Rainbow Junior High - Poppy

 MGA continue to saturate the market with more and more and more dolls. 

So now we have "junior high" rainbow high dolls too. 

Somewhat oddly, they elected to make these younger versions of the same characters rather than say, younger siblings. Which I find an unusual choice. I suppose it's also what they did with a lot of the Bratz kidz but at the same time, surely the "going back in time" element should mean their clothing styles are outdated fashions from several years ago then? lol. 

Also, isn't it a bit wierd to have the same character as a tween and also as an older teen?

Whatever, let's look at the doll. 

The line consists of the original core 6, Poppy, Willow, Sunny, Ruby, Jade and Skyler. Their boxes are like the bigger doll's boxes, just you know.. smaller.

Poppy's artwork is very cute. Though there are a few differences between the concept art and the final product. The sleeves of her top aren't as shaped, her shorts don't have a tattered hem thing going on and her top is tucked in. Also her hair is a bit different but we'll get to that.

So because the boxes are smaller and MGA didn't want to resize their images, the back of the box ONLY shows 3 of the 6 characters. I find this a bit wierd. 

So Ruby, Poppy and Sunny feature on the back of this one and presumably Jade, Skylar and Willow are on those boxes (red, orange, yellow together and green, blue and purple together)

The little label plaque thing points out the "back in time" thing. 

Yep, still find it a bit random. 

The box isn't too bad to open actually, you peel the tape at the bottom and the whole doll with her backing tray slides out. She is though, in standard MGA style, held in with far too many plastic ties.

Anyway, the first thing I wanted to do was compare the bodies. The Junior High dolls are teensy tiny compared to the regular Rainbow High dolls and I wanted to get a decent feel for what was different.

I THINK the Junior High dolls are supposed to represent like a 14 year old compared to the what, 17-18 of the Rainbow High dolls? So they have a small bust but less flared hips than the older dolls. The bodies are very similar shapes though, just on a smaller scale.

The head molds are similar as well. I'm not sure if they're just shrunk down versions of the same head, but the eye shape is different so i'm leaning toward no. 

The Junior High dolls have a little bit of a cross eyed situation going on which is due to the shape of their eyes. I think, personally, that the original head is cuter.

Oddly, the Junior High body has absolutely NO outward hip mobility. None, at all. Meaning her legs cannot be splayed even a tiny bit, they remain stubbornly and awkwardly straight at all times. This severely limits her posability and compromises her balance as well. With the regular dolls you can adjust the legs to balance them without their stands but the Junior High dolls have to rely completely upon their flat shoes. 

They don't appear to come with a stand either so... yeah. Junior Poppy can stand up sure, but she doesn't feel as stable as big Poppy and she can't do any interesting or dynamic poses with her hips. (which raises the question of what the hell that little plastic flange at the groin is even FOR then?)

Junior can however kneel a lot better than big Poppy. Her legs have proper cutouts that allow the peanut joint to actually bend fully. This is a MASSIVE improvement over the original Rainbow High knee design.

Her arms have a similar amount of mobility to the regular dolls though, not much improvement there.

Junior also has the mobility joint at the upper thigh which allows her legs to twist, just like the regular dolls. Of course, this joint would be far more interesting to play with IF SHE COULD EXTEND HER LEGS OUTWARD SLIGHTLY.

I said i'd come back to the hair so let's talk about this.

So, Poppy's art features these cute little braids at the front which appear to be tied into the sides of her hair with little butterfly bows. Unfortunately, it looks a lot better in art form than it does in practice. 

Poppy has these very complicated plaits at the front that take sections from the top of her head resulting in a kinda wierd triangle of gelled hair that on my doll is kinda messy. Loose hairs and shorter hairs in the braids stick up everywhere and she's missing a chunk of hair at the front where it looks like it either broke off or was accidentally cut so that sticks up wierd too. 

The two tendrils of hair she's meant to have at the front don't look right. They're too far across and aren't coming from her temples where it'd make sense, but rather from this random point above her eyes. So it looks... odd. The short piece doesn't help.

I tried to make her braids look neater, I really did. But every time i'd tighten up one loose bit of hair or pull a loose strand out, MORE would take their place. The more I looked at her, the more it irritated the shit out of me that her braids were so messily done (photographs don't show all the loose flyaway hairs sticking up from the plaits themselves but believe me, they were there and enough to irk me) 

I also didn't like the way that wierd triangle of hair just... stopped. Or how sad her butterfly bows looked where they were positioned. 

Her hairstyle just looked messy and unrefined. 

I genuinely tried to redo the braids but they were complicated and I couldn't wrap my head around how they were done. Even staring at one side intact to try to match the other side I couldn't do it. I'm bad with hair.

So I ended up changing her style completely. I didn't like the tendrils at the front anyway, they were positioned all wrong and stuck out and one was too short so I pulled them up into the rest of her hair. I also felt like the bows worked better for pigtails so I ended up pulling the pieces that were in braids up into half pigtails and letting the rest of her hair sit loose. 

I think she looks better with her hair out of her face anyway. 

Her bows are stuck onto clear elastic bands which i'm not convinced about. Elastic bands deteriorate fairly quickly so these aren't going to last. I'd have preferred they'd used something more robust, like a fabric elastic or you know.. ribbon or something. The bows are also really crumpled up and difficult to get to sit nicely. They're cute with the butterfly wing motif, but I wish they were a bit neater. 

Poppy's makeup is fairly straightfoward. She has orangey eyeshadow and shimmery peach lips. Her freckles are less obvious than on her regular doll. Which is... odd. She has more orangey eyebrows too.

Her outfit consists of a pair of white denim shorts (with actual pockets yay!) and a strappy croptop with decorative bows at the shoulders. Like most RH clothing the quality is great and the material choice appropriate.

Over that she wears a thin semi transparent blouse with an elasticated top and flared sleeves with the same butterfly wing motif of her hair bows. 

I have to admit, turning some of the Monarch spots into hearts is a cute touch.

She also has a pair of white knee high socks and chunky peachy beige boots with daisies on them. 

I really like these boots. They're chunky and adorable and also help the doll stand the hell up.

She also comes with a fabric backpack. It's brown with orange writing on it (Sparkle, rainbow high etc), an embroidered butterfly (another monarch) and gold trim. 

The main bag opens up and can fit a fair amount of wadded up paper in it (it's absolutely packed with wadded up paper lol). I always love me a working bag.

I have to say, they managed to make this doll look younger very effectively. Her clothing style, her minimal makeup, even her choice of footwear all feel very "young teen" and I appreciate that.

Compared to regular Poppy, Junior definitely comes across as a cutesy little sister.

For reference, the Junior High dolls are around about the same height as the Failfix dolls and significantly taller than the LOL Be Tweens. 

They're definitely more age appropriately dressed than the Be Tweens though. The Be Tweens feel more grown up despite being supposedly even younger, so I appreciate that for once MGA actually decided to dress their kids AS KIDS (I'm looking at YOU Bratz Kidz)

The LOL OMGs  can wear the Junior High clothing, though the shoes aren't a great fit due to the vastly differently shaped feet (OMGs have super high heeled feet)

Junior High can't wear OMG shoes, but they can wear their other clothing, with a caveat. The tighter fitting bottoms may be too snug on the hips as the Junior High dolls actually have wider hips than the OMGs do.

I couldn't get Roller Chick's trousers to work on Poppy for instance, as once you had the under shorts on the outer piece wouldn't fit. And her trousers are more like chaps so really NEED the under shorts. Layering in general wasn't so easy to do with the Junior High doll as everything fit just that teensy bit more snugly.

I found that some sleeves from the OMG dolls were too short for Poppy and some of the crop tops too short (lots of underboob going on) so it's very much a YMMV situation there, but it's nice to know there ARE some options. Especially given how much easier it is to find OMG dolls and how many more outfit choices there are there. 

I thought R.Cs jumper/jacket thing was especially cute on Poppy. The mint tone went really nicely with her hair and eyes.

Overall, I think Poppy is a very cute doll but there are several aspects of this line i'm not so keen on. 

I HATE that the body can't splay the legs at the hips, it severely limits how I can pose her and makes most of her leg poses look stiff and awkward. 

I also had major issues with her hair. Not only was it messy out of the box and badly done, she also lost a LOT of hair when I started to brush all the gel out of it. Not only regular shedding, but several whole plugs came out! this isn't acceptable. MGA have been pushing too much stuff out lately and their qc is clearly suffering. Their overuse of this glue-like gel on their dolls also results in an excessive amount of shedding as the cut hair sticks to the gel and remains on the doll rather than being removed before packaging. I shouldn't get a small tribble of hair the first time I comb a doll's hair and I certainly shouldn't see whole plugs coming out. 

thankfully their big heads mean they have a lot of hair, but it's still extremely frustrating to see so much hair loss. 

I also don't like that Poppy hasn't got a proper parting. Her hair is only parted where the braids were and it's a little too short to really style her hair properly and looks wierd as the back part of her hair just sorta... flicks out and lays wierd. I don't know how to explain it, but the way they rooted her hair doesn't quite sit correctly on her shallow but wide head. A more natural part line would have looked better and made her substantially easier to restyle and actually play with her hair. 

The way the hair is parted also leaves gaps, so she has several bald spots in the part line which I suppose the braids were supposed to cover up. thankfully her scalp is painted to match her hair so it's less obvious, but it still annoys me that I 1: had to remove her factory style because it was messed up and 2: couldn't restyle it properly as a result of the lazy half arsed rooting job they did. 

I'm sure if you manage to get one with decently done braids she'd be fine, but even with her braids not unravelling and throwing random flyaway hairs all over the place, the positioning of those tendrils is just flat out wierd and wrong. They should either be further IN toward her partline like the artwork, or further OUT toward her temples like real hair.

Being right in the middle looks strange and also results in her hair constantly getting stuck in her lashes and sticking out at strange angles. It just infuriates me. 

Put simply, I have said it before and i'll say it again, the HAIR on the rainbow high dolls always feels like an afterthought. All this effort is put into the clothing and the hair colours, but then they seem to just go "eh, it'll do" with the styling.

I suppose I should be grateful that at least Poppy got braids, and they were complicated braids, but despite the complexity of that style it wasn't executed well and the finishing touches (the bow positioning, the tendrils) weren't well considered. 

She's cute enough. I LOVE her outfit, but to be honest? the outfit is the only bit I really do LOVE. 

I think the regular sized Rainbow High dolls have substantially nicer faces (not to mention variety in their face sculpts, which we may see if junior high get another wave) but also have better posability in their bodies. Even with the original wave not having the ability to tilt their heads (later dolls fixed this issue) they could still pose with a more natural feel than the Junior High dolls and it entirely comes down to that hip joint being frozen in place. You think of any standing up model pose, all of them will involve the hips and leg being angled even slightly. The Junior High dolls can't do any of that, they stand as straight and stiff as an old 70s Barbie doll and it bugs the shit out of me. 

Maybe they'll fix that in another wave too, but as it stands, I don't think i'll buy another one. Poppy was the only one who's outfit I absolutely loved anyway, and the base doll isn't that impressive compared to anything else MGA is producing. 

The Junior High dolls are £26 here in the UK, while the regular sized dolls tend to be about £35 but often come down to £30. For an extra £4 I could buy a full sized Rainbow High doll and get two full outfits and a doll who can actually cock her damn hips.

Why would I get the smaller, less poseable doll?