DC Superhero Girls - Bumblebee

I could talk at length about gender politics and all that rubbish, but i'm tired and lazy and don't want to get into it. If you're ever curious, pop onto the facebook page for Let Toys Be Toys and i'm sure you'll find one of my many long rants on the topic.

To be brief: Yay comic themed dolls. Boo comic stuff "for girls".
DC hardly has a good track record in recent years of their division of the sexes and their general "we don't want icky cootie filled girls reading our titles" crap, so obviously their solution was to make stuff for those icky cootie filled girls so they wouldn't get their gross girly hands on the rest of their stuff? I dunno, it's like a small pink cordoned off area just for us vagina having folk.

This pisses me off because i've been reading DC comics for years and never cottoned on to the whole "this isn't for girls" rubbish. Maybe I was just reading the wrong titles, because there were lots of awesome girl characters to root for too and until the new 52 (argh) and certain writers... the titles I WAS reading were really engaging and fun and not chauvinistic or irritating.
I'm still not over the way Shadow Lass was written in the last iteration of Legion Of Superheroes... it still pisses me off. Or how Saturn Girl's epic one woman quest was haphazardly chopped short and just magically resolved to make more space for yet more "isn't Green Lantern awesome?" crap. Eugh. I'm with Vril Dox on this, the green lanterns can all sod off. 

Anyhoo, if dolls like this get little girls to actually read comics, so be it. They might mean we get well written shows like young justice back once DC and WB get their heads out their arses and realize that cootie filled pink dollars are totally worth the same as the boy money. http://www.themarysue.com/warner-bros-animation-girl-market/ See this article for more information on THAT load of steaming sexist horsecrap.




But as it stands...

Mattel and DC decided they actually DID want some pink cootie dollars, because here's a whole super hero line "for girls" (god the marketing is disgustingly gendered, why not just super hero dolls for kids? why gender it? I'm sure boys would love large sized articulated figures too!)
For some... strange reason instead of taking this opertunity to relaunch Teen Titans or Young Justice or Legion of Superheroes or any of their other many teen super groups, Mattel decided to take a rather schitzophrenic approach and just grab any female character from any of their titles and dump them all in high school together, regardless of whether that makes any sense.
But what's so frustrating is that from the article I linked above, Young Justice WAS DOING WELL WITH GIRLS! that's why they cancelled it. But... but if girls liked it, why not use that for your doll line? bring it back and embrace the cootie dollars?
But nope, we got.. a rather confused mess instead.

And i'm not saying it's bad, I mean the web animations are cute and chock full of references to the comics that no kid is really gonna get, which is fun, but at the same time I don't understand WHY Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy are attending school with Wonder Woman, Batgirl, Supergirl etc. It's... baffling. I mean Wonder Woman isn't a teenager, though she has a teen equivalent and Harley is a grown arse woman too. Since when did she attend high school already crazy and joker themed?
eugh.

Anyway,

My problems with the setting and general bizarre attitude to continuity aside, the dolls themselves are actually pretty interesting.
Mattel decided to do two different toys for this line. A range of 1/6 scale "action dolls" and a range of smaller (they're like 6 inches tall) action figures.
The action figures feature the same characters but they're made like most figures these days, with several points of articulation and painted on outfits.
The dolls on the other hand, have much more potential to be genuinely interesting.

So,

In the UK they retail at £19:99 which is about standard for articulated dolls these days. It does however mean that I can't yet justify getting multiple of them. So I picked my favorite of the lot which interestingly, ended up being the character I knew LEAST about.

Bumblebee is hardly a mainstream DC character, she was a Teen Titan (so... why not just do Teen Titans? argh) so the argument most people have been using to defend the use of Wonderwoman/Supergirl/Harley etc as them being "super well known" kinda falls down when you consider that honestly? Who would know anything about Bumblebee unless they were a titans fan? She's not one of the "big names" and while not hopelessly obscure, some of the other characters featured and tipped to get dolls really ARE, especially with the target market of little girls.

How many kids do you really think will be able to identify more than about 4 characters from this lineup? How many regular non comic nerd folks can id all of em?
I'm still not totally sure who the blue haired chick is (Livewire? or is she frost themed? I don't know!) and supposedly the girl in red on the end is Lady Shiva but I don't even know who that IS! Maybe i'm just not ENOUGH of a comic nerd but isn't the whole point here that they should be characters kids might actually vaguely have heard of and want to know more about? or is that excuse as I expect, a load of tripe and they just picked whatever because they couldn't think of enough "female characters" and were scraping the barrel for ideas? (which is insane because there's like 20 female characters in the legion of superheroes alone! that group is enormous! And there's been several female titans and ... *sigh*)

Anyway, you're here for the doll.

My attraction to Bumblebee may or may not be because she's the only dark skinned character in the line <_<
What can I say, whenever I see a darker skinned doll I have to buy it, because they're like hen's teeth over here and often get the far more interesting styles.
I mean come on, look at that hair!

My camera flash does not like shiny box art.

She's adorable!

The back of the boxes has a brief synopsis but isn't hugely informative. I still wanna know what time vortex dumped the grown ups back in the bodies of 15 year olds. Ahem.
Yeah i'm fixating on that lol, it bothers me more than it really should okay?

It'd be like if Clark Kent was suddenly the same age as Robin. It's WEIRD.

The boxes hinge open in that annoying way Mattel are doing lately where you have to tear off the back piece to access the tabs inside. I hate these, it means I can't keep the boxes which means more trash which means more damn waste.
I guess I don't NEED any more boxes, they were cluttering up my attic but still, I kinda like not destroying a box when I open it you know? it feels so wasteful throwing a huge box of card and plastic into the bin.

Bee is strapped to the box with clear plastic ties, which are a little wider than the thin plastic white things you usually get but snip easy enough.
She's posed dynamically... or something. I'm sure that's what the board meeting would have claimed.

The first thing to strike me about these dolls is how BIG they actually are. We'll get to that though.

Bee has a rather large head with big cartoonish eyes and a friendly smile. Her skin tone is a lovely dark brown you don't see too often on dolls and she has this large mass of curly brown and blonde hair on one side of her head. She's super cute.

Her hair is styled in a half shaved sort of look with moulded on cornrows on one side.
Her hair is a little frizzy so I wouldn't suggest brushing it, but finger combing it got the worst of the box flattening out and the curls hold wonderfully.

The moulded cornrows are actually an extremely elegant solution to the problem of how to do this sort of style neatly. It means her style will stand up to play and yet also manages to look quite cool imo. I dig it. A black doll with cornrows man, from Mattel!? Who'd have thought we'd see that?

Her makeup is very minimal. She has a bright pink lipstick, faint blush on her cheeks and then a pale pink line of eyeshadow. That's it. She only has three eyelashes on each eye too, painted only at the top. There's no lower lashes at all.
It gives her a very simple very cartoonish look but it's quite effective.

Her outfit is also very simple. A pair of black leggings with a hex pattern on the bottom half, some high top sneakers and a long sleeved tee fitted tee with a gold panel at the front and more hex (bee hive) patterns on the sides.

The clothing pieces are well made, just a bit dull I feel. Superhero outfits are usually a bit ridiculous and unattractive but bland and boring? I get they were trying to make them look all modern and stuff, but I dunno, this outfit does nothing for me. It's so.. bleh.

Bee also has a backpack with big plastic bee wings. Sadly the wings don't move. I was hoping they'd be hinged or something but nope, they're static.

The actual pack has lines and dots like circuitry? all over it and the wings are see through. It's all very nicely sculpted, though a bit hard to get on and off as the straps are quite small and don't undo, it's all one piece. It makes it all a bit awkward to get off the shoulders.

Her gauntlets are aqua coloured and have a sort of bee motif on them. I don't know if they're meant to shoot something in the show or comics, but they kinda look like they should have some like darts or something right?

Again these are moulded single pieces and attach to the doll by removing her hands and slipping them onto her arm stumps lol.

Her shoes are nothing special. Just a pair of standard yellow hightops.

I do like that the sole and laces are painted though.

I mentioned she was a big doll, and she is. Though still 1/6 scale and thus "barbie sized", she's actually taller than a Barbie doll. Her head is larger than the My scene head (it's closer to MH size) and her body itself is taller. It's also a very muscular body sculpt with thick well defined limbs which makes her seem all the bigger when you get her out of the box and handle her. These are chunky dolls and their heft and size is quite satisfying to hold I have to admit.. heheh.

Bee also has really big feet. Here they are against an EAH foot for example. Bee's feet aren't just flat, they're also twice the size.

And here they are with the MH boy foot.

This will make shoe sharing across any other doll lines a bit problematic, if you like swapping shoes around.

And here's that muscular body.

The superhero girls are still of course unrealistically thin around the waist, but it's nice to see some muscle definition on the arms and legs like this. It's very "comic book" without being sexualised which is nice.
Too often comic girls have wasp waists, big tits and not much else, this is a much better representation I think of a comic book woman's body. Not realistic, but tastefully stylised.

I really like those thighs... does that make me weird? lol. She has a bit of a sway back like the MH and EAH dolls do.

The articulation is at the shoulders, elbows, wrists, hips, knees and an added bust joint as well.
The joints are all your standard hinges, rather than the peanut joints of the Made to move barbies, which is a shame for an action doll line, but it's about on par with MH/EAH and all of those sorts of dolls. The bust joint kinda pivots side to side but doesn't add a huge amount to the possibility, I have never found these joints to be that well... essential. Wrist articulation I miss a hell of a lot more on a doll than bust pivoting. But eh, it's an added joint so yay?

Oh if you're wondering, her panties have little stars on and are SUPER low riding like omg. I'd find those so uncomfortable to wear all low on the hip like that haha.

The superhero girls come with a variety of hand moulds, some normal like this (which is somewhat similar to the regular EAH or MH hand)

And there's also the clasping hand. Bumblebee has one of each. So does Batgirl and Supergirl. Wonderwoman and Harley have TWO clasping hands. Ivy has two regular open hands.

Anyway, presumably this is so they can hold an accessory but only Harley and Wonderwoman COME with an accessory to hold so... what do the other girls hold? Instead they just look like they're making a kinda rude gesture constantly.
WW and Harley's doublewank pose is particularly troubling if you take their accessory away or in WW's case, try to clip the lasso to her belt.

I mean I get it, but at the same time I don't get it because half the line don't have anything to hold in that gripped hand so it's really strange. Couldn't they have gotten a little something to stick in their hand so they don't look like they're calling me a tosser?

Despite being a lot more muscular, these girls CAN fit some Barbie stuff. Just for the record.  In fact that's actually a Moxie girl tee, it's tight, but it works.

Husband also got Batgirl, because redheads...

Unlike Bee she has painted glove hands.

And comes with slightly more stuff. A backpack, top and leggings/pants, gauntlets and boots and then a belt and mask too. Maaan, why didn't Bee get a belt?

Same body as Bee, just in a pinkish peach tone with black hands.
I was relived the mask came off and didn't leave dents. i was scared they'd be glued to the dolls.
so good news! Your dolls can still have their civilian identities!

Actually I think it's a shame they didn't do that. I mean, these are dolls, giving them a super hero and a civilian outfit to change into would be awesome. I want some fashion packs STAT.

So, overall?

Gender politics and setting confusion aside, I like the dolls. As dolls they're really nicely made, sturdy feeling things with decent articulation and an interestingly different body sculpt.
I think the white girls all mostly use one or two face sculpts, but i'm not 100% sure, but they do all look rather similar to one another. I think that's a shame, more differentiation would have been nice and after MH and all those sculpts i've become spoiled lol.

I hope we get accessories and fashions for these dolls though, some little gadets to hold in those weird clasped hands and some non super outfits for their secret identities! Damnit I want secret identities! Or at least every day attire!

I hope we see more characters. I'm holding out hope we get a few boy dolls too, and some more Titans. SDCC revealed a Starfire doll so here's hoping for a Raven!

Overall though,

a solid 8 time vortexes out of 10