So I thought I had posted something like this already, but when I went back and looked, I realized I hadn't. This is just some background, how I discovered this franchise I've grown to love as well as what my first impressions were back when I didn't have any context. Looking back on it now, I find it funny how wrong I was about some things and yet how right I was about others 😂.

So if you live in America you may know that the UglyDolls movie hit theaters in May. May 3rd if I remember right, but I'm not quite sure of that and frankly I'm too lazy to type the question into Google 😂. Anywho, setting that aside, despite the movie apparently having spent over twice what it made in theaters on advertising (big oof 😅,) thinking back I don't remember seeing a single commercial for it. Maybe I was just watching the wrong channels on TV, but I was barely aware this movie existed. At one point towards the very end I think I might've seen the last few seconds of a commercial.. I somewhat remember seeing Moxy and Uglydog trying to disguise themselves as pretty dolls, and the actual pretty dolls acting disgusted. Followed by the logo for the movie. At the time I believe my thoughts went along the lines of, Super, yet ANOTHER Anvillicious cartoon that tries way too hard to hammer it's sociopolitical message and ends up being way too forced and stilted. Wonderful. /s And then whatever show I was watching at the time came on, and I forgot all about it. I never saw a commercial since then, and for a while UglyDolls just wasn't on my mind at all.

The next time I encountered UglyDolls was around the time when it was still showing in theaters. I was at Walmart at the time. I don't know if every Walmart does this, but in the one in my area there's this one specific aisle that sells merch for whatever is the hot movie at the time (Since Soul went straight to Disney+, I believe currently that aisle is filled with merch for the reboot of Blues Clues). Anyway, the end of that aisle had three really big displays of the UglyDolls plushies: two smaller ones of the keychains and of the artist series dolls, and the biggest one had both the Sincerely, Uglydolls models and the Feature Sounds models. (Looking back, why oh why didn't my past self snap them up while they were cheap??? 😭)

There was a lot of merch there, almost enough to fill the aisle, and they were certainly hyping up this movie quite a bit. But the display was... not exactly ideal for people who didn't already know about the line of dolls from the early 2000s. It was just the movie poster (the one that became the cover of the DVD case), a large cardboard version of the movie logo, and the three displays. That was it. There was no indication of the character's personalities or roles (other than what could be deduced from the poster, which to be fair wasn't nothing, but also wasn't a lot), I didn't even see their names written anywhere.

I decided to check out the display despite having forgotten about the movie because I was (and still am) interested in the "cute little monster" sort of aesthetic. I have a book called "Make Your Own Stupid Sock Creatures". I love Fugglers and Furbies. 

(Nothing to do with the actual story, but LOOK AT THESE LONG FURBIES I FOUND!!! I DIDN'T EVEN KNOW THESE EXISTED BEFORE, NOW I WANT THE RAINBOW ONE!!! ✪ ω ✪)

And while I'm already off the subject anyway, here's the book:

(Okay now back on topic 😂)

These uglydoll things, whatever they were, seemed right up my alley. I picked up each one from the main display and played around with it a little bit: tossed them to test their weight (some had beans and some didn't, to this day I'm still not sure why), stroked the soft fuzziness that the new models all sport now, inspected their designs to see which was my favorite, and tried to peek inside their tags, but they were sadly sealed shut tight. A quick note that the wave 2 dolls hadn't been released yet, so I the display didn't have Tray, Wedgehead, or Ice Bat. The Feature Sounds version of Uglydog was there but not the Sincerely, Uglydolls version.

I was torn between all of them, I really only had the money to buy one, but I couldn't decide, I could've walked away with any of them and been happy... except Moxy (don't hate me, Moxy fans, now that I've seen the movie I love Moxy, I swear! 😂🤣🤣). Like I said, the display said next to nothing about the characters themselves. I had no idea that Wage was also a girl (which I definitely would have found cool) or even that Moxy was meant to be the star of the movie! To me it looked like Moxy was the Pink Power Ranger of the cast. A cast full of boys and then the execs throw in a girl at the last minute because apparently girls can't relate to boy characters?? Or something??? But yeah, generally in those sorts of scenarios the female add-on has very little personality and is just there to sell toys. I also chafe under the idea that a woman has no choice but to relate to woman characters, so I was going to buy one of the boys purely out of spite. I now know better having seen the movie and researched the original dolls, in fact the line of toys from Horvath and Kim break a lot of gender stereotypes. But from the point of view of somebody who knew nothing, that was my impression.

Ultimately, if I had bought one, it probably would have been Babo. I loved his design because I had no idea what he was meant to be. Other dolls somewhat resembled rabbits or cats or bears, but he was just.. Just this blob and I freaking loved it! I was going back and forth between him and Uglydog, who I felt somewhat obligated to buy because at the time I thought he was a cat. So who did I actually end up getting? ✨✨NOBODY!! (✿ﾟ▽ﾟ)ノ✨✨ (WHY, PAST SELF, WHYYY-- 😭😭😭) Actually, that is an apt question: why? When my heart was set on having an adorable monster, when I had already fallen in love with the somewhat (forgive me for this 😂)"meth PSA" look of the artist series dolls, when I had decided prematurely that either Babo or Uglydog was my favorite? Well, I'll tell you why. As I said, the display had the UglyDolls movie poster. To make a long story short, I saw Lou. It's a little sad, I didn't even SEE the commercial with him or anything, I fell in love with him from seeing a static picture that didn't even move or anything 🤣🤣🤣. The poster doesn't convey much in terms of character, but I immediately could guess who Lou would be (a prediction which, unlike Moxy, turned out to be correct). It's like I just looked at the poster and said, "Yeah, I know who my favorite character's gonna be.. (¬‿¬)" So I put my Babo and my Uglydog back on the shelf. Basically I was like, "Yeah these ugly thinks are great, but I'm gonna hold out for a doll of that bratty blonde kid!" (At the time I still thought all of the characters were going to be little kids). ARE YOU LISTENING, HASBRO??? I'M STILL WAITING FOR THAT DOLL, HASBRO!!! ಠ_ಠ And so I went on with my shopping, and my second experience with UglyDolls ended. I vowed that somehow, some way I would see the movie, but I didn't have the money for theater tickets and over time, it slowly faded to the back of my mind. By the time the DVD was released, I was focused on other things (mainly that there was a sequel to one of my other favorite movies, Wreck-It Ralph, in the offing).

Fast-forward one ENTIRE YEAR later. We were in the middle of the first wave of corona, I was bored out of my skull, and my 22nd birthday was right around the corner. My family was begging me for ideas of what I wanted for my birthday (I'm the sort of person who has stuff in mind specifically for that purpose, but as soon as someone asks me it's like my mind is a total blank 🤣 Not to mention my nasty habit of just buying the things I want if I have enough money for them 😂🤣🤣). We had a little bit of spare internet left over, so I thought I'd look up some movies I'd had my eye on. The movie UglyDolls popped into my head. There was only one thing: between the Walmart dolls experience and this point in time, I had FINALLY seen an ad for the movie on my little brother's Grinch DVD. But the ad's opening lines were, "We welcome you to a magical place..." Now, I'm not really into supernatural stuff for various reasons (with a few noted exceptions, but those are exceptions, not the rule). So before I actually asked for it I wanted to do a little research first. I wasn't really caring about spoilers, so I called up the UglyDolls: Western Animation page on TV Tropes, which I am addicted to. I quickly discerned that the "magical world" line had nothing much to do with the plot. The more I skimmed the page, the more interested I got. In fact, one thing caught my eye in particular: Lou. The character I had already had a hunch would be my favorite. It turned out that he was not a bratty but humorous kid in the same vein as Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes or Wolfram from Kyo Kara Mao!. He was a mature, calculating villain with reasons that were actually somewhat legitimate. Not that his reasons excused what he did, but it was SUCH a refreshing change from the trend of 2-dimensional villains who were like "BWAHAHAHAHA, I'm a prejudiced prick, because I'm evil! There's no other reason, evil is my entire personality, AHAHAHAHAHAaa-- *chokes* *gags*" Plus it was an element of inanimate objects interacting with humans that I hadn't given much thought to. I had thought that between The Brave Little Toaster and the Toy Story saga, all of the elements had been exhausted, but I'd never spared a thought to what happened to the prototypes.

I realized that even though my birthday was only a few weeks away, I didn't even want to wait that long. I really wanted to hear what Nick Jonas sounded like when he delivered that Wham Line: "Don't you get it?! Of course I failed! I'll always fail! I'm a PROTOTYPE!!" I was able to find a YouTube video of the whole movie on YouTube but with subtitles (I think it may have been taken down since then). At the time, I had even less internet than I have now, and mp3 files used a lot less data than mp4 did. So I actually listened to the movie before I ever saw it. I converted it to mp3 and just acted out what I thought it would look like in my head, using what I already knew the characters looked like. Long story short, I loved the music, and I LOVED the movie, even if I had some problems with it.

The ending is what disappointed me the most, the way that the dolls all pretty much kicked Lou to the side in a movie that as I understood it was supposed to be about love and acceptance. I searched up whether there was meant to be a sequel, and one of the results that came up as I was casually searching from link to link was "Uglydolls Lou Fanfiction". I used to be very into fanfiction but had more or less sworn it off after high school, thinking I was "too old" and that enjoying it meant I was immature. But I thought, "Why not? What's the harm?" and opened up a book in Wattpad by Sharaug called Uglydolls Cult. And... I pretty much fell down the fandom rabbit hole. 😂😂😂The rest is pretty much history. I now own the movie on disk, I collect retro plushies, and anyone of the opinion that fanfiction is exclusively for teenagers can feel free to exit, stage left.😂🤣🤣