Monster High - Haunted - Porter Geiss

New boy new boy new boy!

Ahem.

So, new season of toys means new characters for Monster high. And a new dvd special too. (well that's not out yet but yeah...)

Anyway, this season's dvd linked line is Haunted, a ghost themed line featuring 4 brand new ghost characters and ghost versions of several of the existing MH cast.
it's a bit gimmicky, much like Freaky Fusion was, but the ghost designs look pretty solid (get it? i'm sorry... I feel bad now)

Anyway, naturally we have one boy character/love interest/eye candy doll.
This time it's graffitti artist Porter Geiss, a poultergeist.

Now here in the UK the new stock hasn't hit yet, and likely won't hit till the new year (end of jan usually) which means a huge delay for us and an annoying drought in the toy aisle.
This happens every year.
However, Amazon.com do really reasonable international shipping so they're my "go to" place for dolls that won't be coming out for months.

I was honestly tempted to buy all the new characters, but this close to christmas I just couldn't justify it. I decided to grab Porter when I could because I knew he'd be a pain to find in stores.
Now, he may be like Neigthan and shipped one to every single case, making him crazy easy to find in any store that carries freaky fusion, or he may end up more like the other boys where he's shipped in some cases but not others. I don't trust Mattel so I bit the bullet and ordered Porter from the US.
It means I don't have the stress of trying to find him when the Haunted range hits the UK, which is a great relief.

So let's get to this review malarky.

The new Haunted boxes are slimmer than the original MH boxes, and much more rectangular than those bizarre Freaky Fusion boxes. it means they stack a lot neater which is nice.
The front of the box has an embossed chain effect that's indented at the bottom and relief at the top (hard to photograph).
The box also has swirls on the sides.

The box is mostly plastic though, which I dislike. Yes it allows you to see more of the doll, but at the same time plastic feels wasteful. The old recycled cardboard boxes seemed a bit more eco friendly and were so easy to open. This box looks more like an EAH box and I hate those things. 

The back of the box if your typical reduced bio and blurb for the upcoming movie/special. Sounds like Spectra should be the main character which is a nice change, though it does mean 2 hours of her voice... I hate her voice so much. It's just awful and false sounding and argh.

Anyway...

Porter's a painter and a rebel, a very pretty baby faced rebel. With poofy hair and pastel clothing hahaha.

He's adorable.

His name is a bit of a lazy pun but oh well, not sure what else they could have named him to be fair.

Sadly it seems the design team ran out of puns with his name. Usually this little circle contains some other pun but here we just have "he has his ghost-paint handy" which just... huh? yeah he uses ghost paint (lol) to spraypaint stuff, paint that fades after a short while and disappears (because heaven forbid he actually deface things permanently, that'd be a bad thing for kids to be shown yes?)
Reeks of PCness right there.
Anyway, he uses ghost paint... yeah... so where's the joke? the pun? I don't get it. "he has paint" yes... he does... and?

Consider previous dolls and what their circle has said. Jackson's said "who says change is good?" which was a cute reference. Spectra's was "A haunting beauty" and so on.
All of them that have had these circles have had a reference, a pun or a little slogan that was cute and monstery.
"He has his ghost paint ready" feels like advertising bamph, the thing you add to the amazon listing description.
And the girls in the line fare no better from what i've seen. Vandala's box simply states her peg leg pops off, which usually would be something put on a different label on the box, not the "silly reference circle"

Anyway, lame slogan aside...

This box is awful. I hate it.

ok, let me explain.

The plastic front piece of the box is attached to a flat card backing with sharp nasty plastic tabs. Plastic tabs with sharp edges, that are eager to slice your fingers to ribbons.
MGA boxes usually require this sort of blood sacrifice to open, but previous MH boxes have been lovely and easy to open with the card tabs that just slip out with no injury.

I cut my fingers no joke, FOUR TIMES trying to get this doll out his box. Didn't draw blood thank goodness, but came close a few times. It was painful.

 I mean look at these things!? Why did there have to be THIS many tabs? the larger flat ones pull out like the regular MH boxes ones, and then there's these smaller secondary tabs that have to be pulled too, and they have a little flap part just waiting.. waiting eagerly to slice a chunk out of your fingers.

Look at all those sharp edges! This is not something a child can open. It's nasty, vicious and spiky and I loathe it.

Please Mattel, go back to the nice cardboard boxes. They're easier to open and aren't dangerous.

Second reason to hate these boxes... the backing card.

So the backing card has a super cool graphic of some sort of crazy library on it, which is sweet. But what's that? see that diary there?
How do you get it out?

Weeeeell... you have to unhinge the backing card (which is taped together because of course it bloody is) and slide the diary out from behind.

The tape tore the graphic even though I was super careful, so I got mad.

I like to keep my boxes, and keep them intact. It pisses me off when packaging means I tear or damage the graphics.
Also, why couldn't the diary be in a regular pocket slot like every other damn diary? Why did it need to be super dooper protected from theft? It's a freaking diary! It's a piece of paper, it's hardly the most tempting thing to steal. Why is it hidden like this? why is it locked into the box so securely? It makes NO SENSE.

Here's the diary anyway. Something about detention chains... which I assume is why the ghosts have so many chains? Are they all in detention like.. always? I dunno, random.

Porter has very neat writing, all block capitals. Much as I like the whole every character has their own handwriting thing, I do find it a chore when the handwriting in question is illegible. I don't want to have to squint at some terrible scrolly scrawl trying to work out what it says, so it's nice when a character has a decent legible and neat handwriting font.

I think it's funny the hall monitors are the ghosts of christmas.. hehehe.

I'm still not sure I understand the POINT of Porter's ghost paint graffiti.... I mean, if it disappears within a few minutes why bother painting it at all? It's not like anyone will get a chance to see it right? Isn't the point of graffiti that people see it? And if it disappears after a few minutes, why do the hall monitors even give a damn? Just wait for a minute or two and bam, problem solved.
I dunno, just seems a bit strange. Like they wanted him to be a vandal but the pc brigade was all "you can't promote that to kids!" so they had to hastily make it stupid.

Porter's diary also mentions a beautiful ghoul, who I honestly feared would end up being bloody Frankie again. Eugh. Thankfully it seems to be Spectra based on the released trailers/promos for the DVD. They look nice together, a contrast of purple and green looks nice on my shelf heh.

Porter is a wonderful ectoplasm green with a luminous quality that makes him almost glow. (He doesn't actually glow, alas)
His eyes have no whites, like Spectra's. Presumably it's to make them look transparent.

His lips are very subtly coloured in the same tone as his skin. You can see the lip paint in photos but not really irl.

His hair is a darker shade of green and swept into fluffy curls on one side of his head.

There's a small amount of gel in his hair keeping it in position and it's a bit messy out the box, but I don't feel the need to rinse it because it's not a solid mass of gluey gross. A little water of the fingers to brush the loose strands down seems to work fine. I feel like the short haired dolls really need a small bit of gel in their hair anyway, to keep the style from fluffing up and looking silly.
I'm glad Porter doesn't have helmet hair, it feels like gelled human hair rather than bulletproof glue.

His curls are only on one side, the other side is shaggy and mostly straight.

I like the curls, I think they're cute and we've not yet had a boy with curls have we? I dig this.

Porter has quite large, slightly pointed ears.

Porter's outfit consists of a pair of brick patterned shorts spattered in paint, a grey shirt with a pastel rainbow spilling across the top, clear blue shoes, a chain belt with hanging chains on both sides and a harness for his paint cans.

It's a kinda weird outfit but it works. The harness is kinda cute and it's rather nice to see a boy wearing pink and pastel tones with such confidence.

Porter also wears a manacle bracelet on one wrist.

He has no special mould or anything to his body, just your standard boy body in luminous green.

While Porter doesn't come with a brush (odd) he does have a stand. A brand new one just for the Haunted line.
It's taller than the standard stand and designed like a twisting chain with a domed base.

Problem is, the clip is huge. Like, it doesn't go around the waist at all. All I can think is it must wedge into the arm pits... what?
There's nothing in the box to explain this, so it's a bit confusing.  But the clip is clearly way too big to work as a waist clip and while it'll slide into the belt loops, it just pulls the belt up ridiculously.

The other thing is, while the stand seems to have three settings for the clip, I cannot wrench it up higher without feeling like i'm going to break it. It's pretty solidly jammed onto the stand.

Jammed into his armpits, Porter can stand on the domed base but I can't help but feel this stand was designed so they'd look like they were floating.
So... why is the stand only just long enough for him to stand comfortably?

The stand also doesn't really clip, it's too wide for the chest as well, it just kinda sits under the armpits so he's balancing precariously on two prongs under his arms.
(Husband said he looks like he has bizarre blue armpit hair from the front lol)

I finally found that if I jammed the pronts into his belt or his harness I could get him to look floaty and not wobble. Though the belt pulls up silly so I think it's best to hook the prongs around the harness instead.

Still, he's a little too tall to really "float" on this stand. It should work great for the shorter girl River, but for Porter it just doesn't quite work.
I think a waist clip on a longer base would have made more sense. I suppose the advantage of this style is that it doesn't damage the clothing or something. But everyone's used to the waist clips, changing it up without any info in the box to explain how the heck this stand is supposed to work is baffling. I wonder how many people will think they got the wrong stand clip instead of thinking "oooh it goes in the armpits!" because honestly why would that be your first thought?

I dunno. The floaty stand is a cool idea but i'm not convinced it was implemented that well. Particularly with Porter who's just too tall to look like he's floating at all.

The longer stand does mean Porter stands slightly taller than the other boys, but not by much. The main height is the domed base that adds a good half inch.

I do like that Porter has one hand sculpted so he can actually hold his spray cans, the can slots in nicely and seems pretty secure in his grip, which is nice. Usually I have to elastic band accessories to a doll's hand so they can hold them, here that's not necessary.

So final thoughts...

Overall I really like Porter. I love his ectoplasm green skin, I like his poofy curly hair and I dig how washed out and well.. ghostly he looks alongside the other MH characters. He has a cute face with sharp defined features and his outfit is quite cute.
Only things I really dislike is his stand, which I feel could have been designed a little better for the male body, and the box which was evil.
I am NOT looking forward to deboxing the rest of the haunted line without armoured gloves on, yeesh.

But Porter is adorable and he does stand out on the shelf pretty great. His desaturated outfit and almost luminescent skin really give him a great ghostly quality that I think is very clever. On his own you don't really appreciate that quality, but as soon as he's with the other regular MH dolls he practically glows.

I give him a solid 9 inconsequential acts of vandalism out of 10.  His stand needed to be more floaty.