Maybe i'm a glutton for punishment, but with no new Monster High hitting the UK i've been thinking back on their last failed attempt to revitalise the series.
G2 is almost universally hated by collectors, but despite that the dolls are uncommon enough that they seem to command pretty decent prices on Ebay. Something I find surprising if this generation is hated as much as online vitriol would suggest.
Now, back when g2 came out I wasn't overly impressed with the "kidification" of the franchise, making everything rather Barbie-like with the baby sisters for everyone, cheaper simpler outfits and a general polish of "this is aimed at 6 year olds not tweens" which I always felt was Mattel panicking because they didn't know how to actually market to the audience who embraced Monster High.
see, I don't think Mattel expected MH to be as successful as it was, particularly not for it to get a bunch of tweens, teens and young adults interested in dolls. From most toy company's perspectives, kids stop playing with dolls when they hit about 10, so why bother marketing stuff to anyone older than that?
but MH managed to capture something Mattel as far as I believe, couldn't quite handle. An audience of older kids, a market they hadn't factored for and one their current exec etc simply didn't know HOW to market to. They were so used to making Barbies for children, suddenly having teenagers wanting dolls when by Mattel's own words they should be "into phones and tablets" was a big deal.
Sadly, instead of embracing this new and previously mostly untapped market, Mattel panicked.
G2 as far as I have always believed was their attempt to wipe the slate clean, push out those unwanted older fans and return to their comfort zone. A toy line marketed to younger children. A nice safe market, one they knew well, one they felt most comfortable with.
g2 felt like a giant "screw you" to the majority of fans of MH simply BECAUSE it wasn't aimed at us. That was never it's point. It was a reboot designed to appeal to younger kids, not the market it currently held.
And I always felt this was short sighted of Mattel because their tween/teen market was such an untapped market otherwise and teens who collect dolls tend to become adults who collect dolls. They don't "age out" like young kids do and it meant you had this gateway franchise. Kids would age out of Barbie and Disney princesses and age INTO Monster High.
Of course this is all conjecture, I have no evidence of any of this, but that was always the vibe I got from the decisions Mattel made. As g1 drew to a close it was already pushing more and more for pink, for girly, for safe child friendly things like mermaids and cats and puppies and shit.
I mean i'm honestly surprised we didn't get a horse riding line for mh the way things were going.(We DID get fairies though with g2, and babies.)
But G2 happened and initially at least, I didn't HATE it.
There were things to loathe for sure, the "everyone gets a baby sister!" thing was tiresome and tacky for example.
But there were also things I LIKED about the first g2 dolls.
They had chunkier limbs which allowed for thicker more sturdy pegs in the wrist, elbow and knees. This made for sturdier joints and more robust dolls that weren't as prone to losing a leg or breaking a wrist through regular play.
They introduced moulded "monstery details" for the original ghouls, like mummy wraps for Cleo and fur detail for Clawdeen. A design idea they continued over into G3.
But they also made some really wierd decisions. Decisions that ultimately turned me off MH as a brand for a long time.
But it's been years. I'm in a better place in terms of my mental health, i'm no longer using dolls as a crutch to keep my head above water and hyperfixating to a dangerous level. So it's time I think to step back and reassess g2 and see if it still pisses me off as much now as it did then.
Spoiler: It probably does.
But let's get retrospective shall we?
So, I don't own many g2 dolls. I never had that many of them anyway but I also sold a lot of them when I went off the brand and Mattel in general.
I won't go into that whole mess, it's an embarrassing chapter in my life and was far more influenced by my poor mental health at the time than Mattel themselves.As I said, i'm a lot healthier nowadays.
Suffice to say, G2 broke me for a while. So this retrospective is as much about giving g2 another chance as it is coming to terms with and healing the negative associations I have for this group of releases.
So, I recently purchased a small bundle of dolls including two g2 dolls. Both of which I once owned.
We'll start with Silvi.
My original Silvi Timberwolf I ended up selling on at a loss and I always regretted letting her go.
Silvi was a new character introduced with the movie "Electrified" which i'll admit I haven't seen. I haven't watched any MH media since Boo York Boo York, I stopped finding the cringe fun and instead just found it annoying. Maybe I just got old.
Whatever.
Anyway.
Electrified was a whole line that was all neon colours and crimped hair with a fabulous 80s vibe that of course I enjoyed because i'm a whore for 80s/90s neon puke.
Unfortunately, like a lot of g2, this line was riddled with QC issues and cost cutting issues.
Missing or smeared paint was common. My original Silvi had half her nose missing and this girl had misprinted fangs.
And the hair? Dear god the hair.
see, crimping doll hair dries it out, so if you're gonna crimp doll hair you need to start with a material that can withstand that without frying. Unfortunately Mattel did NOT pick a material that wouldn't burn, instead they went with the cheapest material they could.
Silvi, like all of the Electrified line uses cheap nylon. It's extremely shiny and plasticky with quite thick strands. It's not particularly soft even before the crimper got near it. Crimping it just absolutely ruins it. The fibre ends up frazzled and split, the hair itself ends up so dry and fried that it sticks out in every direction and I mean i'll give them this, it DOES look like "stuck my finger in an electrical socket" hair.
Can you FEEL the texture through the computer screen?
Yikes.
Now, I have quite a few dolls with crimped hair because I have quite a few 80s and 90s dolls in my collection and it was really popular back then. All of them have soft hair. What crimping is SUPPOSED to do is add texture and it'll add a bit of volume making the hair more poofy but it should still be soft, brushable and sit down.
Here is a Rainbow High doll for comparison. Now Rainbow High dolls tend to use a very high quality hair fiber called "kiwi", which I believe is a sort of nylon. It's very very soft but it doesn't hold a curl that well. In Mara's case here, her hair is crimped but the Kiwi doesn't really WANT to be crimped so it doesn't hold the texture that well.
however, despite her hair having been crimped, something that's done with heat, her hair remains soft and it lays down rather that sticking up like a troll doll.
From the front you can probably see the difference more obviously.
Both dolls have similar hairstyles with a high ponytail. Mara's hair falls naturally while Silvi's has to be pulled downward and finger combed into something resembling a ponytail, otherwise it'll stick directly upright.
the closest texture I can think of would be perhaps the afro hair of a few of my black dolls, but those still have softness even while their hair is defying gravity. Silvi's hair is NOT soft, it feels crispy. In fact, it reminds me a lot of the time I boil washed a 70s Sarah Louise doll and watched in horror as the hair shrank up on itself. The end result was a very similar crispy, dry feeling fiber and that right there is heat damage. I'm fairly certain this hair is actually ruined because the nylon they used wasn't heat safe or they used too much heat. It's shrunk up on itself, dried out and started to split along each strand.
Mattel's cost cutting insistance resulted in a whole line of dolls who's hair is so unpleasant to touch and impossible to style that it sort of ruins their whole point. The crimping, which was supposed to be a feature, instead becomes their biggest problem.
What's especially frustrating is that the movie has another design for Silvi that doesn't feature the static shock hair. But we never got a doll of that version.
A real pity because she has a really pretty face and I love that we finally got another werewolf character that wasn't related to Clawdeen.
So I gotta address the elephant in the room here.
NO, this is NOT Silvi's factory paint.
this is my original Silvi to show you what she looked like straight out of her box.
My new girl has lost an earring (the reason for which is actually becasue the ear holes were too close to the edge of her ear so the earring tore out. You can see one of the holes is torn and the other is so close to the edge that i'm reluctant to put much more than a stud into it) but also had badly errored fangs so I was going to have to repaint her lips anyway. I elected for a darker pink to better match her pink hair streak. While I was at it I also decided to line her eyes to emulate the g1 style a little more (not that all g1 dolls have black around their iris either but eh) and to make her look a little more focused.
I also simplified her eye paint in the same purple and blue colours, because I felt like the radial lines made it look a bit messy and they were uneven and badly painted anyway.
You can see that my new girl has errored eyelashes too.
as I said earlier, the qc on these g2 dolls was horrible. Almost all of them had some form of paint defect.
I vastly prefer my overpainted Silvi. I think she looks more focused and softer. Something about the paint work of the factory doll gives her a slightly unhinged stare into the distance that coupled with her little smile makes me slightly uncomfortable.
With a little overpaint she's really cute and i'm glad to have her back in my collection even if her hair is horrible.
Now as I mentioned, one of the things I liked about g2 was how much more robust the doll bodies felt.
as you can see here, Silvi's elbow peg is substantially chunkier than g1 Abbey's. The g3 dolls have even chunkier pegs which make their joints even sturdier.
Unfortunately, after a couple of good lines, Mattel's cost cutting started to get intollerable.
The first few g2 releases weren't bad. The signature dolls had cheaper and subtantially "safer" outfits than the mini skirts of their original g1 days, but they had okay hair and the quality of their clothes was fine for what it was. Shriek Wrecked was pretty decent again with decent hair and actually fairly nice outfit pieces.
Electrified was where things started to fall fast.
and it was only going to get worse.
Garden/Party ghouls was... a line...
actually i'll be honest, I quite like the Rochelle and Abbey, they're both really pretty dolls imo.
but Venus?
this right here is the doll that broke me when it came to MH, the doll that made me question whether I wanted to give Mattel any money again.
sound over dramatic? Probably. But oh god this doll.
We'll start with the good shall we?
She has a very very pretty face.
Now, like my Silvi, I DID do some tweaks here. Unlike Silvi, Venus didn't really have any major errors. Her eyes are slightly wonky maybe, but it's not that noticable unless I am really nitpicking.
But I felt like her unlined eyes felt a little too unfocused. G1 Venus doesn't have black around her iris either, but her eyes are a deeper brighter blue. G2 Venus has very very pale blue eyes, they're almost grey in fact. So I put a little black around the iris to better highlight them which has the interesting effect of making them look bluer.
huh... wierd.
this was my original Garden/Party Ghoul Venus to show you her eyes.
She would have originally had a headband but my new one has lost hers along with most of her accessories.
Her hair is lovely and soft, but like my original is super choppy and all different lengths which is bizarre.
My new girl also has flocking issues where her flock doesn't actually fill the molded area it's supposed to.
Ho hum. G2's qc issues continue.
I really liked that g2 Venus had darker green in her hair. It's a more emerald green rather than the kinda mossy green of g1 and i think it's really pretty. Though a lot more watermelon with the pink lol.
Now Venus's outfit is dumb with a wierd double waist band on her dress but I don't HATE it with the same passion I did back in 2017. I feel like with g3 Draculaura's "cape" as an extra layer and with a jacket or something it could be styled to work. You just gotta hide one of the waist bands.
but let's talk about the REAL issue here.
an issue that would from this point forward plague g2.
the gappy bodies.
Now, when I first saw this I thought it was a factory error. "no way could they engineer that" I thought.
I was a fool.
No, they intentionally did this. Gappy joints that don't actually fit one another. The theory is they did this to save plastic and thus save money.
they also at this point removed the ability to take the arms or hands off, which meant they had to shrink the hands down and stop having such lovely expressive gestures.
My biggest issue with these joints isn't that they look hideous though, it's that they actively undermine the durability and poseability of the doll. Her wrists are particularly bad. They're stiff and awkard to move, they take quite a bit of effort to twist and there's clear strain to her right hand (not pictured) where the hand and peg are starting to part ways due to the strain.
all the force of the joint is on the peg and where it connects into the hand, whereas the older dolls that is reinforced by the socket itself. Here, it has nothing to brace against. The elbow has the same issue, there's nothing to brace the force against. While the pegs are thick, they still are taking far more strain than they were designed to take. These gappy joints also result in very stiff movement for the doll. The wrists are hard to move as I mentioned and the elbows are substantially stiffer and more awkward than Silvi's.
These badly designed joints continue into her legs with the knee joint having the same problem as the elbows. The peg doesn't fit into the socket, so it has nothing to brace against when you bend it.
this is NOT a healthy knee joint.
And like the elbows it results in really stiff difficult movement with the added "fun" of literally feeling like the whole lower leg is going to pop out at any moment.
Bending Venus' knees is a really awful experience because every time I think i'm going to break her.
Mattel took a decently engineered body that actively IMPROVED upon the g1 design and went "how can we best fuck this up?" and then did that.
They decided that not only aesthetics but actual functionality no longer mattered, what mattered was saving a few pennies on a tiny little bit of plastic.
And from this point ALL the g2 dolls got these bodies.
How much did it cost I wonder for Mattel to switch over from already engineered and existing bodies to their new shit ones? And how much did that little bit less plastic really save overall?
It's also worth pointing out that this line came with a LOAD of extra plastic shit in the form of little flowers you could mix and match into their belts and shoes. So if the intention was to reduce the amount of plastic WHY would you then make loads of little plastic flowers and shit?
These gappy bodies are horrendous. They represent Mattel at their most money grubbing. Actively sabotaging the playability of their product to save a few pennies. A great big "fuck you" to their customers right there.
While the original g2 dolls felt like a doll a child could actually play with, the gappy body g2 dolls are in my mind actively defective.
they also never made it clear that the hands weren't designed to come off and when every other monster high doll had removable hands, even dolls within the same LINE (rochelle and abbey both have ungappy removable hand bodies) it was just asking for these dolls to get broken by someone pulling on the hand.
incidentally, that IS something I did with my original one to see what would happen. I pulled, hard... and her hand tore off the peg.
Yeah...
I wonder how many of these dolls are out there with missing hands or broken legs....
and it's baffling because they already had perfectly good bodies from the earlier g2 releases. They had those moulds, they had them right there!
The gappy bodies were the last straw for me.
But here's the thing. Even back in 2017 I thought g2 Venus was very very pretty. But her body was unforgivable.
I returned mine to the store (yes, after I tore her hand off. What?) which is the first time i've ever actually done that. usually with defective dolls I just make do and try to fix them but Venus was unsalvageable.
My new Venus has those same issues of course and they still piss me off, but at least now she's not a brand new doll and buying her wasn't supporting the contempt of Mattel for their customer base and their betrayal of the idea of making a toy that was actually functional as a goddamn toy.
The unarticulated dolls had a place, they were fine. I mean I didn't much like them but i'd have LOVED that option when my eldest was young so that he could have had his own dolls that were tougher and more able to withstand the play of a very young child.
but the gappy bodies helped nobody. There was no niche they were filling. They were entirely cynical cost cutting at the expense of the product.
And I think that's why they offended me so much and continue to do so.
And i've considered whether it'd be worth rebodying Venus' head onto a g1 body but ultimately? I feel like hanging onto her as she is has merit. She will stand as my benchmark for shitty design. An example of corperate bullshit that actively sabotages their own brand.
She's a great example of what was wrong with g2, though she doesn't fully represent why it failed. G2 failed not just for the bad bodies and crap qc but for a whole host of reasons. It alienated it's existing fanbase for no real reason beyond someone high up in Mattel decided they didn't WANT those sorts of people buying their dolls. It introduced a lot of Barbie tropes and cliches which previously MH had avoided and was part of the reason people LIKED MH in the first place (because it wasn't Barbie!). It relied heavily on pop culture as seen through the lens of 60 year old white men and 12 months out of date (the emojii dolls for example) and cheap outfits cut to the exact same pattern just in different colours rather than distinct costumes for each character. It churned out a huge amount of cheap dolls with mostly plastic outfits, molded outfits or cheap gimmicks that nobody asked for.
and ultimately it utterly failed at its job. It didn't appeal to the kids Mattel wanted and it actively turned away the tweens that HAD been buying the dolls previously.
Now, g2 wasn't all bad. As I said, it did introduce some good ideas. The molded monstery details that g3 has continued with, the introduction of a couple of new characters like Silvi and Moanica who used their own head sculpts and had their own styles. Some cool new shoes even. (Venus' boots are insanely detailed)
I actually LIKE the original g2 bodies more than the g1 bodies because the joints feel more secure and they stand more reliably as they have stronger knees and hips.
but after Garden/Party ghouls... yeah.
The releases after Party Ghouls included a two pack of Draculaura and Twyla wearing outfits with peanut butter and jelly patterns which was... certainly a choice.
A ballerina line... you know, because "little girls like ballet"
and a line featuring outfits with comic book slogans printed all over them.
We also got molded on swimsuit dolls, a whole line of gimmicky "transforming" dolls with wing things, and MORE baby sisters.
so yeah...
g2 quickly wound down and was dead by 2018. It managed perhaps 18 months, limping on til Mattel finally accepted nobody wanted their plastic tat anymore.
Nobody mourned the passing of g2.
And honestly? I'm not sure we should have. It was a cynical reboot from the start, designed not to reinvigorate interest but more to get rid of undesirable fans in favour of Mattel's comfort zone.
And it was so frustrating because yes, g1 sales were slumping, but that's quite normal for a line that old. But it also held onto a market of far more reliable customers, customers who wouldn't "age out" of the brand. Tweens would become teens who liked dolls and if you managed that right, you could keep them as adults who liked dolls too. the original MH dolls appealed to children yes, but they ALSO appealed to tweens and teens who had otherwise grown out of dolls and were looking for something a bit more edgy to capture their interest.
that MH managed to hold such a broad market for so long was a testament to how good it WAS, but instead of embracing that Mattel pivoted away violently.
G3, though it's been woefully mismanaged, at least does seem to understand MH's appeal. We have the playline dolls aimed at kids but also designed in such a way that they're appealing to older folk too. But we also have collector line dolls for all those adults who have expendable income. We have g1 style dolls and classic horror movie tie in dolls. We have a company who at least at some level are finally embracing a diverse audience and trying to cater to it.
Now of course, they aren't doing it WELL. The overpricing of their collector dolls and the absolute pigs ear of their production of those is a whole thing. Their baffling inability to distribute dolls properly not only globally but within the us itself is a symptom of something else going on within the company i'm sure and the confusing nature of having g1's canon opperating alongside g3s is a bit... wierd.
But that said, this is a huge improvement in attitude over g2 which really did feel like it was specifically designed to alienate old fans and attempt to court a much younger audience that Mattel felt more comfortable marketing to. (and I suspect part of that is because 6 year olds are less discerning customers and don't have the ability to complain anyway, so you can cheap out more.)
Looking back at g2 just highlights how good g3 actually IS.
I may not love every choice Mattel made with it, but the dolls at least feel like they were designed with care and consideration for their playability.
that said, Mattel's cost cutting STILL plagues g3. Clawdeen has awful hair, several outfit pieces are really cheaply made and look bad. But it's so minor compared to the glaring issues of g2 dolls like Venus with her mis-engineered body or Silvi with her absolutely destroyed hair.
Mattel's cost cutting this time hasn't resulted in dolls that are defective straight out of the box. A problem that plagued g2.
Time has certainly mellowed me to g2's flaws, but my complaints from 2017 still stand.
I also got G1 Geek Shriek Abbey who has a gorgeous face but I haven't found her a decent outfit yet.
I don't regret adding Silvi and Venus back into my collection, but that doesn't mean they are deeply flawed dolls.
No comments:
Post a Comment