Craving Older Cerberus Project scuplts, Looking for Info/Discussion.

@Lulu Omigosh yes! I remember Trys! Shiwoo just celebrated his 10th birthday with me as well! I do think we got them around the same time, from Luts.

I'm so frustrated FL got rid of the B-line body as an a la carte option. They now call the old A-line non-muscular body the B-line instead. XP It really seems like they're trying to get rid of their old style all together.

I wish there was a list of the different sculptors who are part of CP. I want to know if the artist(s) who created the original Delf line are even still with CP, or if it's new members of the circle doing the sculpting these days. Cause CP is also credited to have sculpted Kid Delfs Woori and Ttori, though those two look more like the other kid delfs of their time and less like the Delf line.

 

Oh, this thread is bringing back some serious feels. TnT I would *love* to see the old CP/Luts sculpts back, because there are a few of the girls I loved and didn't get, and the old Type 1 Mature and Girl bodies are some of my all-time favorites, even with some of their posing quirks. (Kicky legs of dooooooooooooom!) At any rate, you will have to pry my Lishe out of my cold, dead hands.

We've got a lot of the old CP/Luts sculpts in our family, and there is definitely a certain something there that seems lacking in the newer FL sculpts, even the MNF ones. (I have a Ruth, but man, I couldn't stand that A-Line body.) They have an expressiveness that the newer sculpts just don't have, and a versatility.

@Wolfie Pie -- Doesn't Luts lore hold that Rainman of Elfdoll was the original sculptor of Ttori? And that was part of the reason that Ttori wasn't included in the CP/Luts/Fairyland debacle? My ancient and creaky memory might be playing tricks on me, so if someone remembers more accurately, please do correct!!

 

Ah, the question of the CP/Delfs.... I hate to say it, but I doubt we'll ever see some of those sculpts again. The only full-sized dolls that Fairyland is interested in producing these days are pouty little bow-legged Moe girls. They just don't *do* boys anymore, and the non-Moe F60s of either gender seem to have gone the way of the earlier F70 line.

I still have my old CP/Delf crew after all these years, and would have loved to add an F60 Karsh and a Normal skinned replacement for my long-sold-on white resin F70 Vampire Moon head to the collection... But no dice.

So, I moved on. CP used to be a favorite of mine, but these days I pretty much find myself shrugging and saying "Nope. Still not into duck-faced frilly-puffs." There are more interesting fish in the sea.

 

@Osaka Oooh was it Rainman from Elfdoll who made Ttori? I remember looking into who sculpted what for the deviant art group I helped run (CP Haven) and I was told Woori and Ttori were the only (old) Kid Delfs that were sculpted by CP. I just went on Luts' site to double check and ohohoho what is this???

Kid Delf WOORI- Designed, sculpted by LUTS ORIGINAL CREATORS TEAM.

Who's telling the truth now???

So I scrolled all the way to the bottom and BAM!

Model Designed by: Kang Ryong (C.P)
Sculpted by: Cerberus Project TM.

However, Ttori doesn't have that little text at the bottom of his page. Just the designed and sculpted by Luts. Hmmmmmm...


Anyways... back to the plain Delfs.

@Brightfires you just hit the nail on the head with your description of current CP/FL! The agape mouths and overly curved legs are just so strange. They really have boycotted all boys. Heh heh that's kind of a pun. P:

But also, I hadn't noticed before cause I don't browse Luts too often, the Delf line is currently active? There's a type 4 body that actually looks similar to the original? It only has a waist joint, but double jointed elbows and knees. And there are the El grabby hands on the boy body as well.

 

Luts Delfs are petty much on slightly reworked old bodies, but have in-house Luts head-sculpts with s-hooks rather than CP heads with connector pieces. The resin colors are also different. They match the colors of the other Luts lines rather than CP's.

 

@Brightfires Ah, so they kept the old body and are just using it for their new head sculpts and resin colors. Makes sense.

 

@Wolfie Pie I remember Shiwoo too! Nice to know some of them stayed with their original owners, isn't it?!

I must admit, I didn't know FL had actually discontinued the B line altogether, that...is just sad. They're so desperate to eradicate any hint of their past sculpts, you do have to wonder what happened there, but I doubt we'll ever find out the truth.

Luts are indeed still selling what they CALL a Delf, but having played with one, it's not a Delf as we know it, let's put it that way. They're MUCH lighter and as Brightfires says, the resin is no longer that lovely CP standard colour range, it's realskin, which, on the one hand, does mean TAN, but...yeah.

I'm still holding out hope for the re-do of the original resin and heads and I have to say, I'd prefer Luts to do it purely because FL genuinely seems incapable of coping with their own business. Honestly, I'm kinda surprised they've lasted this long given their lax as hell quality control, weird design strategy that ignores their past and this incessant new release scheme they have going on.

As for the sculptors, I was under the impression that all of them went to FL after the split, but that does seem to have been disproven since, because there's a lot of very DELF-Y looking companies popping up here and there now that I assume have some connection in there.

I dunno, sometimes I wonder if maybe a decade in, I just hit the point where my tastes are very firmly set in nostalgia, but then...I go and pick someone up from the doll cabinet and fall in love all over again with CP's old sculpts. Is ten years too short a time period to call it a 'classic'?! Maybe we just need to make enough noise to cause a resurgence in them again! Remember the El Army?! God knows there were enough of them out there to have been a LOT of people's first dolls, it cannot just be us that still owns these beauties, yet you never see them in pictures, or even spoken about. Seems to me like they're overdue a bit of love from the community again!

 

This is something I've noticed as well, and it goes right in line with Dream of Doll folding just recently without so much as a peep. I like Iple boys too (and own and adore an SID Claude), but I also miss the older styles, and I totally get what @Lulu said about hoarding them like gold, because it's what I do with Angelregion minis. Or any old mold I see come up in the MP that I ever wanted, because I don't know when I'll see it again.

We've only got one old-school LUTS/CP boy, our elf Yder, and I always wanted to get him an El for a friend. I wasn't worried about finding one. Back then, it seemed like they'd be popping out Els and Lishes until the end of days; everybody had one and wanted two. Now, nothing.

(edit: here he is. Everybody post some pictures of your vintage CP dolls too? Even old pics. I miss seeing those pretty faces around. )

 

I always felt like old CP/Luts were some of the prettiest dreaming dolls around--they managed to not look half-asleep, but merely thoughtful or even sly. My dreaming Lishe is still the prettiest girl I own, hands down. (No offense to my Souldoll and Dollmore and Volks girls!) She was eye-modded slightly before I got her, and I evened them out a bit. I still want an open-eyed Lishe, even with the Pinky Swear of Doom hand.



Gosh, I love the way that resin mellows.

 

While some of us definitely do still love the "old school", I think we need to be realistic about the way the hobby as a whole has changed since the Old Days...

There are an awful lot of newer BJD fans and collectors now who came into the doll-thing specifically looking for either hyper-realistic "masculine men" (Which our older, anime bishonen-style guys definitely ARE NOT great examples of-), quirky art dolls or girls representing a few very specific types of cute/pouty femininity. Old School stylized anime sculpts aren't the current New Hotness. They're just not what most of the community seems to be interested in anymore.

Keeping in mind that doll companies are businesses, if they want to turn a profit (Which is, after all, what a business exists to do-) they have to pay attention to those collecting trends and what the community as a whole is looking for. Sticking to their proverbial stylistic guns and only making what was popular ten years ago isn't going to keep a company solvent. There aren't enough Old School fanciers to support them. It only makes sense for companies to cater to current desires, rather we're talking about going all-in on hyper-realism, or on DC-style eccentricity or taking Fairyland's track of all-girly-girls-all-the-time.

I suspect a few of the Old School lines will survive. Luts seems to be doing reasonably well with their own sculpts. Crobi is still out there as far as I know, and Volks is apparently eternal... But the hobby as a whole just doesn't have that focus anymore. Times and tastes have changed, and new doll offerings have changed with them.

 

I kind of wonder if the Fairyland/Cerberus Project artists themselves have changed their tastes too, and that is why they do not care to revisit their older works even if there is demand?

It sounds a bit silly and impetuous from a business perspective, but I can kind of understand it from an artist's perspective that they might feel their new work is improved over the old work and therefore they do not want to allow the old work the spotlight any more.

I kind of want an El... except I also want Fairyland to 3D scan him and shrink his giant melon head just a tad. Probably never happening, but hey.

 

Alright, so maybe it's unrealistic to imagine for a moment that anyone but a select group of collectors from back in the day actually give a toss about the older sculpts, but hey, those of us that do clearly have a deep seated love for them! Never know, maybe seeing threads like this will catch the attention of some newer collectors and the old CP stuff can find a few new fans along the way.

What can I say, I live in eternal hope that one day, this hobby can be saved from the pit it's fallen into!

 

o_0

As fond as I am of the older sculpts myself, I'd hardly call the current direction a "pit". That's unfair to the collectors who prefer those styles. To each their own and all that.

 

I was actually referring to the charming state of confession blogs and the general lack of community, what other people collect is up to them and as I already stated, I love the realism stuff too, just not to own.

 

I don't feel like the classic bjd style will never come back into fashion. I mean, honestly I don't even think it has gone away, at least on the other side of the Pacific it seems that the classic asian bjd style absolutely dominates. And overall, Volks and Fairyland and Switch and Soom remain hot while lots of relatively new companies like Foveo, Kanadoll, Miyadoll, and so on carry on in this style. I noticed Peaks Woods seems to have gradually gotten a lot more popular of late - and that's with all these very much big-eyed big-headed sculpts, so that look is still a moneymaker.

Even as the proportions have evolved, smaller head, not quite such huge eyes usually, still something like a Switch Waseon is not a realistic sculpt - while, of course, it is fairly removed from say CP Chiwoo, it's still solidly seated in that particular corner of the aesthetic range in my opinion.

I think it's more that the range of bjds has exploded in a multitude of different directions. So while Volks and old Delfs once dominated and defined the mainstream look of bjds, now it's like those classic asian doll-like bjds still have one piece of the pie, but the other slices go to realism and to western artdoll aesthetic and to pure anime aesthetic. And because there is more competition, more companies and more style variations, some dolls or whole companies do get left in the dust.

As far as bjd fandom culture goes, for sure Tumblr is an absolute cesspit and people who go on these stupid confession blogs should be ashamed of themselves. In fact I'd say Tumblr is a dumpster fire overall, for all fandoms, and seems to be inherently more interested in bitching about other people for a cheap ego trip rather than actually being a fan. What is this, middle school? Ugh. But Instagram and Flickr and Youtube are good places to enjoy bjds with other fans, in my experience they don't carry the drama and bs and it is still about sharing something positive with the world instead of figuring out rotten new reasons to crap on other people.

 

I'd put Soom, Switch and even some of the more recent larger-scale Volks guys in the same "middle path" category as Iple and Spirit Doll, honestly. They're still relatively stylized sculpts rather than strictly realistic ones, but that stylization isn't as pronounced or anime-inspired as CP's dolls or the older Volks sculpts tended to be. They're worlds away from Granado or Venitu, but not quite in the same category as the Old School look, either.

That halfway-between style can be pretty appealing to collectors on both ends of the spectrum, so no surprise that they're popular. I find myself looking at a lot of dolls of that type these days.

 

Even Granado, bastion of realism, has a couple of girls that are old school (Marion and Linca). I don't think the old style will go away completely. There are new BJD fans coming in to the hobby that may not have seen them, but like them once they're aware of them. At least I've seen several threads asking where to find that type of sculpt.

 

I never said that I thought the stylized look was (or would become-) entirely extinct... It won't. Like I said, Luts and Crobi and Volks and such are still around. It's just not the most popular, center-of-the-dolly-universe style anymore.

When we're wondering why a company like Fairyland would abandon their older sculpts in favor of what's more popular right now, the changing preferences of the community at large are a factor.

 

I agree, I think something like Switch is closer to the old CP look then it is to most of Iplehouse. The tastes of Asian collectors are perhaps less diverse then what you find on an English-speaking, global forum like this. It's the international BJD- scene has exploded so much that 'bjd-aesthetic' is barely a thing anymore. Then again, to be fair the older CP sculpts weren't totally uniform either. Something like DES was more stylised then Lu wen or Yder (wasn't he the odd one out due his narrow eyes and small head?) for example.

 

My first bjd was a CP Luts Miyu (my Avatar girl) and I have a Shiwoo and and Elf El. While I don't photograph them like I do my Iples (who I use in photo stories) I keep my original gang near my computer and they hang out with me more.