 

The cover photo lit them from behind almost like they're about to enter a circus tent, and I liked the mystery of the silhouette.

They're facing the camera here, but it's not clear that they are.

And a few more pictures in this corner, including some with their poster.

I was glad to have two of the holdable palm-peg LDD knives--from Gluttony and Res Sadie.

And I staged a very loose re-creation of the Shining hallway scene with what I had.

Here's a shot done like a traditional old photo portrait. Several sideshow performers had photos like these, as persons of public interest.

Then I set up a hall-of-mirrors display for them, since I thought it fit mirror-image twins from a carnival.

Here they are in garden scenery. I wanted to show Hazel with flowers and Hattie leaning in with a knife. This was the raw photo:

I found this a little dark and the brick wall behind them wasn't great, so I did a photo edit with a lush garden behind them and more retro Technicolor tones. Maybe the Dorothy hair got to me a little.

I then tried my own hand at a sideshow poster. This was a long digital art journey with multiple iterations. 

For the twins, I used a pair of ethically-dubious filters to push a photo into a vintage painted look, but heavily edited the output. I replaced the irises manually to correct the color and give the sisters more distinct gazes, inspired by the Res dolls, and I did a ton of manual "paint blending" and color and shading adjustment to make the image look accurate and natural, smearing out the lashes the filter imposed, changing the colors of the lips to be correct, and blurring out and functionally replacing the painted chunky texture for a softer look that felt more suited to the vintage poster aesthetic. This was a good project during my current learning phase with my new not-Photoshop program to get back into the mentality of the program genre and hone my skills therein. 

The rest of the composition came fairly easily, with curtains and the text, and the background color is shaded with a felt texture to give the painted look more dimension. At previous points, I had the twins less filtered in a way that looked too shiny and artificial, or more like a Victorian illustration, and the background was pale yellow, but changing the piece to blue worked well and had the benefit of letting me put the whole poster title in yellow, whereas the 'N' had to change to red when the background was yellow. The phrasing is deliberately a bit dehumanizing and treats the sisters as a unit to invoke the unfair way sideshow performers were objectified. I'm going to keep practicing digital painting skills so I might be able to make future sideshow posters from Series 30 entirely with hand-rendered figures. Here, I'm at least comfortable with the amount of input and effort I put in to transform machine work on the figures into my own, even without the rest of the composition factoring in.

This wasn't the end of the composition, though--I had the idea to "tear" the poster in half and "tape" it back together to symbolize how Hattie wouldn't let Hazel go--as a result, the only piece of tape touching them is their actual point of connection. This was done with two layers of the image. I took the top copy and had one half erased, then put a white line under the edge, and then shading under that with tape pieces overlaid over the whole thing. I also took care to reduce the shading where the tape would be pressing the two pieces together closely.

I think these dolls are very interesting. While their stylistic use of conjoined twins for visual intrigue and freakshow novelty is questionable, as the trope will always be, as stylistic conjoined twins go, they're effective. I think their engineering to build a conjoined pair of dresses to not only disguise the mechanic of the doll connection but also to highlight their connection in a mysterious way is great, and there are even clever symbolic touches like the imagery of entwined twin braids and the good/evil underwear colors painted on the torso. It was fun to lean in and further that imagery of duality and reflection and contrast. The dolls are more dynamic than I expected them to be and even as their bodies ask for some compromises in posing, it's not in a way that feels frustrating. LDD on the whole has been very easy to work with despite articulation limits, but the twins have their own tricks that make them less limited in their own ways. They also have a lot of very classic old-LDD appeal in their face design, and I think their coloring is really strong. Maybe some will find them too lively, but I like how they turned out.

My Hazel and Hattie were in gross condition and their braids had taken some losses in terms of tidiness, which is frustrating, and while getting a sealed set would have probably given me a better hair outcome, it wasn't worth it to me. Still, I can understand why these dolls are expensive. They're a novelty, they're a duo, and they're appealing. If you like the freakshow aesthetic (and like, do you, but explore that aesthetic with caution and empathy, please) or the creepy twin archetype and The Shining, these dolls cover both bases.

Above all, I'm glad to have (evidently) been the one to explore and disclose just how these dolls were built for their unique effect! Documenting toy novelties is a passion of mine, and if I have to find the answers for X or Y doll myself, then I'll do it!