they say that in the depths of a gay toy apartment, there exists a small dragon, made of socks and full of...something....or other. his name is Dr. Mixup, and legend has it he and his twisted assistants are capable of bestowing incredible changes upon those who truly need them...


.... as long as they're okay with going under the knife.


A HOMEBREW DEVIANTS HOLIDAY SPECIAL

DR. MIXUP'S LABORATORY

BY MORTIS VELASQUEZ
ft. COMORANT and KNUX400


CONTENT WARNINGS
while mixup's laboratory is meant to be a fairly lighthearted affair, it delves hard into toy destruction (and somewhat slapstick descriptions of toy gore/surgery to match), discussion of toy origins and extrapolating that into character studies, and existentialism. also, knux's plush is based on a beastieball design (radillo) so if you do not want to be spoiled via a plush that does not hit the actual design of the beastie enough to be a true spoiler, keep that in mind. there may also be eyestrain-heavy images, and image descriptions will come later on, when i am less exhausted. enjoy!





ohhhh hello. it's halloween, isn't it? yes, i think so- i would know, because it's my special discount week, and the patients are lining up.

what's my business? i grant wishes. toys of all kinds come to me to have their dreams made true...even if they don't fully know what they want.  i'm good at figuring that out. haha.

yes, my methods of achieving this are often called extreme. those with faint hearts should look away from my dark machinations- but for those interested in a truly transformative experience, one where toys become their true selves...and get a history lesson in the process- you may want to take a seat and get comfortable. you're on my wild ride now.




my first patients of the week? why, Wally the Walrus and Carl Ripken Jr., of course. They came to me as a pair, having only been friends for a short while...but knowing that the two of them may be able to work together to fulfill their dream- with my help, of course.

you know i cant release all of the patients' information...but i like to do a little interviewing here and there. you'd be surprised at how much people are willing to share in the name of furthering SCIENCE. let me take you on a little journey.




carl ripken jr... well, i suppose that's a name familiar to some out there, maybe. he's a baseball player, a human one too. non-toy! what's this beanie baby doing walking around with a human name? well, you see, my fair reader, this man is not a beanie baby. he is a Salvino's Bamm Beano's plush, specifically the Carl Ripken Jr. plush from 1998.

from what i can tell, these are a MLB-related knockoff brand from the peak of beanie baby hype- and boy, did they sell, if the tripod site i found is to be believed. supposedly, this plush retailed for a whopping 25 dollars back then, and sold out near-instantly. that's almost 50 USD in today's economy! don't you love inflation?!




he looks near-identical to a beanie baby aside from his face, and a feature i'll note later. honestly, the longer snout makes him quite distinct! his tag doesn't feature a poem, instead featuring a fact about the real-world player. such a thing really has to give a guy a complex...and well, as you'll see, it did.

when he came to me, his tag was still encased in its plastic collector's protector, and utterly immaculate, not a scratch or stain to him. oh yes, dear reader, he was a shelf bear. no doubt about it. many of the toys that come to me truly cannot remember their lives before arriving at the gay toy apartment, but the two of us can only assume he belonged to a baseball superfan in the 90's, and arrived at the thrift store he was shipped out from due to either being a hand-me-down or possession found and donated. sad, but very likely.




as for wally the walrus- wow, it gave me some trouble to look this guy up. his tag says that he is a "charter club" plush, along with his name- and charter club wasn't turning up anything on wikipedia. with a little bit of sleuthing, i was able to find out that Charter Club is a brand associated with the Macy's department store- so once again, we find ourselves with a (shockingly authentic looking and feeling) beanie baby knockoff, likely from the height of the craze. don't believe me? look up the Paul the Walrus beanie baby. it's incredibly close, enough that i'm startled macy's didn't get sued. perhaps they were a bigger behemoth than TY, back in the day...

either way, i wasn't able to find an original price- and the singular one on ebay was listed for a whopping 25 USD at some point. granted, i don't think it ever actually sold...perhaps we will never truly know the fate of all of the Wally the Walruses out there. either way, old, the 90's likely for a production year, and similar to ripken- pretty dang good condition. no hang tag, but a collector is equally likely, if not someone who just took damn good care of their stuff.




now we get to their requests. our meeting was brief, but we talked shop about their truest desires...and if you couldn't guess, both of them had some capital-F Feelings about being knockoffs meant to cash in on the biggest toy craze of the decade. we get a lot of people in the same boat in my business, though these two had much more specific issues than you'd expect.

wally here was made to be a fascimile of a mainline brand, produced by a juggernaut of a department store and nearly exactly-replicating an existing pattern. while knock-offs are a storied tradition i still need to look more into to fully, entirely grasp the depth of...there's a sense of "i can do whatever i want with this, because i'm Macy's, and there's nothing you can do to stop me." for fuck's sake, these people run the stupid thanksgiving parade no one shuts up about. they've got their fingers in a lot of pies. while i'm pretty sure they've gone downhill in a lot of peoples' eyes...from a cursory glance, in the 90's? oh, yeah, no, i don't even know if TY, with all their punching weight, could have done anything. which...with our dear patient here today...leads him to wonder what more he truly could be than a power stance, a threat display to the fad to end all fads- that didn't even work in the end.

ripken was also equally a cash-in design, but in a whole other twisted way. celebrity and entertainment tie-in toys are nothing new- and boy, what a way to get an identity complex- but they're especially painful when they ride trends for the sole sake of "well, someone will pay us for this, right?"

if i remember anything about growing up in the 90's/2000's in this department, it was that there were a lot of people who were obsessed with baseball, and even from my limited, sheltered perspective- i had an elderly family friend who was fuuuucking obsessed with both that AND beanie babies. i wouldn't be surprised if that venn diagram was a lot more overlapping than you'd think. just think- those MLB fanatics were already all over baseball cards! what's to stop them from going ham over baseball bears? according to the tripod site i found...nothing at all. bamm beano's were crazy, even if you've likely never heard of them today. to say that ripken (bear edition) has an identity crisis, well, that'd be an understatement.

even with their exact wishes unknown...the two of them struck a bond over not having identities to call their own, thrust into a world without guidance, and further sheltered by existing on shelves for likely nearly three decades. whatever i could do, they wanted to be a new, distinct person... no matter what that entailed.

i asked if they had ANY further requests beyond that, and they stated that they wanted their minds to be together but separate- though they had long since deliberated and decided that ripken should bear their majority of the speaking power. an interesting choice- usually people go for all or nothing, especially when they haven't known each other for a long time. i get the feeling that wally wants to take a backseat...and ripken has ambitions. suppose it makes sense, in a way!




ripken was the first one under the knife. i decided that everything from his waist upwards would be preserved, allowing for a centaur...mermaid...thing-like body plan. ohhh, i've been wanting to do something like this for so long. seeing as both of them wanted to be prominent in their final form, using most of both bodies felt apt- and they were perfectly sized and structured for the job. his tag was removed, his seams were ripped, the works.




wally was next- a proper chunky bastard (his own words!) with a wrinkly body and surprisingly nice fabric. certainly the standard for beanbag plush at the time- but still, rather quality stuff, and such a fetching red color. TY never made any fantasy-colored walruses to my knowledge, and he is a lovely ketchup color. the vast majority of his body was to be preserved, with only his face removed- and his tusks kept. we couldn't deliberate on whether they'd be ideal tusks or horns for the final form...but they trusted me to make the right move.




extra materials were decided on as well...not every case requires this, but they're free with my halloween discount- or they would be, if i even charged money at all. isn't that great? in these two's case, we picked out fuzzy sock material that would be ideal for easing the transition between body sections, some orange ribbon meant to bring a sort of halloween-meets-nautical feeling to it all, and green embroidery floss that i would inevitably replace with orange. my vision was to stitch both parties together with a fuzzy torso blender, using the extra section to help make their new body more structurally sound, and give them that truly unique identity they both so craved. as mentioned, the ribbon was for thematics- and the embroidery floss was on hand in case a face felt right.

gutting the two of them was fairly straightforward, the seams ripping easily enough- but not too easily. it's clear that whoever made these did care about materials and construction, at least enough to make their manufacturing quality comparable to the OG beanie babies. interestingly enough, ripken's front panel included the inner legs, as well, with some gussets to provide shape- i haven't actually operated on an original beanie baby to know how legit this construction is in comparison, but my dear friend Scapula was made with a knockoff pattern that had the legs entirely separate. curious stuff! either way, ripken's polyester pellets were entirely loose, and boy, i'm glad i had a bag to capture all the guts. not a whole lot of stuffing in there, so that stuff went eeeeeverywhere.

wally on the other hand didn't need a whole lot of work. i considered leaving his body stuffed, but ended up gutting him regardless. into the bag with your organs, sir. more stuffing ratio than ripken, but still- lots of pellets spilling everywhere. while his seams ripped make him look rather...suspicious, i ended up just cutting off his whiskery face instead of bothering to rip it, because boy, under that kind of dense faux fur, good luck finding the seams easy. it was all going to be torso anyway.

the construction of the new body...well, it wasn't too bad. from conducting the initial interview to finishing the entire procedure, it was about 3 hours, give or take. longer than my other clients- but this case was going to be a large body, and the actual stitchwork was easy peasy. open and shut!

and, wow....the results!




presenting Shipwreck, a SPORTS TAUR after my own heart. just look at them! the two of them make for a lovingly bonded whole...they fit so well together, don't you think?

the extra segment allows for a lovely color transition, and also allowed me to make a perfect S-curve to their body- waaaay more stable structurally, and what a killer posture! the ribbon made for a nice "netting" vibe as planned...and the embroidery floss was properly utilized to make a happy smile, something that delighted the two of them to wake up to. ripken's back embroidery was maintained at his request- for reasons he said he'd rather keep to himself. i'm not one to pry!




all in all- what a START to my halloween event! i'll likely need some additional help for the next jobs...please feel free to leave any comments or questions about history, my process, the works.


you never know what else will come up, in a spooky season like this... :)