Throwback Thursday review: Ideal Little Honeymoon

Today the Moon Girl has a moon baby...or a fever dream, take your pick.  Tam spoke of this poppet back in March, and I thought she was both strange and adorable.  Her name is Little Honeymoon, and like many of my favorite dolls, she's Ideal.

She is real, she is real, and for you she is Ideal...hold up, that's Mr. Machine!  Daddy liked Mr. Machine!  LOL, back on topic, some of y'all may be shaking your heads and asking "Why does the Moon Girl do this???  Why does she copy other bloggers?"  Well...that answer varies.  In the case of Little Honeymoon, there's not a lot of information online about her, at least as a doll.  Indeed, I didn't know about her existence until Tam made her doll of the day, and when I went digging online I only found pictures from eBay and Etsy, and very little information.  Indeed, googling the query "Honeymoon baby doll" got more pictures of lingerie than of my dolly, and adding "Ideal" didn't help much.  Doll Reference has a brief entry about Little Honeymoon, but the information was all stuff I knew already.

Luckily for me (and subsequently all y'all) Tam knows what's up about this poppet, so I'm paraphrasing her info.  Honeymoon's full name is Honeymoon Tracy, and she is...y'all ready for this???  She's Dick Tracy's granddaughter.  That's right, Dick Tracy.  THE Dick Tracy, the detective in those comic books from back in the day.  Honeymoon is his granddaughter, the progeny of Dick's adopted son and an extraterrestrial named Moon Maid, and...and it gets complicated after that.  This little doll is a fever dream, bar none, but she is a very cute one.  I often call Luciana my star baby after the Guess Who song, and now it looks like she's got a real star baby to be her friend.

So stinkin' cute!  That'll give y'all an idea about Honeymoon's size.  She's a nice sized doll, about fifteen inches like my Bitty Baby, Kiara.  I also threw in the Lickety Treats doll, Emily, for size reference.

Size is about all these three have in common, though.  Their coloring, scale, construction, faces, and hair are all different...well, maybe their construction isn't THAT different, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.  Hair, on the other hand...Honeymoon's hair is VERY different from Kiara's and from Imani's.  We all know that yarn hair isn't unheard-of on dolls; indeed, I've got quite a few with yarn hair, including two with hard heads (Valencia Rose and Sister Belle are shown)...

...dang, is that the only decent picture I have of Val???  I took that picture in 2018 and I reused it not a month ago!  Time to dig up my Cabbies and have a little fun with them, I s'pose.  Anywho, most of my yarn-haired dolls are either rag dolls or have hard heads like Val and Sister Belle do.  Honeymoon has a vinyl head, but she still has yarn hair.  Her packaging called it "moon hair."

LOL, when I was very small I called my moonlit skin "moon skin."  Anyway, when she was new Honeymoon wore a little space helmet, but my little doll is sadly missing that accessory.  I think that helmet must've protected this doll's hair somewhat, and since my doll doesn't have hers her hair is a little out of sorts.  Just a little, mind y'all, and I was able to slap it into shape with my beloved dog brush.  The yarn is thankfully rooted very firmly to Honeymoon's head (Sister Belle's appears to be glued), but since this is yarn hair the rooting is pretty sparse.

According to the comics Moon residents have large eyes and...either antennae or horns on their foreheads.  Since she is half-Lunarian Honeymoon has tufts of hair that stick up from her forehead, but no one knows if there are horns or antennae under the hair.  Either way my girl has these.

The style is achieved by fastening two bits of hair with rubber bands, encasing the hair with plastic tubing, and then attaching a second rubber band above the tubing, like so.  In this case Honeymoon's left tuft has its rubber bands, but they've aged like rubber bands inevitably will.

The rubber bands on the right tuft have crumbled and broken away, and the tubing has split.  I was able to replace the rubber bands, but I'll probably have to resort to scotch tape to hold the tubing shut.

Honeymoon has short little bangs, and because they're both short and pretty dense, they can have a mind of their own.  More often than not they either stick out like the new Barbie's bangs do...

...or they stand straight up, like so!

Indeed, ALL of Honeymoon's hair has a mind of its own!  As I said above it's easy to corral the hair once it's gotten out of control, but keeping it IN control is another story entirely.  It's definitely unique hair, not something I would've picked for a doll from the moon, but...well, I guess a unique doll needs unique hair!

In a similar vein, a unique doll might also have a unique face.  I love Honeymoon's expression!

In addition to a sizeable fivehead Honeymoon has two-toned side-glancing eyes with three black lashes apiece, and with green and white eyebrows that slant downwards.  Her eyeliner is a smidge uneven, being heavier on the left eye than the right one.   She's also got some teeny little dings on her forehead that look suspiciously like the marks that cat claws make.  

Each eye has two white dots painted in to serve as light clusters.  The application was a little shaky here, especially in the right eye.

When viewed from the front Honeymoon looks a bit walleyed, but it's possible to get her to look at me.  She's a little ham!

Honeymoon's eyebrows could be considered the snarky type, but luckily she's smiling and thus looks saucy rather than snarky.

Look at those cheeks, LOL!  Those are apple cheeks if I ever saw 'em!  Since Honeymoon has a lot of contours on her face she's acquired some sand, but since when do my dolls NOT have sand on them somewhere???  Sand notwithstanding, these cheeks are colored a lot like those of high-color Little Miss Revlon dolls.  I can remember calling those "clownish," but since Honeymoon is kinda a clown anyway I'll let it go.  Her mouth is colored with the same paint, but it looks like it might've bled a little bit onto her upper lip area.  That's not terribly noticeable from a regular distance, but I thought I'd point it out.

I think Honeymoon's face looks weird when divided up, so here's a full headshot again.

Much better.  I love this doll's spunk!  But if I'm gonna be perfectly honest, I wish Ideal had taken a lighter hand on the blush.  True, rosy cheeks aren't as goofy-looking on a baby doll as they are on a fashion doll, but still this is a bit much.  Otherwise the face is fine.

Now...like Emily and plenty of my other baby dolls, Honeymoon has a cloth body.  Once upon a time she was stuffed nice and thick, but notice now that she's mostly flat.
<show her front and back>
Apparently at one time Honeymoon was full of sponge rubber, better known in my family as "foam."  I used to like to play with that stuff when I was little, but I digress.  Honeymoon's foam has apparently disintegrated over the years, and because of that she can't really sit or do anything.  She's capable of lounging, and that's about it.  Here she is hanging out at my workstation, on top of my mail for the day (the specific day was July 14th).  Indeed, most of the pictures I've taken of Honeymoon show her lounging at my workstation, during days when work was very, veeeeerrry sloooooooow.

This particular picture took a little bamboozling and exactly one muttered swear word, but I did get Honeymoon to sit up and look semi-believable.  Forgive Rita Cheryl for photobombing, and kindly ignore the photo subject for December 21st.

Awww heck, who am I kiddin'?  Let's let Baby Won't Let Go have a cameo, along with Rita Cheryl and Katherine Alyce.  I know Honeymoon won't mind.

I told y'all Honeymoon was a ham!  Rita Cheryl and Katherine both look exhausted in that picture, Baby Won't Let Go looks generically happy, and saucy little Honeymoon steals the shot even though she's off to the side.  Nevertheless, it's a pain in the posterior not being able to sit Honeymoon up, so I need to take a closer look and see if I can dismantle her without calling in a professional.  If I can get her head off...

...le sigh, I see no cable tie.  Some of my other older dolls have something like that holding on their head, meaning that if I have a new tie on hand I can take their head off for repairs.  But then again, there is this funny-looking tab hanging out of her neck.  It's the same color as her body, so it has to have been intentionally put there.

I lifted the tab and found a twisted wire underneath.

This suggests to me that Honeymoon's head attaches the same way Anita's does, and that a head removal may be tricky but still possible.  That in turn means that I can at least take a stab at restuffing her.

Honeymoon may be flat for now, but her body is the same shape as always.

Cloth torso, vinyl three-quarters arms and legs.  Here's what her little arms look like; the molds are not mirror images of each other.

No joints anywhere, unless you count the floppy fabric at her shoulders.  She's got chubby little baby hands, complete with dimpled little knuckles and well-defined nails.

Her palms don't have a ton of detail, but they do have some nice creases that Emily didn't have on her palms.

In the comics Baby Honeymoon had magnetic hands that could pick up metal stuff like...well, like a magnet!  This aspect was later written out, and the doll herself doesn't have magnets in her hands.  That's kinda a shame, but then again magnets are metal, and metal corrodes as time passes.  If Honeymoon had had magnets in her hands, her hands might very well be black, brown, or green now.  Still, it was a cute idea.

Honeymoon's legs are very much the same; that is, jointed at the hips and nowhere else.  She's got a few far rolls molded in on her upper legs, which is more than the arms have.

Her little feet are molded like her hands, with five separate toes and well-defined nails with cuticles.

The bottoms of Honeymoon's feet are flat.  Unlike the palms of her hands, her soles have next to no molding, except for the demarcations where her toes are.

I talked about magnets staining Honeymoon's hands, and lookie here!  This isn't from a magnet, but Honeymoon does have a stain on the back of one of her thighs.  I have no idea where this came from; her clothes are green, but no other part of her body has stains.

I don't really feel like I can give a fair assessment of this body since the cloth part is no longer stuffed.  Oh sure, the cloth itself is holding up just fine, but the foam rubber inside is for all intents and purposes nonexistent.  The eBay seller warned that the doll was like this, so I knew what I was getting into, but it's still kinda a bummer.  I wonder if other Honeymoon dolls have deflated like this over time?  I haven't met any other collectors who have her, so I can't really say.  Now the vinyl parts are fine except for a few stains here and there.  No one chewed on Honeymoon's fingers or poked her arms with something sharp.  Aside from that one stain her vinyl seems to be pretty robust.  

Now...remember how Honeymoon's eyes are green?  So is her outfit...for the most part, anyway.  Honeymoon is supposed to be half-moon being, and her clothes do indeed have a vaguely spacey flair to them.

Shucks, I wish I had her helmet!  Anyway, Honeymoon's getup looks like a dress with little bloomers built in, but it's actually a bit more complicated than that.  There IS a dress part, and it's pretty elaborate.  It's also made of my favorite colors, green and blue.

The main focal point is this silver foil collar.  This is stiff and stands up...when it wants to.  Note the silver ric-rac around the edge of the collar, and the neckline of the dress (I love ric-rac).

The collar is embellished on the chest with a silver and blue star, which I really like.  I love stars.

Unfortunately this part of the outfit isn't the most robust...either that or some little brat was hard on their things.  Part of Honeymoon's collar has torn loose from her dress.  I'll have to jerry-rig that so it doesn't get worse.

The sleeves are hard to see under that collar, but they're short and gathered, and the elastic still has a bit of stretch to it.  The seams here are zig-zagged and look nice.

There's not much to say about the skirt, other than it's hemmed nicely and is trimmed with more ric-rac.

Now...remember how I said that this looked like a dress and bloomers?  Well, it is and it isn't.  Honeymoon is wearing a pinafore-style dress over a bodysuit.

The bottom half of the bodysuit is the same striped material that makes up the dress.  This fabric is quite robust except for a few loose ends along the hems.  The top half, on the other hand, is made of this thin white stuff that has not aged well.  It's stained in places, and the armholes and neckline are not hemmed.

The bloomer bottoms have gathered legs, and again the elastic still has some stretch.

Yucko, why couldn't Ideal have just done a dress and bloomers?  That white top is neither necessary nor well-executed.

At least Honeymoon's shoes are well-executed, at least from what I can tell.  They're made of that striped fabric, reinforced foil, and ric-rac.

Not much to say, really.  They look good inside and out, and they stay on well due to elastic bands concealed inside the shoes.

Not a bad outfit overall.  It's got your usual signs of wear like loose snaps and a few loose ends, and I'll have to fix that tear in the collar somehow.  Except for the top half of that bodysuit it's a nicely made outfit.

I don't want to play Dolly Dress Shuffle while Honeymoon's body is deflated, so I'll wrap it up.

BAD
*The main bad thing I can think of is that Honeymoon's body has deflated.  This is age-related.
*Hair is hard to handle.  I can get it to look nice, but it prefers to look...well, not nice.
*Parts of my doll's outfit are in rough shape (snaps are loose and the collar is torn), and the top part of the bodysuit is poor quality in general.
*Face paint is a little heavy in places.  I'm just nitpicking there, but I thought I'd add it anyway.
*Again nitpicking, but did very many children got the connection between Dick Tracy and Little Honeymoon?  My mom did, but she's a little faster on the uptake on some things.

GOOD
*I love this concept.  I don't know how many children got the connection between comic book character and doll, but I still love the idea.
*I also love this doll's face.  It's got oodles of personality.
*Hair isn't impossible to care for, like saran doll hair can be.
*HER SHOES STAY ON!!!  I hate it when doll shoes don't stay on.
*Might be able to wear other baby dolls' clothes, but I'm not 100% sure.

I told y'all this doll was a fever dream!  I reiterate my point above that not many kids may have gotten the idea, but Honeymoon is still a cute little doll.  She doesn't age well, apparently; I've found plenty of her sisters online that slouch a little or a lot, and my particular doll has a few tatters in her clothes.  But...well, I love her.  I love her face and I love the idea behind her...if y'all like baby dolls this one might be a good find.  Just remind me to come back in the future and discuss clothes!  Once I restuff Honeymoon I WILL try some Bitty Baby clothes on her.  Oh, it would be awesome if the two could share!  I'll fix her and get back to y'all on that...someday.

Love and shooting stars,
RagingMoon1987