I'm alive! honest! (March roundup)

 I've been pretty bad at keeping up to date I know. Fact is, we're at the drought point in the year and i'm not able to get out to stores like I would usually.

More sadly, our local charity shop is closing down, unable to survive lockdown 3 (or is it 4? i've lost track honestly) which means i'll have far fewer "thrift store fun" stuff going forward. 

However, Ebay is still an option and toy stores are still shipping. I just... I dunno, i'm finding a lot of playline stuff isn't really doing it for me. 

Rainbow are very pretty sure, but something about their faces, particularly their rather blank eyes makes me find it difficult to warm to them. Having purchased the ones I liked best I feel no real drive to go out and complete the collection and i'm not entirely sure WHY. It could be that colour blocking just isn't my jam. It could be that their faces are all a bit too samey that I see no reason to have a lot of them... whatever the case, with those being the big "must have" right now I find myself apparently in the minority for not getting as excited about them. 

Meanwhile Barbie continues to be boring with terrible clothing, cheap hair and grainy dotty facepaint. Which is a shame as a few of the last fashionistas had really nice sculpts but they're so screwed over by the crappy printed faces and I don't want to have to repaint them you know? I don't see the point of paying full price for something i'd have to fix. 

Which leaves us really with just LOL OMG. And I mean I quite like the LOL OMG dolls because their costumes are really fun and varied and despite all having the same face the variety of hair colours, styles and makeup helps to differentiate them a bit. 

I dunno, they appeal to me more than Rainbow High does despite Rainbow High arguably being the better value buy. 

so this month i've bought a few Rainbow High dolls on clearance... ahem. 

I mean at £21 it was rather too tempting. At full price of £30-40 I was holding off on getting any more but then loads of them dropped to £21-24 and I was like "sweet, i'll have that."

lol. 

I also went a little mad with aliexpress. 

So let's take a look at my March purchases shall we?

March's BIG purchase was a body for one of my bjd heads, which will take several months to be made so i'm not expecting that to turn up till July/August sort of time anyway. 

But that did take a large chunk of my monthly doll money.

Some of my Aliexpress orders arrived though.

There are a lot of interesting ex factory heads on Aliexpress including a fairly large assortment of Tonner stuff. 

This Tonner Sindy caught my eye. It's facinating to see the Sindy sculpt blank as you just don't tend to see that. 

The other head is a Leeann head, least it's marked Leeann.cn but I can't figure out WHICH doll it is. It looks masculine to me but that doesn't mean a lot, a great number of blank heads read as pretty gender ambiguous. 

it's an interesting colour too, a sort of ashy brown? A bit like a mcdonalds chocolate thickshake lol. 

Finding a body for this head is gonna be tricky. I can't find any real comparisons of how big the original Leeann body was compared to anything I have here as reference so... yeah.

I really like the head though, it's interesting. It has a very straight nose and a decent chin which I appreciate. 

Like the Tonner heads it's very solid and very hard.

I did a quick and dirty faceup with watercolour pencils and i'm pretty happy with it actually.

Meanwhile Sindy got an acrylic paint faceup. I wanted to emulate the vintage look while incorperating more modern elements to make her more "my own". The purple eyes are a nod to the Hasbro generation while the thicker brows and dark lips are more in keeping with modern dolls. 

She'll need to be wigged (I'm thinking she needs a fringe, I always liked Sindy with a fringe), needs lashes glued in and then will hopefully be able to be forced onto a vintage body with hefty application of heat lol. 

My clothes from Aliexpress also came, along with shoes and stockings from Etsy for Felix. My little clown boy is coming together!

And finally a lot of the previous LOL OMG waves started to go on clearance. 

When these dolls first started appearing they were selling out fast but as MGA has continued to churn out wave after wave after wave in quick succession that's not happening so much, so finally we're seeing stuff being clearanced instead of just being GONE. 

Roller Chick was one I liked but wasn't sure I LOVED enough to pay the full price and break my "one doll per wave" rule I have for the OMGS. 

But she was £16 as an Amazon warehouse deal because apparently her box was "damaged."

I was baffled when she arrived and I couldn't immediately see what damage had gotten her thrown into the reject pile. Can you see it? 

That tiny bit of scuffing along the curved piece of the box. That's literally IT.

I thought maybe it was a return and inside i'd find the doll already snipped clear of stuff but nope, everything was sealed.

I am seriously so bewildered by how that scuffing resulted in such a huge markdown. Pretty much half price because of a little bit of a scuff on the box? Wow.

The Roller babe or whatever she's called LOL was one of the first LOLs I got interestingly enough. I never liked them enough to keep buying them and risking the duplicates. I hate blind boxes, i'm just not lucky.

Anyway,

this wave had fairly typical OMG boxes. The changing room, the two clothing bags, the magazine and the two boxes. 

The doll herself comes as usual half dressed. She has sparkly shorts, a rainbow asymetrical leotard and knee high pink socks. Very retro. 

She has orange and pink makeup and pearly pink lips.

The inside of the box seems to not be sure what era it wants to be. The disco balls scream 70s to me while there's something distinctly 1050s diner about that stool and roller discos always make me think of the 80s more than the 70s even though there's a lot of overlap.

She is a Pisces. I know some people love the starsigns but I personally don't get the point. I suppose it's kinda fun to know if certain dolls are the same star sign or something? I dunno.

So here's the contents of the "mystery" (cough cough not a mystery in any way) pieces. 

I always like the patterns on the garment bags, I just can never figure out a way to reuse them after I carefully peel them open.

The tissue paper has this wobbly wave lines pattern like the curved part of the box and the inner box etc.

So many tiny bits. There's a pair of heart shaped sunglasses that have semi opaque lenses which i appreciate (I cannot stand those stupid solid opaque lenses, the whole point is they should be see through ffs! Otherwise it's not glasses it's a goddamn blindfold) , a pair of disco ball dangly earrings in metallised plastic, a little plastic wrist cuff and two orange... things.

At first I thought these were bracelets but they aren't, they're too big. I THINK they go onto her pigtails but I can't see the point as she already has coloured hair bands and they're really chunky and fall out too easily anyway. So er.... nope, i'm stumped.

in the paper baggie is a pink discoball shaped bag. It looks like it should hinge open but I couldn't get it to do so.

It's tiny, the colour is flaking off in places and the strap doesn't actually stay in the hole on one side. It just keeps slipping straight back out. 

so yeaaaah. Not a greatly designed piece.

Her jacket is a cute piece though with a very late 70s/early 80s look to it with the orange strip down each sleeve, the thick ribbed cuffs etc. The decal on the back is cute too. Kinda reminds me of the "that's all folks" warner brother's thing lol. It's the circles. It might be supposed to be a record? I dunno.

She also has this pair is EXTREMELY shiny lycra pants.

They're actually surprisingly detailed with little stitched pocket details and belt loops. 

However, they are skin tight so in order to wear them you'd have to take her shorts off first. I'm not sure I fully understand this as all the previous omgs have come wearing undergarments designed to go UNDER their remaining pieces. It does however give you the option of shorts or pants. I prefer the shorts personally, shows off her socks.

I was disappointed her skates don't roll. The wheels are a sort of semi glittery transparent plastic but they're static, molded as one single piece. Boo. 

Spinny wheels are so much fun MGA! Why you gotta deprive us of that? 

There's a fair few paint defecets here but they're cute and very small so i'll cut em some slack.

The doll dressed (as I said, I opted for the shorts to show off her socks) is looking pretty cute. I like the combination of colours here, it feels bright and garish but still cohesive. 

Her hair is cool too. It's a deep fushia tone with a sort of pinky orange and a hot pink blended through it. It's styled into two buns at the top of her head and then 8 braids divided into 2 pigtails. 

It's kinda complicated. one of the things I quite like about the LOL OMG dolls is they quite often do have interesting hairstyles. My biggest complaint with MGA's other big line, Rainbow High, is that they almost all have the exact same hair style and the vast majority are completely unstyled with just long center parted hair. 

it's BORING. 

OMG often have quite unusual hair styles and I appreciate the hell outta that. It offers more variation in a line that utlises the same face sculpt for everyone.

Her earrings feel kinda fragile and I was scared i'd break them trying to get them in. I also hurt my finger trying to ram them into her rock hard head. 

I feel like MGA could make this a bit less painful by either making the doll heads a little softer or the earrings a little more robust and the ear holes the correct damn size rather than half a size too small. -_- 

The orange things still baffle me. 

Her inner box makes for a funky backdrop.

She's much brighter coloured than most of my other OMGS lol. 

I enjoy that.

The Remix series was a cool one. I do enjoy me some past few decades inspired fashion dolls. I just really enjoy retro and vintage stuff okay? 

When the line first dropped I thought I wanted the one who looks like Ariana Grande but at £40 a pop I sort of blanched at getting ANY of them. 

I mean OUCH that's a lot of money for a playline doll. 

Instead I got the 4 pack set which was about £90 and came with electronic instruments and stuff. Way more worth the cost. 

But the more I looked at photos, the more I appreciated the 80s Madonna explosion that is Pop B.B. 

Her box is BIG. It's a lot bigger than the previous wave's boxes and very chunky.

Apparently it contains a record. Which is why the box is so big. 

And apparently you "debox song lyrics"? Now if they actually bothered to do that so that each little thing had a different line, that'd be cute but I seriously doubt that's what they mean here. MGA have a real tendency to make something inane sounds really exciting which just leads to disappointment.

There's the record. it's wedged inside the outer box lid piece and a pain in the arse to get out. 

It's big, it's yellow and transparent and it has grooves. I mean it LOOKS like a record. Though my eldest pointed out it's too small, it's a good half inch too small to actually be a real record. How odd they went to the trouble of making it ALMOST full record sized and thus so big they had to make the box bigger to accomidate but didn't make it actually properly record sized. 

What was the point then? Just make it the same size as the smaller singles records? I mean it's labelled to supposedly only have ONE song on it so why is it trying to be the size of a whole album anyway? A smaller 7 inch single would have fit into the box better, been easier to handle and made more sense anyway. Wouldn't it?

This new box is odd to open. The older style had the whole "pull out the drawer" effectively, but the remix boxes are rather more complicated. The inner piece slides out like the original boxes but the inner box isn't just the doll in a little drawer box thing, there's a whole other box here. It flaps open like a record sleeve kinda... I suppose? but because it's so chunky that association is somewhat diluted.

On the inner flap is the doll and her bff Kitty K. That's another wierd gimmick they went with on this line, each of the dolls was paired with another one and came with a spare outfit piece specifically for that friend. It was a way to encourage kids to NEED the other dolls I suppose, but it's kinda random. 

Anyway, the other half of the box has a big fake record player... or rather, it has PART of a record player because it's offset with the faux spindle not in the middle of the box but rather to one side. This means they couldn't even fit a full record image on the box. Wtf mga? wtf?

Instructions include mention of batteries and tell me the box is also a record player. Given the box has no arm or needle i'm gonna call bullshit on that.

The two little round... uh... knobs? I don't know what they're supposed to be... flap aside to expose the shoe and hat boxes. This is a new way of packaging those. 

Seems pointless but eh. 

the hat box is transparent this time, huh.

Underneath the "record player" part is the doll who slides out in her own little drawer. 

So far this is feeling like a hell of a lot of cardboard just to get to the doll. 

Inside she has three garment bags (presumably one is for her friend), a magazine of herself, a stand, a paper baggy containing another accessory and the doll.

The magazine is apparently volume 8. I wonder what the previous 7 were....

You've got to... vogue! 

Ahem. (I think it would have been cute if they had their friend's magazine instead of their own actually)

that tape "barcode" sys Got nthn 2 prv3. (got nothing to prove?)

The garment bags. I REALLY like the two colourful ones here, they're extremely fun. 

The one with "music/live" all over is very fat and squishy. It has the jumper/hoodie for Kitty K in it.

Pop BB herself comes in an... interesting outfit. It's an 80s workout leotard thing with an attempt at a conical bra underneath. (actually I think it might be the Dolche and Gabana number she wore on her tour in 93 which was dripping in bling.)

It's um.. a look. 

She also has lace gloves which curiously have no thumb hole despite clearly needing one. They're quite messily sewn too.

The bra makes me laugh so much seriously.

Her makeup is hot pink and yellow, as is her hair. Her hair has black streaks through it as well and is crimped to hell and back. 

UNLIKE Mattel's shitty ass crimping though, this still feels like regular doll hair rather than a burned to a crisp mess. 

She has tight curls at the front of her head and a huge lace bow. 

 

Her hair is quite coarse because of the crimping of course, and it has product in it. Particularly at the top to achieve this wierd sticking up part which is quite in keeping with 80s "hairspray? hair gel? I want ALL OF IT!" looks lol.

Her outfit pieces and "gift" for Kitty K. 

Kitty K's hoodie is extremely soft plush material, very baggy and has oversized bows on the sleeves.

Meanwhile Pop BB has a lace skirt with two belts, a lace top and a stone washed denim jacket.

The jacket has this symbol on the back which seems to be riffing on the US dollar with the pyramid. Instead of the eye at the top it has a broken heart radiating light.

MMXVI is 2016 isn't it? I think that's when the original LOL Surprise line launched. 

Under that is the latin "novus Ordo Nugas", again a riff on the American Dollar which has "Novus Ordo Seclorum" which roughly translates to "new order of the ages". 

The LOL slogan is a bit confusing because just plugging it straight into a latin/english translator on google claims it's "new order of toys" or "new classic toys" but "toy" in Latin is NOT "nugas". Nugas is more like... Joke or jest or something... 

I mean i'm assuming they probably meant it to be "new order of dolls/toys" as a play on "new order of the ages" and a bit of a flex on how they're bring new things in toys...  but I don't speak Latin and I doubt anyone at MGA does either.

The stuff in her "hatbox" is erm.. a lot of stuff. 

There's a tamborine, a little walkman (or walkB.B as it's labelled) that goes with the headphones that were inside the paper baggy, some stockings/tights, a necklace and some earrings. 

Now this is the first time i've ever seen stockings packaged not ON the doll. I'm not looking forward to trying to get those on her.

it was at this point I realised the magazine actually folded open to reveal more stuff (whoops) and oh look, there's the lyrics we were supposed to "unbox". 

I knew they wouldn't do it in a fun way. They're all just there on one piece of paper. 

it would have been far more fun to have them on little stickers or something scattered throughout the different boxes and baggies which you then put into order on the magazine. It would even give a reason to listen to the record to figure out the correct order. (hey mga, hire me!)

Now, when I picked the doll up to put her stockings on it occured to me that there was NO WAY they were going to go on over the top of that gym leotard thing. I looked at all the pictures on the box of the doll and there was no hint of the leotard thing being present in her final look either, so I theorised you must have to remove it like you had to take off Roller Chick's shorts to get her trousers on. 

But what the hell? When did MGA decide to ditch the whole "doll comes in undergarments that main outfit goes over the top of to create full look" thing? NONE of the other dolls i've opened have I had to remove something they came wearing to put their outfit on them. 

this is changing the script and I don't like it!

also, oh my god that leotard was hard to get off. The sleeves don't stretch much and she's got rather a lot of booty that's far too thikk for those little straps to slide over. I had a point there where I seriously wondered if i was even POSSIBLE to get the thing off. It took ages and it wasn't fun. 

no way could a kid to that. I don't approve. -_-

Her stockings were a breeze to get on after the struggle of her leotard. That's not to say they were that easy, they were just a lot less awkward than the leotard. 

Now, let's discuss a few more issues with this doll. 

I think she's gorgeous, I love her overall look BUT there's a few aspects MGA really didn't consider or play test here.

The two belts of her skirt don't sit properly and no amount of messing with them will get them to do so. There's also a wierd tuck in the front of the skirt that won't flatten out.

her walkman can clip to the belts but as they're just thin ribbon it's not really very sturdy and only serves to further distort them and pull them up onto her belly rather than laying neatly on top of the skirt. 

the headphones are too big for her head AND won't fit over her ears with her earrings in. They won't stay on her head without the earrings either though because as I said, they're TOO DAMN WIDE for her head and OMG's have big wide noggins so how'd they screw that one up?

I had to reglue a stud on her jacket because it was coming off. This is an ongoing issue with how they do the studs on these dolls. 

Her gloves haven't got a thumb hole so I rammed her thumbs through the lace so they'd sit where they were supposed to sit. They're messily made with a very big seam for such a tiny item which is obvious and ugly. 

She is cute though. 

Her necklace has a little venus symbol where the circle is a heart instead. I swear Madonna wore something like this at some point. 

In fact it's a lot of fun going through and finding all the Madonna references with the doll. 

As for the record, it isn't a record. In fact, the whole thing is pointless. You're supposed to put it onto the "spindle" of the box and turn it till music starts. All that does is turn the electronic music box on to play a 20 second snippet of music and you don't even NEED the record to do this. All you need to do is twist the spindle piece and music starts. 

rendering the large plastic record TOTALLY FUCKING POINTLESS.

also not a record.

Now, they COULD have embraced the idea and actually provided a cheap little needle piece that would play the grooves on the record like an old fashioned music box or whatever. I mean I have some talking toys from the 1960s who basically use a small record and a little needle to play when you pull the cord so why could you not do the same sort of thing here? Have the kid have to turn the record at just the right speed to hear the song while introducing them to the idea of how records work in the first place. 

It'd be kinda magical don't you think? to turn this plastic disk and have sound come out as you turned it, speeding up and slowing down depending on how fast you turned. Way cooler than a shitty battery powered electronic box that just plays a short sample when you poke a switch. And I refuse to believe that it would be that much more expensive than a whole ass electronic piece that'll be chucked out with the box anyway.

and then the record would have a POINT. 

Hell, if they'd made the record a 7 inch one they could even have incorperated it as part of the stand by letting you slide it in behind the doll as a sort of backdrop/stand decoration. 

But it's too big to use for anything except a frizbee. 

And I don't understand the point. It's huge, it meant they had to make the box huge to accomidate it and it does NOTHING, it's literally just a very large chunk of plastic. Why? Just... why?

If you're gonna do a record gimmick do a proper fucking record playing thing or shut up. I mean ffs. What a waste of a fun idea. Same with the lyrics waste. 

It's like at this point MGA don't even really care about the deboxing aspect being "fun" and part of the appeal, it's just become some wierd obligation instead. 

And if you aren't going to bother to make it fun then there's no point in having all the bits scattered like that, just sell the damn doll assembled and be done with the pretense. 

I like Pop BB, but her box could have been half the size if she didn't come with the totally redundant plastic disk masquerading as a record. 

I also ordered a few more dolls because well, cheap and also because I realised how damn good Camp Cutie would look in Groovy Babe's outfit and NEEDED to get both to achieve this dream. 

So first of course, Camp Cutie wearing some of her own pieces (hat, glasses, bag) and the rest of Groovy Babe's outfit. 

I absolutely adore how she came out. She's super mod and it delights me.

Meanwhile Groovy Babe took Uptown Girl's outfit because I felt like the blue, white and black would work quite well for her, providing a splash of colour that wouldn't overwhelm the effectiveness of her two toned hair. 

I really like this outfit on her. The blue ties into her makeup beautifully and the white and black splashes bring her hair in. 

in her original outfit I felt she was a bit too "samey" and her long hair completely obscured her very cool earrings and interfered with the collar of her jacket too much. It bothered me. 

Now I think she works.

Which left me with Uptown who's been in a box since I first got her. Her hair was so full of gel it pissed me off and while I love her outfit as a whole doll she just wasn't doing it for me. I dunno why. 

I finally brushed the gunk out of her hair which helped a lot to soften her look and gave her a combination of parts from the other dolls. She's wearing Groovy Babe's glasses, Camp Cutie's tee and jacket (which is actually PINK, I thought it was red like her dungarees but nope, it's pink. Wtf?), rainbow high jeans which fit her pretty nicely (unlike the tops which are a bit baggy) and Camp Cutie's shoes (which again are PINK and are flocked, which is pretty bizarre). The walkman is also Camp Cutie's and as I knew from Pop BB that it'd be awkward having both headphones AND earrings I opted for just headphones. You can't see any earrings when she's wearing them anyway, her hair conceals them. 

This outfit certainly gave her a completely new personality huh? 

I'm still not 100% sure on it but i'm never as happy with my own mixing and matching as I am with almost complete stock swaps. 

I also can't remember where I put groovy babe's stand so yeah... that's annoying. 

I also bought Missy Meow but I haven't opened her yet. I'm sleepy and lazy.

IN relation to camp cutie, she's a very pretty doll but her hair is CAKED in gel and rock hard. The hat is shoved haphazardly into the hat box when it clearly should be kept flat and so it's all creased up and there's a line of missed stitches that are unravelling already. Her shoes are flocked and as a result they're kinda messy around the heels and there's some parts where the flocking is a bit sparse. 

outfit pieces all look good though. So that's nice. She also comes with a little sister who is cute but I don't give a shit about so whatever. Just an excuse to hike the price a little more. Doesn't everyone who cared already have all these LOL babies anyway? I don't even think they're any different to their original releases. Variants i'd understand to an extent but rereleases of the exact same thing all over? Hmm. 

I still feel like MGA massively overpackage their dolls and i'm tired of having to tear the boxes apart because they're all mixed together with plastic inside card and has to be separated for recycling before I can throw it away (the snow ones have a stupid spinny mechanism for half the box for no clear reason beyond "GIMMICK!" 

It's a box mga, it's purpose is to hold a doll and keep all the bits safe till it's opened. Stop packaging extra plastic crap in there and focus on the quality of the dolls themselves please.

I'd vastly prefer a few more accessories or a little more time and attention paid to each piece to make sure they're perfect and fit correctly rather than a spinny box or a fuzzy handle or an electronic music box thing glued to the cardboard.