Anyway, MGA's witch dolls may be dead in the water, but they're still clogging up shelf space in just about every toy store I go into.
Sadly many places haven't gotten the memo about reducing the prices, and even those that have are charging a little more than i'm willing to pay for more of MGA's half arsed madness.
But I liked Carolina's colours and I wanted at least one of the princesses. When I spotted her for £7 in TK Maxx, I snapped her up. Yes, under a tenner is a perfectly reasonable price for a Bratzilla thank you very much.
Anyway, I haven't been able to find the other two for a similar price since. Booo. While Angelica looks like she may in fact murder me in my sleep (Get in line girl, Vampelina has first dibs at my jugular) I think Siernna's pretty. Despite her drunken slur of a name.
Anyhoo,
right now Carolina is the only one i've got and can I just say... firstly... OMG she has such a normal bloody first name! No extra letters, no stupid "yooneek" spelling, it's just... a regular name. I'm shocked MGA, SHOCKED. I was so sure you were trawling bad baby naming sites for trendy terrible names for your dolls.
I suppose though, after naming 20 billion Bratz, a few normal names had to sneak in there somewhere huh? Like Jade and um... Ciara? There was a Ciara right? I lose track.
Anyway, name is beside the point, I could rant for days on the trendy ridiculous names a lot of Bratz dolls have been given. (Brogan is still legitimately the worst name i've heard from MGA, i'm not letting that one lie, if you named your kid Brogan, you should feel bad.)
I'm getting distracted.
Pictures!
Of course you can see here TK Maxx are lying about the RRP of their products again. They got in trouble for doing it with clothes, so they started doing it with toys instead. They just pull a number out of the air and roll with it.
In this case, they're claiming this doll was originally £24:99 making their price of £9:99 omg AMAZIIIING. Rubbish, they were £16:99.
Not that £9:99 isn't still a good price, but £7 is much nicer.
Annoyingly, TK maxx has a fairly lackadaisical approach toward their clearance items. They seem to just pick up a random doll, slap a reduction sticker on and call it a day. Meaning the store had several more Carolina's IDENTICAL to this one (her box is perfect, she has no problems.) but marked at full price.
they do this a lot.
Or they'll mark one character (So Carolina in this case) but the other two will be full price. And they only honour the price on the barcode, even if you SHOW them two identical damn dolls and go "explain this!" they just shrug and tell you they can't do the lower price.
It's ludicrous.
Anyway, Carolina's box is the standard blister pack of ridiculous evil MGA are so fond of. My hatred for these boxes burns like a thousand suns.
The back of the box shows off the newer logo they shoved on this and the Back to Magic line, where the Bratzillaz part is really small and "house of Witchez" is the big focus. I really do think they were intending to rebrand to House of Witchez. Perhaps Toho got in touch about the use of "zilla" in the name, or they realised it was a bloody stupid name for a set of WITCHES not giant lizard monsters.
Carolina's power is post cognition, that is, she can see the past. So she's effectively the exact opposite of Yasmina who sees the future.
I've always felt post cognition was an underused super power.
I mean, think about it. In a superhero setting she'd be great. She'd take one look at Spiderman and be all "yep, that's Peter Parker" "but how do you know?" "I just saw his origin"
She could instantly tell you who every super hero or villain was and how they got the way they were.
She could become a super cop, like, there's a murder and she shows up and is all "that guy did it."
Who needs CSI when you have Bratzillaz!
She'd also be a right pain in arguments. "I never said that!" you'd say. "ahh yes you did, at precisely 3:22pm last Tuesday you promised you would meet my parents this weekend." "damnit."
What her friends love about her is a bit more redundant. Wait.. she learns from her past? you mean.. like every other human being on the planet? OH MY GOD! She learns from mistakes! AHHHHHHHH BURN THE WITCH!
As you can see, MGA had to do their usual "put the much more detailed prototype photo on the box so you can see nice and clear what we didn't give you" trick.
Carolina's design hasn't changed TOO much, though I think I prefer those shoes and the darker streaks in her hair would have been so striking!
Her bird glows in the dark apparently. At least Carolina was sensible enough to have a floor in her birdcage hat. Sierrna's cage has an open bottom, meaning she's totally gonna have radioactive bird poop all over her hair by the end of the night.
I dunno, maybe it's the newest hair care sensation?
Still, i'm not sure i'd want something that radioactive in such proximity to my head, cage floor or none. You can't tell me that bird ain't seriously throwing out some gamma rays right there ok? That bird's a toxic mutant and we all know it!
Let's open this box.
*insert tearing sounds, anguished screams and much profanity*
Ok.. so the blister pack thing is like.. GLUED on so much it doesn't want to come off.
Look! I even managed to tear the top of her backing card off in shear rage!
Actually no, it was just that there was so much glue it wouldn't come away from the plastic cover and ripped.
I hate these boxes so much. Why Mga, why can't we have a BOX.. you know.. with sides.. and openings?
Carolina looks a little shocked here, like my frantic tearing at her box has her a bit freaked out.
Don't worry my dear, i'll have you out of this cardboard prison soon.
Poor girl has eye wonk. Look at that lazy eye! It kinda amuses me so i'm not too upset. I like to imagine that's her past seein' eye, drifting off into the faraway distance.
Anyway, starting at the top.
Carolina has nylon hair, it's not brilliant quality honestly. It's a bit cheap feeling, rather prone to frizz i'm sure but it's a lovely colour. Her hair is actually two toned, a pale blue with a bright blue blended in.
Annoyingly she has this weird bit of hair on one side of her face that sticks out. This bit is crunchy like there's glue or gel or something in it. I have no idea.
Her hair has a faint wave in it, though how much of that is packaging kink and how much is intentional i'm not sure.
Her hair is, as usual for MGA dolls, stupid long. It's knee length in this case, which is less frustrating than ankle length (I hate ankle length hair ok? It just unreasonably angers me)
Her hair is a bit choppy and a bit dry and frazzled at the ends, showing how cheap that fibre really is.
(She won't stand up for some reason, hence my finger)
The top part of her hair is pulled back and has a small braid/twist that runs down one side. The front of her hair has two long swept back pieces framing her face. These are held in place by a tie under the rest of her hair.
The style is a bit messy out the box but i'm not convinced I could redo that twist/braid if I tried to tidy it all up.
A shame, clock face eyes would have been awesome.
Her brows are very thin and very sharply angled and there's squiggly patterns down one cheek. I totally used to do this in eyeliner in my teen years, it was fun.
Her eyeshadow is a dusky grey and silver and her lips are a deep blue.
I kinda dig this, her eyes have heavy eyeliner and I can't help but reminisce about my goth years. Ahh...
She has large dangly earrings, the mould isn't familiar but honestly there's nothing particularly memorable about the Bratzilla earrings anyway. These ones look like feathers or something to me.
Around her neck Carolina wears a silly lace ruffle thing. It's a bit clown to me, but I think they were going for "victorian".
It fastens at the front with velcro. The top layer is white frilly lace, the bottom layer is blue tulle. It's fairly soft tulle at least but really the collar only serves to hide the detail of her actual dress.
Caroline's dress has a sort of deco scroll pattern on it in shades of blue. It's a little shiny and the cut is very tight around her hips. In fact, she can't actually sit properly and due to the bend in her legs from packaging combined with the tightness of her dress, her legs spring into this annoying "one foot in front of the other" pose constantly. It makes her very unstable.
Her dress has a sweetheart neckline with a black lace trim and small black straps. The bottom of the dress has a white lace trim to match her neck cuff/collar thing.
The back of the dress has these "wings" that poof out. I'm not sure how to describe this, it's like a really poofy bustle that also kinda wants to be a train.
It doesn't sit right on one side.
The dress itself is pretty decently constructed, though i'm not totally convinced the fabric is hugely robust. I had some moments when redressing her I was certain the side seams on the bodice would pop but thankfully they didn't.
The bustle section of the dress is ragged blue fabric with a black overlay with lots of holes. There's some tulle as well for added volume but it doesn't really work that well. The bustle is lacking enough to really poof it out correctly, so it mostly just dangles behind the doll looking a bit odd.
Perhaps stiffer tulle or more of it would have helped puff this out for the desired look, I don't really know.
It doesn't look terrible, but it doesn't look as good as her promo would have you believe either.
Carolina also wears shiny blue arm cuffs/sleeves (they're not gloves, they haven't got a thumb hole) amd comes with what I think are supposed to be opera glasses.
I'm not entirely certain what opera glasses have to do with seeing the past but i'm thinking the same logic as Yasmina's magnifying glass = future.
Clearly the design team just went with "things you look through! things that aren't glasses but are kinda like glasses"
Having never really handled opera glasses, I really don't know which way around these are supposed to go. Not that it matters as Carolina's articulation is such she can't hold them to her eyes anyway.
I... kinda.. see you.
Carolina also comes with that afformentioned ridiculous birdcage hat.
And a pair of superbly unattractive shoes.
Those shoes are just so bland and ill fitting... they're awful.
Articulation is as standard, that is, ok but a bit crap.
Her legs are bent from packaging, as usual and her waist is wierdly gappy (again, pretty usual).
I think Carolina's a similar skin tone to Jade and Yasmina etc. It's quite a saturated pinkish caucasian tone, not pink pink like Cloetta, not tanned like Sashabella and not pale like Meyganna. Just kinda... generic flesh tone. And very shiny.
But who cares about that, we wanna see that bird hat right?
Well here it is! the glow and the dark bird is very difficult to photograph, but has surprisingly quite a detailed little body. It has texture for the feathers, little eyes. I'm actually quite impressed. Such a shame its all washed out by the glow in the dark plastic.
The entire cage is mounted on a headband, and there's even a moulded cage door! cute. Sadly it doesn't open.
I'm not sure if you can get the bird out, I wasn't about to try yanking to find out. It felt pretty sturdily put together but I feel like if I tugged enough, the cage would come away from the base.
I found Carolina a stand, having gotten tired of her wonky leg faceplanting. Bratzillaz can fit into Ever After High stands, which is maybe useful to know?
The headband doesn't really go on her head that easily. the clippy bits just seem determined to ruin her careful hairstyle (which I tied back because I got sick of the sticky out bit) and the actual headband itself is slightly too wide for the curve of her head. wth?
Still, it stays on and that's the important thing.
Carolina then tried to convince me her birdcage hat was the height of couture and the absolute pinnacle of sexy.
An argument ensued. In which I informed her that no hat, radioactive bird or not, would ever beat the neon 90sness of the Sindy hat.
She countered with this... and I have to say, she was right. A sindy hat with a doll with a birdcage hat on top IS the absolute hottest thing you'll see in your lifetime.
Admit it, you're jealous of how hot I look in this aren't you? SO jealous.
I'm bringing sexy back, oh yeah baby.
At this point, Action Gran showed up and spoiled all our fun.
He doesn't approve of these hat wearing shenanigans. Frankly I just think he's jealous he doesn't have a super sexy hat of awesome.
And so...
actually i've gotten myself totally distracted now. What was I doing? Oh right, thanks Carolina, see? Postcognition, useful.
Carolina Past is a cute doll, eye wonk and all. Her quality is about standard for Bratzillaz. Her hair is crappy but a pretty colour, her legs are wonky and she falls on her face a lot. But damn she's pretty and her dress is kinda cool I have to admit.
Overall I give her 7 radioactive birds out of 10.
Oh, her bird does actually glow btw, fairly brightly but not for very long.
But yeah, she's cute and worth the £7 I paid for her, but at the full price these were? (£16:99, ignore TK Maxx and their delusions) her hair fibre is just too cheap and despite a rather nice outfit, there's something just a bit too knockoffy about a doll with hair that bad and accessories that don't actually fit correctly. (her shoes don't fit her damn feet, she looks like she's wearing shoes a size too big, and look at that headband, wth headband?)
But at least her makeup's on and not smeared and at least she has a right and left foot (seriously, I once saw a Bratz boy with two left legs and I don't even know HOW they managed that... because the hip socket and all that.. I just.. what? HOW DOES THAT HAPPEN MGA? What did you do?)
You got a splendid price. The only place I've seen 'Zillas lingering here in Arizona is at Walmart, where the clearance price on the beach line is roughly a tenner in your money.
ReplyDeleteThe wonky eye somehow ups her charm...
You have an Action Granny, I have Chat Noir sitting on Rainbow Dash. I guess we all have our weird thingies laying around XD.
ReplyDeleteI have a few Bratzillaz, all of them semi repainted, and I have to admit, they're quite awful in quality. I only deboxed one, the dragon, and the first thing she did was losing her earrings. There they go...
At first, when I saw them coming out, I wanted Meygana, I liked her appearance. Nowadays I don't know if I'll ever get her with the awful hair she carries around.