Witchy Wonders Interlude I: Effanbee Yellow Brick Road Travelers!

When selecting Effanbee dolls for my second Witchy Wonders post, I ended up getting three extra non-witch Oz dolls--two as part of a bundle to get the witch for cheaper than getting her solo and complete would be, and one as a lucky find of a design I loved!

First are the two Li'l Innocents from the small witch's series--the Cowardly Lion and the Scarecrow. Both came with their boxes and stands. The Scarecrow is missing his diploma; I couldn't find it among any of the packaging.

The Lion is first. He's never been my favorite of Dorothy's companions, and I always preferred the Scarecrow and Tin Man as iconic characters. This Effanbee doll is quite a sensation, but I'm not sure it's a good sensation.

He's wearing a knitted suit of hairy yarn, and his mane is an explosion of yarn much bigger than his head. The mane is made of a separate lion hood, plus a collar of yarn sewn to the bodysuit. Lion ears are present on top, but they get buried.

The lion tail has wire inside to make it poseable, and is ended off with yarn and a gold ribbon. The wire is a welcome surprise, but the base attached to the suit still flops around, so the tail isn't able to be really lifted up by the wire.

The hood closes with a snap by the throat.

The doll has an orangey-brown color which is a good choice for a lion, reducing the kid-in-a-costume look, while also providing a bit of diversity if taken as a human color. I like the face paint and the leonine features. He has no hair.

The suit is not pleasant to me. It's overlarge and not fitted. The arms aren't separated enough from the torso, and the paws don't fit around the body at all. It doesn't really feel like the costume was made for this doll. The suit opens with two snaps down the front.

After looking at all three Li'l Innocents and deconstructing their boxes, I found the Lion's medal. It's on a gold elastic cord and had a "Made in China" sticker across the back which I tried to scrape off. The charm is metal.

Yeah, I'm not in love. He does look kinda good when seated, though. It almost looks like a cat pose.

The Lion's body was very greasy and even goopy inside from poor aging or storage, so I had to pop him apart to properly clean him and get rid of the disgusting residue. This body's neck peg is essentially the same idea as the fugly witch's, though I wondered if the larger Effanbee dolls of the period with conventional sculpts had the peg as part of the head mold or torso mold. My answer is coming up!

I was surprised to see the sleepy eyes are individually enclosed in vinyl cups inside the head. I wonder how they work that way!

Effanbee has two other Lions Cowardly. The first would be from the series my first Effanbee witch was from. He's got the wavy hair and face evoking the Bert Lahr MGM portrayal, but his suit is absolutely, entirely absurd by in no conceivable way resembling a lion. It looks closer to a cheetah/jaguar/leopard, but doesn't match any of those either!

What in tarnation...?

He's nearly crappy enough to steal my heart, but I'll be reasonable and decide he's just crappy.

I think Effanbee's best Cowardly Lion is from the 1993 series my fugly witch is from. This one has a similar body color and a similar yarn mane, but his suit looks much more pleasant and better-fitted, and his medal looks great. I'd probably be quite happy with this version.

Next is the Li'l Innocents Scarecrow. 

Scarecrows are adjacent to rag dolls, and I've always adored both. This is a pretty excellent friendly scarecrow design!

My Scarecrow's blue clothing is badly faded by sunlight and should look much more vivid:

The Patsyette edition wearing the same costume.

I think the sun bleaching adds a lot of authenticity to the look, though!

The Scarecrow's hat is blue per Munchkin tradition in the book (he was a Munchkin creation), and has a point and a ribbed brim. It feels very folksy and comfortable. The cone is trimmed with a red spotted bow, while the brim is sewn into an upturn on the opposite side, so I don't know which is meant to face forward. Under the hat, two straw bundles are sewn, but they don't hang in any way that makes a ton of visual sense.

Tissue stuffing added by me.

The Scarecrow's burlap face is simulated with a yellowish body casting and a hood of cheesecloth layered over. It's not seamless but it's a classic scarecrow costume look.

The hood is pretty fragile-looking, but the texture adds a lot. The hood is pulled tight with a bow made of strips of suede, attached to the hood (not a separate cord piece).

The face paint is very simple and fits the scarecrow/rag doll look. I love it.

No hair on this doll, either.

Similar to the Living Dead Dolls Oz set, there's some flatter, more illustrative paint design in Effanbee's Ozians of this period. Perhaps both brands are trying to evoke the classic Oz book illustrations and affect a distinct art style from their other dolls.

The Scarecrow is wearing overalls and a green gingham shirt. The shirt has no collar or button details, and closes with one snap at the neck. It's separate from the pants and has overlong sleeves with straw sewn in so the doll's hands can be hidden by the sleeves and "replaced by" the straw. The overalls have only one shoulder strap which crosses disgonally over the torso. The pants are gathered with straw ties around the waist and ankles, while patches are sewn on in different places.

The Scarecrow has wonderful little pleather pointy boots with real laces. Keeping them messy suits the character.

I like this Scarecrow a lot. He's better-executed than the Lion, and I can definitely see him being kept as an autumn decoration.

I also like the Tin Man in this Li'l Innocents series...but I like the 1993 big Tin Man even more! I had to get him the moment I saw one being sold solo for cheap.

I don't know why I'm so drawn to the Tin Man. There may be some mix of robot aesthetics and fairy-tale whimsy mixed together that attract me. 

I was annoyed to open my Tin Man and find no funnel hat--and after losing some of Maddie Hatter's pieces through my own doing, I double-checked and it wasn't on me! Fortunately, I contacted the seller and they confirmed they had the hat and would send it forward. 

While many Effanbee dolls have firm flat-bottomed shoes and stand with no issues, the Tin Man had to borrow a stand from someone who didn't really need it, as he has fabric footies with no firm base. This stand did not come with my Tin Man, but otherwise, this is the order, delivered in two parts.

One of the most consistent, though not strictly necessary, features of the Tin (Wood)Man's visual depictions is a hat made from a funnel, originating in the book illustrations and usually retained in adaptations. It wasn't in the text, but it's so iconic that few Tin Men eschew the detail.

This Effanbee funnel is silver-painted plastic with a real spout that would allow it to be functional. The Tin Man's funnel sometimes has a ring-shaped finger loop on it, but this one does not. Sewn to the funnel is a strip of metallic fabric, decorated with rivet-like faceted studs, serving as a chinstrap.

The funnel also has ribs inside. 

This chinstrap is a nice idea, but really doesn't make sense here. It's in conflict, visually and functionally, with the edge of the tight hood around the Tin Man's face, and it does nothing to actually hold the hat on. The Effanbee head has very little chin projecting in front of the neck to keep the strap in tension, not helped by the strap being just a bit too long, and also completely inelastic. It's not doing any good.

Around the head, as mentioned, the Tin Man has a hood of scratchy sparkly silver fabric. It might have once fit tighter, but now, it's a bit loose, and the lower edge looks pretty untidy.

The hood is closed with a plastic snap under the chin, but the snap is tighter than the thread, and the snap tore off when trying to open it.

In the bottom right, you can see both halves of the snap stuck together on one of the corners.

The Tin Man is useful to look at a sleepy-eyed standard face sculpt for this era and style of Effanbee dolls. The Witch wasn't very representative! This face design is not the same as the oldest Effanbee witch I looked at.

I fell in love with this Effanbee Tin Man thanks to his face paint and the beautiful use of illusionistic coloring to suggest metal seams and shading on his face. His eyes have arches with contour down the sides of his nose, giving him a very 1930s futuristic sculptural style, almost like the robot from Metropolis, and fake seams extend from the corners of his eyes and his mouth. It's suggested that he has a separate lower jaw, which is even deliberately painted to look askew. A dark dot on the end of his nose, suggesting a spout, is also present, as is common with this character. The philtrum is also painted white.

I really love the paint job on this doll. It suits the early twentieth-century mood of Oz and it gives the Tin Man a sense of artistic dignity.

Around his neck, the Tin Man has the heart given to him by the Wizard, here depicted as a small plastic heart gem on a red ribbon necklace. It's a little underwhelming.

I do think the faceted jewel heart is just right for the textures and aesthetic of this Tin Man, though.

The costume is a shirt and pants, using the same materials we've seen on the hood and chinstrap, with metallic fabric covered in "rivets" and scratchy fabric covering most of the limbs. Two metallic bands encircle the elbows, and two more encircle the knees. The limbs have rings of texture around them to suggest flex joints, robot-style, and the feet have shoe caps made of metallic fabric which actually come off with more tight snaps. The outfit is a shirt and footie pants and the shoe caps.

The way the pants are sewn, the details on each leg don't want to sit parallel.

It turns out the whole body below the head is the same as the other dolls of this period, so this head mold also pops onto a peg on the torso rather than popping down into a socket like older Effanbee or swivel-joint Living Dead Dolls heads. The Tin Man is cast entirely in this medium grey color. The body is not metallic at all, and is darker than the costume by a couple of shades, but it all looks good put together. This doll's hip joints have some wonkiness going on--they don't want to stay turned back, and if I try to tilt the doll backward on his hip joints, his upper body starts to tip forward again.

This doll also seems to prove that the eyelid color is never customized for the Effanbee character, as, like my first Effanbee witch, the eyelid color is pale flesh when the face is a fantasy color.

This could suit the Tin Man's original backstory, being a human replaced bit by bit with tin, as if the eyes are the last remaining piece of his old self, but I don't really think it looks good.

The Tin Man underwent several modifications.

First, with the hood, I tried just tying the corners that had the snap, and that tightened the hood pretty well. I didn't bother replacing the snap.  

The heart medal was cute, but I had a better idea--matching the film, I used a larger heart jewel to stick onto the breast of the costume, and also like the film almost certainly did, I used magnets so the piece is optional. One is glued inside the shirt, and one is on the back of the heart gem. 

To fix the hat, I had no luck using the original chinstrap. Shortening it with a glued fold made it too short to fit, and after attempting multiple ways to make it work, I gave up and turned the chinstrap into a velcro high collar band which covered the tied bottom of the hood. To replace the hat mount, I used a stiff wire chinstrap ring, twisting the ends together to not only close the loop, but create a peg for the funnel to fit onto. This goes on in two pieces--band first, then the hat pops on.

The chinstrap as a collar.

The wire band hat mount in place--Teletubby-esque. The wire twist fits inside the funnel tube.

I also repainted the eyelids.

I didn't bother to make this Tin Man an axe. 

Here are some more comparisons with Living Dead Dolls' takes on Oz--first, my Tin Men.

The LDD Tin Man is one of my favorites from the brand, but I lost her heart sometime last year. The last time I can be certain I had the piece was when it featured in my LDD Queen of Hearts photoshoot, and thereafter, I have no idea what happened to it. It's not where it should be (behind the door I modded into the Tin Man's torso). Logically, I can assume the piece never found its way back where it belonged after putting away the props from that shoot, but the heart isn't in the bag of Alice props or any of the other locations the pieces I used in that shoot ended up. I don't think it was out on the lawn for the cover photo where it could have gotten left and lost outside, either. It's a big bummer. Do I have use for a second Wizard doll to replace the heart, or should I attempt to get it 3D printed? A mutual of mine on Tumblr 3D modeled the piece after I sent reference photos (of the LDD Series 3 edition of the heart). When I sent those photos, I thought I was only using the Series 3 heart out of convenience, not yet realizing I had no idea where the other heart was.

Then here's the LDD Scarecrow next to the Effanbee one.

The LDD Scarecrow unmasked and with her brain.

I've never not wanted the LDD doll of the Lion, but never had strong enough motivation to go out for him, either. He's been on standby in case I needed a third for a LDD Roundup roster, but this hasn't been an LDD-heavy year any more than 2025, so that might take a while yet.

I apparently refuse to show you a Dorothy. I have nothing against her, but LDD's, nor Effanbee's, are not priorities.

Then I set everyone up for photos. With the cover, I abstracted a slice of the Yellow Brick Road with the fugly Witch's shadow over it to tie the cover into the greater Witchy Wonders series and segue from the last post. The color of the bricks and the green backdrop were done with photo edits, but the witch's shadow was in-camera. This setup also nicely hides that the Tin Man is a different scale from the other two.

And I gave the dolls a few focus photos each.

These are a fun group of dolls. I think the Lion is probably among Effanbee's worst showings since the costume is terribly awkward and hard to display well, but the Scarecrow is wonderful, and the Tin Man from the 1993 series is also striking, though he needed a bit of work to really feel polished. Witchy Wonders will continue shortly in a very different direction. We need to talk about one particular brand, even if only entering its outskirts, before a rival belatedly steals its game in July.