This began with a very unusual and highly unlikely meeting of personal interests.
Warning for bloody/gory imagery.
One fascination of mine, having spanned over a decade, is Halloween animatronics and electronic decorations. I have a psychologically unusual relationship with things that scare me--that is to say, horror that gets to me also sows a deep fascination within me, and as a kid who grew up petrified by animatronics and who reviled electronic animated toys, it was probably inevitable that I become deeply interested in them as well. I only fully kicked the fear at age 19, and I think it was essentially rooted in my aversion to startles and not knowing when an animatronic will activate (like the hatred I have for the loud and abrupt pilot announcements whenever I fly), but I was paradoxically fascinated by the animatronics for many years prior. I've always been a spectator to the market because I have no desire to own a life-size animatronic, and simply don't have the money and real estate needed to be a haunt collector of such props, but since 2013, I've learned the ins and outs of consumer retail animatronics for Halloween and always keep an eye on what's new.
I'm kind of glad I picked up the doll hobby instead of the animatronic hobby, because the two are highly similar...but the problems are all worse on the animatronics side. Both hobbies involve collecting artificial representations of predominantly humanoid characters. Both dolls and animatronics can be judged on similar merits as collectibles (are they new in box, what condition are they in, etc.) and animatronics can be customized. But animatronics take up way more space, can often age far worse, and are much pricier on an average individual level. Pricing, storage, and upkeep already trouble me as a doll collector. I'd be destroyed by an animatronics hobby, and you have to be a special kind of rich and spacious and patient to have a significant amount of Halloween animatronics.
If I want to remain on-mission for this blog, animatronics are not a niche of interest I can guide onto this blog (even discussion-only, which is the extent of my participation in the sphere). However, one exception crawled into my territory.
One of the premiere horror archetypes is the haunted or distressing old doll, and creepy dolls are a dime a dozen in Halloween decor. There are some pretty good ones in the antique baby-doll category, yet I've never felt compelled to collect them or review them. But then we got an oddity--light-up creepy articulated fashion dolls which are classed as Halloween decorations first and foremost, not play toys. That's just in the range of necessary discussion for me.
These dolls come from Halloween animatronics giant Tekky Design. Tekky (formerly called Tekky Toys) has a long history of inventive animatronic designs with surprising animations and a command over jumpscare startles, delivering some of the most creative and effectively scary mass-retail Halloween props in the business. Tekky used to be known as a primary partner of Spirit Halloween before migrating to Party City, and now, it seems, the Halloweencostumes.com company in the wake of Party City's USA demise, though Tekky still supplies a good prop or two to Spirit occasionally. Tekky is perhaps less known for its smaller decor pieces, though it does those too, and in 2018, they did something pretty unusual--the Zombie Dolls...which are basically bootleg fully-jointed Barbies with LEDs in their torsos that light up their hollow heads and eye sockets while zombie grumbles play.
I wouldn't call these Tekky's most involved or original product. These could have been made by any Chinese factory, where knockoff dolls and unnecessary LED features are a dime a dozen. The Zombie Dolls feel more "outsourced" than something Tekky put much design into, or more likely, like a product that Tekky folded into their line and slapped their name on. Tekky has more distinctive miniature props than these.
I was under no illusions that these were particularly good items. They looked like cheap drugstore decor with crappy waxy doll hair fiber and rooting and very simple costumes. But the fact that they had full articulation and that someone was trying the fashion-doll build in the genre of Halloween decorations made them magnetic to me.
Tekky sold three Zombie Dolls total, all with the same blue LED, hair color, and audio track. There's vaguely seventies-looking Tammy Terror with a red cotton tattered floral dress that might be the best quality by a margin.
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| The stock photo looks more polished and detailed in paint and clothing than the real thing. |
The Bride was tempting:
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| With a Barbie wedding dress and a face repaint, she could maybe be turned into a Haunted Mansion Bride. |
I eventually picked the only other doll in the group: Bloody Mary. She in no way earns that name (trust me; I've reviewed a worthy Bloody Mary), but I liked her more traditional glam fashion doll "Barbie" vibe. I think a zombified fashion doll (as opposed to a fashion doll of a zombie character; there's a difference) ought to really embody the fashion-doll archetype.
These dolls have removable shoes, and as such, some aftermarket copies are missing them. I was able to easily find Bloody Mary complete for about $15 when price and shipping were added. I'd believe that being the MSRP, if perhaps more expensive. Nothing higher would be justifiable, though.
Despite the zombie theme, I don't think these dolls have any real connection to Monster High. They're more Barbie-like in build despite their stylized heads, and they're too late to be accused of riding the wave of MH influence and imitation. They're not play dolls, anyhow, so I think they're only attempting to imitate the most famous doll to a layperson--a Barbie.
I've reviewed a cheap bizarre spooky drugstore-tier doll line before in the Temu-exclusive Masker Masquerade line. I still have the pink doll from that line (who I dubbed Barbie Yaga) because how could I ever let her go?
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| She may forever be one of the weirdest dolls I own. |
Bloody Mary is far more conventional in comparison.
The Zombie Dolls had no packaging, just tags stapled to their costume and the hanging cord loops in their scalps which they would be placed on store rack hooks with. Tekky's logo isn't on the tag, but their name is.
Given that this is a fashion doll with removable shoes and even a head and hands that can be popped out, I'm surprised there wasn't more done to protect her, but this isn't the kind of product anybody involved really cared about.
Because I find this doll unworthy of her name, and because it's generic in a horror context, I'm going to be renaming her. Because I wanted something similar in sound to "Barbie" while referencing zombie lore, I'm calling my doll Romi, in tribute to George A. Romero, while also evoking the roaming a zombie is wont to do.
I had no idea until getting her in person that the doll has a tiara. Well, okay, saying that is kind of generous. It's barely a tiara.
It's a piece of silver metallic die-cut fabric lightly glued to her scalp, and it's so well-hidden by her hair, it took a couple of minutes to notice even after unboxing her and having her in-person. I'm not sure if this is meant to make the doll a princess or a beauty queen, or a Carrie-style prom queen? She'd pair well with LDD Deadbra Ann, perhaps, but I have no use for this crown and I don't want the doll to be any of the associated archetypes.
All three Zombie Dolls have the same hair color and fiber. It's a honey blonde shade and not very high-quality, styled in a side-parted wave (at least, I think; parting with such sparse rooting is hard to determine.) High-quality or dense hair are not necessary for a zombie fashion doll; I'd say messy thin hair is kind of the desired effect for a toy turned undead. I've already conceptualized my vision for this doll as being a former glamor toy who was lost or abandoned and turned into a wandering toy zombie.
While the doll body is either a Barbie or Disney Princess ripoff, I'm not sure about the origins of the head sculpt. It's proportionally larger than Barbie heads, and looks too large for, and doesn't resemble, Disney dolls I'm familiar with. The eyes are empty cutouts into the hollow of the doll head, but there's probably a mold or a casting of this head that has no eyeholes. Maybe this is a generic fashion doll face floating around Chinese markets. This doll, unsurprisingly, has no stamps on her body parts. The head is flexible vinyl.
The face paint is really simple and doesn't sell her well.
She has chunky stark black paint for cartoony eyebrows and a mouth design which shades between her lips and hooks down on one end. Her eye sockets are covered by black spray shading extending to most of her face, and she has really simple blood designs in overly pinkish and unrealistically textured paint. The blood is sprayed on the side of her neck, perhaps suggesting a zombie bite.
Not impressive. Not characterful. Not beautiful or truly scary. The head has pierced ears ready for earrings, which is promising. She'll only get to have one for the right zombie asymmetry, but it's nice that I don't have to add the piercings myself.
The bad paint continues on her limbs which are nearly coated with grey in an extension of the face shading, but which lacks any depth or dimension. This isn't the kind of doll more could be expected from, but still.
The doll's electronics are activated by a disguised button on her chest, taking the form of a gemstone heart pendant at the bottom of a molded-on bead necklace sculpted to her torso. This was probably first featured on a talking/singing Barbie or Disney Princess.
It suits this doll okay, but all three have this molding and button design. The "try me" sticker label that was placed over the chest ended up in my doll's hair.
My doll evidently has low batteries, because the blue LED seems to be on the fritz, only flashing briefly once or twice each time the button is pressed. Her audio feature seems to work fine. Pressing the button twice quickly starts and then cancels an activation. I can't demonstrate her features well, but they're documented elsewhere and I'm not going to retain her electronics once I make her over.
The Bloody Mary dress is peach pink with a strapless design, a sweetheart neckline, a dropped waist and an unrealistic zigzag tattered hem. The bodice doesn't fit great and it doesn't feel like the dress has a set height on her torso--it's ostensibly supposed to sit below the necklace to outline the breasts, but isn't tightly tailored. A fairly cartoony red blood spatter effect covers the dress, which is very thin fabric with unfinished top and bottom edges.
The velcro for the dress is rigid and not elegant, and opens further down than I would expect.
The dress is lightly glued to the sides of the doll body, but it was easy to pull it away and then remove the glue spots.
The shoes are simple strappy black sandal heels.
The body, save gimmicky necklace and electronics, is a familiar Barbie/Disney-related frame with the full jointing standard made commonplace by G1 Monster High, save the head, which is a static knob that only offers a swivel. Neck aside, the articulation is more graceful than many Disney dolls, and feels as good as a Barbie on this level.
This body passes the one-legged kneel test better than many more expensive or polished dolls. She has the right proportions and joints for it.
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| This is a pretty big achievement for such a cheapo doll. |
The Zombie Dolls being fully-jointed was the factor making them unmissable for me. Had they only had the minimum five Barbie swivel joints, they'd be easily dismissed as bootleg junk, but poseable dolls are almost always more attractive to me, especially because full jointing is usually the first thing to go when making a doll ultra-cheap.
The doll's hip ball joints seem slightly too loose or fluid, and her right lower leg is slightly warped. Her arms also stress the sockets and flex the two-part shell of her torso open a little when they move forward. Otherwise, I'm really impressed with the articulation. It's solid and versatile for something this cheap.
Here's the doll's battery compartment and speaker, visible on the back. The battery compartment cover has a screw, and the torso has two other screws holding it together.
Once the screws are out, it's not too hard to pry apart the torso shells. This is something most fashion dolls do not permit, being intentionally assembled for permanent construction because that's safe and reliable. Here's the electronics.
I disemboweled my zombie and took all the electronics and metal away (except the screws), and also scrapped the button gem of her "necklace". On any other doll, I'd have to keep it or maybe patch and fill the hole and repaint over that area...but here? That can be a heart-shaped hole and a chest wound. Perfect for a glamor-girlie zombie doll.
It's kind of novel being able to take apart a doll in this fashion.
Making over this doll was a one-night project, and I honestly can't remember the last time customizing a doll was so purely fun. I had a blast with this, and I found my process improvisational but very successful and pretty easy. I think I made a dramatic change that turned this doll into something legitimately beautiful and freaky. Truly scary, truly pretty, truly bloody. I flipped her, which isn't something I think I can say for other custom projects. Here, it's an unequivocal visual improvement that I think actively raises her value and removes the perception of obvious cheapness.
I started with the face paint, removing the eyebrows and black mouth paint and the factory blood. I liked that the shading on her right eye was heavier, so I basically erased the shading on the left to leave the dark area as a patch of necrotic decay. On the "cleaner" eye, I painted some mascara, wonky lashes, and peach eyeshadow, and some dribbling blood, and also did what these dolls should have done and gave her a red lip that's clearly just blood from whatever she's nibbled on. I added some blood on her jaw to segue into the blood on her neck, while going over that paint as well, and redid the forehead blood. All of the blood paint on this doll got gloss varnish over it for a gross wet look.
I think I achieved just the right ambiguous effect with the face. With no eyes and eyebrows, the face is hauntingly empty, but also not definitely wicked, kind, or sad. With her stark pallor and blood and her glamor aesthetic, I actually get vibes of Asian horror work, like a mix of something from a horror manga and the imagery in the infamous jumpscare-prank Korean webcomic "The Bongcheon-dong Ghost". I could see Romi as an undead idol or rich lady from East Asia just as much as she could be a Western Barbie-style icon. Whatever it is, this face kills. She looks good in any display.
I probably could have gotten the inside of her head painted black pretty well, but that was complicated, and I think she retains some of the dolly meta-concept by leaving the interior of the head unpainted. A doll zombie probably would not be bloody or pale like this, no, but I had to leave in enough for the story of this character being an actual doll.
To evoke the dolly side of her zombie horror, a patch of her hair is cut down and some of the roots are poked out altogether, like a distressed toy.
I cut the heart hole in the torso a bit larger and painted the internals black and glued a pink heart rhinestone inside for an inset exposed cartoon glamor zombie heart effect.
I see this doll's gimmicky body as an advantage in the end, because I could not have done this kind of interesting visual with a more high-production doll. Being able to open the torso opened up some opportunity in making her over.
On the limbs, I wiped and smudged and lightened most of the ugly shading, and added some blood paint, dashed onto the hands and feet. On the left hand especially, the blood interacts great with her face.
I added one dangle earring, a barbed-wire earring that could serve as a necklace, and some silver bracelets, all MGA doll pieces, to accessorize her. The one earring is because she lost the other, and the bracelets are deliberately only on one wrist. The barbed-wire necklace is something she might have scavenged from her days stumbling around blockades in the wasteland, and I also gave her a Mego shoe offset against one of her original heels as if she's replaced a lost shoe with another.
As a doll body part for her to eat, I gave her one of the "normal" arm pieces from Barbie Yaga.
Upgrading her neck articulation was tricky, and the new neck peg is imperfect. I sawed off the neck knob she had once I realized the connecting post inside her neck shells could anchor a DIY neck piece like the ones Monster High dolls use. I fashioned one from wire and a wooden spool. The doll's head had an internal ring in the neck hole that tore out, and the edge of her neck hole does not naturally encircle the top of the torso neck that remains, and when tipped back, the anchor no longer pulls her head down tight against the neck, but the articulation is as functional as it needs to be, and adds everything to her. With the dress, I tattered up the lower edge with more realistic cutting and ripping, and tore some holes in the torso before adding prominent messy black stitching repair. I don't know if Romi has the presence or dexterity to repair her dress, but I like the mystery the visual provides.
Here's made-over Romi next to Barbie Yaga.
With both dolls in factory form, Barbie Yaga was arguably the higher value with her wacky surreal transformation rebuild features, but with my makeover of the Tekky doll, Romi, at least on a visual level, steps out of the cheapo classification Barbie Yaga inhabits.
This doll was an unexpected delight. As sold, she was nothing special, only having an above-average doll body (and even that is potentially hampered by the neck and electronics), but modifying her gave me the most fun I've had from doll customization...maybe ever. She reminded me how low-stakes, uncomplicated, and rewarding a custom project could be in the best conditions. This wasn't a grand plan delayed and hindered by logistical problems or supply shortages. It was just one night of figuring things out and getting something really good, and that was a really refreshing experience. My efforts turned her into something with real eerie, bloody, fashion horror star quality. I adore the doll I turned her into.
With Romi and Barbie Yaga forming a fun duo of pink fashion dolls on the bizarre and ghoulish side, I wondered if there existed any potential thirds on this theme with which I could assemble a trio. Knockoff bootleg dolls fascinate me, so I trawled AliExpress to see if they had anything that fit.
There are, of course, dozens of G1 Monster High bootlegs, some of whom reuse molds in colors that Mattel never has, and some have intriguing faceups. There was a Frankie-faced doll cast in pale flesh with blonde hair and intense blue makeup that I liked.
There were also some promising white-cast dolls that had some striking makeup, and the everpresent knockoff Wydowna bodies, which are genuinely desirable and useful for their accessibility compared to copies of the two official G1 Wydownas. More color castings for them would be great. I'd get a kick out of a human-colored doll with six arms.
I also lingered on this fascinating set of knockoffs imitating Monster High with entirely foreign head sculpts. The faces are all loosely based on Draculaura, except for the head molded and painted like Clawdeen. I don't know what the base sculpt is derived from. I thought of Cave Club, maybe, but there's not much of a match in truth. The non-Clawdeen head mold may be attempting to resemble a fairy, but I see a bit of goblin in it too.
These are interesting, but they weren't inspiring me on this post's theme.
Then I totally ditched the idea of another pink blonde fashion lady for my third zombie because how could I possibly ignore these?
When the doll arrived to me, I got the distinct impression that years had passed since the taking of the listing photo. Flatly, my doll was in disgusting condition.
The first apparent issue is the head, which looks yellowed or stained into a redder, perhaps more Simpsons, shade than the body, and looks less neon as a result. This was one of the dolls I expected to be color-matched. Also, some of his pieces felt sticky. and looked grimy. What should I have expected, though?
I'm going to call this doll Lazaro.
While the Black dolls in this production run had rooted colorful hair in a straight fiber, the fantasy-colored dolls are bald, and the pictured yellow and green models have bandannas. This feels familiar to 2000s street fashion aesthetics. Lazaro's bandanna has some discoloration and might have discolored his head. It's plastic-tagged into his head in three places.
Lazaro's head is pretty rigid at normal temperature, but it is vinyl.
The reason I chose a Spanish undead name for the doll is because his "zombie" makeup is actually a Dia de Muertos calavera design. At first, I inspected the backlog of Dia de Muertos Ken faces to see if that was the source, but I quickly realized this is actually a face I know well--it's G1 signature Skelita Calaveras' specific makeup design adapted to a totally different face shape.
All of the details and stylistic touches are Skelita's, from the blue shading and dots around the eyes to the way the lips are done and the brows turn into swirls. Only the eyes are done in a style native to this head sculpt. Lazaro's lips are sculpted relaxed with a white strip of teeth painted between.
I assumed Lazaro was built on some model of Ken doll, but this turned out not to be the case!
Lazaro's skintone is meant to all be a neon yellow color which fades to black at his extremities, in a way that reminds me of the Create-a-Monster Insect. He'd make a pretty good base for a male gender-swap of that doll if he was nicer. The coloring is very loud and very "boy", especially evocative of the hideous 200s/2010s fashions reflected by boy dolls of that era. There's a charm in the utter tastelessness and bold visuals, especially if assuming the wearer is innocent and kind. This skin coloring is the sole reason I can't perceive Lazaro's faceup as a direct anchor in Dia de Muertos, as I think the neon yellow disqualifies him from being either a living celebrant of the holiday or a skeleton brought back to celebrate. Instead, this is either a zombie with a face design that doesn't belong, or he's just a zombie who happens to be Mexican and ready to celebrate the holiday. (Sure, he could be a human in a very unusual take on holiday makeup via body paints, but I don't see it.)
Lazaro is wearing a tank top that almost looks like it needs a hood, which is divided vertically into a black and white half, while a skull patch decorates the white side. A green ribbon lines the neck, and the piece opems fully down the back with two separate velcro closures. It doesn't fit badly, but does not hug the torso tightly. The shorts have a checkered pattern, with a matching green ribbon adding an athletic stripe only down the left-hip side.
The clothes don't look all that badly-sewn, but they are stained and look pretty gross.
The shoes are simple vinyl slip-on sneakers in black, and felt sticky, just like the hands and bare feet of the doll. They are very stiff and difficult to get on and off the doll's feet. If he had ankle joints, I'd be afraid the shoes would break them in the removal and putting on.
Lazaro's black coloring is neither all cast nor all painted. The hands and legs appear cast with neon yellow spray on the legs, while the forearms appear cast in the yellow shade, with the black part painted on. I'd honestly have preferred a fully yellow-cast doll without this faded gimmick...and a doll with the color-match in the photo I bought from.
The paint on the lower legs looks messy, and I'm not sure why the feet and hands felt sticky, seeing as they're not flexible vinyl and the black coloring isn't a paint layer.
Lazaro's body design looks fairly typical for a male fashion doll. He has complete jointing, but substandard articulation with those joints. The head doesn't tip very much and the hips don't spread far. The shoulder hinges of this knockoff are very loose and can only be lifted parallel to the collarbone to hold a pose--any less, and they'll fall back parallel to the torso. The doll feels like hard hollow plastic in most of his pieces. The head is vinyl, but is not squishy without heating.
While Chinese knockoff dolls usually make alterations or remove mold markers when making something through infringement, Lazaro didn't. His molds seem not to have been altered at all--or at least, the head and torso are totally the same as the doll he stole from, and at that point, I'd imagine his whole body is an intact lift. Unusually, thanks to the source brand's unique form of labeling, I know both the doll line and the specific character Lazaro happens to steal body parts from--he's TJ from the Kenya Fashion Madness doll line.
I was clued in by the intact "Kenya's World" stamp on Lazaro's back, marked with the year 2012. Photo taken after repainting; apologies!
Searching for "Kenya's World dolls" brought up a 2010s Black doll line called "Kenya Fashion Madness" (or is it Fashion Madness Kenya? The line is part of a "Kenya" umbrella), featuring Black doll characters. Kenya is the name of the lead character in the doll line.
As such, the dolls in this knockoff zombie lineup who had Black color casting for their heads are being the most authentic to the original mold. I was able to discern the character from Kenya Fashion Madness that Lazaro ripped off because Kenya's World appeared to mold the character name in the waistband of the sculpted underwear--at least, in this case, an unmistakable TJ is featured on the underpants.
Ironically, the bald fantasy-color zombie dolls display an alternate faithfulness to the doll they're built with. The brown-headed dolls are more or less accurate to the skintone of the original mold's user, but they had rooted hair. TJ is a bald doll, which the fantasy-colored castings match.
I wonder if the other male character I've seen in the line, Dwayne, had his own torso mold, if only to change the underwear label.
I learned a bit more about the Kenya Fashion Madness line from the blog Black Doll Collecting, who documented the dolls in their time. Black Doll Collecting indicates the articulation standard and body materials were about the same for the real KFM line, and because the blog said they were found at Family Dollar, they might have never been a big-store line with a high production budget. This post from Black Doll Collecting shows the exact articulated TJ sculpts that Lazaro was cast from. When checking the most recent work on the blog, I was instantly disappointed to see that the most recent post was the author's disclosure and endorsement of generative AI imagery and image editing. I left a polite but critical comment after seeing that, intending to express my gratitude and respect for the information and mission the blog has provided over the years while in no uncertain terms laying out how badly seeing the newest post uncritically embracing AI use disappointed me. The blog author responded respectfully but was unmoved, with the tone of it being a benign "agree to disagree" matter, so I'm sad to say I could only ever find value in older blog posts there and I can't recommend supporting the author currently. I respect her mission and her past work, but the way she's gone about it in the current day spoils it for me.
Not that Lazaro is really much better than AI use. While I'm glad to have been informed of the existence of the Kenya Fashion Madness line through Lazaro, Lazaro's gang is stealing from a Black-focused doll line that doesn't have the unsympathetic status of megacorp doll companies. It's deeply unfair that I had to learn of the KFM dolls through this bizarre cheap ripoff--it would have been nice if I knew of them on their own merits beforehand. I don't often collect fashion dolls without some fantasy character type or novel production gimmick, but I'd be prouder to own a Kenya Fashion Madness piece than Lazaro, by far. The Christmasy "Fireside Chatting" Kenya doll could be worth a look in December. The brand deserves a shot after I blundered into this disrespect.
To make over Lazaro, I put his head out with a coating of Remove-Zit for several sunny days until it looked clean enough. Scraping the Remove-Zit off the head was smearing and blurring the black face paint. I repainted the body and the head with a slight half-and-half decay theme aligned with the split of his tank top, splotching black moldy paint effects over his left half clothed in the white side of the tank, while adding neon yellow solid coloring to the right half to downplay the black limb coloring on that side. I also repainted the lips black with white tooth marks to remove the pink from the palette and blacked out the left eye while touching up the nose paint which was faded. The Dia de Muertos look has faded as such, but I didn't erase it from his depiction. To make sure the head and body looked better matched, I rubbed some neon yellow paint over the head before the other repaint steps there.
I didn't add to or subtract from his wardrobe. I'd have been happy to put some softer, easier-to-use shoes on the doll, but I didn't have any in the right colors. The stains didn't clear out well, so I splotched some paint on in some places. Here he is put together.
I took some photos staging a "graveyard" outside, but got eaten alive by mosquitoes in the process. I tried to stage the cover, hiding the repaint work on Romi and Lazaro while including both. My first take was similar to an older zombie cover shoot.
I then tried some takes with Romi holding Lazaro's head. Is this a tragedy? A love story? Or is it simply a meal?
I chose the first "holding head" shot for my cover photo, feeling Lazaro's body was detracting somehow. I only edited one with a background replacement because that's tedious work to implement for multiple shots. Here's the first pass, desaturated.
I then did some more edits to give it more of a poppy, campy color scheme to suit the dolls.
Here are a couple other shots while I could stand being eaten alive---and it wasn't even the zombies doing it!
And some more portraits of Romi.
Of the two zombies I found, Romi is by far the better doll. She's marginally more "official" and feels significantly more ethical since I couldn't identify a specific doll she was copying. She repainted and modded into a haunting zombie doll, too. And she's not ripping off an independent doll brand with a purposeful mission to depict a sphere that struggles to get a foothold in the doll world. Lazaro turning out to have stolen from a Black-focused doll just makes me feel bad. Romi could be stealing from Mattel and/or Disney, and in that case...I have no reason to cry for them.
Unfortunately, even as dolls in a vacuum, Romi/Bloody Mary comes out as the better experience. Her fully-jointed body handles and poses really nicely for the kind of doll she is, with the deficit being her swivel neck joint. Her electronic gimmick didn't wow me and her "tiara" was very cheap, but she was a delightful base for a quick repaint project, giving me one of the most breezy and fun customizing experiences I've ever had with a fashion doll. Lazaro's posing feels limited even for the kind of doll he is, and I'm not certain an authentic Kenya Fashion Madness TJ would outperform him. The neck joint does very little and the construction of the knockoff doll had some poor friction in some of his joints, in addition to him evidently being several years old and aging in poor conditions. The only recommendable factor for Lazaro is just that he was a boy doll cast in novelty coloring. Since repainting dolls stably is difficult or impossible, that had an appeal...and even then, I had to do a lot of work because some of his paint felt sticky and gross and I repainted him with unstable layering to make him click better anyway. So really, there was nothing with Lazaro that I couldn't have done with a fully-jointed pale Ken whose vinyl parts I could dye and whose hard-plastic parts I could repaint. Realistically, I should have left off at Romi and not purchased Lazaro. There wasn't any net positive in doing so. He reminded me of the inherent problems with "fakie" dolls moreso than the oddity and appeal factor. As I have him, he's an alright zombie, but not something I would have purchased with the benefit of hindsight. Maybe I should have grabbed one of the goblin-head Monster High knockoffs instead. I'm not going to now, at least.
With all that said...happy zombieween!
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