Last but not least, it's Cleo! - Monster High ressurection

 Sorry this took me a while. I've been struggling a little with exhaustion lately. 

Also, I didn't have as much to say about Cleo that hadn't already been covered by the Frankie and Draculaura reviews. But here she is anyway. 

Not much preamble, let's just dive in.

Cleo's box is the same as the others. She has Draculaura and Frankie with her in the artwork.

Cleo comes wearing a blue and bandage motif dress with little gold sparkles on, a chunky belt, a chunky necklace and bandage boots. These boots have been a bit of a controversial decision to some people but i don't mind them. My only gripe would be that the red on them doesn't tie into anything else in Cleo's outfit. 

Her hair is now blue instead of black, more like her Comet Crossed Couple doll from the Boo York movie. It also THANKFULLY lacks the awful tinsel of her original dolls. I HATED that tinsel. It made brushing the hair really difficult and it just tangled itself up all the time. Bletch. 

She's tied in much like the other two, with too many staples in her head and too many plastic tabs holding her hair to the backing card. 

And just like the other dolls she comes with a bunch of plastic bullshit.

The back of her box is interesting though because the illustration is clearly an earlier draft design, the outfit is completely different. Instead of the dress and fringed jacket Cleo is depicted wearing what looks like a jumpsuit with bandage details, which brings to mind a few of her older outfits including her original signature outfit as well as her "i heart shoes" outfit and the Skull Shores coverup too. First wave Cleo wore a lot of jumpsuits. 

With this she also has bandage wrist cuffs, an upper arm cuff and bandage sandals. 

I wonder why they changed this. Did Mattel decide kids didn't like dolls wearing trousers or something? It's a pity because it would have been nice to see at least one character wearing trousers you know? For diversity's sake at least. 

I also find it really wierd they didn't bother to just like trace over this with the new outfit design because it's quite jarring how different this outfit is. It furthers my theory that the release was a bit rushed. The box art not matching the production dolls screams of running out of time or just not wanting to invest a little extra. It's wierd is what i'm saying.

I wonder if we'll ever see this jumpsuit. It'd make a very cool fashion pack. Please Mattel? Can we have fashion packs again? We miss fashion packs. 

Cleo has a quite interesting face. Her eyes are very large with a blue pupil and amber coloured irises which gives her quite a blank stare. I assume this was the play up the whole "mummy" thing but it's a little odd. 

Her eyes have a little diamond sparkle in them but she's lost her diamond cheek design. Now instead she has this elaborate makeup featuring an eye of Horus swirl on one side and these thick square ended lashes toward the outer part of her eye. 

Her makeup is yellow blending rather abruptly into grey and then with a little splash of blue. 

Her lips also feature a little gold stripe down the middle of the lower lip. I'm not sure why but it's cool.

Like all the dolls in this new generation, Cleo has quite prominant eats with a very slight point to the tips. 

Her hair is two different shades of blue, a deep dark navy and a brighter blue. There are also streaks of gold tinselly stuff but it's very fine and lacks the awful unravelling nature of the original Cleo or the big fat comb grabbing bobbles of Abbey's original tinsel. Like her original doll, the tinsel is only on the top layer of her hair so would be fairly easy to remove if you wanted to. But as it seems to hold up okay to combing for now, i'm inclined to leave it be. 

Her hair has the same "greasy" feeling that Draculaura's has so i'm thinking they're both saran, but i'm honestly not very good at identifying hair types. Her hair is soft and sorta slippery like it's coated in some sort of product. Make of that what you will. 

The plastic crap she comes with feature a gyro/pita wrap, a canopic jar themed thermos, sunglasses and a makeup compact. I can't get the compact open but it does look like it should open. My fat fingers just aren't strong enough to struggle with the catch.

The thermos opens up and the Anubus head can be used as a cup. It's cute, but at the same time i'm not sure how appropriate it is to use a canopic jar as a thermos you know? It feels somehow... disrespectful. *shrug* 

The sides of the jar itself feature a bandage texture and what I think is Egyptian figures (likely also Anubus) but the whole image is a bit blurred by the bandage texture over the top of it.

Her dress is simple but cute. It has bandage patterned sleeves that remind me a lot of her original signature doll's jumpsuit. The fabric pattern is a series of repeating patterns with winged scarabs, peacock? feathers and I think reeds? 

There's gold braid off centered that makes it look like a panel or wrap over dress. The little gold diamonds look to me a bit like buttons which furthers this idea. But they are rather hidden by the pattern of the fabric they're on so they're not easy to see. 

The whole garment is made from a polyester fabric but it's all hemmed and each section is individually sewn so that's nice. Often Mattel would print things like buttons or trim onto the fabric itself, so it's nice that for MH they bothered to actually use real trimmings. 

The sleeves of this dress are slightly puffy and in my doll's case, the collar sits a little askew but i'm not totally sure why.

The boots are designed to look like bandages with a gold square pattern down the front, a blue and red toe cap and a gold heel shaped like a shepherds crook (the symbol of royalty in ancient Egypt I think) 

I feel like it's a slight shame both heels are the crook when typically in Egyptian iconography a pharoh would hold both a crook AND a flail but I suppose it was just easier to design them this way. 

I feel like these boots could benefit from a little paint wash to pick out the bandage details, I might have a go at that at some point. 

I don't mind these shoes, but like all of this new Monster High generation, they're quite a bit plainer than the original shoes which were, to be frank, rather extra.

Cleo's necklace is a huge chunk of plastic featuring gems, a scarab you can barely make out (the middle cabochon) and a feather motif. It's quite suitably Egyptian feeling, even if hte paint is a bit thick and sloppy in parts. 

I didn't get a decent photo of her belt but it has an eye buckle. 

Her earrings are just asymetrical triangles with a geometric line and triangle motif engraved. They're pretty boring but they do the job. 

The sunglasses, like Frankie's sunglasses, are a reused Gloom Beach pair. I find it interesting that they reused such an old mold for these but Draculaura's look to be new. Least, I couldn't find any that looked quite like them. 

Cleo's phone also features an Anubus headed canopic jar. I guess they couldn't think of anything else "mummy" related? lol.

The front doesn't have any detail like the others, but oddly, the print on the screen is a little bit less illegible. I mean it's still grainy and shit, but it's just LESS shit.

It's fun to see Cleo's original Skullette as an icon there.

Cleo's backpack is awkward. It's pyramid shaped so it's really bulky and it's made from hard plastic instead of the soft vinyl of the other bags. It has these three blue scarab buttons on it which are actually pierced into the plastic rather than being molded as part of the bag itself, this means they kinda wobble if you touch them. 

The top of the bag has a winged handle and then two backpack straps made of soft vinyl so they go over the doll's shoulders.

The bag hinges open, so you can put her plastic crap inside of it, but the hinge looks like it won't really withstand you doing this too often and it's quite difficult to actually open in the first place. 

I vastly prefer the design of the other bags, they're easier to use. 

also, the bulk of this bag due to the awkward shape makes it kinda wierd to put on the doll. It doesn't look right worn as a backpack imo and when only held over one shoulder it slips and falls off. *sigh* 

Cleo also now has a new pet. Remember I remarked that everyone needed to have "cute" pets like puppies and kittens now? Well that's what they've done here. Instead of Cleo's snake which was a rather morbid nod to her namesake, a link with her canonical boyfriend (she and Deuce are no longer a couple in G3 and I have no idea WHY) and just generally a very common Egyptian motif, she now has a baby uh... dog... dressed up like the jackal headed god Anubus.

This critter is called "Tut" and has a very unfortunately placed mold number on his groin. 

He's very very shiny with a metallic finish to all his paintwork. I don't know why but it does look pretty cool. 

But I miss Hissette. I always liked that we had several pets that weren't conventionally "cute" animals you know? 

Tut has grainy printed eyes but they're significantly clearer than either Whatzie or Count fabulous. It looks like they used a somewhat higher resolution print for Cleo's accessories which is bewildering.This means that from a normal "holding it in front of you" distance Tut's eyes look absolutely fine. Their graininess only becomes clear if you really study him or you know, take close up photos. 

I'd joke that Cleo demanded the better print but honestly, I have no idea why there's such a discrepency there. 

Anyway, Tut is probably my favourite of the pets so far. His shiny metallic finish makes him look quite cool and his mold is inoffensive. He actually sits which is something my Count Fabulous can't do and he feels like a pretty cohesive design concept, unlike Whatsie who just feels a bit all over the place (and not in an intentional manner.) He also has much better paintwork which makes him feel significantly less cheap and sloppy. 

G3 Cleo has, like the rest of G3, a much wider and more shapely body than the original dolls. I really do like this new body. The hips are nice! 

Cleo's body is unique to her I believe, least currently, with a sharply cinched in waist, thicker thigs and a mummy bandage detail to one leg and one arm like her G2 dolls. 

I like the addition of "monster details" to the bodies themselves, I think it's a lot of fun and was one element of g2 I really enjoyed. 

New Cleo is also a different skintone. She has an almost shimmery quality to her skintone and is a much richer brown. I'm pleased with this change. Mattel has a tendency to slowly make non white characters paler over time so it's nice to see g3 Cleo actually getting her tan on. 

Alongside Scaris Cleo i found it really interesting how similar and yet different the sculpts are. I believe they must have either modified the original sculpts or references them heavily when sculpting these new ones. Cleo has a distinctively shaped nose bridge which is present in both versions along with a very angled jaw and extremely wide eyewells. 

G3 Cleo definitely looks a lot friendlier than Scaris who looks like she's about ready to stab someone. Oops. It's the less sharply angled brows and the slight smile painted into her lips that does it. 

Scaris Cleo cannot fit into G3 Cleo's dress. It's too big in the hips and also the bust/shoulders. It's not too awful but it looks frumpy being that little too big and I don't like it.

 Scaris' stretchy dress however fits beautifully onto G3 Cleo and once I put her accessories on over the top I fell in love with this look. 

The sleeveless dress makes getting the jacket on significantly easier (long sleeves under long sleeves are a nightmare, there's a reason why doll suits tend to use a sleeveless shirt) and the splashes of red in the print tie in with the red of her boots. I also like how tightly it hugs her hips heh. 

Regarding the jacket, because I didn't earlier, it's made from a fabric that feels a bit like that very very thin "fashion denim" but I think it's polyester. It's printed so the inside is white with the print being printed on one side. The tassels are gold ribbons. I actually quite like it as a piece. It's pretty nicely made, the collar sits down which is always an issue with anything with a sewn in collar and it adds a bit of fun detail to her outfit. Yeah it's a bit "western" but eh. I think it's a fun piece. 

Cleo's wider hips and thighs made me think of Draculaura's new body but they're actually quite distinct from one another. 

Cleo's hips are slimmer, as are her thighs and her waist cinches in lower and more sharply than Drac's. Drac also appears to have wider shoulders and a larger bust. 

That said, Cleo's hips and thighs are larger than Frankie's. I didn't check if they could share clothing but their upper bodies look quite similar so they probably can.

this means they can't share clothes. The shorts are too big in the waist and the top is just an absolute no go for fit. 

As Cleo's outfit also has no stretch to it, Draculaura couldn't even get it over her thighs. 

Ho hum. 

To be fair, given how character specific Monster High clothing has always been, I don't see this as being much of a loss. It's annoying with Barbie sure because their whole thing is mixing and matching clothes, but with Monster High they've always been so character specific with each outfit pieces and accessory that it never looked right to mix them even when the bodies were all the same shape. 

 Yeah Scaris Cleo isn't getting her dress back. I don't dislike G3's signature dress, I just think that this dress matches her accessories better. The blue dress works better without a jacket and with heels or something. 

I really do like these three. They're all quite different from one another and have a lot of personality in their faces, more so than a lot of their original renditions honestly. 

I really enjoy the body diversity, I quite like most of their new outfits and their bodies feel good and solid and are quite enjoyable to pose and play around with. The new bust joint is great fun for dynamic posing. I also really do prefer the new body shapes, they make the original body look like a shapeless noodle.

I also like that they can stand without support. I always appreciate a doll who can stand the hell up on their own. 

I'm not without gripes though of course. A few of the outfit pieces feel very cheap (Frankie's sweater vest being the biggest culprit) and the lack of consistancy in the print quality of the accessories and pets is really frustrating. The grainy as shit Icoffin displays is annoying as it destroys the fun details hidden in their home page designs by making them too difficult to make out behind the static and I still don't think the food adds anything of value. 

But DAMN Cleo is a pretty doll. 

I'll be honest, most of the first wave Cleo's really didn't do it for me. The way her eyes were painted so they wrapped around her skull always bothered me and she was as a result extremely prone to wall eye. 

I quite liked G2 Cleo's softer look because her eyes weren't so distorted and i'm quite pleased that G3 has taken the few good aspects of G2 (the less wierdly warped eyes and the monstery details on the body itself) and improved upon them. What we ended up with is a line that calls back to the original but also brings in some nice improvements to the design. A more structurally stable body with stronger joints and easier to remove hands, heads without unstable glue and shoes that are soft enough to actually come off without taking the whole dang leg with them. 

I appreciate this. 

Now they just have to stop using poly for some of the hair and stop wasting budget on plastic bullshit so they can give us more detailed outfits with consistant quality for every piece. 

Oh yeah, and to maintain consistancy:

I give Cleo a solid 8 out of 10 staticky strands of tinsel. 

I feel like her dress and jacket weren't designed with one another in mind and the fact the red in her shoes doesn't go with anything else still bugs me okay? Also I took a point off for her bag and makeup compact hurting my fingers. If I can't open them, how the hell will a kid? Also the wear already on those hinges from opening the bag ONCE concerns me about the longevity of that piece. 

But otherwise, i'm quite pleased with Cleo.