REAL Dug Up: A Brief Look at the ORIGINAL Original Living Dead Dolls

I think I've cracked some lore here.

It's been known how Living Dead Dolls got their start--as handmade customs built on a doll base before being adapted to official release. Photos of the handmades are kept on the LDD site, offering some fun comparisons:

Handmade Sadie.

Series 1 Sadie.

Handmade Eggzorcist.

Series 1 Eggzorcist.

Handmade Bride of Valentine.

Series 3 Bride of Valentine.

There are a couple of other handmades LDD has archived, of Posey and an unidentified doll who might be the original Candy Rotten prior to her official debut ages later in Series 35 (the end of the classic era). 

These original dolls are fascinating. While their obvious brushed-yarn hair material marks them as customs, they're pretty well-painted and their body colors look well-altered, and they look fairly cohesive and fairly close in ways to the produced versions. But when thinking for a moment more on these dolls, I suddenly wanted to know who was under that paint and yarn. It looked like the LDD guys had built their handmades on a uniform doll base, so what was it? What did they source? 

Looking on eBay for vintage plastic dolls wasn't super helpful. A couple of dolls had hands with the kind of wiggly finger pose the handmade LDDs have, but most vintage plastic dolls in a child design have inset eyes rather than painted ones, and their faces didn't match the vibe of LDD. I was helped by remembering the dolls I wanted were in some way angels thanks to Series 11 doll Rain.

Rain's creative origin is a tribute to the mother of LDD co-creator Ed Long. Long's mother had died before Series 11, inspiring this doll, and it's not just an angel theme as generic memorial--the lore goes that Long's mother was reported to be the source of the "angel doll kits" the LDD handmades were built upon. Thus, Rain being an angel works twofold as a tribute to a beloved woman and to the dolls which inspired LDD. Looking up vintage angel dolls brought me exactly what I was looking for. Not an angel intrinsically in anything but name, but a nude doll base with a fully-painted face, shoes, and a body that lines up with the LDD handmades...and quite a lot with the official Mezco dolls.

Bingo.

This is an angel doll base kit by Fibre Craft, a craft store supplier which appears to have gone defunct in the long time since this was made. I gather from the name and context that this doll would be the model you can buy as a clotheshorse for an angel dress and wings Fibre Craft would have supplied materials and patterns for. She's not a play doll with readymade clothes. She's the body the clothes you sew yourself will fit on.

She ticks all the boxes. The size is roughly correct (9.5''), the head mold includes the neck and the face sculpt is similar and could easily repaint to a LDD character, the hands have the right shape for the handmade LDDs, the articulation would be identical to the swivel LDDs the brand started with, and the torso contours are similar. It looks like Mezco imitated this exact base closely to make LDD official! Without direct word on the matter, this is the closest I think we can come to a positive ID.

I got two Fibre Craft dolls--a blonde and a brunette, who are basically identical save for hair color, using them as part of my birthday haul.

There didn't seem to be much variance in look among the angel dolls beyond hair color. I did see a dark-skinned version too late after I had bought the copies I'm using, but if I make Black custom LDDs (and I'd like to), they should be Black custom LDDs. 

The dolls come in a very simple plastic sleeve with a card tag stapled to the top. The dolls are nude save for shoes, which feels odd out of context, but knowing that these are meant to be models for a dress you sew yourself, that adds up. Doll shoes aren't so much a home craft staple, so Fibre Craft giving her footwear makes sense as long as you provide the gown.

...yeah, about that...

The design of what we have is fairly retro and classic, however, with the face sculpt, hairstyle, and paint bringing to mind plastic dolls of the 1950s and 1960s, which suited early LDD just fine as they clearly aped that aesthetic themselves. I'm given to believe these Fibre Craft dolls would have been available during the 1990s, however, since that was where LDD started and I'd expect these were a current product then.

The hair is a very yellow blonde reminiscent of the color LDD used for the mask wig on Hemlock and the natural hair on Wrath. It comes pressed down under a snug band of plastic around the doll's face like Return Living Dead Dolls have used.

Hemlock.

The style is center-parted and wavy above the shoulder with a very retro silhouette. The rooting is not dense, but the fiber feels fine and isn't stiff or snarled or fried. I've also handled a black-haired model of this doll, and her hair was ratty, full of short fibers, and combing in clumps that never seemed to stop falling out...so good hair wasn't a guarantee.

The face has a very hand-painted look (it probably was) and continues the retro aesthetic with the way it's rendered. The pupils and irises are not concentric circles and there's a softness to the look. The doll has small black arcs for brows, blue eyes and eyeshadow, and small pink lips and blush.

The head is a neutral sculpt with a young childlike face that isn't overtly toddlerish or expressive, making it apt for a base to craft many different characters with, and quite similar to LDD's base face. It does have more smile, though.

The brunette, mostly wiped.

It's not too hard to see where Sadie would have come from.

The paint was not easy to remove from the brunette, but otherwise, it makes sense why repainters would latch onto these. LDD's official basic face follows this ethos, with a majority of characters getting personality and divergent aesthetics with the same base sculpt. Obviously, some LDD face sculpts depicting open mouths and dimensional gore could not be achieved on a base like this, but the only evidenced character who was in the handmade club and later got a specialty sculpt upon going official is Posey, whose official doll has skin bumps that don't get in the way of the basic face shape. Otherwise, there's no indication any LDD characters with screaming or mutilated faces were tried out on the Fibre Craft base with a more neutral or painted-only look in the handmade era. The handmades' translation to official dolls don't seem to have ever been as drastic as that. There doesn't seem to have been a handmade Lilith with a closed mouth, for example, or a handmade Sin without horns. (You'd have to go to the LDD Minis line for a Sin without horns. Inexcusable, by the way.)

The dolls are wearing broad and flat white Mary Jane shoes with one ankle strap. No socks.

This isn't what the handmade LDDs wore, as their shoes had a divider bar in the gap on top like the official Mezco shoes. 

Mezco shoe on the left.

I wonder where those handmades' shoes were sourced from. Given the low photo quality of the handmades, it was tricky, but this was the closest shape match I could find to what they were wearing, sold on eBay, but who knows if it would fit a Fibre Craft doll well. I didn't buy these just to try.

I was incidentally able to ID the basket that handmade Eggzorcist used, and whose form the Mezco line closely adapted. I like the original more because the weave is molded with gaps as a true lattice. The LDD basket looks like a waffle cone.

Official Eggy's basket, held by Bloody Mary to test how the gripping hand works with it.

Actually, the Fibre Craft shoe resembles the Mary Jane worn by Return LDD Sadie more.

Return Sin went back to a split-gap Mary Jane design more like the classic LDD shoe, but I wonder if Return Sadie did her shoes this way as a reference to the Fibre Craft genesis? Please know I can't confirm that idea. It's also not like these are an especially special shoe design, and Return Sadie could just be reflecting a very common style for Mary Janes.

The Fibre Craft doll heads are an easily-compressible vinyl like many fashion dolls' and are less firm than LDD vinyl. The Fibre Craft bodies are blow-molded plastic, easily recognizable because they're lightweight, translucent, and can get crushed and dented. This doll's heel had such an issue.

The blow-molded pieces have some rougher seams, which I recognized in the handmade LDD photos. You can see the over-molded edges on the hands in the handmade pictures, and the handmade Bride of Valentine visibly has the same seam cutting from shoulder to shoulder across the top of the torso that these dolls do. The hand shaping is also a dead ringer.

Also see that torso seam on the sides of the Bride's shoulders here--it's just like the Fibre Craft dolls.

I'm not sure what method LDD used to change the color of their handmade dolls. Dye can change vinyl to a more vibrant or darker color easily, but blow-mold plastic...spray paint, perhaps? But then what were the heads recolored with? I can't think of one easy process that would fix both materials of the Fibre Craft dolls, short of a spray sealant primer to keep paint adhered, and then a painted recolor...but I know from my efforts trying to work with these dolls that a stable recolor can be very hard to achieve and I was ultimately defeated in my efforts to make it happen.

The articulation is just the same as swivel LDD.

Now, a body comparison. 

The Fibre Craft dolls are smaller and shorter than the original swivel LDDs, but not by enough for these not to have been the original base. It's definitely far smaller than I assumed the handmades would have been, though. I'd been ready to believe the Mezco dolls were actually smaller than the handmades. LDDs are all vinyl and are heavier and more polished, with finer engineering on the molds that make their bodies visually cleaner and fit together more tidily.

The Fibre Craft arms are thicker. The LDD fingers are also flatter and aligned, while the Fibre Craft hands have the fingers in a more gestural up-and-down shape. The skinny torso and waist contour was the clincher because it's pretty similar to produced LDD, though less close than I assumed from seeing them separately.  The Fibre Craft torso has slight breast definition, though whether this is to indicate developing maturity is unclear. LDD's torso is entirely featureless and flat in that region. I imagine LDD chose to have that completely flat so their boy characters easily used the same torso...and to think of it, the handmades we have photos of are all girls. Maybe the guys didn't think the Fibre Craft bases were suitable for male characters. I don't know. With the right clothing, the Fibre Craft doll could easily slide into a masculine role. It's not like they have Dolly Parton's figure.

The LDD body is overall similar to Fibre Craft, but made better and with a more neutral design for the benefit of more characters to build from it. Even the way the two brands' swivel bodies pop together is strikingly familiar. 

There's not a doubt in my mind the two are related. I already clocked LDD for closely copying another doll body with LDD Minis being a Barbie Kelly clone...

...so I know close imitation of another body and its mechanics was in LDD's capacity.

I had intended to make a custom doll out of one of the Fibre Craft copies in the spirit of tribute to the original LDD ethos, but after several false starts trying to recolor and repaint a doll and frustrations with the body/head coloring and discarding bases that had been altered too much during false starts, I've basically put those plans on ice until such a time as I get reinvigorated to try again. Mezco LDDs are much easier bases to work with due to their consistent vinyl material and matched colors, and I don't enjoy replacing doll hair or hunting for clothes that dolls of this size might possibly wear. It's been long enough since I got the Fibre Craft dolls that I think it's worth it to just publish this investigative post to review the original bases, rather than keeping the information in limbo on account of a custom project I've lost the energy for and don't feel fully up to. It's not fun to acknowledge, but LDD and Monster High exist in competition for my dominant interest, and I've been riding a wave of MH right now that I'm happy to continue exploring, so while a Fibre Craft custom reinvention is still on the table, I'm not making any promises right now.