Uncanny Valley/Toys

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Examples of Uncanny Valley/Toys include:

• The Big Comfy Couch generally averts this, as even though the main characters are clowns, the make-up used was minimal that it was easy to tell that they're humans playing the role. And then, there's this Loonette doll. With a voice chip inside. Sleep tight, kids!
• These Reborn Baby dolls from MacPherson crafts. The photos alone are fine, because they just look like photos of babies. Having such a doll around would be like having a real baby that never moves at all, which is just horrific.
• Baby Born ^{[dead link]} dolls are deep in the Valley, with their empty staring eyes and their faces forever frozen in an unnatural pout... brrr.
• Resusci Annie. Don't even get us started on the baby versions of that doll. It helps that the mold for her face was based on L'Inconnue de la Seine, the death mask of an unidentified young woman who drowned in the Seine River around the late 1880s. And don't even get close to the neonate one. Augh!
• Baby Alive.
• Almost any realistic doll based on a baby, really. This is likely because babies are such twitchy expressive energy pods that seeing one of these inactive homonculi triggers some deep instinct to save the life of a baby that suddenly ceased moving. Or maybe they just really are that creepy (the fact they're often the first things demons possess in literature certainly doesn't help).
• China dolls. Oh god, china dolls... *shudders*
• Any doll that has eyes weighted so they open and close, especially the ones that suddenly pop open at the last second after picking them up.
• Has anyone heard of the My Twinn dolls? Parents send pictures of their children with hair samples to get a doll that is designed to look like the kid.
  • Apparently, some author did hear of these dolls. He published a book of short stories, with one of these stories being that the doll was treated like another daughter. This freaked out the original daughter a lot, but the parents didn't notice that IT'S STILL JUST A DOLL.
• Asian ball joint dolls. Ye gods, they can be spooky-looking -- especially if you weren't expecting one. In particular, the Johnny Depp minimee -- which resembles Johnny Depp, yes, but in a disturbingly static way. Just slightly out of proportion -- and did we mention it's on about one third the scale?
  • For those who've never seen one before this site is one of the biggest suppliers. And if you think that's creepy then you haven't seen Pullip dolls, which are like regular BJDs, but Super-Deformed. (They can also be made to look like Anime characters.)
    • That site even has 'Come see what's growing in the Valley' on it. /shudder
  • BJDs are certainly an area where Your Mileage May Vary on how creepy you find them. While some find them creepy, others find them cute; and most seem to skirt the edges of the valley. Not so for the apparently defunct Paper Moon Dolls; whose sole business was creating life-sized BJDs. Again, creepiness factor varies for most of them; but they did a line of Japanese anime-style dolls which slide rapidly down into the valley. Something that looks cute and attractive in 2d seems to really ratchet up the creepy factor when expanded into the third dimension.
• McFarlane Toys tend to do this with their action figures and so do Neca.
• Baby Laugh A-Lot. Just...Baby Laugh A-Lot. * shudder*
• This doll. Not scared yet? HERE'S A CLOSE-UP OF ITS FACE.
  • AAAAAAAHHHH DON'T CLICK IT.
• The Barbie Island Princess Rosella Karaoke Styling Head is kind of in the Valley as-is. When someone turns it into a Skele-Bot 9000, it may or may not have exited the Valley for you, but good lord preserve us anyway.
• Hot Toys, a Hong Kong-based company specialising in 12 inch collectible action figures, have become famous for the astounding likenesses they produce. Since they mostly make figures licensed from films, actors such as Brad Pitt, Mickey Rourke, Scarlett Johannson and Arnold Schwarzenneger have become immortalised as Hot Toys figures. Their most creepy products are arguably those of the Joker, as played by Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight. check it out and tell me you're not even mildly disturbed. A big part of this is the "Parallel Eyeball Rolling System", which allows the figures eyeballs to move. Brr. Most of the time however, Hot Toys' work is more awesome than creepy.
• Perfect Petzzz Sure they look cute, but then you realize that your cute puppy/kitten will never wake up....
• How about a piggy bank...with a face
• Teddy Ruxpin is notorious for this.
• A company in Japan makes custom dolls and action figures with an exact replica of your head/face on it. Looks like something from straight out of a horror anime.