Monster High - Scarisian Vacation - Garrott DuRoque and Rochelle Goyle

new dolls! (Mattel's photo from sdcc)

These still haven't hit the uk so I had someone in the US send them over. It does however mean they came without their box which is a shame but eh.
you'll have to live without box photos.

Also my camera hates sunlight so taking pictures during the day left me with a lot of shots I couldn't use. Go figure. So this may be a bit picture light and i'm sorry for that.

Still, let's dig in

Rochelle first.

This Rochelle is quite different to her other releases in that she has mint green and pale pink hair. It's a striking change and for me personally, makes her feel like a whole new character.

Her dress is supposedly designed by Garrott himself, and it's cute but rather simple. There's a fitted pink and black bodice with a ruffled collar in pale teal, and then a poofy skirt in striped patterned fabric.
She wears mint green shoes that match her hair.

On top of her head she has a headband with an enormous black plastic flower on top.

Her makeup is pale and beautiful. A band of silver and then a band of green above the eyes with large baby pink lips.
She also seems to have the same big randomised spots that her original release had. Subsequent dolls seemed to have more uniformity to the speckles on the face but I recall going through multiple first release Rochelle's to find one with face speckles I liked most.
This particular Rochelle does have some oddly placed spots, namely around her nose but I can live with this. they're like moles or something heh.

 Her hair is tied into a side ponytail and she has her usual wings. Though these ones aren't made from the slightly flexible plastic of her original doll or Scaris, they're rigid hard things and feel kinda cheap to me.
They DO stay in though, which is nice. Early dolls had terrible problems with tails and wings etc just popping off randomly.

Her hairstyle reminded me of Scaris Rochelle, but the colour of her hair is completely different. It's not inverted colours like I thought, it's a much paler green and pink. The teal is now mint green and the pink is now a soft baby pink rather than a candy pink. The fibre feels about the same though.

Scarisian Vacation rochelle's skin seems to be ever so slightly paler but that could be down to plastic batches, i've noticed this before with dolls. My two pack Deuce and Gil are paler than their single releases for instance.

Scarisian Vacation Rochelle sadly comes with very little in the way of accessories, no bracelets, no belts, no socks, nothing. I suppose it IS a two pack but it's a shame, her outfit needs a few tweaks to my eye to look just right.

She comes with a hangbag though. It's a strangely bulky thing that's more a basket than a bag. It's quite wide, open at the top so you can put things in it and has a lot of architectural elements to it. It's cute, simple but cute, but it's really really bulky and feels a little too big for a handbag to me. It gets in the way and looks awkward.

Disappointingly, the shoes are just recolours of her original release shoes. I don't mind reusing of shoes but when you have a character like Rochelle who hasn't had an enormous amount of releases and thus doesn't have a large and varied catalogue of shoes, the reuse is very very obvious and i'm not so happy.
In my collection I in fact only have three different pairs of Rochelle shoes, while I have clawdeen, draculaura and frankie shoes all over the place. It's crazy how many different pairs those guys have.

Her dress is also very similar in shape to her original doll, only it's one piece instead of separates.
It suits her though, and it's made from decent feeling summer dress fabric.

The silly flower had to go though, it was just so huge and static and in the way. It was stapled to her head and then had plastic wrapped around it as well, for.. reasons? so it messed her hair up removing the thing, annoyingly.

Thankfully, I happen to have Scaris Rochelle laying around in my "spares" box and her accessories look like they'll be cute here.

Scaris Rochelle's beret, bracelet and Ghoul's Night Out's shoes. I love GNO's shoes, even if the heels are floppy and prone to bending. I also gave her music festival draculaura's waist cinch.
I really like this look, happy I kept my random Rochelle accessories in preparation heh.

Speaking of random plastic wrap. Rochelle's arm comes wrapped like this. Just this one arm, the one touching Garrott in the box.
Now, while it's nice that Mattel are wrapping the dolls against staining, I can't help but think "couldn't you just use fabrics that were COLOURFAST?" but what do I know. *sigh*
Still, at least her arm isn't stained black right?

And now Garrott, who is of course the reason I wanted this set in the first place.

Sadly unlike his prototype, somewhere along the way the green patina around his eyes has become some sort of ziggy stardust teal stripe. He looks like he should be in the getting ghostly line man! they all have these face stripes too!

But he is cute despite his oddly teal eyeshadow.
Like Rochelle he has slightly worried eyebrows and random speckles, though his skin is much darker and more well... rock toned.
His eyes are green and his hair is a wonderful blend of light teal blue and a deep cobalt blue which gives it a wonderful sheen. Husband said it made him think of copper oxide which would make sense for a rock being right?

Either way, the multi tonal nature of it is lovely.
Also surprisingly he doesn't have a ton of product in his hair. Oh he has some sure, but not that solid glued mass we often get with short hair. It's still brushable and soft without rinsing which is great. I'm pleasently surprised as I was expecting helmet hair.

Unlike Rochelle, Garrott's ears are on the sides of his head but they are finned and flared like her ears. They look in fact, very much like the Gargoyle cam ears. He has a little gold ring pierced into this left ear.
however, Garrott does NOT use the Gargoyle cam facemould.

They have completely different jaw shapes, lips and noses. Garrott's features are sharper and narrower and he's adorable

I think he's using Clawd's clawed hands, because they certainly aren't the cam hands either.
Unfortunately both are in this splayed pose which means he looks ridiculous holding the rose he came with.

Speaking of the rose. It's the same sculpt as DOTD Deuce's, but in one solid black colour instead of green and black.

Garrott comes with plastic sheathed arms as well, presumably to protect his arms from his jacket... but his body isn't covered so.. um... I have no idea. the vinyl of the jacket touches his chest as well as his arms so i'd have thought if it was going to stain, it'd stain his chest as much as his arms.

His wings are cast as one solid piece instead of two individual wings like the gargoyle cam or Rochelle. They plug into the back with this odd blunted triangle shape. They're not easy to get on once he's dressed, the hole in the back of his jacket is pretty small and gets in the way and if it's not in EXACTLY right the wings pop off again. they don't feel that sturdily attached to be honest, so hmmm.

I do wonder why they decided to do a whole different attachment here rather than just using the cam body and wings, but maybe it's easier to mould one piece wings instead of two wings, I don't know.
They don't really stay in any better than the cam wings did, but I wonder if that was the intention.
his wings are teeeeny.

His body has REALLY obvious leg seams, like... super obvious. And the whole body feels a bit lighter than other dolls. I'm not sure but I think they're cutting some plastic content to save costs. The obvious seams are ok on a doll with long pants but I can see this being a problem on dolls with shorts or skirts.

His outfit consists of a leather effect jacket with a faux shirt underneath (just the bottom part to make it look like he's wearing something underneath. Disappointing), a rose which he can't hold, a neck scarf with a spirderweb and rose pattern, a pair of grey boots with skullettes on the heel and a pair of jeans that aren't actually jeans. They're made of thin cottony fabric like those more recent Barbie fashion pack jeans,they look like denim from a distance but are much thinner much cheaper fabric.
Again, disappointing given previous boys DID get actual jeans but 'd sooner have these than more shorts or those horrendous purple pants of Disembodied council Slo Mo.

The entire outfit looks nice once it's on, but some of the materials used are a bit surprising.

His shoes are soft and easy to get on and off, but alas, no fun moulding on the sole. (man these are going to be slippy shoes, he'll step outside and fall flat on his butt having no treads hahaha)

I like Garrott, but his mask needed some work. I got out my coloured pencils and dappled some grey and brown into the mix to dull the colour and make it feel a bit more natural. It's not perfect but it's a lot better I think. Now it looks more like moss and not makeup heh.

Garrott's shirt tails match Rochelle's hair.

The set also came with Garrott's diary, which is short but at least being the US version is actually in english. It contains the story of how they met, and a few amusing tidbits include: He fell in love with her frown (hahaha), she was working as a crossing guard and there are mime construction workers in Scaris who build invisible walls. Uh... the monster high universe is wiiiierrrd.

Overall, a cute little two pack. Two nice dolls and though they are a bit cheaped out their faceups are mostly even and unsmeared and the hair fibre is fine. The hair is rooted decently and though simple, their outfits work nicely.

I have no idea how much these will be when they finally hit the uk, nor how long that'll be, but I suspect they'll be at least £35 and i'm not convinced they're worth quite that. £30 yeah, but the quality of mh vs price is making them rather overpriced for what you get. They just aren't representing any value for money right now in the uk and it's frustrating to see such huge budget cuts so rapidly.
While this set suffers the least I feel of mattel's latest swathe of cuts, upcoming releases have me nervous. Instead of excitement my first thoughts are always "how much will these cost and how much detail will be cut in the final release?" which isn't fun.

At least this two pack came with stands. No hairbrush though, but we're kinda drowning in those at this point so it's a relief honestly.

The stands also seem to be clicking into their bases more solidly and consistently these days, which is nice. I have several of the older black stands that simply do not click into the base resulting in frequent faceplanting dolls.

Overall, minor gripes aside (and they are fairly minor here thankfully), I do like this set and i'm glad to have it.
I do not like that i had to import because Mattel and Tru seem unable to comprehend the concept of international marketplaces and competitive pricing but ho hum. I probably actually saved money importing them anyway. And I got a full diary/booklet heh.

Also I avoided having to go near another horrible hand slicing box. Those boxes are honestly putting me off opening dolls, they're that awful to me. They're verging into MGA level of "oh god how much blood does this toy demand of me?" territory. Scary.
doll boxes shouldn't cause injury damnit, it's just wrong.

Anyway,

I give this Scarisian Vacation 2 pack a solid 8 monstrous mimes out of 10. If Garrott had come with an actual SHIRT under his jacket and proper jeans, perhaps we'd be looking at a near perfect score but sadly monster high boys seem to have become allergic to shirts these days. Just like most of them seem allergic to actual trousers too.
*sigh*

Now Mattel, fix the boxes and maybe i'll be able to stand opening your products again.