Dolls Divided, 2/2: Living Dead Dolls Exclusive The Great Zombini (new) and Viv (redux) by Mezco Toyz

This is an unusual one--I'm re-reviewing one Living Dead Doll here because I decided I wanted her in full context, and since Mattel dropped another bisecting horror doll, having two posts was resonant. 

Warning for bloody and anatomical gory imagery.

Last spring, I got a copy of LDD Viv, the genuinely-cut-in-half magician's assistant, incomplete for $20. At the time, I wanted her for her delightfully ghoulish doll novelty of a gory bisected body that really split in two, and I didn't care much for the full context of the whole two-pack. Zombini wasn't the novelty doll in the set, and he didn't look like much from what I saw. The copy of Viv I got had slightly damaged but still much better hair than she had any right to, considering she was grimy and reeked of gasoline from the garage she would have been stored in, and I had fun reinventing her gag into her being a swimmer bit in half by a shark.

However, as time went on, I found diminishing enjoyment from her. I wasn't keeping her on the shelf because I had her outside of her canonical context (and the bathing suit was a sloppy fit) and trying to strip her down to basics for a custom character didn't go anywhere because what else can you really do with this already extremely specific gore concept? My aesthetic tastes in LDD had broadened significantly over the course of 2024 after I got her, enough to eventually want Viv back in my collection through the full two-pack, including the "magician" who killed her. 

When deciding to do this re-review, I could have pulled the first review of Viv off the blog and reincorporated the points which were relevant into this post to discuss what made the two different and how I approached the character then and now, but I decided not to. I'll leave the older review up and write this new one essentially like it's my first time with the doll, at risk of some redundancy, so you can read this post and understand Viv without reading the older post. Having the older post up still makes for an interesting experience as archival material. This is going to be a better review, anyway, since I'm discussing the full context and intent of the dolls.

The Great Zombini and Viv duo is, of course, based on a subversion of the classic magic trick of "sawing the lady in half".

In the classic trick, a woman climbs into a horizontal box on legs and wheels, where only her head pokes out of one end and her legs poke out of another. The magician passes a saw down a gap in the middle of the box across the waist region and separates the box into two closed halves. Then he puts the halves back together, says a magic word, and the lady climbs out whole. 

The way the trick is performed is well-known enough now for the magic trick to rarely be played straight anymore and it's since passed into cliché--the secret is that the box contains two women, one in each enclosed half, bent in so the head of woman 1 pokes out the top and the legs of woman 2 poke out of the bottom. The audience never sees the internals of the box from the top.

However, the subversion of the trick is an easy gag: that there is no trick and the person in the box is truly cut in half with a saw. It's gone back at least as far as 1957 Looney Tunes cartoon "Show Biz Bugs", where Daffy Duck gets split into two halves by the trick and only notices it's for real when jumping and (wrongly) screaming about how his rival Bugs Bunny was faking the performance.

Daffy attempts to discredit the act live on stage. Note how we can see inside the box where it's separated in halves. Note also that the halves could not stand with only two wheels each.

When yelling at the audience for applauding Bugs, as Daffy wants to expose the trick, it becomes clear he was actually cut in two.

One of the quirky visual-gag afterlife characters in the first Beetlejuice is a magician's assistant in two halves, with the clear implication she was a victim of the classic saw trick being all too real.

The gag has continued in pop culture and has also postdated LDD Viv, and features in American Horror Story: Freak Show, when a conning fortune teller is killed in the magic box by being truly sawn in half, gore spilling out of the box when the halves are separate. Viv preceded AHS's depiction of the idea but the two scenes are highly similar.

While it's not implied by LDD, I feel like there could have been a second twist with Zombini and Viv--sawing her in half was no illusion, but then Zombini could have pulled actual magic to bring her back undead! In their act, the showstopper could have been, rather than Viv being made whole, Viv coming back from the dead! If Zombini had nothing to do with Viv's revival, then he was flat-out the worst anybody has ever been at their job because he wasn't an illusionist and he committed murder. He was a hack magician...and far too literally.

It's a little strange the full set never appealed to me sooner, because I was obsessed with stage magic as a kid and loved all things magic shows. I should have latched onto Zombini and Viv sooner as a result!

These dolls might be the lowest-fetching LDD two-pack on the aftermarket. They weren't very hard to get. I got a sealed copy. Here's the shrink-wrap and lid off.

The tissue color is a white tone that suits them oddly well, though I'm not sure if it was ever a brilliant pure white when fully new, or if this is intentionally off-white. It's lighter than their chipboard, so maybe it is to be taken as a neutral white. Zombini is packaged on the left and Viv is to the right. The aesthetic of the set is very stylized with the limited red, white, and black palette, and I appreciate the touches of other warm tones in their face paint that add a bit of yellow and orange, as well as the presence of white/cream tones which make it less on-the-nose goth red-and-black than it could be. I always appreciate when LDD uses starker palettes but grounds them with a bit of natural tone or other colors.

The Zombini/Viv two-pack are early enough in the brand that they're swivel-joint dolls, but they have fully custom chipboard art with no elements of the art style that ran from Series 1-4 and clung on for the way Series 5 was rendered. 

They're probably after Series 5 within the swivel-doll era. 

The board is cut with straight edges except for a curve outlining the figure of Zombini in the foreground. The board has a cream background and red stripes in different colors, with a color portrait of Zombini and a mostly greyscale portrait of Viv. Viv is shown lying on her back, split and bleeding, though perhaps her arms should be raised because they'd have to have been out of the way when she was sawed apart. Lightning surrounds her and old-style theatrical text says "Great Zombini and his lovely assistant Viv" to name the dolls, while above Zombini's head, another tagline says: "With real vivisect action!" This comes too close to explaining the joke behind Viv's name for me, but it's a fun line. The dolls are marked as Tower Records exclusives. Hazel and Hattie were also distributed through Tower. I think the chipboard art does successfully stylize the dolls in the vein of an old show poster, which is kind of the aesthetic of the dolls themselves as well. 

The chipboard also has a poem under Viv's image:

The Great Zombini has a trick for you all

His lovely assistant split by his saw

Not a rhyme. I offer an alternate poem I wrote about Zombini way back when that I'm still proud of:

Devoted to the stage

With a fervor almost tragic

His performance wasn't fake

But neither was it magic.

Viv and Zombini are listed on the LDD online archive with two separate death dates: March 5, 1975 for Zombini, and March 14, 1975 for Viv. This would make them the only two-pack with separate death dates, and implies Zombini was an undead when he killed Viv in the trick. That also fits with his stage name...but on the certificate, only one date is printed: the March 5 date.

I'm not quite sure what to do with this information. I've previously went strictly by the certificates for what dates to trust in the event of inconsistent information, but for LDD to name two death dates on the archive is so out of the way and specific that it feels like the certificate would be the erroneous source in this case. Then again, why not print both dates if they were both intended when the dolls were first created? That seems hard to forget. It's more consistent for LDD two-packs to have only one reported death date which could be one or both characters'. I'm going to say the jury is still out in this case because I can't make a call either way. I will edit the calendar and timeline posts I made to note that this situation is unclear, though. 

The 1975 year feels just right for the aesthetic of these dolls. There were plenty of magic acts that looked like them between the seventies and nineties. I couldn't find a specific thematic reason behind either reported March date associated with this duo.

The certificate poem says:

The crowd had gathered to see a trick

But Zombini opted to make them sick

As his assistant he trapped in a box, afraid

He severs her body with a cut of his blade

The last two lines are pretty poor grammar. The third line is a fragment with no follow-through and has unnatural syntax and the tenses of the two last lines don't agree. Have another fully alternate poem:

 He walked onstage and looked quite odd

He took the girl and box and sawed
The cut was real--he seemed a fraud

But then he said some magic words
And then the pieces newly stirred
Undead--through sorcery unheard!

The Great Zombini's name mixes "zombie" and the classic magician's "ini" name suffix  popularized by Harry Houdini (Known as Erich Weiss before, with his stage name coming from magician Jean-Eugene Robert-Houdin). Viv's name is not standing in for "Vivian" here--it's based on the word vivisection (cutting apart while alive). The box kind of explains the joke, but it's still clever. A fun side effect of her name is that it's a palindrome that, when in all caps, can be perfectly symmetrically cut in half! LDD couldn't have planned that, but it's such a fun bonus resonance to her name.

Typographically, her name is perfectly suited!

Here they are unboxed. 

The Great Zombini is a doll I knew very little about, but I kind of expected zero surprises from him. I was still game for the doll.

Zombini starts on top with a red turban. 

This is a unique piece of costuming for LDD, but it's also almost certainly an act of appropriation on this rather pale character. It was common for turbans to be objectified as something mystical or "other" by outsiders for magic shows and the like, even paired with the magician himself pretending to be "foreign" and "exotic", but the prevalence of the historical pattern doesn't make it right. I almost feel like Zombini needs a curled mustache paired with this turban for the full hokey look, but only Edgar Allan Poe and Gomez Addams are LDDs with mustaches, and neither are original characters created by LDD.

Except for the shirt, all of Zombini's clothing is made from the same satiny material, but it's not the smoothest, most drapey flexible satin material out there. This includes the turban, which is red and nicely sewn to shape the fabric in folds that look appropriate. The front is decorated with an oval jewel of opaque black plastic. The piece slides onto the head and has a little elastication just at the back.

While this piece on this man depicts cultural appropriation, that's not to say aesthetic callousness was the entire situation of turbans in magic acts. The pieces could also serve practical functions in illusions, such as allowing a "mind-reader" to conceal an electronic earpiece through which an assistant wearing a mic could convey information he would "psychically" glean from tbe volunteer speaking to the assistant.

I was 99% certain Zombini was a bald doll under the turban despite me never remembering seeing proof as such. I just didn't expect hair under there. Dr. Dedwin was a bald doll in a cap, but S11 Isaiah wasn't, so it was maybe possible for a flocked buzz cut, if not actual rooting, to be present, but I wasn't holding my breath.

I was right to think Zombini was bald. He also evidently used to have a tape square holding his turban in place--as in, it used to hold the turban, not that it used to be there--the tape is present but has no stick to it.

The tape would later peel off pretty easily and left no residue.

I'd previously thought Quack and Sybil were the only LDDs with a cartoony spiraling eye design, but I'd never seen Zombini's face in high definition! 

He has yellow irises with red swirls, putting him a bit closer to Quack later on, though both Quack and Sybil have white sclerae. Zombini's spirals are mirrored while Quack and Sybil's eye spirals turn the same direction on both eyes. I like Zombini a lot more knowing this is his face paint design. I'd observed a kind of whimsical retro painted-poster quality to Viv's face, and I'm glad to see Zombini's face has similar stylization. The swirly eyes make him look like he's in a trance, perhaps reanimated and possessed by a magic force, but can also serve as a shorthand for a hypnotizer, which a magician may sometimes be. Swirly eyes and magic spells are a common pairing.

His eyebrows are done all in individual hair strokes with some smudging that furthers a greyish bushy look. I'm not in love with the brows in general, or for the art style of this doll set. I'd have preferred solid cartoony single strokes. I see what they're going for, though, and it's not wrong for a vintage poster look. Zombini's eyes are surrounded with heavy brownish orange shading that's watery paint in thick rings, and his lips are unpainted.

Zombini is wearing a black cape of the satin material, and I appreciate the cut and volume, but I wish it had more flow and drape.

The cape has a little bit of a vampirish collar to it, and is held on with a closed elastic strap across the front. While this suggests it can pull over the doll's head, this doesn't actually seem to be the case and I didn't want to break any sewing by really trying. I think Zombini was popped together inside his costume.

This doll doesn't have any hair and wasn't gross and begging for a bath, so it doesn't bother me that his cape is held on this way. 

Under the cape, the doll is wearing a white dress shirt, a red bow tie, a red cummerbund, and black dress pants. 

The shirt has a typical shirt collar, and the collar and sewn-on bow tie need to be watched so the cape strap is tucked under them nicely. The shirt has seams to define the cuffs and has a button strip panel down the front, but no simulated buttons.

The shirt is a matte cotton seen nowhere else on the outfit. He's mostly a satiny guy.

The cummerbund is actually kind of interesting to me because it feels like a design echo to Viv. She's cut and bleeding across her torso, and the magician is wearing a horizontal red garment around the waist that mirrors her cut wound. I think that's very clever if intentional, and I'll offer the credit in good faith. I'd believe they thought of this. LDD has done cummerbunds a few times, and since I knew it was removable for fellow stage performer GreGORY, I expected Zombini's to be a separate piece. It is, velcro-ing at the back.

The shirt and pants are sewn as one piece, so I'm glad I'm not trying to undress this doll. If Vincent Vaude is anybody to go by, that wouldn't be easy.

Zombini's pants are sewn with a slight gathering and flare just at the ankles, and he wears glossy male LDD dress shoes in black and black socks that keep them fitted.

Zombini has a unique accessory that's kind of pivotal to tying the whole scene together--a vicious-looking two-person logging saw which cut through Viv for real. 

The edge is serrated and quite bloody with glossy two-toned red paint, with jagged teeth that are  too large and uneven to have cut Viv so cleanly. Realistically, this saw would have seriously mangled her midsection, but it's effective caricature. The piece has a palm peg on each handle, placed on opposite sides.

These pegs let Zombini hold it plugged into both hands in a diagonal like this:

The blade is a bit bendy (like a real saw!), letting the piece be finagled into both palm holes. Thanks to the placement of the pegs the way they are, Zombini can't hold the saw in the opposite diagonal with the teeth facing down. He can also only hold the saw blade forward in front of him to cut across Viv by using his right hand--and even so, the angle of the hand sculpt makes the angle of the saw less straight. 

If each handle had a peg on both sides, there would be more display options, but I don't mind the way the doll and saw work as it is.

A copy of the saw without the pegs would work great in a gripping hand from later LDDs...for the purposes of sawing forward, at least. Without the peg, the handle could slide down the fist and rotate within the grip to a perfect forward angle. You would lose the two-handed diagonal pose with a gripping hand, though.

Preview of an upcoming doll...

Zombini's palm piercings needed to be bored out a little wider so the pegs would fit. Viv's palms are pierced too, but she wouldn't be using the saw.

Now let's look at Viv...again.

I wasn't surprised her hair elastic had disintegrated.

Viv's hair is primary red, long, voluminous, and side-parted toward her left while tied in a low ponytail. Some of the plugs at the front of the hairline aren't tight together, but it's not too bad. I expected the ends to be fried, and they were, but my last Viv still had pretty solid hair in volume and texture, especially given her horrendous storage conditions. This one's hair is comparable, if perhaps a little less snarled and thus hanging a little smoother and thinner.

Viv is fittingly terrified, using the open-mouth face and having an expression of horror looking down and to her right as if processing that the magic act she signed up for is no illusion. 

Viv is an assistant already established as an act with Zombini, not an unlucky audience volunteer, so how much history do they have? Did Viv and Zombini have a normal act working together until her theatrical partner/boss suddenly came in different one fateful day? Or did Viv get hired after Zombini resurrected, not realizing her first performance with him would kill her?

Her eyebrows are thin arcs raised up high, and her irises are concentric rings of color, black with red and yellow, which convey a stylized theatrical art aesthetic and also a cartoon element of alarm--concentric irises often signify shock and mania. Viv's eyes are shaded with purplish smudging around them, and her lips are painted red while her tongue is pale purple. Her teeth are a bit yellow and her upper tooth sculpt is atypically long.

I had previously been sure Viv's very long teeth were unique to her, but it looks like I was wrong and missed one--it seems like Bad Bette Jane (depicting the Deadly Sin of Wrath) also has them, making Viv and Wrath the only two with the tooth mold.

I can see myself getting this doll sometime.

It's an unusual tooth variant for LDD to have developed at all, but it works.

This copy of Viv has a black spot by her nose which isn't supposed to be there, so I'll need to remove that paint.

EDIT: This dark spot is a deliberate paint application to give her a mole. Oops. I added it back on, but it won't be appearing in the rest of the photos after this one, since those were taken before.

I think Viv 1 had the mole too, but lost it by the time she was cleaned. Maybe I made the same mistake before and wiped it off with acetone? If not, Viv 1 lost her mole by normal washing!

Viv 1's face out of the box. You can understand why I'd think the mole was part of her grime, though I don't know if it came off from nail polish remover or normal wash!

The mole wasn't painted well enough to look intentional. I like the feature but I think it was flopped on the Vivs I've handled.

Zombini and Viv's skintones, if they are different, are still very close.

Viv is wearing a classic magician's-assistant costume that emphasizes sparkles and a showgirl quality with a tight top and bottoms/tights.

Her jacket is a red piece with scratchy sparkle thread and flat reflective sequins dotting the surface. The piece has a collar and lapels, but there aren't any buttons or closures and the fit of the piece isn't very snug, nor does the fabric material have any grip on the doll. It doesn't lay super flat.

The jacket hangs under her cut normally, but if her arms are raised above her head (like they'll have to be to stage Viv in the trick), the waist of the jacket pulls up enough that it's plausible for Zombini to have sawed through Viv without touching the jacket.

Under the jacket, she has a top made of the same style of fabric as the jacket, but in black. The top is sleeveless and has two matching black ribbon straps, and is cropped above the waist and her saw cut.

This top velcros in the back.

Viv's bottom half is dressed in a combination tights/bottoms piece, with net footie tights coming from an opaque bikini-bottom-shaped piece that matches the fabric of the crop top. The waist of the piece sits lower on the doll waist than the painted underwear of LDDs that have it, and lower than I think it ought to. The tops of the doll's hip joints are showing, and the bottoms are below the bikini line. I think I ended up with a badly-sewn deal. It feels like the net legs are too short for the bottoms to pull up the waist a bit more. Viv 1's bottoms sat a little higher, but I ruined them by cutting the feet off when I wanted to try them as socks for another doll who needed tighter shoes.

Viv 1's bottoms weren't perfect, mind. The waistband of hers was coming detached at the back. 

Viv wears the LDD sandals in red, also worn in this color by Calico, Nurse Necro, and Ruby.

My first Viv's costume was incomplete and a little damaged. She didn't have her shoes, and her jacket had a possibly moth-eaten hole in it while her tights/bottoms piece had a partially-detached waistband from the netting breaking.

Viv's torso cut is dimensional and she splits at the waist into two gory pieces. 

The connection is essentially interlocking tubes--a tube inside the upper torso fits into the tube inside the lower torso that simultaneously fits around the upper torso. The wound is all painted with glossy red paint that pairs with the blood on the saw, and the lower torso tube even has special anatomical sculpting where you can see intestines on the front and a bit of spine on the back!

I love that they turned the functional tube connection into further detail, really putting the "vivisection" into Viv as we get a peek at her internals. 

However, I was concerned to find red pigment on my fingers and the doll when I touched her, and I realized it was all coming from her internals. Viv was, in a sense, literally bleeding as the color? paint? something was smearing red. I had to wash and swab out her insides with a Q-tip to get the red residue out. It wasn't like her paint was uncured or anything. She still had her proper gore paint when she was cleaned up. But somehow there was excess pigment that was still wet, maybe from the doll being airtight and popped together before the paint could fully dry? Well, anyway, having her gore be an actual visceral mess was quite the twisted experience and not exactly welcome. I had no such issue with Viv 1. 

I've mentioned there's an uncomfortable element to a toy of a woman in an objectified profession who you can split into two gory pieces, and found the absence of this feature to be one of the most positive mitigating factors of LDD's Dahlia, who was based on a real victim of this mutilation. Dahlia came first, though, so I can't be confident LDD wouldn't have given her the Viv body had Viv preceded her. When Dahlia came back in Resurrection, the Viv body was well retired and LDD didn't recreate it for the ball-joint era, nor did they paint a cut on the Res Dahlias' waists--but that could have been for budget as much as artistic intent. 

The two bisected characters. Only Viv actually separates. Dahlia is "stapled" together.

Both dolls have the factory stamp vertically across their right buttocks since their waist detail gets in the way of the usual placement.

The scars are at the same level on the torso, too--neither higher or lower. 

Resurrection-variant Dahlia (as labeled on the LDD archive) does have a waist frill on the dress that subtly alludes to the idea of bisection, so the reference is in one of the Res dolls despite being absent as a literal visceral detail in Resurrection Dahlia.

I think perhaps Viv's gag of a mutilated woman could be lessened in the sting of poor potential connotations if Zombini also had a magic-trick death gimmick so it's not just the woman who's been horrifically killed. There are plenty of ways a magician could die in his own trick, after all. A bullet catch that was just him getting shot for real. The cabinet of swords, but he was really run through while standing inside the box. A knife-throwing stabbing. A fire trick with real immolation. It could have evened out a bit so we don't just have an interactive man-killing-a-woman toy. Heck, if Maitre des Morts' hole-through-torso gag came earlier, Zombini could have been bored out by a trick cannon. Viv could have killed him back as assistant to a trick where he was the guinea pig. Alternatively...make Viv okay with it. Give her the standard face sculpt and a smirk. Make her a freak who likes it and finds it fun rather than having her scream. 

Viv's torso cut also has the bonus of letting her rotate at the waist, since the shape of the torso and cut is a pretty clean circle that makes her look natural as her torso pieces turn, rather than the pieces no longer aligning. 

The cut will angle the torso as it turns, so it's not a level 360.

This wasn't designed as articulation, but it's fun that it can be! Zombini might even use it for tricks!

Here's Viv's hair after washing and retying it. Still fried at the ends.

I brought Viv in at this moment because of Corazón Marikit making Viv one of two bisected horror dolls when she had previously been just the one. 

Here's their features compared.

Viv is obviously more gruesome, with sculpted internal organs and lots of blood and flesh in her bisection, while Cora is grim by Monster High standards, but only depicts a spine inside her body, with no real gore. Her costume implies hanging entrails from her waist, though. Viv's body pieces connect pretty well, though her body split is highlighted by the design gag even when assembled and the pieces pop together securely but feel less precise, though they're durable. They also let her waist rotate. Cora's pieces click into a set position with a seamless look and the parts cannot rotate out of their assembled position, and the peg of her spine feels a little potentially fragile when assembling her. Viv's lower half pokes up into her upper half, while Cora's upper half plugs down into her lower half. Both dolls are successful at what they do and both are fun.

The Zombini and Viv set has thematic similarities to LDD Series 5's Vincent Vaude, as both releases feature performers dying through magic-related stunts, though Vincent is more escapology in specific, not other kinds of magic. Viv and Vincent are even closer related by both being screaming-faced dolls with V names who died by entering a box intended for their act. (Vincent locked himself in a trunk and suffocated). Their eyes are even looking up and down, respectively! They were also my first two screaming LDD characters.

Variant Vincent pictured.

The language in Vincent's poem indicates he was a child when he died, so these two characters could not be a romantic couple, but I think they could be friends, with Viv being an honorary older sister. Vincent would technically have seniority by decades as an undead since 1926, but he'd still be an undead kid.

Now, there was simply no photoshoot for this magic duo without the center of the whole gag--the magician's saw box. Thus, I needed to make the thing.

To build the box, I first tried buying an unfinished hinged wood box from the craft store, which I wanted to saw the ends and middle of. The doll sized up okay (using my wrecked custom that never was from the Viv I copy):

I even bought a larger saw to try cutting the box like I needed, but it was messy and uneven, part of the wood split, and I decided the proportions were too large, with the box being wider than the doll than it needed to be. So I tried cutting foam board instead. While the paper slicer can do this, it does crush and deform the material (it may be dulled) so I wasn't sure about the rough look, but it was useful at least for prototyping.

I used glue on the wall panels but I also pushed sewing pins in like nails to hold the boards together and make them more rigid. 

I then added panels to the foot of the box in order to enclose the legs more. On the top half, I couldn't do this because Viv's arms need to be swiveled up and emerging alongside her head, but putting the feet through a smaller hole made the gag better and also made it impossible for the legs to slide out of the end of the box when the halves are split. These panels are held in just by the pins.

This was a pretty good setup for the box.

...but I was wondering if I still couldn't do better. This would be functional, but looked pretty janky. I considered multiple other materials, but nothing was satisfying me, so I stuck with the prototype and decided to embrace sketchiness and a homemade look to suit a doll magician who really isn't doing it right. I used the hinges from the wooden box attempt to put the lid halves on, with the hinges glued on.

I didn't have enough of my trusty wood spool beads to make four legs for each half, so I tried one leg for each half, connected to LEGO wheel sets. They're attached with one stud piece glued to the end so I didn't have to sacrifice the wheel plates themselves--only the expendable 1x1 studs got glued.

These poles glued to and supported the box alright, but putting Viv into it was a no-go. Her body halves threatened the balance, and her detached upper half badly wanted to slide out of the end of the box from the weight of her head and arms. I switched tactics. I did have enough spool beads for three legs on each half, and put a wheel plate on the end of each. Viv's upper half was still sliding out, though, so I added a smaller board to support her head on the end, glued and also fixed in with pins slid diagonally in to run through both pieces. I then painted the edges with messy red to lean into the messy material.

I painted up the box with detail and flicked-on splattered "real" blood, but Viv turned out to still be too heavy for the pieces after I thought I was done, so I had to tweak the build a bit more to add two panels at the bottom edge extending out past the box. The panels are the same width as the box, not only to support the head and legs, but to let me move the end wheels further down under the corners of the panels so the legs of the box were under the ends of the doll. This finally made the box functional with Viv inside it. Here's the final assembly.

I don't know if, were the dolls flexible like humans, it would be impossible to do the trick the right way, with two women, in the dimensions of the box I made, but I like the idea of the box being built wrong with truly no space for the two-bodies deception, such that a skilled magician watching would realize there was no other assistant before the saw made its cut, while the audience of laypeople would be none the wiser until they saw the blood flowing. Viv herself would know she was poking out of both ends and in danger. Unless perhaps she was a complete newbie to the biz and was lied to that the trick would work. That makes her too naïve and foolish, though, so while it's more horrific, I have to believe Viv understood this wasn't right the moment she realized she was alone in the box.

I also modified a mini stuffed bunny to be a magic prop, unstitching the original face, pushing in yellow pins for eyes, and splattering the bunny too.

The display of these dolls is just stunning with the simple stage and curtain. If I had the real estate to keep this set up, I would. I think the staging proves the effectiveness of their bold color palette even more.

I had an earlier moment where the word on the box was Zombini's name and the rabbit was clean, but I decided Zombini's name on the box would be redundant when mocking up stage posters with his name on them. I switched to the "ABRACADAVER" pun because the joke was too good to not use and because the word can be symmetrically divided on the third "A" where the saw runs through. This was the first setup.

For more pictures with the box, I put red cord between Viv's halves while the box is separated and shot a poster pose.

Like a poem said by a lady in red, you'll hear the last few words of your life...

Abracadabra-

Here's more of them onstage with this trick.

And taking a bow.

Maybe Viv and her legs will turn the tables?

Here's the classic rabbit trick. I glued an elastic strip on the back that the dolls can slide their fingers in for holding the rabbit. This isn't intended to be a real creature in the act, just a stuffed toy.

Viv does a pretty good "how'd he do that?" face for selling a trick that isn't harming her.

Zombini can do the rabbit trick on a larger scale, too.

Here's some portraits with Zombini, the latter two using Lizzie Hearts' cards and a Mego sword as props.

And the sword with Viv.

When I had Viv before, I borrowed my Calico's sandals to complete her for gravesite photos with her split body. All of these photos are still valid for this current review because they were taken with Viv in her factory getup. This was my teaser: showing her two halves separate without fully giving away it's all Viv.

And a pulled-back view.

Here's some different arrangements showing how to potentially bury the two halves.

And the legs standing on the surface looking into the grave.

Since Zombini and Viv are performers (on paper, at least), I decided to honor them with Hollywood footprint slabs like I did for all of the Series 5 dolls. Both slabs feature impressions of the saw teeth and contour, while Viv's slab is arranged with handprints and sideways footprints mimicking her lying down, and her signature is split down the middle with the slab divided.

I have a lot of pavement now!

And one more poster for the road.

I had a lot more fun with this set than I was expecting to, even with all the times I had to re-glue the legs on the saw box. It feels right to have Viv and her doll novelty in full context now, the way she was meant to be designed, and Zombini turned out a more visually appealing and photogenic doll than I expected. LDD two-packs do a good job of feeling pretty "even", as in, there's no feeling that one of the dolls is an afterthought or got less budget than the other. Viv has the gory novelty build while Zombini has a nicer costume and a fun accessory. There's no B-doll in this set even though I used to think only Viv was worth having. Having them now, the two of them rock their color palettes and play into a vintage theatrical art style that suits them perfectly. Building the saw box was an ordeal and a half, and it's a fiddly, fragile piece...but it's also probably my favorite prop build for my dolls yet. Making it absolutely did them justice. The dolls successfully, though twistedly, gave me the atmosphere of magic shows, which I still have a soft spot for. The dolls are lurid and there are meaningful questions to ask about this horror gag involving the horrific murder of a woman, but the dolls feel unreal and cartooned enough to scan okay as a dark subversion of an iconic magic act.

In terms of production quality, Zombini and Viv are not spectacular. Zombini's satin fabric isn't the most deluxe, and the saw is fun, but would have more display potential with palm pegs on both sides of each handle. Viv's hair has aged as it tends to for LDD, and her bottoms and jacket aren't well-sewn to fit her great. I also had goopy gore paint on Viv II that I wasn't expecting and which was pretty unpleasant. The dolls being even doesn't make them prime manufacturing. The dolls also do lack the saw box itself, and it would be a fantastic LDD production if they were sold as a playset including such a prop--I'm sure it could have even been something you built out of flat panels that could pack into the space under the coffin tray when disassembled. That would make them more expensive, but also more complete. However, the dolls do look wonderful on display thanks to the attractive designs and the saw and Viv display setup options. Viv is enough novelty to distinguish the set. While the dolls have issues, when they're set up on the shelf even with no external props, they don't look like the least valued LDD two-pack. They look like a hell of a show.

A stage and saw box, however, do flatter them enormously.