Terror Takes Shape: The Monster High Create-a-Monster Blob by Mattel

One of the Monster High dolls I really loved but never got during my earlier collection was the Blob Girl character in the Create-a-Monster line. 

I'm extremely proud of myself for achieving this
poster homage photo, so I'll explain how I did
it at the end!

Her retro design, bright colors, and translucent body and sculpted hair all made her into a really cute and pretty well-thought-out execution of her monster concept. I did get two Create-a-Monster dolls (the Mummy and Gorgon set) but never got the Blob and eventually convinced myself I didn't need her. 

Until now.

The Blob was sold in a duo set alongside the similarly-translucent Ice Girl. The Ice Girl wasn’t just packed with the Blob for the shared translucency gimmick--there was a character connection as well! Freezing was the sole weakness of the Blob monster in the original film and the remake! 

In 2023, complete Create-A-Monster dolls are pretty hard to come by in the aftermarket, with the eBay selections being the least accessible I've seen yet for any of my doll shopping on the platform. Most examples I see on eBay are either unreasonably pricey as listed and/or exorbitantly expensive to ship to me due to being from Europe. This is a bit disappointing and definitely restricted my options. A listing with both the Blob and Ice ghouls was tempting since I like their themed pairing, but it simply wasn’t worth the higher cost to me to get a second doll that I never really loved. I think the only CAM duo set where both dolls were winners for me was the Mummy/Gorgon pack.

The Create-a-Monster dolls come in what I would designate as five tiers of completeness. The lowest tier is “sold incomplete”-- characters that were sold as parts to attach to bodies, but whose designated torsos and upper limb sections to construct a whole standalone doll were either not included, never made, or were sold separately after the fact. Characters like the Insect, Three-Eyed Girl, Puma Boy, Skeleton, Ghost, Harpy, and Siren are in this category, as well as a few dolls from the two-packs who were first released in this state before their packs were reissued to include both characters’ torsos. Further complicating things is that these dolls were sold in two tiers of incompleteness--the solo dolls like the Insect, Skeleton, and Puma lacked the upper segments of their arms and legs as well as their torsos, but characters who were initially incomplete in duo sets, like the Sea Monster or Dragon, had their full limbs and only lacked a torso. The next tier is “two complete bodies, one wig and pair of shoes between ‘em”. These dolls were sold in two-packs that had a single fiber wig and pair of shoes that left one doll bald and/or barefoot. The next tier is “two complete dolls, one barefoot”-- these are the dolls in the two-bodied two-pack sets that included two wigs (one fiber, one sculpted) who were not designed to match the (inexplicably) singular pair of shoes in the set. The Ice Girl would be that tier, as the shoes in the Ice/Blob set were plainly for the Blob. The last tier of completeness is “sub-budget”-- a doll with a dress, maybe an accessory or two, a full body, and shoes. These dolls were whole, but subpar next to most slim-box mainline dolls for their simple outfits and general lack of adornment. The Blob is in this tier. Within these final two tiers, though, is a subcategory shared between them-- sculpted-wigged or fiber-wigged. The Blob is the former.

There were never Create-a-Monster duo sets that fully decked out both characters, and no releases of complete solo CAM dolls. Several CAM characters like the Puma Boy, Harpy, and Siren never received a designated torso to complete them in any release. None of those confusing, inconvenient, and incomplete release decisions were acceptable.

This tier system unsurprisingly contributes heavily to the difficulty in getting a complete CAM on the aftermarket. Even disregarding the deconstructable nature of the dolls leading to a lot of lost pieces, many of the dolls being already very difficult to complete on the primary market in their time of release makes finding the dolls who were at some point sold incomplete much harder to get complete on the aftermarket. It's really worth knowing exactly which CAM dolls were released in which way, because certain CAMs on the aftermarket are worth a ton more just by being sold with their elusive torso!

To get the Blob, I eventually chose a solo Blob listing pictured with a stand who had a paint flaw in her right eye’s makeup that I thought I could fix.

I hadn't actually watched either version of The Blob by this point (fake fan, I know), so the doll convinced me to get on that so I'd have some context. 

The Blob (1958) poster

The original 1958 The Blob is an enjoyable enough creature feature with some genuine dark stakes, but I wouldn't call it a scary film today. In this film, the Blob is an extraterrestrial life-form that crashes down from a comet. It's a little cheesy and I didn't feel very entertained by it. The most I can really enthusiastically recommend it for is its wonderfully groovy and out-of-tone theme song and to have context for the remake.

The Blob (1988) poster

The 1988 The Blob is pretty much a popcorn-movie thrill ride, so it's not too deep, but it is a fun ride and definitely pretty impressive effects-wise. The Blob itself is the result of science, not an alien life-form, and it takes on a more digestive motif as it moves like a muscle, a stomach, and intestines, and functions like an acid. The movie is much more of a blockbuster spectacle and it's nicely-paced and escalates in a fun way. If you can handle seriously gnarly eighties body-horror gore effects (there's a ton of dissolving people), then I'd recommend it. I definitely had more fun with the remake than the original.

Now I was prepared for the doll herself.

My Blob did not come with the stand the seller used in the listing photos. You can never trust the photos, folks. Sometimes they’ll show a stand and include it. Sometimes they’ll show it and won’t include it. And sometimes, you won’t see a stand in the listing but one will be thrown in anyway and it’s somehow a bootleg knockoff, but hey, free stand, whatever!

The unbranded stands I have work much better for G3 MH than G1. The G1 torso isn't really grabbed by the clip so much as encircled, so they can stand, but not especially securely. The clip needs to be slid down to brace against the hips, because if it's at waist level, a G1 torso can literally fall forward through the clip off the stand.

Before, I liked to write MH-style profiles for the Create-a-Monster characters I got so they'd have names and characterization on par with mainline characters. Back in my first collection era, when I only dreamed of getting the Blob doll, my name for her was Gelatina Globbs (pronounced "je-LATIN-a", not "jella-tina"). 

Now I think I have something with more personality that's more clearly-pronounced and more retro in sound, so here's my new name and profile. I tried to get a bit of both movies into the bio.

Oozanna “Oozie” McGoo

Monster Parentage: The Blob
Killer Style: I’m a freaky-fab fifties ghoul at heart- pastels, flipped hair, and splotch patterns are all my thing.
Freaky Flaw: I tend to be a bit clingy and I need to get better at not smothering people in my life.
Favorite Activity: I ab-soul-utely love going to the boovies. There’s nothing like seeping into the theater to catch the newest picture on the big scream.
Biggest Pet Peeve: I can’t deal with people who get all frosty or give me the cold shoulder. Tell me what your problem is and we can talk.
Favorite School Subject: Biteology class is really fun. I find the study of microbes and newly-discovered life-forms completely absorbing.
Least Favorite School Subject: Art class. Every project I touch just turns into a splatter.
Favorite Food: A plate of red jelly.
Pet: Jammie is my cutest li'l glob. He crash-landed right in my lawn, so I know it was meant to be.
Best Friends: Gooliope Jellington, Operetta

Oozie's color palette is very pink and translucent, reflecting the color of the Blob from the 1988 film. In the original, the Blob was a darker red, implied to be so as a result of absorbing and diffusing the blood of its victims--the Blob starts as a grey color. None of Oozie's body parts are completely opaque, and, prior to the Off White fashion-brand collector doll Symphanee Midnight, the Blob and her companion the Ice Girl were the only MH dolls to have fully-translucent bodies. The closest to them would be Maul Monsteristas Invisi Billy, whose head is opaque and who has some paint on his neck for a transition effect from the head.

Oozie is one of the CAM dolls with sculpted wigs, and she makes an incredibly strong argument for more ghouls deserving to have them.

Her hair is a vinyl wig that takes the shape of a short chin-length flipped bob made out of dripping pink slime.

I know that dolls get a lot of appeal from hair to brush and play with, but Oozie shows how beautifully some concepts in a monster-themed toyline can be executed with their hair being vinyl. A goo monster simply looks the best when her hair is translucent vinyl--it looks like jelly this way, and it can capture a hairstyle that would be hard to maintain with fiber. We've seen with the later pink blob monster Gooliope how fiber hair ain't always the strongest visually.

Fluffy, dry, and not slimy enough. (photo of Gooliope from my former collection). 

Oozie's wig is a darker tone than her body and head and has no glitter in it. I think it might be lacking in gloss, and I could easily add a gloss layer to it, but I’d be concerned about that layer not holding up well with the piece needing to flex and bend in the removal and application of the wig.

The wig kind of just squeezes onto her head and because it doesn’t attach with a peg like the fiber ones, it can be scooted a bit up and down and side-to-side. It’s kind of up to you how you want the wig precisely oriented in relation to her face. 

The wig also feels pretty solid. It’s not hard to flex and put on, but it’s not a flimsy hollow piece and that probably makes it more sturdy. It won't be tearing.

These sculpted wigs are in the minority for Create-a-Monster. Most of the wigs in the line are fiber, like the mainline ghouls, and are attached to a clear vinyl wig cap with a flat peg in the middle that slots into the top of the head.

For demonstration purposes, we'll use this messy CAM
Insect wig that hasn't been treated or tidied yet.
(I'm using it for someone else--stay tuned!)

.

Note the peg in the middle of the wig cap in both
photos.

Most of the CAM wigs feature a healthy amount of bangs across the forehead to best conceal the cap of the wigs, though some are less successful. The worst MH wig for this purpose was a side-parted wig in the Inner Monster line that had no bangs.

Here's the top of Oozie's head with the peg slot. This slot extrudes inside the head in a small rectangular housing that the peg is enclosed by. The section with the slot looks like a disk, and looks like it's a different piece of plastic, but might not be.

[UPDATE: The disc on the top of the head is a separate piece!

My confirmation was seeing that, on some CAMs, the disc can be distinctly discolored, and on the CAMs that aren't the Blob, it feels more obviously different to the touch.

The discolored wig disc on the CAM
Werewolf head.

 I got a reason to take the head apart when I noticed a misaligned wig disc on an Insect head.

The head is straight, but the disc isn't.

I used a potter's needle to pry around the seam of the disc and loosen it, and I was eventually able to pop it out.

The disc, which contains the sheath for the wig peg, pops in with a 4/5 circle shape and fits into a recess in the head. This means that, while CAM dolls' facial sculpts may have been reused within the brand, those new dolls' heads are very different molds. 

The wig disc popped back in and realigned nicely. That's a relief, since I need this head to wear a wig properly!

Cool stuff.]

Here's a quick shot of Oozie wearing the fiber wig, which doesn't remotely go with her look.

The Inner Monster line also features fiber wigs, but those attach differently. Since Inner Monsters have mechanical buttons on the top of their heads to flip their eye-change mechanism, their wigs attach to the back of their head with two smaller pegs that more loosely slot in. 

The inside of an IM wig, with the two shorter pegs on the inner rim of the cap.
These wigs could stand to be more secure on their dolls.

Now Oozie's head. 

I was initially not sure about Oozie’s face, but in person, she seems pretty sweet.

Her eyes are orange, which strikes me as very odd and perhaps the wrong choice. The color isn’t anywhere else on her, and it’d make a heck of a lot more visual sense to me if they’d been a shade of pink. Her eyebrows are very faint against her skin, but not to detrimental effect. It won't surprise you to hear that I appreciate how they match her hair. My Oozie has some missing paint in her right eye's blue eyeshadow.

Not to toot my own horn too loudly, but I rule
at color-matching paint, so this'll be easy to fix.

Here's her side profile:

Oozie's nose is very rounded and perhaps a bit bulbous, and has practically zero bridge. It seems like a cute human facial design to make her look a bit more round and blobby, like her nose is more of a glob or droplet on the surface of her head.

Oozie's ears are not inhumanly shaped or specially detailed. They are not pierced and they don't even include the sculpted guide-mark indentations that can be seen on mainline dolls who aren't pierced on certain editions. 

This is unsurprising. No CAM doll has earrings, so none are sculpted to be pierced for them, and Oozie's wig sculpt makes it impossible for her to wear them, anyway. I know mainline character Amanita Nightshade used the CAM Vampire girl's face sculpt, so I wonder if you can see hints of indents for her ear piercings on her head, or if they left the sculpt totally untouched and she doesn't have those guide marks? I never checked that when I owned her. 

(I loved Amanita. She was my first doll and is now the biggest giveaway regret I have from the old collection.)

Oozie's dress is a light sea-foam green/mint/aqua color. It's very fittingly paired with her pink body, since these two specific colors together instantly read as iconic of the 1950s. The dress doesn't feel quite as opaque or saturated as I'd like it to be, but it's fine.

I like this dress a lot, but it strikes me as pretty inaccurate for the fifties vibe. An off-the-shoulder body-hugging sleeved dress? No. I think she'd need a collared dress with a wide skirt, or a blouse-and-skirt combo, to truly feel fifties to me. 

This is a huge problem I had/have with the Create-a-Monster line: the doll bodies are awesome and finished and the head sculpts are unique, but the clothes are made under a cheap budget that makes so very few of the doll clothes have silhouettes that seem that feel matched to the character aesthetic, and they're simple pieces so no Create-a-Monster really looked the best they could. I think this was a consequence of the mix-and-match gimmick as well as budget restrictions--the clothing needed to be generic and simple enough to conceivably swap around, but it just ends up in this middle ground where the clothing is clearly themed but very unpolished. It just furthers my opinion that that gimmick of mixing pieces didn't really work too well in the end. With ensembles that can't live up to G1 budget dolls, there's a lot of potential lost in these inventive Create-a-Monster characters. Being treated as throwaway experimental dolls focused on a mix-and-match gimmick muffled some otherwise-great character designs.

It's tied to another weakness in MH as a whole--the extremely unique character aesthetics and design motifs on top of each other are great, but they make re-dressing dolls very difficult, as many pieces are designed for pretty specific monster themes or fashion senses. Unthemed or all-purpose applicable clothes are almost nowhere in the brand, and even more difficult is finding character-specific clothing that can slide out of that character's theme/aesthetic and be used for another. I can appreciate G3 dolls embracing more diverse body types because the dolls' clothing is so specific that they won't be swapping much as it is. Re-dressing was never the point of MH, so making it less possible on the dolls doesn't feel as problematic to me.

Oozie's shoes are pretty great. They're strapped heels in translucent pink vinyl that matches her wig, and they're made to look entirely like dripping goo.

The Create-a-Monster dolls are fully deconstructable so their pieces can mix and match with each other. Mainline MH dolls only have removeable hands and forearms.

The complete Blob doll as-sold is made of sixteen pieces in total.

The body snaps together pretty easily and securely.

The heads attach to the body with a rounded short nub that squeezes into the neck hole. The nub is slightly tapered at the top and can move a little bit inside the neck, but not nearly as loosely as the neck pegs on mainline dolls. 

This doesn't offer a great range of forward-and-back articulation because the knob doesn't push into the hollow region of the head. The head on a mainline doll actually rotates around the round shape of the top of the neck while the anchor moves freely inside the empty part of the head. This short peg doesn't offer the same range as the mainline anchor pegs. 

That's the inside of the head you're looking at (through the wig slot)- the nub doesn't go past
the neck hole into the hollow.

However, it's easy to understand why this was done this way. Not only does the neck nub make popping the heads on and off much easier and gentler (and less likely to cause damage) than wrenching the head past a disc and prongs, but also, by not entering the hollow of the head, the neck peg won't get in the way of the small protrusion that holds the pegs of the fiber wigs. The wig peg doesn't go that far into the head, but the neck peg could still get caught on the small housing for the peg that enters the hollow area.

[UPDATE: Disregard that previous explanation for the sticky head problem. I've realized since that this might actually just be a problem with later CAM dolls, and not for the reason I suspected! Some CAMs I got after this had much better neck articulation, on par with mainline G1 dolls, and it seems to be because their neck nubs were loose and rotated inside the neck freely. The problem is not that the nub doesn't go high enough into the head--it's that the neck nub isn't moving freely enough. The reason I attribute this to the era within CAM is that the Mummy and Gorgon set I once owned, released the same year as the Ice and Blob, had the same neck problem, and the CAMs I now have without the problem were earlier releases than the stiff-necked dolls I had. 

It turns out this is also precisely the same issue that can affect mainline dolls. I took the head off a Rochelle who refused to tilt her head downward, and when I did, I found that her neck peg wasn't able to rotate freely enough inside her neck to allow the wider range of motion. Unfortunately, I don't see a fix for this issue on either mainline or CAM dolls, but that's the explanation---a lot is affected by how much either neck peg can move around inside the neck itself.]

The CAM neck attachment was used once in the mainline (which was also its only use on the "big sister" body size) for Headless Headmistress Bloodgood's doll.

This is one of those doll concepts that makes me sit
back and appreciate how cool MH was.
(stock photo of Bloodgood's doll by Mattel)

The upper and lower arm pieces aren't sculpted to be directional. You can put them on either side of the body. The hands obviously are directional and mirrored, and the same goes for the upper and lower leg parts.

CAM forearm and wrist pegs are thicker than those of the G1 mainline dolls, and so the two types of dolls cannot swap forearms and hands. G1 revival dolls, on the other hand…

Kinda? Creeproduction Frankie's hand peg is similar and it pops into Oozie's arm, but pretty loosely. It's not quite the same connection so I wouldn't recommend it.

G1 revival bodies have significantly thicker arm pegs than the CAM dolls, so those pieces can't viably swap. 

The torsos of CAM dolls have rectangular slots in the back for wings to fit into. It's pretty much the same two-piece wing system that debuted in the mainline with Rochelle Goyle. Wings released in the CAM line are not made to be interchangeable with the two-piece wings in the main MH line, with the tabs and slots on the mainline winged dolls being subtly different so the fit isn't right between the two doll types. I once tried Rochelle wings in the Gorgon CAM, and the fit was too loose to use them.

Also on the backs of the torsos is a hole for a tail to plug into. Unlike with the wings, this attachment is compatible with mainline dolls-- a tail from a werecat doll in the mainline fits just fine in a CAM doll, though not perfectly. It seems like mainline tails have pretty reduced friction in a CAM body-- they rotate pretty loosely and can't hold a position.

Oozie wearing the CAM Insect wings firmly
and a Catrine DeMew tail securely but loosely.

It's like a trifecta of old movies--
The Blob, Cat People, and The Fly!

The wing and tail attachments are another limitation on the outfit design in the CAM line, since the costumes have to make space for the wing holes so any of the CAMs can wear wings, and there needs to be a gap a tail can poke out of as well. It's another example where I feel like the customization angle kind of lets down the character design angle...though this is character-by-character. Some parts swapping looks good, and making custom dolls and repaints from CAM dolls would make these features more welcome. There is a custom doll I want to make sometime that will take advantage of the wing options, so it's not always a problem.

All of the female CAM dolls used the standard median-age teenage body proportions from the main line, and most of them used the same neutral undetailed body design as well. I believe only three CAM dolls had unique textured torso sculpts-- the Gorgon girl, with scales and a snaky underbelly, the Ice Girl with a faceted polygonal sculpt, and the Mummy Girl, who was bandaged from neck to toe. This created discrepancies in the case of dolls like the Skeleton and Dragon, who had unique limb sculpts that had to attach to a neutral torso. It was more noticeable with the Skeleton, who was sold as lower limbs and a head, and later got a white torso and upper limbs in a supplemental pack, which were in the standard fleshy shape. The Dragon came with a complete body in her duo set's reiusse, but that torso wasn't detailed like her head and complete limbs were. 

The hips and legs can be snapped on either side of a CAM body and the legs can be attached to the incorrect hips, but both segments are directional sculpts and easy to figure out. The hip pieces have pointed kneecaps that need to face frontward, and the legs are oriented like human ones, which you can tell based on the feet. 

Naturally, any CAM's parts can swap around with each other's. If I had the Ice Girl, I could swap parts of her limbs onto Oozie to make Oozie look like she was being frozen and defeated!

The compatibility with the Inner Monster CAM spinoff line is limited. All the arm and leg pieces can mix together and attach to each doll type's torsos, and CAM heads can pop onto IM bodies--the neck knob on the IM dolls actually offered Oozie's head a wider range of motion than her own stiff-necked body! (A loose-necked CAM doll has better neck range than a CAM head on the IM body.) CAM dolls can also technically wear IM wigs, even though they attach differently and aren't meant for CAM. The Inner Monster head does not pop onto the CAM neck, and I couldn't squeeze Oozie's sculpted wig onto the IM head. I think this is specific to the blob wig, though--I recall that the Gorgon sculpted wig worked with the IM head when I tried that in my old collection. Inner Monster dolls cannot wear any of the CAM fiber wigs due to the way they attach with a peg in the center. Inner Monster sculpted wigs, conversely, will be a little too loose on CAM heads, since those wigs are designed to fit onto the Inner Monster head while the clip-on faceplate that adds some size is attached to their head. The Inner Monster body does not offer tail or wing connections at all, since it's formed of two translucent plates over a skeletal core that the limbs and head attach to.

The basic amount of body-part swapping the two doll types allow. 
Limbs any which way, above the neck is restricted, and no wings or
tail on the IM torso.

Oozie's head works well with the translucent pink Inner Monster torso, but I'd have some serious questions about where she got that skeleton and those organs!

[UPDATE: This compatibility is pretty much exactly the same situation with the unusual Monster Maker blank print-on CAM dolls that released as the final iteration of MH customization toys. 

A blank Monster Maker doll.

Similar to Inner Monster, these dolls have hard plastic heads that snap onto a unique torso with a static neck knob, so CAM heads can fit on a Monster Maker body, but not vice-versa.

The static knob makes the head unable to tip in any direction.
CAM or MM. It just rotates.

Inner Monster and Monster Maker heads cannot fit on each other's bodies, either.

Limb pieces are all swappable through, just like with Inner Monster. All three customization-doll body styles below the head have fully-swappable limbs, so you can use each torso and build on mixes of all three doll types' limb parts.

 The Monster Maker heads, necks, and feet have T-slots in them designed to snap into the Monster Maker printing machine so the graphics aligned properly, and so the head of the Monster Maker doll doesn't have a traditional CAM wig disc. I can only assume the Monster Maker fiber wig had a unique peg that fit into these unique slots, but perhaps it had no peg at all? Whatever the case is, the Monster Maker dolls can only wear their own fiber wig or sculpted MH wigs. 

The Monster Maker shoulder and lower leg pieces also have raised asymmetrical dots to match up with each other, presumably to keep the pieces on the correct side of the body and keep them placed right in the printing machine. I'd never thought of the shoulders as directional pieces that needed to be on one side of the body. I'd thought they were completely viable on both sides of the body, but Mattel didn't think so for this idea, I guess.

Monster Maker dolls have no wing or tail holes, so they're like the Inner Monsters in being unable to share those parts with CAM.

That's the end of the parts-swapping section now!]

The detachable parts of these dolls can lead to some more surreal and cartoonish photo scenarios, like a doll who appears to be falling into a box they can't logically fit in:

Besides Bloodgood with the neck nub, one other mainline doll has used a Create-a-Monster joint attachment--ghostly pirate Vandala Doubloons. 

Mattel stock photo of the Vandala doll.

Her prosthetic wooden peg leg had a Create-a-Monster joint peg to let it be detached from her body, though this was more as an illustration of its prosthetic nature than for making it swappable. You could still swap other CAM right legs in on Vandala if you wanted to make like you were updating her prosthesis or giving her a transplant. Or you could give a CAM doll a translucent wooden leg. Vandala's prosthetic leg sculpt also doubled as a shoed foot, leaving her doll with only one shoe, so she'd need to get a new pair of matching shoes if you gave her a CAM leg. Likewise, a CAM with her prosthetic would need a shoe that matched the height of the peg leg--like the one Vandala has.

Oozie's body, as you've noticed, is glittery all over, but thankfully, this glitter is smoothly mixed in and embedded in all of her plastic. This approach is something I think they should have done for Abbey Bominable's dolls, but Abbey just had glitter encrusted over her body with glue--a process that left her feeling rough to the touch and unpleasant, gave her body too much friction against tighter clothing, and could age poorly with the application glue turning yellow. We'll see what G3 Abbey does, but I suspect she'll be like G2 and have a shimmer effect rather than outright glitter. [UPDATE: Yep, seems to be the case now that we've seen her.]

Oozie could easily be mistaken (like, by me, for example) for a vanilla CAM doll body simply cast in an unusual color, but she does have some easy-to-miss sculpted blob detail that surprised me when I got her. On the undersides of her forearms, there are goo drips on each running toward her wrists, and the drips are subtly different on each arm.

They really only needed to sculpt one forearm
shape for her--I'm impressed!

 It's not nearly as detailed as Gooliope's blob features (she had drips on her ears and all over her body), but it is something and I appreciate that it's there. The smaller presence of the drip detail also has an advantage over Gooliope's heavier sculpting--it doesn’t play into the common MH discrepancy of detailed, heavily-textured monster bodies and conspicuously smooth and humanoid heads and faces.

I also really like the expressive shape of Oozie's hands. They're good for gesturing.

Oozie and the Ice Girl alike have uneven opacity in their body parts, with their heads and lower legs being darker and less translucent than the other pieces of their bodies. I'd have guessed this was partially to obscure the internals of the dolls' construction (you wouldn't want to see the inside of Oozie's head from the outside), but the rest of their bodies show off enough that it might have made more sense for the whole doll to match the head and lower legs. I still think the effect is cool, and the discrepancy in opacity is much more prominent in photographs than it is in real life. They wanted to have their cake and eat it too, so some of the doll had to be more translucent than the rest. For a blob, it makes sense it wouldn't be fully "evenly-mixed", anyway.

Here's Oozie lit up in the head.

And in the torso:

And in the legs:

Also, in some lower lighting, Oozie's head can look darker than her hair.

Oozie's head post-repaint in low lighting.

Then I tried finding pieces to make Oozie more substantial.

G3 signature Draculaura's cherry gulp cup suits Oozie really well. The translucent red is like the 1958 Blob, the piece has drips that match her, and the cup itself looks like a movie-theater drink.

I also figured G3 signature Frankie's camera purse would look good with Oozie. They're not using it the way I display them, so it was fair game. With some repainting to make the colors match more, it might be perfect.

For a doll whose head pops off, the camera gets more display options--it can be worn around the neck or across the body!

In any form, the ghoul loves her film.

I tried G3 signature Ghoulia's glasses on Oozie, and while they can actually squeeze in between the wig and her head, I don't think it's needed. Oozie looks fine without them.

Even with just the drink cup and the purse, Oozie looked a lot more polished and personable and complete to me. After Coffin Bean Twyla, I've really enjoyed this experiment in upgrading simpler dolls with accessories to make them more in line with a deluxe signature doll release.

Oh, hey! If you caught that "pet" entry in her profile, well, here's the payoff!

I wasn't initially planning to make a pet for Oozie, but I ended up getting this little alien head that was once a pen topper. I thought he could be something. 

You will be Jammie! Yes, you will!

I decided to repaint him red to match the original Blob, and reinterpreted the shape so he has one large eye that disguises the molded mouth on the head. I like the weird retro-futurist makeup I gave it. The eyestalks are now just antennae. I used some gold glitter glue to dab on some sparkles so he'd match Oozie better despite his opacity. I added some drippy hot glue on the bottom so he'd look more gooey and blobby, and painted and glittered that part too to blend it, and covered Jammie with a gloss layer. 

He's done! And he gave me a wicked glue burn!
Worth it.

Simultaneously, I repainted Oozie's head a bit to fix her eyeshadow and change her eye color to pink. I also changed her eye reflections to multiple dots like Jammie's so they'd look like bubbled gel.

I think the finished Oozie and Jammie look cute together.

I think Jammie is either a different type of blob than Oozie and isn't as sentient...or else he is as sentient, and has no interest whatsoever in being a person and is totally cool being a pet.

I was really stuck on the Create-a-Monster clothing letdown, and tried to think if there were other clothes that could suit Oozie…and what d'you know? Despite my knowledge of how tricky it is to find clothing in this brand that transplants well to another character, I realized there was actually a perfect swap for Oozie. For there has previously been a pastel 1950s-styled Monster High doll wearing a blouse-and-skirt combo…and she happens to feature perfectly-suited pink drip and splatter motifs!!!

I give you Art Class Draculaura.

A mostly-incomplete Art Class Draculaura ordered from eBay. I only needed
the dress, anyway.

It’s fate.

Since ordering a whole incomplete doll was cheap, I have a whole Draculaura I didn't necessarily want. It works out, however, since I think I can use her head for a dollmaking project that stalled. I was inspired by unbranded heads I was gifted, and until it was undone by unstable application, I got a good faceup on one of them, but the base shape didn't feel ideal for the character I was making and I think using an actual Monster High head as the base could give me a better result. Using a Monster High head would also guarantee the custom wig I'd ordered would fit well, since the unbranded heads are a bit smaller. So Draculaura, plus the clawed hands from the Catrine body I'd previously wanted to use, is going to form the new base doll.

Here's the result:

Ooo! Oozie!

Hm. I don't actually know about this now that I have it. This is fifties and gooey…but I don't actually think I like Oozie as much in it. It feels a bit too formal and dark for the character's personality, and the CAM outfit feels more fun and cohesive. I still like this look, and I'll definitely keep the Art Class dress in the rotation for Oozie for sure, but I'm surprised. I don't think this is actually the outfit that wins the day. Bulking out the base doll seems to be the better upgrade than a shift in wardrobe.

Lastly, I wanted to indulge in a silly sense of humor. I keep my dolls that are off display in a bin, sealed in plastic bags to keep them in order, but after watching the '88 film, I was struck with an idea for Oozie. In the film, a deranged reverend rescues crystals of frozen Blob and puts them in a jar, later keeping the thawed specimen around. Oozie isn't liquid, but she could certainly be packed into a small vessel as long as her legs and torso piece could fit and the neck was wide enough for her head.

Voila!

Her legs and torso are a squeeze and negotiating them with her head is tough, but all of Oozie's parts save the stand (which I'd keep out for another doll, anyway) pack into this jar. When Oozie goes into storage, this is how she'll be going. 

So, to take that cover photo. My first inclination was to take a picture of Oozie illuminated from behind in the same pose as the woman in the poster.

A dignified setup.

This wasn't yielding a great visual, what with the doll stand and desk lamp and weak illumination. I tried putting a sheet of office paper between her and the light to hide the source, but the effect wasn't impressive. When I put the paper in front of Oozie, however (using the convenient tabs on the front of the stand to hold it!), the whole image changed, turning her into a blurry silhouette like on the poster.

This was the raw photo I took that became the poster:

After I had this, I used my phone photo editor to rotate the figure and compose the frame, and raised the contrast to darken her figure.

Then I just put the photo in a graphics program on my computer to put a translucent pink rectangle over the image to serve as a color filter, and added text and basic circles posing as bubbles to emulate the 1988 poster further.

Only too late did I realize it was never remotely necessary for Oozie to have been actually upside-down in-camera. I could have set her up upright and flipped the photo. Oh, well. It's more fun the way I did it!

I'm extremely glad I decided to get the Blob CAM in the end. She's one of the most striking and well-realized dolls in the Create-a-Monster line, offering something visually strong and stylistically unique even among the more lavish mainline characters. She feels the most iconic of any of the CAM character designs to me. With some accessories and slight paint tweaks, I think Oozie holds her own on the doll shelf, and she just makes me smile with her happy and bright appearance.

She leaped, and seeped, and slid, and glid into my heart.

Beware of the Blob.