Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, or the fingers typing it.
Was giving them names too hard?
Anyway,
Barbie signature line, whoop.
In case anyone was wondering, BMR stands for Barbie Millicent Roberts (Barbie's full canonical name) and 1959 is her birth year.
I am not totally sure how the wierd 80s vibe outfits really fit with a name that seems more in keeping with a vintage "classic barbie" theme but there ya go.
There are 6 dolls in the line, 4 girls and 2 boys. ALL are on Made to Move bodies which is cool.
there are 2 standard mtm girls, 1 tall, 1 curvy and 2 mtm kens, the first non collector line time those have been made available.
The dolls are £24:99 in the UK which honestly surprised me because the Made To Move dolls are about £21:99 ANYWAY and come in yoga outfits with no shoes so... 25 feels like quite a steal for a fully dressed doll with a more deluxe faceup.
I will say though, the outfits are a bit... YIKES.
apparently this is a fashion subculture... to old fogey me it looks like some teens had a party in a thrift store and threw random shit from the bargain bin on for the lulz.
I mean seriously, who dresses like this?
However, some interested face sculpts being used.
Purple dress has the Kira face sculpt which you don't see very often, pink shoes athletic wear is the Mhibli sculpt, one of my personal faves. The black girl in the floral dress uses the Pazette sculpt to great effect and the blonde is an interestingly painted Millie (the standard playline Barbie sculpt nowadays)
The boys are Harley (manbun) and Tango (green overalls)
So an interesting mix of sculpts.
I originally ordered Pazette, Mhibli and Harley Ken but then I decided I couldn't justify it and cancelled Pazette and Harley.
I don't really collect a lot of Barbie honestly, so I felt like I was just too excited to get something NEW and vuagely interesting that I was being impulsive.
that said, I do still really like Pazette, I think she's beautiful. I might get her at some point later down the line.
This time Amazon did NOT screw up my preorder and my girl shipped on time the day of release. Nice.
What I find really interesting about this line is that they ship is what is, basically, a cardboard shoe box.
No plastic here, just nice recyclable card.
This style of box is SO old school, 60s and 70s dolls used to ship in a box with just an illustration of the doll inside on the outside.
The only problem with this is you can't check the doll in store to see if there's any wonk or whatever.
The back of the box says something about fashion heritage and current trends. As I said earlier, i'm not sure thrift store chic is really a "current trend" but i'm not a teenager so what do I know. I just haven't seen anyone wearing clown clothes in public like.. ever.
The box isn't taped shut or anything. It just opens up to reveal some bmr1959 labelled tissue paper.
And under that is the doll in a green card tray.
She's held in place with broad plastic ties in a few key places and comes with a stand. nice.
I chose this girl because her hair was so unusual. Mattel have only done one other doll with this sort of microbraided hair lately and I think it's quite cool.
She has very very nicely painted features, there's some slight wonk but it's pretty crisp and nicely done.
Her outfit... isn't terrible it's just... odd.
the shoes match nothing and it's a bit oddly athletic for everyday wear.
I do like the croptop's sleeves though, they're like bell sleeves in a sort of soft mesh and they're quite well done. I haven't a clue what the top could really work with, but I like the sleeves.
She has a bum bag ahahahaha. (that's a fanny pack to the Americans)
I thought only middle aged tourists wore those things nowadays!
The card tray isn't attached to anything in the box so it just lifts out, allowing you easy access to the tabs holding her in place.
The back of the tray has her certificate, it's literally just a piece of printed paper. It doesn't even seem to be fancy paper, it's JUST paper. It's kinda... lame.
She's pretty easy to get out of the box though her hair suffered some distortion from the packing ties. *sigh*
She has a great face. Her eyes are slightly uneven but not too bad. She has vividly red lips, a beauty mark and thick sassy eyebrows which I really like.
She also has painted on baby hairs which I don't think i've seen Mattel do before, certainly not on their lower priced dolls.
Her faceup feels pretty "collector line" compared to her price tag, I like that.
She's a sort of medium tan and is painted in such a way as to be rather ethnically ambiguous. I've seen people call her "Blasian" (Black/Asian) but I think it's up to you and I do appreciate that. Barbie could do with a little more variety in the lineup.
Her hair is interesting, it's microbraided fibre that reminds me a bit of embroidery thread but even smaller and tighter. It works pretty dang well.
The actual style itself is kinda complicated and odd with a big rolled bun thing on top. It's also not that thickly rooted so i'm not totally sure if it would look decent with that bun taken down or you might get a lot of bald patches. I'm not really willing to find out.
Her stand has a massive chunky base with the name of the line on it. It's massive and clunky and I dunno, I think i'd have preferred a more compact generic base. It takes up a LOT of space on a shelf unneccisarily.
Her outfit is all separate pieces which is nice. The top comes off and underneath she's wearing this er... cycle outfit?
It has elastic band style sleeves which i'm not so happy about, those things never stand the test of time and snap quite easily.
She uses the very old fashioned method for attaching her rings which means pierced hands. In the case of her very large ring, two holes in one hand as it's actually two separate pieces. OUCH.
this does however mean that this body isn't gonna be much use to anyone who doesn't want to keep those rings. And one of them is enormous and says "bmr1959" on it (obsessed with the name much?) so it's not that versatile.
Her fingernails are painted blue, that's cool.
Her outfit is pretty random. I wonder if it would have looked more cohesive had her shoes been blue, or yellow, or even green to tie into that green stripe on the cycling suit.
I dunno, it's too many colours and it makes it feel disjointed to me.
I couldn't get her earrings out so I gave up. They aren't overly interesting anyway, they're just dangly silver things. Perfectly servicable earrings.
Her body is the standard Made to Move body. The joints are REALLY stiff and it took quite a lot of force to get her elbows and knees to actually unfreeze and start moving. I was so worried I was going to snap something. Eep.
The QC on the body isn't great. There's very very obvious seams, cracks where the seams haven't quite come together, marbling of the plastic mix and scratches all over the place.
good thing she'll always be covered up huh?
I still hate Barbie feet, they look so wrong proportionately. Eugh.
Look at those tiny little trotters!
The MTM body has weak ankles and it annoys me.It also makes me nervous putting shoes on and taking them off because it feels like a weak point.
The pink shoes are quite hard and not that easy to get on and off so yeah, not great.
After some fighting with the joints I got her loosened up enough she could pose but damn those knees and elbows are stiff and difficult to pose.
I couldn't live with her mishmashed outfit though, it bothered me far too much. So I had a dig through my stash to see if I had anything that had a similar 80/90s reject vibe but wasn't so mishmashed and well.. sporty. I always HATED sportswear on my dolls. I don't DO sport haha.
I believe this jacket is vintage Barbie, it was just so 90s I had to have it when I found it in a charity shop lol.
Playing around with the joints definitely helped loosen them up a bit. But her elbows still feel very stiff.
She's quite beautiful though. I really do like her face.
Interestingly, the BMR dolls have TEENSY TINY heads compared with modern playline, which means they don't really look right alongside a regular Barbie. I don't think I really realised how giant Fashionista heads were till this point.
The smaller head is more in keeping with how Barbie heads were back in the 90s and into the 2000s I think. Fashion Fever had teensy heads too from what I remember of them.
I actually genuinely love this damn doll. It's her face, it's such an expressive detailed face. So many Barbies don't really appeal to me because their faces are so bland and characterless, meaning I tend to opt for more stylised dolls by preference because at least they have expression and personality.
This girl's face feels like a throwback to the Fashion Fever days (Damn I miss Fashion Fever) and in less garish and polarising clothing I think this line could have been perfect. I do love me a closed mouth sculpt. I always HATED the open mouth manic grin so many Barbie dolls get given *shudder*, it's too much.
Sadly i've seen some reports of pretty iffy QC on this line which is a real shame. Mattel really don't give a shit huh?
So be aware of that.
Right now Amazon UK is the only place i've seen this line for sale, the closed boxes feel to me more marketed toward an online sort of sale anyway. Brown shoeboxes don't exactly inspire on a shelf.
But I do like the packaging decision there. It feels like a good idea for online sales, there's no real NEED for a fancy display box when you're buying blind anyway. And it's definitely more eco friendly than a load of plastic and tape and laminated bullshit.
The waste from this doll was absolutely minimal and that's a good thing. A few plastic ties was all I threw out. I'm using the fairly sturdy shoe box to store doll stuff atm. It's a decent box.
I'd like to see more dolls packaged in such a waste free manner. Focus on making a good doll instead of throwing a huge budget at the damn packaging which is going in the trash anyway.
Was this girl worth the £24:99? Maybe? Given i'm happy to pay £30 for LOL OMG who have better clothes but inferior bodies, yeah.. for the detail of her face and how unique her screening and hair is, plus a fully articulated body, it doesn't feel like a terrible deal. Dolls have become pretty dang expensive nowadays and it looks like anything decent is gonna set you back about £25-30 anyway.
That's inflation for you.
I don't feel robbed at least.
Oh god! That group picture looks like a 1980s Benetton ad!
ReplyDeleteBut the faces and hairstyles do look way better than the usual Barbie fare