Hatter Madness 3, or "Hullo, TT&T readers! I'm Madeline Hatter from Ever After High! Oh, am I hijacking the title?"

Hatter Madness rolls around again, and for the first time in this series, I landed in familiar doll territory!

Familiar? Hmm...I don't know how familiar you mean if I've never met you before!

Excuse me.

You're excused!

Hm. 

This is Ever After High's future Hatter...or resident future Hatter: Madeline "Maddie" Hatter, the daughter of the Mad Hatter, and the Wonderlandian with the most prominence in the brand, being considered a core cast member in Ever After High. 

Who's that enchanting thing? Oh, that's just little ol' ME!

Maddie, as she's already begun expressing herself, is kooky, cheerful, exuberant, and gleefully mad, and is Raven's best friend at the start of the series when nobody else is especially keen to be friends with the Evil Queen's daughter. She is also able to hear the storybook narrators of the land of Ever After which none of the other characters are aware of, with at least one joke about them being "the voices" in her head which the audience knows are actually real. At one point, Maddie describes fourth-wall-breaking guidance from a narrator  as "the voices telling her" in a way that makes her sound like she's confessing to schizophrenia hallucinations to everyone around her. Is it a good gag? No. Is it funny? Well..it shouldn't be; let's say that. Maddie's meta-awareness doesn't extend to the fourth wall of EAH itself. She's not like Deadpool, able to address the viewers. However, she does seem rather aware of me as blog writer...

Indeedy-doo! Welcome to my little spotlight!

Maddie has no qualms about being the next Mad Hatter, and has a great relationship with her dad, but she is a Rebel who supports the agency of the fairy-tale kids to choose their own paths and diverge from the script. Why would someone mad as she is believe in order and tradition, after all?

I'd argue Maddie could be written as a compelling Royal, though, as the original book puts a lot of satirical emphasis on Wonderland characters demanding certain standards and behavior from Alice to lampoon the way Victorian adults expected children to behave, with the book's Hatter being a prime case of a judgmental character with lots to be criticized for himself. Maddie being a Royal and thus demanding a way of life for others that doesn't make sense to them could be a valid interpretation of Carroll.

That girl sounds like a real stinker to me. Nooo thank you! Madness should be fun!

Sounds like you align with the Looking-Glass lens of nonsense being potentially enriching fancy rather than social injustice, then?

My dad moonlighted in Looking-Glass Land! He picked up some good ideas there.

Maddie doesn't have an English accent, which is a bit odd for someone who hails from such an English story, and her voice acting by Cindy Robinson might be derided as a "millennial quirky girl" intonation today, but I don't think that'd be fair, and I enjoy her performance.

Maddie's name might just be an obvious choice to include the word "Mad", but her full name, Madeline, might also be intended to invoke the name of a madeleine teacake.

It's hard not to get hungry when I hear m'own name! Going by "Maddie" makes it easier!

Now, Hatter Madness has several justifications, but one of the more important may be finally adding a Maddie Hatter to my collection. It's a fact, but one that feels entirely out-of-character, that I simply never had a Maddie before, despite collecting Wonderlandians, despite loving her character, despite being a tea fanatic...and yet. I had Kitty (second edition) and Courtly. I had Alistair and Bunny's Carnival Date set briefly (they were at the tail end of my old collection). And in my present collection, I have two Lizzies and Al again! It was high (tea)time that I got Madeline herself in my collection (I'll say!) and this was the perfect vehicle.

Maddie has a few good dolls, and I may not be done with her as such, but her signature design seemed the most appropriate for this feature. I also dipped into the maligned Ever After High soft-reboot era to give my Maddie an alternate head option--you'll quickly understand why.

I am known to lose my head from time to time, and with Lizzie around, you never know when you might need a spare!

A complete signature Maddie is a spicy commodity, and can't be found below the $90 range. Several copies are missing earrings, most are missing her finger ring, more copies than I'd expect have lost their hats and one or both shoes, her two-part teapot purse is hard to pin down, and I've even seen a copy that had her footie tights frayed and damaged to a knee-high leggings shape. Because I had the idea to change Maddie's head out, I was willing to buy a repainted copy with a face I really didn't love, but even she was missing the teapot purse.

I  had a busy week where I was unable to stage Maddie's scenery and review photos when she came in, so I took her, wrapped-up, out of her box, recycled the box, and set the doll package aside. In a free moment, still at a point before I was able to stage the review, I decided to peek at Maddie and was annoyed and confused to find no hat, no stand clip or base, and no teapot purse. 

I'm not quite ready for this party, sir.

I messaged the seller about this. On my end, I was allowing for the grim possibility that maybe I had failed to notice a second package in the exterior packaging I had discarded, and which I knew was unrecoverable by the time I unwrapped the doll (a trash/recycling pickup had taken place between Maddie's arrival and full opening). Getting rid of a package with something still in it doesn't seem like the kind of careless thing I'd do, but it was a viable explanation. I wanted to hear this explanation from the seller first, without suggesting it to them, if that was the case, though. I waited for the seller response to confirm whether I needed to get a third Maddie for the missing parts or not, but proactively located a listing with the hat and purse I needed and put that on standby. Ugh. The seller response shortly after confirmed there was a second package I had missed and lost. Great... Bad timing and carelessness screwed me over. Careful disposal of the packaging would have located the second packet inside the box, a clear week would have let me relax and open the doll immediately and never lose the parts to begin with, and a delivery at the start of a week rather than the end of one might have given me sufficient time to realize and retrieve the lost items from my bin before it was too late! Dang.

The Maddie II I put on deck was called over as such.

Maddie II was actually complete except for the ring and stand, so my first purchase amounted to literally just the ring--granted, the hardest piece for her copies to retain. I then noticed some bad blue stains on Maddie I's right forearm, so maybe building one doll from two copies wasn't such a bad idea after all.

Mercury is no joke!

Maddie I also kept things moving for me by standing in as a size model when building a tea table for her upcoming party photoshoot. 

I had to get ready for my palistair Alistair!

Could I have used one of my Lizzies for this purpose too? Sure, but I'm wringing the value from my misadventure here! I am glad I didn't discover this issue any later, though. That would have delayed me further.

For the doll stand issue, I was going to use my purple bootleg copy of the EAH stand I've had for a few years, but I lost the pole to that (I hope I find it again!), and the bootleg clip doesn't fit on the official pole. I do have a Monster High stand which actually matches Maddie's color, though, so she just gets that.

I knew there was a Monster High!

If sig Maddie were a later doll released when the Royals faction of students had gold stands and the Rebels had silver, then Maddie would have ended up with a doll stand that clashed, as her gold colors would be suited to the stand design of the faction she doesn't align with. Maybe a neutral black EAH stand would be best for her in that period--several dolls got those.

Dang it. What a mess on my part!

I ultimately decided this review would go a bit differently. This series has been staged thus far with the review-documentation photos in a custom tearoom setting for each doll, with photoshoot pictures of the doll in that setting afterward. However, the prior two Hatters required no extensive work to prep them for the photoshoot half of their reviews, so I was able to do it all in one sitting. With Maddie here, I decided to hair-prep both of the doll heads I was using before staging her tearoom since I didn't have the luxury or desire to keep the setup in place while I waited for her hair to be finished. I envision Maddie to be the only Hatter I'll need to do this with, as she has long hair with style/texture requirements her factory execution did not excel in. 

When Maddie II arrived, I cobbled my doll together. The second doll body didn't have any stains, so I commissioned Maddie II to be my body. EAH forearms don't appear to be removable like MH ones, so it wasn't as simple as trading the stained forearm for the clean one. The tights, dress shoes, purse, headband, and body are from the second doll, but the jewelry and head are from the first doll, with the ring being the only piece the second didn't have. I thought for a moment that the second doll's dress was askew and swapped in the first copy...and then I noticed the first dress had a patch of print that was faded, and I got the second dress back in and sitting properly. Ultimately, Maddie II gave me a better body and a better dress, in addition to completing things after I messed up. I'm less annoyed now.

Here's the cobbled-together signature edition, finally. In getting Maddie together and then staging her tea table with its own delays, this might be the longest it's taken to put together the opening of one of my tea doll reviews, including Series 23 LDD.

Well, I think it's lovely!

Maddie's visual aesthetic uses purple, gold, azure, white, and mint with very whimsical motifs and patterns that resemble some of the more colorful and silly pieces in the MacKenzie-Childs interior decor catalogue, itself aiming often for a Victorian pastel whimsy in its pieces. Maddie's aesthetic isn't miles away from Mattel's preceding Hatter in the Barbie Silver Label collection, though the two have very different sculpting art styles, and Maddie's canon dad doesn't look like the Silver Label doll.

Maddie and Mattel's previous original Hatter doll design. The mint and stripes and are all present on both though they're not hugely similar overall.

My dear ol' dad! Indeed. If I'm the one person who would welcome a doll of this man, so be it. Gimme.

If we choose to believe that the fairytale repetition structure of EAH has happened multiple times, though, maybe the Silver Label doll could be Maddie's grandpa? (sidenote: The repetition thing doesn't make much sense for any fairy tale that ends with a couple marrying, since those couples could only produce one of the parents' fairytale heirs. One half of the next generation of that fairy tale would have to come from another family altogether, so categorically, not every child can fulfill their parent's role. That suits the idea of the EAH canon landing on the fact that divergence is the way forward, but how have previous generations actually repeated the stories with this in mind?)

Ironically, Maddie has never had a full-on proper hat like her dad, but perhaps that comes of being his junior. Instead, Maddie's hats are all mounted on headbands and typically small rather than exaggerated. The closest she gets to her pops is in Way Too Wonderland, and I think this hat repainted could do wonders on an "ultimate Hatter" Maddie custom, like the one I did for Lizzie to push her Queen of Hearts theme to the max.

This line has no perfect designs, perhaps save Courtly, but there's a lot of great potential fodder for customs!

Here, however, Maddie's piece is a small headband mount which cleverly frames a teacup and saucer in the silhouette of a tiny top hat. 

The headband is blue while the cup piece is mounted on a peg, and is violet with some gold paint for the cup patterning and teabag detail. This piece is best oriented askew, as if the tea is ready to spill over Maddie's head. There is no separate color for the "tea" itself, and the gold could work fine there. How literal this teacup hat is meant to be is up to you. The headband is one of Mattel's better fits, and doesn't need what factory packaging it would have started with.

None of Maddie's headwear references the famous price label on the side of the Hatter's hat in the Tenniel artwork.

I'm really only set to be a Mad Hatter on account of the tea party! Millinery doesn't seem to actually be a requirement for the position.

Maddie's hair is G1-Twyla-green and Clawdeen-purple in coloring. 

It's a fantasy color combo that is pretty frequent in Mattel's work, with purple/mint pairings also appearing in some form for Faybelle Thorn or Monster High's Twyla, but Maddie's design has so much warmth in it from her gold and her skintone that the purple/mint pair has no coldness or eeriness in her context, and it's a great hair look for a vintage whimsy aesthetic. 

The mint green fiber never seems to be the best texture or age well, and seems to end up either waxy or very dry over time, and is squeaky when combed while wet. I don't know what material this mint hair is, but it has a texture I recognize specifically with this color of fiber. Perhaps it's like how some black doll hair seems especially prone to being ratty and dry? Is this a normal doll hair fiber, but the coloring has some bizarre unique properties added on? I can't really blame Mattel for stepping away from this shade with G3 Twyla if the color or fiber exhibit these texture oddities, though I do prefer this mint shade over Twy's G3 coloring. 

Maddie's factory work has never given her the huge poof of curls she's meant to have, and while Way Too Wonderland came the closest, she was seriously finessed for the stock photos. I tried curling the hair tighter, but admittedly tried much harder with more thorough curling on the other head I ordered, because I plan to use that one as my main for this doll. I put far fewer curlers into the signature head.

Maddie has the original EAH face sculpt. 

The face is extremely circular, as ever, and the portrait looks about the same as most everyone else in the brand, since EAH had far fewer face molds, though more were introduced later on. I do like the art style of this face design, with the poised, firm, but beautiful look. Maddie has the highlight dots on her lower lip, as was typical for the brand. G1 Monster High and early Ever After High dolls were a bit too focused on serving face, though, and that could result in some dolls looking out of character with overly stoic or emotionless expressions that reduced their likeness to their illustrated/cartoon counterparts and poorly conveyed their characters. Exuberant Mari and Finnegan were bland as dolls, and I think Maddie is the worst case in the Ever After High brand. I can see grown Maddie being more composed, perhaps. In the book, her dad isn't actually goofy and loony so much as irrational and rude. But Maddie Hatter is a proud nutso and you get the idea she'd be really hard to actually photograph for a model magazine because she'd never take it seriously enough. And yet, the doll is ready for it like she's been posing for serious magazines all her life.

It's not easy for me, I can tell you that much! It's like a constant tickle at the corners of my mouth when I look this calm!

Well, fortunately, the Devil sometimes grants us gifts. Or: a tea-drowned pocket watch is right twice a day!

When Ever After High underwent a soft reboot in 2016, it was overall detrimental, as it upended the storytelling and replaced the product with cheaper dolls that included more gimmicks, molded-on attire, and largely kiddie changes parallel to Monster High G2. One of the changes the brand made was to give more of the girls grinning faces to make them more friendly and Barbie-esque and approachable to the kiddies...and despite this arguably being a scourge and a negative alongside the rest of the brand's changes, I think it was really a blessing for Maddie. It was! But everybody should have a big silly smile in my book! Wonderland characters Kitty and Courtly already used grinning faces well in the pre-reboot era, and that made Maddie feel even more oddly serene. Maddie is most associated with a joyful goofy grin, and the soft reboot actually gave her the face she deserved to have had the whole time! I knew I wanted to get a Maddie head with the grin option to animate her a bit more. Fortunately, Maddie's hair color rooting is pretty homogenous across most of her dolls, and it wasn't hard to find a comparable cheap reboot doll with the grinning mold and hair that easily passed for the signature doll. I think there may have been a cheaper rerelease of signature with the new face too, but I didn't need that.

While normally, this plan to swap Maddie's head out would mean I could have just left the original head as-is and wouldn't need to fix it up, there is at least one specific use I get can from keeping the serious face as a swap-out option, so I fixed up both--though I gave much more attention to the grinning head.

Ooh! Who'm I gonna get mad at, Mr. Blogger?

You'll find out in July.

Here's the incomplete reboot doll I got. These could get seriously cheapo, and while this edition is missing pieces, she'd still provide very little to write home about.

No comment.

The knee articulation is genuinely surprising since the head is a static swivel and the arms are simple swivels too. I've encountered this style of cheap doll before with a late-G1 Gigi Grant edition I collected for her costume to put on a better Gigi, and the neck knob is solid plastic, molded on the torso with a long rod above it that reaches the top of the internals of the head. I guess it's nice that you can just yank the head off this one without worrying about breaking the neck anchor.

The face and hair are pretty similar to signature. The eyes are wider with more dilated pupils and she's grinning, but it gives her the cheerfully mad energy she's supposed to have.

The reboot head's 2015 stamp aligns with the year Kitty debuted in the doll line, and with no reason for Mattel to mold this head concept twice, I'm confident saying it's the same grinning mold and that it just got more common in the brand after the rework. I also thought Apple wore this head pretty well, but I think today, I'd prefer to own Apple with the serious face because her signature design is very pretty that way.

The ears on the grinning head will need piercing for her to fully assume signature Maddie's look. And speaking of piercings:

Maddie's earrings are little symmetrical gold teaspoons! I'm surprised they're not two different items, like a teaspoon and a teabag. Symmetry seems uncommonly ordered for this doll.

Silly! You've got the looking-glass the wrong way! After all, what's more mad than using two teaspoons?

Point taken.

Since I have two pairs of these earrings from my exploits, I just popped one set into each head so I don't have to swap them out. It's hard enough getting earrings into piercings you make yourself the first time they're inserted, so leaving one pair in the personally-pierced grin head allowed me to not deal with the hassle.

Maddie's necklace introduces the azure blue/tealish shade of her costume, which looks good. I like that it's not the same as her hair color. 

The necklace is translucent with a chunky jeweled look and has a golden bow accent. The asymmetry and gaudiness of the piece is just right and Maddie looks really incomplete without it. 

Maddie's dress is nicely textured and the silhouette doesn't feel inadequate for her aesthetic. 

The shoulders are tight puffs of sheer violet while the sweetheart bodice is white with a silver sparkle grid. 

Around the waist is a large azure bow offset toward her left hip, while the skirt is three layers--violet with gold teaware patterning on top, Victorian stripes of blue and white, and then black net with gold glitter that sheds everywhere. That's the one thing I don't like about this dress. 

There's no figural imagery in the gold pattern on the purple layer. It's all abstract flourishes.

The stripe layer was where the patch of fading on the first dress was present.

...thank you, Maddie. Very helpful.

Always happy to lend a hand...so long's you give it back! 

Regarding hands, Maddie is made to look like she's wearing gloves with wrist frills and teal-cast hands with painted polka dots. 

The hands look splendid and the painted dots are effective, while the cuffs around the wrist are a pearly white that mixes the look of ruffled fabric with fine china. I just wish these cuffs were really tightly fit around the wrists, because they can pretty easily slide down the arm and break the illusion, especially when the arms are raised.

Mattel is capable of making tight-fitted bracelets, but they never seem to do this when the bracelets are depicting glove cuffs that need to stay in place by the hand. More recently, I found this problem with Howliday Love Draculaura. I had to retake a few photos for Maddie's shoot when I realized the cuffs had slipped, but inevitably, I forgot to check this for several later photos, which do contain the error. Whatever.

If you like it, then you simply must put a ring on it--so it feels good that you got me mine!

That's not really what that means, Maddie, but okay. Yes, I had to have Maddie's ring, as small as it is. Like the others in the EAH line, this fits around her middle and ring fingers together, which makes a more secure fit than a one-finger ring, and it won't spin around the fingers this way. Maddie's ring is a violet chunky gemstone in opaque plastic.

Maddie has tights which are sheer white with blue polka dots that invert the look of the gloves. These fit well around her knees, unlike signature Lizzie's.

These tights made me nervous when dressing and undressing Maddie, but the velcro on her dress was intelligently placed with the hook strip being the piece that faces outward, meaning the hook velcro doesn't ever risk brushing against or snagging her tights when pulling it up and down Maddie's body. I wish that were considered more often!

Maddie's shoes are not sculpted to look like any real piece of tea china, but definitely evoke the feeling with their white bodies, cup and spoon-like forms, and gold and pattern elements. They're awesome.

Sometimes my shoes find their way into the china cabinet! They hold a good cuppa, so long as they've been in the wash!

I realized belatedly that the two Maddie copies' shoes I got are different. These here are the second copy's, and the white parts actually aren't pearly. The first pair of shoes does have a pearl look for the white part, but the gold is also brighter and doesn't match the teapot purse like the second shoes do.

I wonder, then, if the lost teapot purse I never got to see was the same shade of gold as the heels on the first pair of shoes? Unfortunately, there's no fully matchy-matchy option for me because both copies' wrist cuffs are pearly, as is the lid of the purse. There's no way to swap out the pearl for solid white. I like the pearl effect of the first pair of shoes, but the gold tones matching with the second pair in play works better for me overall.

Now to that purse, which is Maddie's only accessory. EAH didn't do pet figurines despite some pets existing in the canon. In this version of the story, the Dormouse didn't have a kid, but Maddie had one as a pet. Not present here.

How do you know he's not in my hat?

The purse, however, is fantastic, like early EAH purses tend to be. It's a teapot with a swinging bag handle, and I love the gold and teal striped body. I'm sure there's always actual tea ready to pour from it.

But of course! You never know when you need some! Sometimes it misbehaves, though, and spills when it's not meant to...or doesn't pour when it is!

The lid is pearly white with a bow-shaped knob, and it fits into the pot in one of two positions with special molding. 

It only fits in two 180-degree rotations, not all four 90-degree ones. The four nubs are two pairs which are molded differently.

The lid isn't too tight, but not loose enough to fall off when turned upside-down. Maddie can easily hold the bag as an actual teapot, even using her ring hand, and the handle folded down is quite hidden, though her teacup hat isn't designed to pop off to be held as an accessory and her articulation doesn't allow her to pose as if pouring her pot into her hat while it's on her head.

This is my second Hatter to include a teapot the doll can hold, after the Silver Label doll.

Maddie was the first of few EAH dolls to diverge from the standard body build, establishing a rule that Wonderlandian girls are short. We only got one male Wonderland character in this doll line, and he's playing the role of the outsider Alice, anyhow, so we don't know if any other Wonderland guys would be shorter as dolls. Maddie's only body difference from the usual EAH girl body is in her shortened upper leg pieces. The torso, head, arms, and lower legs are standard. If I was smart, I'd have taken a photo of Thronecoming Cupid as comparison with Lizzie back in 2024, but that review of two characters featured no documentation of the standard EAH body build, and now I have no standard EAH girl body to compare Maddie to since that Cupid and my custom built on Cedar have left my collection.

The short stature of Wonderland's girls seems to be a reference to the size-changing shenanigans of the place where proportion is always a little strange, and perhaps also invokes the caricatured John Tenniel art--with shorter legs, Maddie's head can read a bit larger compared to the other girls, though it's exactly as exaggerated as everyone else's.

I've gone over the articulation before, but it's pretty good. The head tilts pretty far side-to-side and kind of exposes the ball shape of the neck a bit, while the neck doesn't tip forward much. The hips are static ball joints rather than rotating hinges. They're tighter than Monster High hips but have less range. The arms have some similar weaknesses, and I could do with tighter elbows, only it's not possible to really tighten joints you can't take apart. I've had to go through some significant arm-joint tightening on a Monster High doll recently, but I couldn't really do the same for Maddie's fixed elbow connections.

On the smiling head, I put an order of magnitude more curl in, and I'm glad I devoted all the effort to this head, because the result is glorious. It's basically as perfect as Maddie's doll could be rendered with existing parts. The parted hair is tucked aside, and then got loosely tied in a knot with a curl from the back to keep it in place after it kept falling down over her face too much when not held in tension.

Now this puts the "M" and "E" in "Maddie!"

I don't think I'd have gotten nearly as much from this doll without this head and this curl job. The grin and the Wonderlandiful hair makeover bring Maddie the doll to life in a special way. Mattel never did her this right, and getting this result brings all my love for Maddie the character into the doll.

To set her review scenery, I wanted her with a tabletop table (actually a garden pot stand) she's climbing up to with a ladder. The review/cover scenes are still basically human-scaled sets, but this let Maddie interact with the scale in a different way. When testing scenery, I found that my backdrop papers weren't sufficient to tie the composition together and didn't feel "Maddie" enough.

I actually paused mid-setup and walked into town to see if I could find a better paper, and I did, getting a teal and gold pattern to make the scene look right. A pink velvet piece and a gold placemat also helped. I tried shooting this scene on my review desk, but the space I needed drove me down to my dining room table instead. None of the Hatters' review sets have been shot in the same spots yet!

That's a returning teapot for this series. It appeared in my first Hatter Madness setup too, but here it's color-edited to look pinker. The stripes were just too good to pass up.

For treats, Madeline has madeleines, of course, and I've been saving some whimsical battenberg treats for her too. Maddie's table also gets graced with some Bolands custard creams, which are my favorite cookie of all time and the best treat that could possibly be on a tea table for me.

Another plate also has some scones.

The teacups and pot were empty for this shoot, though I did brew myself a small mug of Earl Grey on the side. I didn't eat all of the tea treats, but Maddie's table deserved them all. Here are some other photos in this setup.

It turns out that Maddie wears her maybe-granddad's clothes really well! The hat and the pants don't fit; the pants can't close in back and the hat is for a smaller cranium. She can't wear the Silver Label shoes, either, but the visual is otherwise seamless.

I accept Maddie expressing herself in whatever way she pleases, but I am disappointed Mattel never went far in on trousers and jackets for her. More gentlemen's silhouettes in her clothing could have been lots of fun.

Maddie has had a doll-scale tea table in the Hat-Tastic Party doll line, where she's the playset doll with all of the fixings.

I wouldn't mind having these pieces, but getting this set was an expense I didn't want at the moment, and besides, these are the fixings for Hat-Tastic Maddie. I took the opportunity to design a table for the signature doll specifically. I wanted the feeling of Victorian off-kilter whimsy and an irregular build which looked like someone lost the concept of a table somewhere along the way and produced a delightful work of madness. While Tenniel's table is a rectangle, Maddie has no March Hare or Dormouse to join her, only Alistair. Her potential for staging the original art was already lower. She might just do her inheritance in a Rebel's way, anyhow, following the story in a different manner, so she gets an abstracted circular table. 

I set Al up in the jewelry-box chair from the last post. Some quick updates on Al--since his flask and boots did not retain their black dye over time, I removed them and put Al in some white socks and squeezed him into black Ken-sized shoes. While trying to iron his rumpled pant legs straight, though, he got some instant brown marks which might be burns. Oops. I'm fine with him looking even more like the traditional gentleman. 

When I first had the time to shoot the tea-party scene, the backdrop board fell forward and knocked the table over and it fell apart, cancelling the shoot for the time being and forcing a long repair and rebuild session. I did what I could to work some more nails into the assembly because the wood glue failed me on its own (to be sure, it wasn't done slowly enough and I don't have the clamp setup that would be ideal), but I got so frustrated with this table that I tossed it across the room and nearly gave up on it. It put me in a very bad mood. At this point, I was second-guessing my decision to not get the Hat-Tastic set. I finally got the table good enough to photograph again, and set up the scene. I gave Maddie every Mattel doll teapot, cup, and treat I had on hand.

Standing her on a human teacup inverted got her in a good position for the awkward tabletops.

She found herself getting a bit too into the tea- Impossible!- and upsetting the tea things.

Here's the final shot, with a sky edited in. This one hides the fourth tabletop, but it was my favorite shot.

Then I did an alternate shoot with just Maddie and a long table with a chair on top and an elevated stand being used as a footrest. I thought of trying my mom's Halloween painting as a backdrop to see if I could edit the colors in post. I kind of could, but not without messing with Maddie's skintone too, and the black trees seemed a bit harsh.

To resolve this, I basically made a knockoff of my mom's painting, imitating the composition in the colors I wanted for Maddie. I set it up as a backdrop and then touched up some distracting paint texture flaws in post.

Then I set her up in my giant tea can.

It's quite depleted, sir. You've got to fill it up again!

Indeed I do.

Here are some more pictures.

When thinking of other dolls of this character, there are a few notable editions. I thought Maddie had one other really strong Hatter design in Legacy Day, which styles her with a jacket more like her dad and gives her an awesome literal tea bag!

Her jacket matches her signature teapot purse.

I like basically everything about this doll except the big skirt. If there's a way to set her up without the skirt, and then repaint the Way Too Wonderland hat, I might have a custom project in mind.

Maddie also had Ever After High's only oversize dolls to reflect Wonderland size-shifting. She had one doll at the scale of Monster High's Frightfully Tall dolls and Gooliope, with the added articulation therein.

Despite the larger "canvas", 17-inch Maddie actually has less detail than 10-inch Maddie, including painted-on tights, which is a shame. The hands and face are clearly upscaled EAH molds, but Maddie is actually on a Monster High body here, reusing the vanilla Frightfully Tall sculpt featured on 17-inch Frankie, Draculaura, Clawdeen, and Elissabat. This is the economical choice, but it makes Maddie's proportions too leggy and it's not an EAH doll shape.

Screencap from UNNiEDOLLS' video review of the doll.

That's called "opening up like a telescope". Wonderland'll do that to ya! Sometimes you grow, sometimes you stretch...

Mattel also outsourced to Just Play for some even larger toys at the time, with the company doing styling heads and giant 28-inch Monster High dolls called Beast Freaky Friends, with the BFFs having the same head size as the styling heads. They also did a Hat-Tastic Maddie in the BFF scale. Despite the mold, the knees are unarticulated and she has the grinning face style made large. The BFF scale has more comparable articulation (sans knees) to the 1/6 dolls, not the Frightfully Tall scale. No double joints or torso joints here.

The Monster High dolls at this scale were more customization-focused, like simplified Inner Monsters, with mechanical eye-change features, faceplate masks, and hand, wing, and accessory pieces you're encouraged to swap for style, while the mega Maddie is just a big rendition of a smaller doll. I'm guessing mega Maddie uses the same body as the Beast Freaky Friends. (I'd be curious to look at a Monster High BFF, but don't know where I'd put it!)

I guess two characters have swapped bodies between the sister brands, then! Maddie has had sculpts used in Monster High in some fashion, while Monster High's male Frankenstein Skullector doll uses an Ever After High body!

It could be really fun to get both Hat-Tastic sizes, though shooting such a large doll is harder with the scenery available to me. It's easy to fake a nature background or avoid unwanted scenery in the frame when the subject is small.

There was one doll of Maddie which arguably has the most Tenniel-esque proportions, but it's a stylistic "toddler" edition from the deep pits of reboot hell, and does not appeal to me. She might technically be 1/6 compatible though, as it looks like her necklace and teapot purse are not remolds at a different size. 

But back to the signature edition. She's a delightful doll-

Why, thank you very much!

-with some caveats.

Maddie's signature character design is a lot of fun, capturing the vibe of a whimsical colorful Victorian tea table perfectly. I think her accessories, hair, and costume are all brilliant...but her doll was not produced to bring out the strengths to their best. Signature Maddie's factory head is muted by the facial expression and her hair isn't well produced. I was able to find the delight I needed by swapping in a grinning Maddie head from the soft reboot and curling the dickens out of it--and even then, there are some flaws. I don't think the facial expression is just right to match illustrated/animated Maddie or her energy, and the hair fiber curl could fall out over time, as it seems wont to do. Who knows how long this makeover will be impressing me. We'll have to see how Maddie's doing in November when this series concludes. Whether this makeover holds up will definitely affect her final contention in the group of Hatters.

For now, though, she's a lot of fun. It's only correct for her to be in my collection after so long being mad about her, Alice, and tea alike. While I don't think Ever After High has the best grasp on Carroll's work and what it's about, I could never be critical of Maddie. She's just too fun.

Well, thanks for having me on and letting me butt in like this!

...Who said I let you?!?

Ha ha!