Hot damn, i'm alive I swear! - Susi by Plaggona

Okay I know, I haven't posted since JUNE! 

 In my defense, school holidays happened... family visited from overseas and I had surgery so i've had a busy few months and been rather distracted. 

I've also been trying really hard to maintain my "sell more than you buy" resolution. I'm not sure how that's going because while i've sold quite a few things, i've also bought various small bundles of things... oops. 

Anyway, that's not what today is about. today, I want to talk about a very strange clone doll I found.A Greek clone of a Brazillian doll who in herself is kinda a sort of copy too. It's uh... it's complicated. let's dive into this

So.... 

First we need to talk about Estrela and their doll Susi. 

Estrela are a Brazilian toy company and Susi was their big success. Initially a version of Ideal's Tammy made under license (much like Sindy was), she soon spun off into her own thing and is still being made today, which is pretty damn impressive. 

Anyway, the thing is, she's immensely popular in her native Brazil, but not so well known across the rest of the world. Certainly she's not a doll I would expect to find a clone of, and yet, here we are. 

 one of Susi's big features are her large inset eyes. Her original 1966 dolls had painted eyes, being as they were repurposed Tammy dolls, but by 1969 she'd acquired her signature inset eyes and rooted lashes.

Image from the Susi Museum https://bonecasusimuseuvirtual.blogspot.com

  This is an example of the 1981 box, there's a reason I chose this specific image. 

 

I present, Plaggona Susi. in her duplicate box and everything. Even her combs and mirror are the same as Estrela's! 

The box is a little worse for wear and the doll is looking a little partied out, but she's a fascinating little thing. 

 

 

 

The back of the box is IDENTICAL to the 81 Estrela boxes, these are Estrela dolls pictured. on the bottom row you can see the skater girl from the first image I shared. 

 

 All Plaggona have done here is erase the text under the photos and enlarge the logo. Which, incidentally, is ALSO the real Susi logo. 

 

  

Now, I looked up Plaggona but I couldn't find much. It looks like they made a fair few random clone dolls over the years but none appear as blatant as this one. 

And it's the use of the literal logo and box design I find especially unusual for a vintage clone doll. Usually clones skirted trademark or went with super generic. To use the exact same name, the box, the logo...and then to slap their own company logo on there so obviously...  it all makes me wonder if there was some sort of agreement here with Estrela or did Plaggona just assume that they'd never find out?  

Whatever the case, the box design leads me to believe that this doll is actually from the very early 80s rather than the 70s as the seller and I had assumed. 

 

 

poor girl really is looking worse for wear. 

 

According to the seller, she's been in their attic for several decades and was never actually removed from her box. She's dirty, her hair is a mess, her lashes are a mess and she's suffering some major discoloration on her arms.  

 

 

She's a very light weight doll made of a lot of rather random parts, all made of different plastics. She's a real frankendoll. 

 Her head is made from vinyl, it's very soft and squishy and a little more textured than a decent quality vinyl but it's good enough imo. 

 

The back of her head had a huge chunk of flash left over and she has very very thinly rooted hair. What hair she does have is pretty nice, it's soft and silky, but there's massive bald patches and the whole back of her head is missing any hair at all. It's also weirdly flat at the back of her head, I don't really understand this. 

 

 

 

she also has a big hole in the top of her head which makes me think the mold they used might have been from a hair play doll, it looks like the hole you'd have in a hair play/hair growing gimmick doll. 

 

 

Her torso is two parts and made from a hard textured plastic that's surprisingly tough. I'm accustomed to clones squishing very easily but despite being a hollow body, it's pretty decently made. 

 

her arms are very squishy vinyl and have turned white. One shoulder also has blue stains which is baffling as there's no blue anywhere in her outfit or her box. The arms pop off really easily because they're so squishy. They also seem a touch too short for her, if you put her in any clothes of this scale that have sleeves her hands disappear. 

 

her legs are the cheapest part, typical hollow blown plastic with very obvious seams. They stand out because the rest of the doll is fairly decently constructed, and then she has these really crap legs. it's weird. 

 

None of this body looks much like Estrela's body designs, certainly the tiny heeled feet feel very Barbie inspired. I suspect she's cobbled together from parts they had from other doll lines Plaggona made. 

 

 

Her eyes are... kinda wierd actually. They have really beautiful printed irises but the actual eye itself is strange and lumpy. One eye is scratched up, both have uneven clear plastic lenses that aren't symmetrical. I have no idea what they're made of, but the white part feels.. chalky almost and the back of the eyes were filled with what I can only assume was some sort of hot glue or similar. 

 

the lashes slot into a slit above each lens but they were so full of whatever adhesive they'd used that I had to carve them out again to replace the lashes. 

and it was a pain in the arse. 

 

 With her eyes out she really reminds me of Sindy. 

 

you can also see how terribly rooted her hair is. 

 

I took this oppertunity to repaint her faded lips (I opted for this soft pink) and blush her cheeks. The bright blue eyeshadow is all original and damn it's vivid. 

 

 

Her clothing also proved to be a bit of an oddity. See, instead of either just sewing her into her dress or adding poppers or velcro, the factory decided stabbing a pin into her body was the way to hold it together.

What the fuck were they doing? 

 

 

The dress itself, while garish as all hell, is pretty nicely made. It's a soft polyester material with shimmery foil frills. While the frills aren't hemmed (i'm not sure this fabric would look right if you did honestly), all the other edges are neatly finished. 

 

 It just bewilders me why they wouldn't just sew a popper or a little bit of velcro on this. It's so nearly finished, it's like they just gave up at the last step and couldn't be arsed. 

 

 

I did end up sewing a popper onto the dress but in the end I decided I preferred to go for a different outfit for her. 

 

 So she was given a good clean and her hair conditioned and combed. It tamed itself super easily and while there was some glue-like residue in parts of it, it all combed out nice. 

 

I repainted her lips and blushed her cheeks. I also replaced her lashes with some human strip lashes I had. I filled her eyes with pva glue to try to hold the lashes in place and then reinserted the eyes. This proved to be a pain in the absolute arse. One eye went in easy, the other one refused to. Now they refuse to sit even. 

One eye is sigificantly lumpier than the other, and maybe that wouldn't be so obvious if I could position it just right but it will not budge from this position so I give up. It'll do. 

 

I also gave her the tiniest touch up to her lashes and added in one upper lash to emulate actual Estrela Susi dolls and soften her gaze slightly. She's a VERY starey doll. 

 

I also found some replacement arms in my doll parts stash which matched her skin tone exactly and were a touch longer so more proportionate. They're a very similar shape to her original arms, so it works out well I think. 

 

 And finally I dressed her in this vintage blue kaftan thing and some clone boots. I liked how the blue brought out her eyes. 

 

 

 

I don't have an early Estrela Susi, only this 2000s girl but I thought it was interesting to take a picture of them together anyway. Plaggona Susi is significantly more wide eyed, she looks startled lol. 

 

 

I'll be honest, she's not really looking much like the dolls on her box. I wonder if wider lashes might help reduce that stare, but it was difficult enough getting these replicas of her original ones in, I don't want to deal with that again. 

 

 

I really enjoyed her box with the 3d card shelf element, but there were a lot of tears that needed to be repaired. 

 

I honestly have no idea what the gold thing is, it was stuck to the lid of the box when I opened it. It looks to just be a random scrap of gold fabric that's sewn into almost but not quite a bow? I don't know what it is. 

 

 She photographs a lot better without flash. Flash makes her eyes light up too much and then she looks deranged. 

 

At the wrong angle she looks a bit odd. 

But catch her at just the right spot and she's very very sweet. 

 

But I will say, she reads significantly more "Sindy" to my eye than Susi.  She makes me think of the sleep eye Sindy doll and her unsettling glassy stare lol. 

 

 All in all I find this girl fascinating and I would love to know how she came to be. If anyone has any info on Plaggona that would be awesome.