My Monster at Heart: Monster High Boo-riginal Creeproduction Frankie Stein by Mattel

Monster High was an unusual franchise to enter my life. I learned about it through reading the Bogleech horror blog, which highlighted the toy brand as exceptional in the girl’s toy market for having genuinely freaky and creatively spooky dolls, including the gnarly Inner Monster line that had brains under their wigs serving as eye-change buttons, and translucent bodies with skeletons inside that could be customized with different organ-style mood charms. I was interested in this toy, a toy so wicked that it could have easily been a 1980s parody of a girl’s toy, a toy that was earnestly being sold to girls. Through this doll, I discovered the Toy Box Philosopher blog, which has remained an informative, thoughtful, and funny source of doll reviews, and my primary inspiration for writing my own toy reviews (Hi, Emily--love your work!) Then I started looking up the Monster High catalogue. Then things turned into a doll collection.

Monster High appealed to me as a forever fan of monsters and I won’t lie and say I didn’t get invested. I knew all the characters, gathered an encyclopedic knowledge of the dolls, and watched the webisodes…and a few of the specials uploaded illegally on YouTube (don't tell anyone).

My first time buying Monster High, I found myself getting three dolls on one day, from two stores. At Toys "R" Us, I was stunned by the dark and extravagant Amanita Nightshade in her box, so she was my first purchase and the first deboxed.

Photo of my bygone original Gloom and Bloom Amanita.

I also got Frights, Camera, Action! Operetta and Kala Mer'ri that day at Walmart, who became my second and third dolls.

From there, I snapped up dolls left and right, often without a lot of discretion since I was enjoying the hobby and collecting characters by how I could find them in stores. I was coming in at the tail end of G1 (that's "Generation 1" for those who aren't familiar with toy franchise reboots--G1 was the first incarnation of the franchise), right when Freak du Chic and Boo York, Boo York were the latest big new MH doll lines, Great Scarrier Reef was new, and Walgreens locations had old budget dolls that had warmed shelves for cold, cold eons.

Pro tip: Walgreens and Walmart are where toys go to die, and the back catalog of toys you can find there that have elsewhere become rare via discontinuation is always a fun opportunity.

Toys "R" Us (RIP), Walmart, Target, and Walgreens became my haunts (pun intended?) and it feels like I got dolls all across the state. Simultaneously, MH helped me explore untraditional interests as a teenage boy. This was something I knew was very unusual and yet being interested saw me pushing myself against the pressures I perceived upon me to reject my curiosity. I think I took some healthy steps into asserting my interests because they were mine.

Acquiring and caring for the dolls turned into a nice relaxing activity and often served as a fun problem-solving or design challenge. How do I fix X doll's hair? How can I modify or re-style Y doll to personalize them or make them look their best? It was always fun to open a doll, examine the craftsmanship and detail, and then form a plan for bringing out whatever quality of the doll needed some work.

MH was also instrumental to my growth as a visual artist. I've always been creative and made characters when I was younger, but I never took art skill seriously and my art level was embarrassing for my age in high school. I was never interested in reality and drawing real people...so I taught myself to draw better by copying the fantastical and freaky MH dolls and noticing areas where I failed the likeness, style, and detail. Then I tried again. Making iterative drawings for the first time saw me refining my work and making strides that turned me into a proper artist and character designer with a command of style, detail, and personality. I owe these dolls quite a huge and personal debt for them motivating me that way.

Here's the first MH drawing I ever made, of the Feisty/Love Inner Monster doll. Feel free to judge; it was the drawing that convinced me I needed to work harder.

The 2016 drawing. I feel like it would be generous to guess that a ten-year-old drew it.

Here's a drawing of the same doll made in November 2022, shortly after buying the Frankie I'm reviewing here.

2022- flawed, but much much improved.

And together with their model:

I have a lot already written about this ghoul, but the photo-taking requirements to make a review of all she has going on will be intense.

If you're interested in my artwork (and you don't at all have to be), I share more of it on my Instagram account @mr._witch_db .

I saw out the 2016 Monster High reboot (G2) and wasn't as impressed by it due to the way it softened the outfits and faces for an appeal to younger audiences, though I still got a few dolls that weren't too dulled by the reboot (or were transparently squeezed into the G2 product line as unreleased leftovers from G1 that didn't make it to shelves before the reboot).

 

Eventually, I dropped Monster High from my life to the point of purging almost my entire collection. I regret that brutality today. Valentina up there is the only full doll I kept. 

The reason I dropped it was that I'd felt that for all my boldness in exploring the hobby, I wasn't validated for it. My mother never did anything to stop me from exploring MH and I value her giving me that agency to do so, but she still made it known she wasn't a fan of the aesthetic (which was her right). My best friend also made me feel a little weird about it at the time when he found out. I don't at all hold it against him now, but it still left me feeling a little isolated in my new hobby. At that stage in my life, I couldn't sustain my hesitant foray into MH without feeling like I was being supported.

There were legitimate creative differences I had with the brand as well, like the implausibly pretty faces of the cast regardless of archetype, and their oversized heads, and these helped me convince myself it was good to put it behind me. I also used our move of house as an excuse to dump the dolls as part of the downsizing process. I think my exploration and personal changes were simply too fragile at the time, so I chose to run back to a simpler version of myself after being challenged.

But you can only take the boy out of Monster High. Not vice-versa. And I think I kind of always knew the next version of the brand would bring me back.

It was inevitable, really. MH was a goofy thing that turned into a huge influence on my identity. It helped me find my art practice and develop higher creative aspirations and taught me things about following your harmless weird little interests and damn the rest. How could I say the hobby was a failure when Monster High made me, as a person, more successful? This silly creepy doll brand changed me positively and I treated myself poorly for it due to my insecurity creeping back against the progress it brought. Now I regret the loss of many of the dolls I had. Oh well. Perhaps I'll trawl eBay…and there was a future for me.

Creeproduction Frankie

I never fully put the brand out of my mind after giving away my collection. I still looked over the work it inspired for me and I kept good enough watch on doll blogs discussing newer things. I never stopped reading The Toy Box Philosopher, and was delighted when Emily left her hiatus. I missed a couple of things, like the news of the Universal Monster Skullector dolls, but I knew much of the goings-on, including bubblings about G3. The first reveals of the G3 dolls and continuity got me invested again and I started thinking about dolls I wanted.

And then I got a job at my longtime favorite independent toy store and saw some familiar trapper-keeper boxes in the storage room. And one of them was a Creeproduction Frankie and I sold my heart back to MH, buying her the following week.

It’s funny. I wouldn’t have identified myself to like the character that much, but even before I dumped my collection and then later saw Creepro and bought her, G1 Frankie Stein had been the most highly-represented character in my collection. She was the only character I had purchased three separate doll releases of-- her Gloom Beach rerelease, her Original Favorites budget reproduction, and her Freak du Chic doll. My collection was aimed more at the breadth of the cast and collecting what I saw as the best dolls of as many characters as I thought were nice, and I didn’t buy specialized releases of characters or multiple iterations unless I thought the dolls were really appealing or fascinating.

(In retrospect, this breadth approach strikes me as really misguided. The dolls I bought primarily to fill a character gap in my collection, rather than because their designs specifically appealed to me, happened to be the dolls I most often regretted buying. If I still had all of my old collection to evaluate with today's eyes, those dolls would still end up culled--just on their own demerits.)

Miss Stein happened to be the one character who broke through the margin to hold the record of having three available dolls that had that appeal in my old collection. Young Stein of G3 looks like they might be shaping up similarly, as I want two of their first-wave dolls versus just one doll of their compatriots.

Maybe I do really like Frankie.

In the moment at work, the reason Creeproduction Frankie called to me wasn’t because I loved Frankie especially as a character/doll. But I really like G1 signature Frankie’s design, and in doll form, I’ve grown to appreciate it even more since owning the already-nice Original Favorites edition. G1 signature Frankie was designed to stand for the entire franchise conceptually and aesthetically, and succeeds with flying colors. Getting a nicer, more accurate reproduction of her original doll seemed like the perfect symbol of me re-embracing the franchise. Plus, I wanted to compare her to her G3 counterpart, and having the character I had the most of again is a nice bit of resonance. The Creeproduction dolls were overpriced by scarcity and I resent paying for nostalgia, but there is sentimental and personal value to me that can excuse it. Call it healing.

First up is Frankie's box.

My Folkmanis sea nymph puppet says hi on the right :)

This packaging closely recreates the shape, construction, and graphic style of the oldest G1 MH boxes (though the basic style endured for a good amount of waves) with a matte cardboard box in a vague wedge-shaped Trapper-Keeper design with a wide coffin-silhouetted window. The box seems to be a really successful copy of the originals, and I was able to see this successful imitation effect firsthand. The Monster High dolls in the storage room were all placed in a bag so I only saw the tops and sides of them. First off, I couldn't tell the Creeproductions weren't the old Ghoul's Alive dolls that the store had once sold the year before. Secondly, after I discovered they were Creeproductions, I pulled up the last box in the row--and it was an original Dot Dead Gorgeous Lagoona (a doll which hasn't been remade), who was very close boxwise to the new dolls, with the only difference at first being the top face lacking decoration.

The interior of the box is largely the same as Frankie's signature release, with maybe just millimeters of skewed placements inside. It's very much the same, down to Frankie's pose and the placement of the diary and the stand inside. The popout text bubble that said the filler tag phrase "stitched together with style!" is now used to designate her as a Boo-riginal Creeproduction and features a slightly different background graphic, and the text elsewhere on the box features the same information but with more languages.

The last notable difference is the coffin-shaped window, which wraps around to the right face of the box. The original box had the window enclosed entirely on the front.

The opposite face of the box is narrower.

Here's the back.

I see two fewer Original Ghouls than I should...

The other characters advertised on the back have stark absences confirming that the Boo-riginal Creeproduction line does not include Cleo de Nile and Ghoulia Yelps-- it's just Frankie Stein, Clawdeen Wolf, Draculaura, and Lagoona Blue. Four out of the six G1 main characters. This is shocking to me, especially given that Cleo is a powerhouse in the cast and Ghoulia has always been one of the most popular and well-collected of the Original Ghouls within the fanbase. Then again, Cleo was first released in a duo set with Deuce Gorgon, so a solo release of her wouldn't be authentic. Ghoulia was also previously demoted in the Original Favorites line, where she was only available in a five-pack set, so maybe I shouldn't be surprised by her loss, either. I can only hope the final two characters will be forthcoming (maybe just reproduce the original Cleo/Deuce set for Cleo?), but I'm not super optimistic. 

And heck, expanding the Creeproduction line over time to all of the classic signature characters (Abbey, Venus, Toralei, Rochelle, Spectra, Nefera, Robecca, Operetta, Jackson, Holt, and maybe Deuce, Clawd, Gil and Heath's basic dolls as solo releases) could be a fantastic business decision that could release sturdier, untouched versions of more classic MH dolls for a new audience. 

Mattel. 

The money is staring you right in the face. 

Some of it is mine. 

Remake more dolls.

[UPDATE: They're doing it! A second wave of Creepro dolls is coming out, reproducing the Cleo/ Deuce set and Ghoulia at long last, and also Abbey and Spectra's signature dolls. Weird format break, but they got done!]

Now, my boss seemed concerned by the prospect of me taking Frankie out of her box, and I reflexively told her I wouldn't to reassure her, but it was a white lie. (I feel silly about it now, since I really don't think she would have actually withheld the doll if I said I wanted to open her.) I definitely intended to keep the box with a twist tie or two to re-package her for storage, but I firmly disagree with the idea of toys or other collectibles as an investment to resell. Toys are meant to be enjoyed--especially if buying multiple copies isn't feasible. A doll in a box may be a lucrative investment (and a nice display if it's G1 MH); but personally to me, it's not anywhere near worth the price sealed up. The only thing a sealed box adds for me is that the knowledge that the doll is complete...but for a buyer like me who's gonna end up with the doll out-of-box anyway, a complete doll found loose is just as good. Whichever's cheaper, at that point. Complete is complete.

De-boxing Frankie was done as delicately as possible, but not without a couple of cardboard tears. The nice thing about these old-style boxes is that they don't need to be deconstructed or destroyed to free the dolls. The backdrop that everything is attached to lifts neatly out of the outer box when the top is opened, and the elastic bands and tags holding the doll in are all accessible right there on the back without any tape blocking them. 

Easy access for complex fasteners.

The top of the box wasn’t sealed with tape, but the intertwined tabs were very difficult to undo and resulted in some damage in the opening, and one of the strips of the backdrop anchoring some elastic bands broke as well, though not on both ends. I saved the elastic bands I could undo from the box (a bonus I learned from my first collection--the boxes give you all the bands you need to supply yourself with bands for doll hairstyling!) and cut those I couldn’t (the ones around Watzit seemed impossible to remove in one piece) and carefully cut all of the tie tags from the back side of the backdrop to make sure I wasn’t confusing them for useful elastic bands or cutting into any fabric or hair. It's definitely more time-effective to cut things from the front when you can, but for the heads, you'll always be reaching to the back to get those few tags.

Here she is fresh out of the box:

The nymph is really going through something right now...

Let’s look at the supplemental things first.

Frankie comes with the classic waste-of-plastic brush, shaped like the brand's Skullette icon.

Whoopee and hurrah...

This was part of the original release, but they could have left it out with no complaints because these things were just junk and clutter that any G1 collector quickly ended up with more of than they could use. Any human-use comb or brush is more practical and effective at making dolls look nice, and I feel like there were at least a few MH dolls with hairstyles that were not meant to be touched...and they were packaged with brushes. Whoops.

Frankie comes with a doll stand, which is typical of the MH brand's design, but replicates a few unique factors that distinguished the oldest stands from the more common standard as the brand found its groove. I've already handled this stand with the Original Favorites rerelease, as that line reproduced the old stands in the same way Boo-riginal Creeproduction does. 

Three pieces- the base has the text logo and texture patterns on it.

.

Three factors made these early MH stands unique:

1. Like the brushes, the stands were color-coded to the character, something which very quickly dropped off to the stands being a neutral black for everyone. The exceptions for both stand and brush were some novelty doll lines that featured a divergent color and/or construction across the board for the brushes and stands of the entire cast. Skultimate Roller Maze had lime green stands and brushes, Freaky Fusion had yellow stands and brushes, Haunted had stands made to look like translucent ghostly chains that held the dolls under the arms so they could be posed in a floaty manner and brushes shaped like wispy ghost Skullettes, Inner Monster had a unique saddle stand system holding the doll between the legs, and Boo York, Boo York had crystal-textured silver stand bases and clear poles and clips as well as crystalline silver Skullette brushes.

2. The oldest stands have a T-shaped pole for the clip to attach to, with the rear of the pole being smooth. The clip also grips pretty firmly and can be tricky to snap onto the doll. Later MH stands adopted a plus-shaped stand pole with a new clip that fit the new pole and also felt more lenient around the waist, making it easier to use.

3. The stand base is a pretty sturdy piece of light but firm plastic. Later bases in this mold, much to my chagrin, would be made of flimsier, more flexible plastic that could sometimes come warped, which was much less of a guarantee for stability and aiding display...you know, the thing they're designed for.

Anyway, whether old-style or newer, the stands are all three simple pieces and work the same way, clipping around the middle of the doll's torso, with the clip being able to slide up and down a fair amount on the pole to accommodate for height fluctuations offered by shoes, and later, the other two main body types developed for the G1 female cast. That feels like a nice bit of foresight so the stand worked for everybody even though the toys started with only one female body type.

Male dolls have gotten their own stand clip pieces to suit their wider bodies. The largest clips in the 11-inch scale made by the brand are for Manny Taur and Hexiciah Steam, who have extremely exaggerated top-heavy bulky muscular torsos. 

Side view of Frankie clipped into her stand.

The stands are definitely a luxury in a world where Mattel decides they're expendable. That unfair decision was even a major issue during G1, since Mattel stopped including stands in slim-box budget releases and multipack sets of dolls.

Frankie’s last extra is her diary, which is a 2021-copyrighted reprint of her 2010 one.

The story within the entries discusses Frankie adjusting to life experiences after only very recently being created in the lab, with amusing questions of whether she’s the only one who’s ever had experiences most young people with parents can easily relate to. One episode shows her meeting Clawdeen and Draculaura, but it’s a bit stilted and market-y, since not once in the diary is Clawdeen referred to by only her first name. Each time, her name is dropped in full as “Clawdeen Wolf”, which screams of MH trying to imprint the complete trademarked character name on the reader so they can get hooked to buy the Clawdeen doll. Awkward writing, and not restricted to just this diary. Another fun part is hearing about Frankie getting Watzit, and the diary ends before she goes to school for her first day. 

Frankie's full profile from the back of the diary.

Now the doll.

From this point forth, the Original Favorites Frankie I previously owned will be referred to as "rerelease Frankie", while this one will be "Creeproduction". The rerelease was simply that--a rerelease that wasn't an outright replica of the original product.

Creepro Frankie's hair had a lot to live up to, since I recall rerelease's being very nice.

The colors are a fun mix of black and white streaks owing to her mom, the Bride of Frankenstein. The front of the hair is tied back on top into a bouffant shape and is rooted in thin stripes of black and white.

 

The rest of her hair, like before, falls loose down the sides of her head and her back in wider streaks of black and white than the top section’s thin stripes.

You can see the layers that are formed from the shorter tied-off section of hair falling on top of the longer remainder.

As seen in the freshly-deboxed photo, Creepro Frankie’s hair came out of the box pretty kinked from the rubber bands that held it, and it had a fair bit of wide volume. Boil-washing the hair removed the kinks and slimmed the profile a bit, but not to detrimental effect. From touch, it doesn’t quite feel like Creepro Frankie’s hair is as glossy and silky as rerelease’s, but it’s by no means unpleasant. It’s really nice smooth soft hair, just not as nice as I recall the rerelease’s being. It reminds me more of the feel of the Gloom Beach rerelease Frankie I owned--that doll's hair was a tiny bit coarse in the same way this one feels. I may be wrong, and I imagine washing her hair with product could improve it. This hair also feels pretty easy to ruffle out of a combed look by touching it, but it combs nicely back to tidiness.

On my rerelease Frankie, I came away with the impression that her hair was a bit shorter than the original’s, but the Creeproduction's length doesn't give me a sense of discrepancy, so either it's longer than rerelease's or they're both the same as the older doll.

Creepro Frankie's face looks really nice.

Gore-geous.

I’ve seen Creepro Frankie faces that look a bit distorted, but mine (luckily) seems pretty pristine, evenly screened, and attractive. She has a wide-eyed friendly openness to her face that works nicely against her fabulous edgy makeup. I used to lump Monster High in with Bratz when I casually observed it back in 2010 or so, but I really didn’t give MH enough credit there. Sure, the eyes and lips are large and the noses are small, but the monsters' faces feel prettier to me and their characters are more sincere and approachable. There’s a real artfulness to the fusion of edgy and creepy, stylized and realistic, and friendly and pretty in these face sculpts and paint jobs. They’re very fashion and fabulous and maybe unwarrantedly beautiful sometimes, but they look like specific and interesting people as well and carry themselves with a weird class. The Bratz were objects of fascination and aspiration (and perhaps revulsion), more like caricatured celebrities or reality stars. To me it feels like most of the doll lines made by Mattel competitor MGA Entertainment, and not just Bratz, seem to be about glamor and trendiness that eclipses any kind of depth and character sincerity. That's something I can only take in small doses. 

I could maybe watch these people on TV-and that's a maybe- but I would never meet them.

The ghouls, on the other hand, feel both aspirational and relatable to me. These are fashion icons who could still be your friends and classmates. This is tinted a bit by the Creepro face, though, as the oldest MH dolls had a bit less open expressions, with smaller eyes that made them look more mature and standoffish. 

Frankie is a pale minty green and has stitches on her right cheek as well as heterochromic eyes implying her parents couldn’t find (or chose not to give her) a matching set. Maybe it's a compromise-- Mom wanted one color and Dad wanted the other, so they split the difference! Her head is subtly squared to reflect her dad, which her signature hairstyle brilliantly highlights by having her hair fall in a direct outline of a squared forehead. Frankie’s eyes are a bright blue and green, and she wears purple eyeshadow with grey undereye shadow as a stylish imitation of dad’s sunken eye sockets. Her lips are a dark red shade and her eyebrows are brown. I’ll never understand doll designers’ frequent refusal to make eyebrows match their dolls’ hair color, particularly for fantastical characters, but Frankie’s brown brows are fairly excusable for an artificial cobbled-together person.

 

Frankie's head is her original sculpt/mold, stamped 2008 on the back.

Frankie Stein: 15 days old for over 14 years strong!

Not that I expected anything different, but it's so cool to see this piece has existed for so long. It's also a neat artifact that exposes some of the brand's development history--even by the point the head sculpts were figured out and finalized, the dolls were still two years out from release!

Universal’s copyright rules for unlicensed Frankenstein monsters have been stated to disallow for other people to depict the Monster with all of these traits in conjunction:

1. Flat-top head

2. Protruding brow ridge 

3. Green skin 

4. forehead scar (which one they mean, I have no idea)

5. Neck bolts

Colorized photo of Boris Karloff in makeup as the Monster.

Frankie has two, maybe three of these five- green skin and neck bolts, plus the subtle squaring of her head invoking the flat-top look, which may or may not be explicit enough to count according to Universal. She does not have a forehead scar or heavy brow, though she does have a line of stitches on her cheek and staple lines like on the Monster's forehead around her neck and limbs. Looking further into the Frankenstein iconography in MH is interesting-- G2 introduced a younger sister for Frankie, Alivia. How does she compare to the checklist? 

Mattel stock photo of Alivia Stein's solo release from the Monster Family doll assortment.
I'd like to have this doll.

Well, Alivia has bluer skin, but still has a squarish hairline and adds a line of stitches across her forehead hidden under her bangs (done with sculpted stitches). Her bolts aren't on her neck--they're forehead bolts, which is a very common alternate way unlicensed Monsters incorporate them. 

G3 Frankie strays even further from Karloff, with their skin being blue, their hairline no longer framing a square shape, and their body no longer having neck bolts or stapled flesh, though bolts and staples still appear on their prosthetic bionic metal leg.

Mattel stock photo of G3 signature Frankie Stein.

Back on topic. (I warned you what this blog would be like!)

Creepro Frankie's earrings are shaped like Skullettes, done in metallic blue and dangling from silver chains. 

The chains were unpainted in the rerelease doll, whose earrings were molded in a solid flat blue. That really broke with the very first MH designs, which felt a bit more realistic, gothic and detailed and less campy and colorful and toylike. 

Close-up on Original Favorites Frankie's solid flat earrings.
(stock photo by Mattel)

Creepro Frankie's earrings match the original and preserve the fairly unique look of those signature dolls.

As always, Frankie’s neck includes tiny little bolts, which are such a fun detail and perhaps one of the smallest touches that has ever made an MH torso physically unique from the standard. 

The row of staples being painted continuously around the neck evidences that the bolts are separate parts placed into the neck after the paint job. Either the torso is a barely-modified mold with the holes as a part of the shape, or it starts as a standard-molded torso before going through an extra step to have holes bored in it so the bolts can go in. The bolts aren’t particularly shiny, but they are pearlescent and chrome bolts could look too fancy for a Frankenstein creature. 

Frankie’s costume is probably the simplest of all of the Original Ghouls', being a one-piece dress with a belt, shoes, and a bracelet. 

The one-piece nature isn’t a bad thing at all because it’s a perfect design, but Frankie’s ensemble just has fewer parts. I’m struck by the realization that every G3 signature doll has multi-piece outfits and at least two layers of torso clothing and/or alternate clothing pieces. That lends their signature outfits a pretty equally raised level of permutations while the doll can look complete even with the minimum of pieces, and avoids the clothes-play imbalance the G1 signatures may have offered. It's a nice way to ensure the G3 signatures are roughly on par in terms of play and display options regardless of the character they portray, since kids might not always know what each doll offers before playing. In stark contrast to G1, G3 signature Frankie has one of the most complex outfits of their collection, with two optional layers of torso clothing they can wear over a two-piece outfit!

Anyway, Frankie’s dress is great. It looks essentially identical to the version from the Original Favorites doll from what I remember, and may be identical to the original as well. The outfit is like a private-school dress with just a bit of edge to it, primarily due to its short length and netted sleeves and skirt trim. The prep-school connotations on the protagonist character are an excellent visual shorthand to broadcast that school is the center of the MH premise. Animated Frankie’s sleeves are more puffed, but it’d be hard to do that on the doll with this fabric at this scale, so I don’t mind that they’re not on the toy. The top section is a satiny white fabric with a tiny collar that lies flat well and zigzag black stitching on the lower edge. 

Frankie wears a black necktie with white spots, represented by a ribbony fabric sewn to the middle of the collar. The piece isn't wrapped or tied in a convincing knot at the top. It's just sewn down a bit under the top to denote where the knot is.

Nothing of note under the tie, and it's only affixed at the top.

The tie includes a silver Skullette pin on the tail, represented by a small plastic charm sewn onto it.

Over Frankie’s dress, she wears a thick bolt-studded belt with a couple of dangling silver chains and a large lightning-bolt buckle. 

The belt connotes laboratory straps and gives her a bit of Frankenstein toughness. The piece is a soft, very flexible vinyl that closes in the back with a peg that pushes down into the hole on the other side.

 The belt comes held to the dress by a small white stitch on the front, but I cut this (oh, horror; I’ve devalued the doll even further!) to allow the piece to separate fully. I believe the stitch was also present on the rerelease (and thus, I'm sure, the original). 

Frankie wears a small simple bracelet on her right wrist- a silver bangle with a blue stripe in the middle. The bracelet clips on, which is very rare for MH. Most of the doll bracelets are enclosed loops since the removable hands allow the bracelets to come off. 

Frankie’s shoes are the same as I’ve known them, being rounded chunky platform heels with ankle straps, and stripes making up their entirety. 

They’re really simple but striking and their clunkiness works well to put a bit of stompy Frankenstein boots into the pretty heels. The stripes aren't just painted-they're sculpted as part of the shoes’ texture as well. Which shoe goes on which side can be hard to tell when looking head-on or at their soles, but looking into the shoes from the top very easily tells you which foot goes in which due to the marked "L1" and "R2" as well as the contour of the hole the feet slide into.

Honestly, the text is unnecessary if you can look at the shape.

Let’s talk about how great this outfit is. The colors, details, and length make it feel very mature and definitely give it a 2000s-era edge, but not in a way that feels outdated or unattractive today. Other old MH outfits feel much more like relics.

Not a relic!

MH would evolve to become a little more fantastical, bright, and fabulous, and I adore its camp fashion designs, but there’s something to be said about the more understated and edgy older designs. They’re an introduction to Monster High that says the brand isn’t there to play around with cutesy generic spooks. The old dolls tell the viewer that MH has a legitimate creative passion for classic horror and fashion and that it’s worth sticking around to see just what freaky-fab stuff it’ll pull out. The Original Ghouls make a fantastic opening statement for the brand-- unusual, trendy, mature, and freaky like no other mainstream play doll had been before, and for that they feel really artistically solid and special. Frankie’s costume and hair and face all fit together exceptionally well for me, and I think she absolutely nailed the design assignment for “first character people will associate with the brand”. Frankie is alternative, fashionable, friendly, and creepy while visually connoting academy uniforms and one of the most famous cinematic monsters of all time. I can imagine a lot of precise workshopping went into her look, and boy did it pay off. 

(Monster High was hugely responsible for turning me from a creative kid to a full-fledged visual artist and character designer, so yes, I am going to get analytically laudatory about it!)

I’ve seen and pondered myself some concerns about the old fashion style, though. 

Lots of makeup, nots of modesty.
(Mattel stock photo of the Original Favorites rerelease five-pack.)

It's pretty telling that G2 and G3 seem to pointedly feature much more school-appropriate takes on the character's fashion senses. The Original Ghouls are edgy, confident, and creative...but maybe not age-appropriate and they'd never get a pass in a real school. 

Let's examine this. G1 Monster High comes from a specific social context. Back in the 2000s, edgy girls’ fashion was the moment. For example, this was the heyday of America’s Next Top Model, the competition reality show which put the “Tyra” in “tyranny” as it promoted extremely toxic body image standards and constantly championed unusual and alternative expression as the ultimate way to get fame and success from your looks. This was also the heyday of MySpace goth and emo Internet culture and the Hot Topic store that both catered to and served as a formative pillar of said subcultures. The teen feminine 2000s zeitgeist was also heavily defined by the massive success of Stephenie Meyer's supernatural-romance Twilight series. Teen girls were really interested in the dark and macabre, and in being edgy and mature in their fashion, so Monster High shrewdly targeted both of those interests--and boy did it pay off!

Sure, the ghouls aren't realistically dressed, but no part of them is realistic, and edgy fashion kind of aligned perfectly with the cast and represented an aspirational fantasy of confidence and rebellion that many people discovering themselves feel. Heck, this brand  had a "cool factor" that helped me challenge myself and and learn about myself as a teen! I think you could take the tack that these older dolls are sexualized or indecent and reductive to women, but even though these outfits are a little hard to swallow on teenage characters, this was a teen fantasy in its time and the MH characters were never portrayed with a drop of lust in their bodies. They were very fashion…for the purpose of being very fashion! I think that was understood by the audience and reinforced by their innocent portrayal. And even if I could call the ghouls' designs inappropriate, I could never call them trashy. I think the dolls have intent, imagination, and aesthetic strengths that make them acceptable as a fantasy construct. They reflected a fashion culture marketed to and enjoyed by adolescent girls and tapped into a trendy alternative zeitgeist, regardless of whether that fashion culture was healthy or not. When criticizing the dolls, it's probably better to view them as a symptom rather than the problem.

The brand's audience reshaping itself also helped make things more appropriate. There was time to respond to feedback from wave 1, and since the brand's (let's face it, unlikely) target market of tween girls found itself eclipsed by adult collectors and younger children, the brand started softening its edge. MH redirected its flair into more avant-garde and "fabulous" directions, turning out works of visual camp and fantasy clothing design that were to die for, plus more extravagant creepy body detailing, rather than edge delivered through clothing cuts and designs that felt more adultified and scandalous. After wave 1, the cuts of the outfits never felt so alarming again even as they remained short. I’m completely willing to give you that the flouncy microskirt with no under layer on signature Clawdeen was a mistake…but her dolls never looked like that again.

Wave 2 School's Out Clawdeen-- still cutting-edge chic with calmer clothing cuts.
(Mattel stock photo.)

At the end of the day, I love Frankie’s costume design and think she holds up the strongest out of the G1 Original Ghouls for being more approachable, less dated, and the most personally appealing to me.

Now let’s talk about the body and articulation.

The standard Monster High body shape (plus bolts and painted scars).

In several ways, the Monster High body was a stroke of brilliance. Paired with the head, it created a stylized, spooky, unreal creepy figure that allowed for clothes to be smaller and thus more detailed and intricate--a standard doll-clothes budget paired with a body that requires less fabric to cover it means more detail can be included. The body also featured a truly exceptional standard of articulation for play dolls at the time of MH’s debut. MH was not the first to develop articulation like this, and did not feature the most articulated play doll on the market at the time. I believe the Liv doll brand which featured everything MH had, plus double-jointed knees, held that honor. However, MH's massive success set its level of articulation as a high standard that many doll lines may find themselves compared to as a baseline. Up until Mattel's own Made to Move Barbie designs one-upped it, the MH standard was a handy, recognizable posing paragon when evaluating other dolls, and is still the standard most well-articulated dolls fall in line with. That articulation, paired with the brand's stylish face paint, stylized bodies, and detailed clothing made them feel rather like art dolls moreso than trite playthings. Monster High has endured as a popular doll brand for hobbyist customizing and artist repaints due to their stylized look evoking more niche art dolls and their display value being so high from their joints.

The shape of the body is stylized and quite slender, with smallish breasts and a thin waist, and is sculpted in a somewhat-uncomfortable looking swooshy profile contour that sees the belly sticking out in front of the hips and neck. 

You could prop a crowbar between her upper back and butt.

It doesn’t look as dramatic or weird when the dolls are clothed, but it’s a very strutty, flowy fashion shape. Creepro Frankie’s body has a 2021 stamp on it, which intrigues me. I imagine it has something to do with the sturdier elbow pegs, but it's strange, then, that from what I've seen, the Skullector dolls made post-2021 don't have this updated body. 

The body has sculpted underwear, which also features on some dolls with unique bodies in this body type, but for a few dolls whose bodies are detailed and textured all over, underwear is omitted, likely to maintain a more artistic fantasy body design that doesn't have to interrupt the intricate detail.

As for that articulation? There's a lot of it.

This is...a pose, for sure.

As I've known it, the head is mounted on a long peg which pops in with a disc at the base that squeezes through the neck hole of the head, as well as having anchoring prongs that taper down and flare outward, as they're designed to make the head hard to pull off. The whole peg ends on a small ball that slips onto a tiny bar inside the neck to keep it extra secure. The peg can tip back and forth and wobble in a circle by sliding up and down on the bar. I've pulled a whole neck peg out with the head before, breaking the small bar inside the torso, but the bottom of the peg snaps into the neck like a ball joint even without the bar holding it in. The peg secures the head while allowing it to rotate 360 degrees and tilt side to side and a bit up and down. 

Diagrams of the neck peg inside the head and how it attaches inside the neck...
based on how I saw them from G1 dolls.

The anchoring peg being unable to rotate smoothly inside the neck appears to be the sole source of any head articulation problems these dolls may have. If the head isn't tipping forward and back, the ball at the end of the peg is likely too tight inside the neck, prohibiting the peg from tipping forward and allowing the head to move that way. 

Unfortunately? I don't think there's any real way to fix this issue on a doll with a sticky neck. Fortunately? All of the dolls I've gotten from 2022 have had excellent head articulation, so maybe Mattel figured out how to tighten the manufacturing so the neck pegs wouldn't be sticky or ill-fitted on their current output. 

Frankie's head moves great!

The arms are made in three pieces, the lower two of which can separate for ease of redressing. This is particularly useful for dolls with sleeves that simply can’t fit around the hands at all. This system also hugely expands the outfits' creative potential by allowing Mattel to make tight-sleeved outfits to begin with. Later dolls in G2 proved this, with the last articulated bodies it introduced axing the removable aspect and featuring stuck-together jointed arms that forced the outfits to be sleeveless or wide-sleeved to work. It was another disappointing kiddie...ing step for the brand to take. Especially since many dolls got very gappy ugly joints. The later G1 dolls and the revival G1 body addressed the stability problem by just having thicker, sturdier removable arm pegs.

Frankie's separable parts.

(This is just Frankie's everyday life.)

Only one Monster High doll has ever utilized the separable arm pieces as a visual gag and play feature--Freak du Chic Frankie. Since her character canonically has body parts that can detach, that doll's magician top hat has a socket in the underside to place one of her detached hands to make like the hand is emerging from it. The doll was even packaged with her hand in the hat socket for display!

Ta-da!
(Mattel stock photo of Freak du Chic Frankie in-box.)

The upper arm is fixed to the body and features a ball-shaped rotating hinge joint that lets the arm spin forward and back at any angle and raise upward to be parallel with the collarbone.

Not all poseable toys with rotating shoulder hinges can do this, and it's a shame.

 The lower arm also has a rotating hinge, allowing for multiple arm poses at the elbow, with the arm bending to 90 degrees. The hand is separable from the forearm and is also on a rotating 90-degree hinge. 

Male MH dolls initially had one-piece forearms without rotating wrist joints, but this was soon amended because it clearly never should have been that way. All of the male characters who had that baffling first body design eventually got at least one doll release with articulated wrists afterward.

Up high...

Down low...

And wrists too.

The hand joints are generally not the highest-friction on an MH doll, making it sometimes difficult to balance objects on them for the doll to carry. 

The lower arms and hands are made of softish vinyl, while the rest of the body is harder, and the legs and torso are the most firm plastic on the body. They can make a good clacking sound. 

The legs of the standard dolls cannot be taken apart at the joints…not that there'd be any reason to do so. 

MH hip joints started out attached with elastic in the original few waves of dolls, but shortly after changed to a plastic swivel hinge joint for better longevity and durability. I believe by the end of 2012, all MH dolls had plastic hip joints. The problem with elastic is that it naturally slackens over time, leaving dolls with elastic joints pretty loose and floppy as the years go by. The shift away from this system means a rerelease of signature Frankie will have sturdier legs, and Creepro in particular will have stronger forearm and wrist pegs. This doesn't universally protect the dolls, since variance can result in some dolls having loose hip joints from the start. Oh, well.

The legs close together neatly but cannot do side splits.

This is as far apart as they go.

 The knees are rotating hinges that allow for some crossing, but the sheer proportional length of MH legs makes it hard to find a chair high enough off the ground to let them sit without their legs sticking out in front of them. They also cannot kneel elegantly on one leg because of this--not even the “little sister”-sized dolls who have shorter legs. My Creepro Frankie’s lower legs both rotate a bit too freely for my liking, but it’s not too bad.

See how tall a chair would need to be for this long 90-degree leg bend?

Technically kneeling. As if the bend of the body wasn't already extreme...

Yeah, I think we've found the weak points in these dolls' elegance factor.

The feet of the Monster High girls (and in G3, the femme-bodied nonbinary Frankie) are molded in a high arch with no jointing,  as they're shaped for wearing heeled shoes. This makes it impossible for them to stand freely on their bare feet. Male MH dolls have flat feet with rotating hinges at the ankles. 

This is the standard articulation for the G1 female body, but some dolls in the brand have had more. A few dolls in G1 with irregular body shapes have torso joints, as do the femme signature dolls in G3, and the Gooliope Jellington doll and the other, non-mainline 17-inch dolls had torso joints as well as double joints in their knees and elbows to allow each to bend further in more realistic ways.

For as artful and playable as the G1 body is, it unsurprisingly faced criticism. Dolls are always subject to cultural debates about body image and beauty standards, and for a brand to be composed of such spindly skinny characters (that happen to play into the aughts-era fashion zeitgeist) really rubbed some people the wrong way. I understand that. I don’t think this was negative intent, and the idea was likely to evoke Tim Burtony gothic spindliness more than toxic beauty standards, but complaints and concerns are fair to have. These were not, at the end of the day, art dolls; these were mainstream toys sold as the headliner of a children's franchise. This issue has been addressed since in G2 and G3, with the dolls being less drastically skinny and adopting a more mainstream cartoon body shape and, in G3, no longer being in uniform shapes. The skinny, spookier G1 body is currently reserved for use in Monster High dolls aimed at adult collectors (which I count the nostalgic Creepro dolls in). For collector releases, the body can be more clearly received as an stylized artistic choice and doesn't send the wrong message.

Creepro Frankie has the missing pieces rerelease Frankie didn't-- her purse and her pet.

All of the G1 signature Original Ghouls had a purse of some kind and a pet, save for Draculaura, who swapped a purse out for a static plastic parasol sculpted in a closed shape. G3’s signature dolls follow a formula, too, with G3 having a phone, a backpack, a pet, and snacks and other extras for each signature character.

Frankie’s purse feels, like the rest of her pieces, less overtly themed than the brand would later become. It was so much less overt, in fact, that the bag sculpt made a reappearance paired with another character-- Scarah Screams' first mass-market release in the I Love Fashion line. The bag looks fairly realistic and maybe a bit luxury but in kind of that clunky ugly-luxury way.

An angry granny could probably kill with this thing.

It isn’t a graceful bag, but it works for her. The red strap handles have silver studs that evoke the laboratory a bit, and the front has a designer(?) Skullette emblem. 

This bag is a solid piece of vinyl with no opening at the top, though a closed zipper is molded there to explain why, and it's nicely painted silver. The bag’s two handles mean it looks best on the crook of her arm, but it can hang on her shoulder pretty well, too.

Frankie's pet is Watzit, a Frankensteined dog monster with various animal parts and a pet license ten pages long.

Meow!

Not gonna ask which animal's poop Frankie has to pick up from this guy.

 I don't find this character design fully lives up to that concept, though, since he looks really concrete and consistent for a pet that's meant to be cobbled together from many sources. Sure, he has spikes and wings, but that’s not much. I get that dogs are extremely lovable, marketable and relatable, but it feels like this concept could have been much more creative. All the same, Watzit is a successful design that pairs well with Frankie. It's cool that their eyes are matchingly mismatched! I like the G1 MH pets because they’re allowed to be fierce and grumpy and spooky in a more organically cute way. These guys have attitude and creepiness that was utterly gutted by the time of G3’s Littlest Pet Shop-esque glossy-eyed cutesy critters. 

[UPDATE: I had assumed Watzit's name was changed to Watzie in G3 because Mattel lost their trademark for the original name, but that's clearly not the case because the name is written with a trademark in this doll's box. However, it does look like that could be the case for G3 Abbey's pet being named Tundra after being called Shiver in G1. Abbey's Creepro box notably lacks any name or trademark on the popout bubble where her pet is packaged, while Spectra and Ghoulia's pets still have their names written there like just like in this Frankie's box. The final proof would be if the diary and profile includes Shiver's name in it or not, or whether the name has a trademark or not. Most people won't open Creepro dolls to see, and I don't want Abbey enough to get her and check myself.]

Watzit is unarticulated and molded in a seated position looking forward. His paint job is a little weaker than the original Watzit who had more crisp black linework, but he still looks fine. Frankie can hold him decently enough even though his pose doesn’t feel matched to it.

Aww.

So this turned out to be a very nice doll. My only real complaints are that her hair fiber isn't as silky and pleasant as it was on her Original Favorites rerelease and that my copy of this doll has pretty loose lower leg rotation. 

Was Boo-riginal Creeproduction Frankie worth what I paid for her? 

Objectively, no. This doll release could have been purchased for a more faithful price to the original at an earlier time. However, for someone getting sentimental and brave about re-embracing an interest he regretted shaming himself away from? I think Frankie was just what the doctor ordered. Besides, she’s an extremely polished character design and a largely polished and gorgeous doll who displays well and makes me smile. The Creeproduction release delivers a good doll if you dare to open it, and I’m glad I did. I really enjoyed the opportunity to look at Monster High with familiar eyes and to take a retrospective look at its impact and legacy. 

I promise you this was a good photo before Blogger crunched it up! Just click it if you want a better view!