"Hatter Madness 1" or "A Cozy Crumpet": Madame Alexander's Storyland Collection!

Hatter Madness is ready to begin! So who's first to tea? Well, what about a little Madame Alexander doll?

I've talked about Madame Alexander before, if in a cursory manner, when I looked through a doll trunk of my mom's which contained two Mme. A specimens of different doll types. Those were larger dolls, and not entirely my thing. Madame Alexander is characterized by a childlike aesthetic and what seems to be a refusal to depict mature faces on any of its dolls, at least until recent decades, which can be charming to some or weird to others. I do, however, quite like the Mme. A dolls which are smaller and themed after popular characters. They feel like retro childhood icons, and there are even some fun novelty dolls, especially in the storybook collections. Like this Humpty Dumpty, who is billed as part of the Alice collection, making him the Through the Looking-Glass version of the egg.

Wall included!

I assume the plastic doll parts are not connected to each other and are attached inside the egg suit somehow. I'd expect this doll to be floppy, not poseable. If there's a plastic torso in there, then that would be a fascinatingly cursed build. I'd love to investigate the construction.

Then there's a six-legged Caterpillar not far from something Monster High might do...

The pom-poms and legs are a separate module from the standard doll body, but use a clothing snap to attach to the back of the costume, making her into a one-piece assembly. Not sure why she's a drum majorette. Is it because her legs make her a whole march all by herself? The colors are awful, and inaccurate (the book character is described clearly as blue), but I still admire her novelty.

There's also an absolutely irresistible Cheshire Cat.

Love it.

This Cat makes me feel even more confident that Living Dead Dolls are sometimes reflecting Mme. A dolls in parody, since not only do I find the two brands' takes on the Tin Man similar in a way where LDD's feels influenced by Alexander's, but LDD's Cheshire Cat (played by their character Jinx) also has a "hoodie"-cut costume and a grin painted in opposition to the neutral head sculpt underneath.

I could conceivably round up this project again with the same brands, just focusing on versions of the Cheshire Cat, though half of the Hatters I've picked don't have Cats in their series, so that would be a shorter project. I could also just get the Madame Alexander and LDD Cats regardless.

Other Alice dolls I like by Mme. A are the Dormouse wearing a sugar bowl:

Not sure how the lower body is built, but the bowl is apparently a separate piece from the mouse legs?

The sumptuously dressed Red Queen (the chess piece from the second book):

If her hair matched the red of her dress, she'd be even better.

And this design for the Five of Spades, one of the cards painting white roses red.

While I'm not sure this one is so successful, I respect them for attempting the Frog Footman.

Would have been even harder to try the Fish Footman.

They also made a doll labeled "Jabberwocky", but I honestly have no idea what Madame thought this character design was. This is absolutely not the Jabberwock monster. No, not even if that was the intent; in no way could you convince me this...Christmas angel is anywhere near a cogent adaptation of the Jabberwock. (By the way, calling the monster the "Jabberwocky" suggests you didn't read the poem closely. "Jabberwocky" is the epic poem-styled title of the verse featuring the Jabberwock monster. I'm an Alice pedant.) But who is it then? The poem's hero? Doesn't look like either figure illustrated by Tenniel.

John Tenniel's illustration of "Jabberwocky". Not pictured: a resemblance to the Madame Alexander doll.

Mme. A also has a wedding-themed Frankenstein set which I'm intrigued by. 

I can definitely get behind weirdo dolls in this small, cute retro childlike format. But we're not talking about any of those. 

We're talking about the Hatter from the 1995 Storyland collection. I...just thought he was charming!

These classic small Madame dolls come in blue cardboard packaging that could be uncharitably described as "shoeboxes". 

They're heavily skewed toward practicality over presentation, with six opaque walls covered in uniform pattern (nothing unique on top) and lift-off lids that would make these boxes very easy to shelve and stack in storage, but they do nothing to display or showcase the dolls within, and aren't customized in any way to the doll inside. The cardboard is pretty thin and not likely to be the sturdiest.

While there's a seller's sticker on the box showing the Hatter, at one point, sold at a shop for $55, I paid significantly less than that for this copy on eBay! This doll project is a fairly merciful one for me, as it includes a few dolls with less market demand and lower prices! This guy isn't a big ticket.

Inside the box is some pink tissue lining the bottom and folded over the contents. A cardboard neck brace spans the walls of the box, and the hat is stapled to this piece in a plastic bag. It seems that this doll has never been unboxed, or at least, has never worn his hat.

The rest of the box is the Hatter, not tied down and with one piece of tissue across his face, plus a single-fold card with a Madame Alexander doll club application. This kind of thing doesn't tend to happen anymore, and this club is probably defunct. Toy clubs now are pretty purely oriented toward access to new online item drops. I'm not sure if that's just the capitalist angle of these club memberships being laid bare in modern times, or if there really was something greater to them back in the day.

Here's the hat and doll removed.

The doll comes with a tag around his wrist which names him in the "Storyland" collection, Alice in Wonderland subset. The other Alice dolls in this doll style whose tags I could see in pictures were put under a collection just called the "Alice in Wonderland Collection". The tag has some copy about the brand when folded open. 

The message about the value of a doll to a child is sweet, but it's written so both the doll and owner are assumed to be female. For this review, neither is accurate, but I'm also not a child, either. When I was a kid, I had no interest in dolls and would have seen this doll tag's limited perspective as a matter of fact.

The back of the tag dates the doll very helpfully, and also names the other Alice dolls which were part of this Hatter's set--Alice, the Queen of Hearts, the Caterpillar, and the White Rabbit. You've seen the Caterpillar already. These are the other dolls from this specific Alice group--I checked to find the versions that matched this Hatter's wrist tag so I wasn't showing the wrong Mme. Alexander Alice or White Rabbit or Queen of Hearts.

Alice. Nah. Too frilly and rolled-up. And Alice is an older child than the doll resembles. 

White Rabbit. Also nah. Hate the ear fabric choice.

Queen of Hearts. Not bad, but the folksy flower trim looks out-of-place.

Honestly, the Hatter is my favorite design from this series, though the Caterpillar is irresistibly weird with her eight doll legs. The White Rabbit is another potential parallel to LDD, as their Eggzorcist character is pretty similar, and her casting as the White Rabbit in LDD's Wonderland collection raises the resemblance...though I'm not sure there were many other ways LDD could have designed a rabbit suit for a doll, so I'd say the argument is weaker for a reflection of Madame Alexander in Eggy's case(s).

Here's my Hatter all presented.

He uses a whimsical retro red, black, and white color scheme which could easily be used for a sinister character, but none of that quality is found here. He looks very wholesome. 

If I'd thought of the "Hatters across the year" seasonal concept for this series earlier, I'd have definitely gotten this doll earlier...or, perhaps, later! He feels like he could be a great winter doll to me, perhaps a February doll, but potentially a Christmasy one as well. I don't know if he's full "winter Wonderland", but his cozy costume and colors would be great for winter. I think the risk of further snow has finally passed, so he'll be getting no snowy photos. He's not bad for spring, either. I can easily see him in a cozy meadow scene, but like, an artificial stop-motion kind of pastoral setting from 1980s Japanese animation or so. It's a very specific vibe, but look up Stories of the Sylvanian Families or Domo-kun animations to see what I mean.

The Hatter wins his first points by having an oversized hat, but he loses one of the most famous attributes of Tenniel: the paper label tucked into the band. Tenniel's Hatter very famously has a tag reading "In this style 10/6" (meaning 10 shillings and sixpence), which is an eccentric piece of costume design. Nobody wants a price tag to be visible on their costume, and it's a very strange way to advertise one's own services. Its absence is palpable in this design. 

The hat here is black felt with red gingham trim on the brim, while a ribbon band encircles the hat and is sewn down. 

The hat is not structured, but has tissue stuffing it, and a chinstrap elastic that can be used.

The hat also has a white band inside to hug the head, but it is very thick and sticks out of the bottom of the hat, being eminently visible when the Hatter's head is tilted up, to a distracting and messy degree. The chinstrap looks clunky and unflattering on this doll, too, so it's a mess.

While I can use the hat without the chinstrap in play, I need to get the white band tucked inside.

Under the hat, the hair of the Hatter is a wild shock of grey, done by using a fur piece affixed to the head in a widow's peak shape. He looks a bit like the archetypal "Einstein" caricature sans hat.

Much as I enjoy doll hair, I also appreciate every doll that gives me a break from working with it, either by being bald or by having alternate hair manufacturing that requires no washing or tidying, like full microbraids or flocking, or, as here, fur hair! 

His face has a white mustache painted on to complement his grey hair, and it's a welcome departure from Tenniel to make him out as a grown man. Tenniel's Hatter has no facial hair, and I'd always read him as middle-aged and imagined he'd have brown hair, though more elderly Hatters are sometimes seen, like Disney's animated version. A barefaced Madame doll looks every bit the child they're sculpted after, so any fight against that, like mustachery, is worthwhile. The doll is still quite childlike with his rosy cheeks and downturned pouted lip shape. His eyes are a light sparkly brown. The box checking off "blue eyes" was wrong.

The Hatter, like all classic Madame Alexander dolls, has closing eyes, but these are not classic "sleepy eyes". The eyes are snugly fit and do not open and close automatically when the doll is tipped forward and back. These must instead be manually flipped open and closed by using the lashes, which are sculpted plastic projections here, as levers. 

Like a lightswitch!

Without more dolls of this type, I can't say for sure the eyes weren't meant to open on their own, but it seems intentional that they don't here. The eyes move in tandem. The left eye is a bit misaligned toward the doll's left, but can't be adjusted. 

When the lids are fully closed, a black line is visible on top of the right lid. Not sure if this is an errant paint mark, or if the flesh color is painted over the black of the eyelashes and this is where the paint did not cover a black section or was scraped away.

Honestly, I prefer the freedom of controlling the eyelids by hand to the classic tipping mechanism. This setup lets me precisely set the angle of eye openness and easily stage closed-eye pictures while the doll is upright. Separate eyelid hinges for winking or other wonky expressions could be even more fun, but this is fine.

The doll can look a bit startled and forlorn with his eyes fully open, but lowering the lids can turn him into a more stuffy sort, looking more suited to his character's age and making him look less sad.

My favorite piece of this doll is his coat. It's sewn to look oversized like the hat, and is red felt with a white felt lobed collar, embellished with really fun embroidered red and black spirals that look like big candy buttons. This swirling will actually give the doll an unusual synergy with one of my other Hatters to come, who leans into spiral imagery in a totally different fashion.

The front has some symmetrical notches cut into the lower edge.

The costume feels like it comes from an older doll than it does, and has similarities to the Series 1 Living Dead Dolls' own retro simple felt-like costumes, though the LDDs use more of a fleece material for most of the costume, while the Hatter costume here is unambiguously felt. 

On the back of the coat, under the collar, is a Madame Alexander label exposed to the open.

I would have sewn this inside the coat, but this is the Hatter we're talking about, and if we can't get the canonical offbeat label on his costume, then I'll have to accept this one instead.

The collar needs some ironing to lie in its intended shape, and the coat snaps closed in two places which aren't under the spirals, resulting in one piece of red sewing visible on the other side of the snap which stands out a bit from the rest of the coat because there's nothing covering the thread and the "buttons" of the coat are separate decorations. The sleeves are also not perfectly even with the rolled-up sewn cuffs.

The coat is trimmed at the neck with a red gingham bow which is affixed to the right panel. The ends are fraying a bit. 

It looks like the bow encircles the doll's neck, but that's actually the collar of the clothing underneath the coat! 

I think this is a deliberate illusion, however, making the bow look fully tied around the neck while not forcing the owner to untie and retie a bow. The costume is clearly never supposed to be seen sans coat, so the collar being gingham must be intended to blend with the bow on the coat. The bow is actually a separate gingham from the pattern everywhere else on the doll, but it works fine. 

The costume under the coat is a one-piece Ken deal of a sleeveless shirt and gingham trousers sewn together. The piece snaps in back in two places--at the neck and waist.

The socks of the costume are knit in white with thin red horizontal stripes, and are separate pieces. Redressing the doll requires the socks to go on before the pants so they're tucked in.

I love these red and white stripe and gingham patterns. There's such a homey, humble whimsical feeling of joy and comfort to them. That's why I always liked Raggedy Ann and Andy and classic wooden toys--that sense of classic humble charm.

The shoes are structured velvet with lining and firm soles that let the doll stand well, trimmed by gold buckles on the front. 

I'm a little surprised the hat isn't structured fabric given how often Mme. A does doll shoes with solid fabric work, but maybe packaging needs called for a soft hat that could squish down.

All of the doll's body is rigid plastic, with none of it being flexible vinyl. It feels pretty hardy, neither lightweight nor super dense, and is sculpted as childlike as the face.

The doll body, unlike the larger 13-inch or 18-inch dolls, is elastic-strung with hooks in the head, arms, and legs attached to rubber bands in tension. 

Mego figures' waists and limbs are strung to the body this way, so I've encountered this before with other toys. Mego heads, elbows, and wrists use action-figure joints.

Some of the Hatter's joints are stronger than others--the left arm doesn't want to stay posed, but the head and hips work fine. The arms have no hinge-outward articulation and are capable only of swiveling forward and back, but the hips have more of a "ball-jointed" range the way they're shaped. The doll has absolutely no trouble standing up in his shoes, and is very easy to pose stably standing up, even with some expressive leg angles. The head has good articulation, too. This doll head sits on top of the neck, rather than the neck being part of the head. The costume limits some articulation, with the sleeves of the coat being barely separated from the waist, making it harder to lift the arms up (and the sleeves pull up the arm a lot when this is done), while the hips can't sit as far forward when wearing the costume. 

Here's the Hatter next to two other Madame Alexander doll sizes--a 13-inch child doll and an 17-inch Elise model, which I called Sabrina when looking her over.

The doll in the middle is a Renoir-themed doll from the same art-themed series as my mom's late-childhood doll (who I called Chrissy in my previous discussion). Chrissy was based on a Degas painting originally, but today only has her original shoes. The Renoir doll is complete with her original stock. I got her at an antique shop last autumn because she was cheap and I thought she was sweet, but now I don't know if I have strong enough feelings about her to write a post about her, let alone keep her. I can take a couple of garden photos when it gets pretty, but might not hold onto her. She's living in the trunk with my mom's old dolls for now.

I like the Hatter's 8-inch size the most. It lends to the kitschier side of the doll brand's aesthetic and it's endearing for a Wonderland character. It's not quite Tenniel's political-cartoon style, but the proportions of the doll and costume feel right. I also like his mobility the most. Elastic joints are typically a thing of dread, as loosening with age can occur, and repair sounds fairly painful, but this is the most pleasant articulation I've experienced with a Madame doll. The other two body types have unreliable plastic joints, with my Chrissy having a totally loose arm swivel on one side while Sabrina's arms seem to be linked in tandem and not intended to swivel separately from each other. The dolls from my mom's trunk also have some color variation issues with their plastics aging differently. The Renoir girl looks okay, but she's overall been kept better, while the Hatter seems to be made of one type of plastic rather than multiple, granting him a promise of color consistency.

To fix the Hatter doll up, I used glue to push the white hat band down into the inner walls of the hat so it wouldn't be sticking out, and I ironed the collar to let it sit better.

As you can see, I staged a tea table for the doll's aesthetic. I had such fun making custom tea settings for my Series 23 Living Dead Dolls that I wanted to recapture that for this project. I'm not going into particularly themed tea servings and pairings this time, but I'm setting scenery to suit the visuals of the dolls, treats included. I had fun arranging the right tableau and making pictures with a vintage style to suit the doll.

Sewing pins look good in  his hat.

This is not Madame Alexander's only Mad Hatter. In this doll scale, there's two others I saw while browsing--one with similar palette and patterning to the one I picked, but clean-shaven with normal doll hair in a straight tidy shape.

I like his accessories, but I'm not sure why Madame Alexander insist on putting the Dormouse in everything but the teapot. In the book, that was the only vessel he was inside, and only because the Hatter and March Hare were stuffing him into it (head-first, by Tenniel's interpretation!) as Alice left the party.

This other Mme. A. Hatter has a painted smirk and a much more boyish look, and has colors I associate more with the Hatter somehow.

Both of these Hatters have the hat label. 

There's also this one. 

I don't enjoy this kind of thing where it's clearly very modern and kiddie design eyes on a vintage template. I really dislike the colors here.

Madame has branched out of strictly childlike design in later decades, and they did a few steampunk fashion dolls based on The Wizard of Oz and Alice, including this...emo? take on the Hatter. You get zero guesses on which decade this released in. It's so very 2010s in all regards!

Honestly, the Hatter is primed for a steampunk interpretation like few other characters. Clocks, top hats, and Victorian are already part of his schtick!

I think this was the only Alice character that Madame A. turned into a steampunk fashion doll. There's a case to be made that he's an unlicensed adaptation of the Johnny Depp portrayal, or at least, that he only exists because of the Burton film. I like him. He's obscure, deliciously dated, an interesting boy doll, and overall appealing...

 

You know where this goes. Sigh. Put a hatpin in it. Sadboy Hatter is why I said my series is planned to end in November! It would have been October until I learned about this guy! No guarantees, of course. Maybe he'll vanish when I need to get him, as I don't plan to get him too far in advance, but he's on my list for sure.

The steampunk Wicked Witch is fun, too. She's an oversize doll, though (16'') and was very limited in quantity, so she's quite expensive. 

I could easily do a series on Wicked Witch dolls (MGM versions, the 1959-sculpt Barbie, Oz: The Great and Powerful, Elphaba, this steampunk version, etc.--I already have the Living Dead Doll variant!) but I don't want to head down that path.

I went back to photos because I really wanted to capture that toylike artificial outdoor diorama style I felt this doll would be best suited for. It's also a goal of mine to stage each Hatter doll in a recreation of the classic Tenniel illustration. To join this doll, there is no Alice, because I don't like the one paired with him, but I fashioned a March Hare and a Dormouse out of different toys. The Hare is a crochet bunny shoved into doll clothes with straw on his head to evoke the Tenniel illustration.

The Dormouse is a Frankenstein of a vintage plastic fur-covered mouse doll's head on a wire doll's body.

To stage a scene, I used a new green fabric storage bench as the green grass, and built on it with other fabric pieces for fake hills. I painted the reverse of one of my red walls I made for the Sadie Alice hall into a sky backdrop, and added other toy trimmings to fill out the fake outdoor scene, which is meant to look deliberately artificial in a "cozy toyland" way. The table is set, with the Hare standing on a Playmobil trunk. He's not weighted or flat on the bottom, so it was very tricky to get him stable. Even as a raw photo, the charming retro toy diorama tone is coming through perfectly. 

Here are some more photos and edits from the shoot.

My final take used digital edits to darken the floor section and add contrast while putting clouds in the sky. The former was not precise and required a lot of cleanup, since the floor itself could not be cleanly selected.

This photo was not really conducive to software filters in a mimic of Tenniel's drawings, and I wasn't in the mood to hand-draw. Maybe if I want to later in this project, I'll do drawn versions, but for now, here's my best photo recreation.

Results are necessarily limited with this doll, but it's a cute scene for this art style! There is one doll in this project who I think is going to be really close and quite possible to stage pretty faithfully to the original drawing, but the others will be more interpretive.

I really debated and flip-flopped over whether the Tenniel illustration-recreation shoot or the human tea-table solo shoot should be the cover photo for these Hatter Madness posts. The latter is closer to how I cover-shot LDD Series 23, and is focused by only including the doll character I'm making the post for. Maybe that's redundant to my Series 23 covers, but if I'm doing these themed human-scale tea tableaux for the doll at all, then it feels a bit wasteful not to have them be the covers. I didn't make the S23 setups only for review backdrops, after all. While the Tenniel recreation shots are and will be fun and important to each review, they could be less focused, and I always want to have the covers spotlight the review subject first and foremost. I actually may get one or two Alices for the purpose of later Hatters' photoshoots, so it would be fair to use the Tenniel photo for covers there because the Alices would be new topics too, but they'd be supplemental footnotes to the Hatters and I'll keep it consistent by using the Hatters on my tables for the covers, and then stage each in their own scale to evoke the illustration as a benchmark for each doll.

Here's a few more photos of this doll for the road.

This was a charming little toy. I'll admit the Madame Alexander faces are still a little hard to love, but with this Hatter tidied up and displayed just right, he lands the tone of retro kitsch charm more than unappealingly infantilized. He's a fun interpretation of the character visually, though the famous tag on the hat feels as absent as it is. It was fun discovering this style of Madame doll and how they work, and I'd definitely be open to pursuing more of the weirdos like Humpty, the Cheshire Cat, the Caterpillar, and the Frankensteins. There is something very classic and wholesome and charming about these dolls, with a quintessential childhood-playroom feeling to them. They feel like the archetypal toys of yesteryear which so many children's stories were written about in 19th and 20th-century fiction. While Madame Alexander has mixed results with modern styles, from the inelegant to the chic to the pricelessly dated, their more classic dolls can't be pinned to a specific release date because they come across as timeless vintage in a way I really enjoy. The craft and design of this Hatter could easily be from 1955, but he's from '95! The design here gives me a warm cozy nostalgic feeling, and that can hardly be argued with. Maybe these "based on a character" Madame Alexander littles are my niche of the brand!

Hatter Madness should continue fairly shortly, as I would like to make April the month of my next installment, but I have two other specific April projects to work on as well. I expect my next post will be a Living Dead Dolls Easter celebration!