They Belonged Dolls: The Monster High Skullector "Bride of Frankenstein" Set by Mattel Creations

...so why did nobody tell me they made this? I completely didn't get the memo about it, and I picked up on a lot of other MH news. Maybe it was for the best because this lit a spark in my brain and quickly became my absolute most coveted MH collector release, far outstripping any admiration I had for any of the G1-era exclusives. For one big reason.

Photo of Elsa Lanchester as the Bride of Frankenstein.

I've long adored the Bride of Frankenstein monster-- enough to forgive the fact that she and her movie cemented the monster/scientist name confusion! Her iconic hairstyle, her bandages and white dress, her inhuman behavior, and her jawline scars all make her a memorable and recognizable presence with a lot of character design appeal. She's extremely spooky and has a delightful bit of fabulous silliness or camp in her look that makes her a ton of fun. Much like her debut film overall, she feels like a bridge between dramatic gothic horror and more fun pulp horror and I love her for it.

It's genuinely interesting how much she had to overcome to end up as iconic as she did, too. 

For one, she's based on a hypothetical character from Shelley's book. Frankenstein starts to build a bride for his creation under the Creature's orders but refuses to be responsible for a potential race of monsters and destroys the unfinished bride, upon which the Creature swears to destroy him.

For two, the Bride has very little screentime at the end of her own movie and is a one-film character who only appears in the classic film franchise for that brief screentime, unlike the other classic monsters who all got sequels, remakes, and goofy spinoffs for encore performances. That brief screentime sees her rejecting the Monster shortly after she wakes, causing him to kill the both of them (and the mad Dr. Pretorius who urged Frankenstein to make her) by blowing up the lab. Still, I get why the character caught on, what with her fantastic costume design and makeup, Elsa Lanchester's uncanny jerking, hissing performance, the fact that she was the only female Universal Monster, and the character being the namesake of the film. In a way, she’s also a successful expansion, however minor, of untapped narrative potential--through her, we got to see a story where the Bride had been given life.

My love of the character has been there for a while. Once I tried to design a Bride of Frankenstein LEGO minifigure. I was intrigued by action figures of the Bride. I never had any merchandise of her, though, leaving my unintentional collection of Frankenstein monsters overwhelmingly Karloffian (and a little Boylian).

It's like that old saying: "always the Monster, never the Bride..."

For my goal of adding a bit of Lanchester to my collection, the Monster High doll just clicked. It was gorgeous. It was spooky. It was the Bride of Frankenstein for me.

The Monster High Skullector doll line started in 2020 and is MH's first continuous, themed adult collector line, all featuring dolls that are licensed to depict classic horror-movie characters. Each year has featured three Skullector dolls total, broken up in two Skullector releases-- one release being a single doll from one movie and one being a two-pack of characters from a different movie. 

Even though each Skullector release is from a different film, each year's pair of releases is themed. 2020's Skullector dolls were from Stephen King movie adaptations, 2021's were from classic horror comedies, and 2022's are from the classic Universal Horror franchise. I can't wait to see 2023's Skullector dolls and their theme! (Just gonna make guesses here-- they could do a slasher year with Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees as a solo doll and Chucky and Tiffany as a duo set...or maybe they'll do a Tim Burton year with a hot-ticket Jenna Ortega Wednesday solo doll and a Jack and Sally set?)

It may not be deliberate, but it also feels like, each year, one of the Skullector releases is more literal and faithful to the characters than the other, with one release per year featuring a male character that's been gender-flipped to female while the other release adheres more closely to the character design and gender of the source material. It's not consistent whether the solo doll or the duo set is the more accurate translation each year-- in 2020 and 2022, the duo sets were the more literal adaptations.

[UPDATE Jan 14: The first 2023 Skullector release, put out on Friday the 13th this January, is Elvira (I literally watched her movie the very day her doll was released without learning about the doll until the next day). Listings have also been found seemingly confirming my guess of a Chucky/Tiffany duo as the year's duo set. It's hard to say what the theme of the year would be with these two beyond a return to classic horror comedies, so maybe Mattel's doing a rotation of one year's releases being pure horror and themed and the next year being broadly united under horror comedy? Also, since Elvira is very faithful to the character, I'm guessing based on the pattern of Skullector faithfulness that Chucky may end up being a female doll...though that would work just fine, since the Chucky franchise, created and helmed by gay fimmaker Don Mancini, is no stranger to explorations of gender queerness. 

It's a pretty solidly consistent pattern, though. A pure-horror year with the duo set being more faithful than the solo, then a horror-comedy year with the solo set more faithful than the duo, and repeat. I wonder if it'll keep up that way.]

I love the concept of the Skullector line. It's really smart of Mattel to make an adult collector line whose adult angle relates to the subject matter as well as the doll styling and craftsmanship. It feels like they're taking full advantage of the demographic and the unique things it can offer. The Skullectors aren't just extra-fancy dolls of kid-friendly characters like older collector releases in the brand-- these are dolls of characters from mature horror properties and dark comedies that Mattel can only make under the pretext of an adult collector line. And that cheers me quite a lot, since having a good market for dolls of characters from mature properties like The Shining or IT means there's an outlet for the MH team to fully flex their long-standing and obvious passion for the real scary stuff. The Skullector dolls manage to be as playful and inventive and dark in their designs as any top-tier G1 doll, and it's nice to see there's somewhere they can fully take the reins off to make scary fabulous art. The Skullector line is a great tribute to the horror phenomena that motivated the MH brand from the get-go.

I’d never bought a Monster High collector doll before. I tried once with the Zomby Gaga release--I paid for it through Amazon and never got a thing. Bleh. Otherwise, collector dolls were things to covet from afar, and often didn’t break my heart too much being there. But now as an adult with a salary and a fresh paycheck deposited, I kept thinking about this Skullector set and I knew that since it was the same year they were released, the eBay prices would never be better than they were now and I was certain beyond any doubt that I would absolutely be kicking myself in the future if I didn’t get this. None of MH’s other exclusive or collector-geared sets before had spoken to me quite like this-- these looked awesome and pretty darn essential to my collection. Furthermore, as somebody who’d come to realize and embrace a special attachment toward the first and third incarnations of Frankie Stein, getting her and their forebears' dolls was making a strong “do it do it do it” call in my mind. Since they were so nice, and it was so close before the holiday when I ordered them and they arrived, I thought it would be inappropriate to open and enjoy them before Christmas day, so my mom graciously offered to wrap them for me to keep them safe. I guess it helped that I didn't really ask for anything this past season and I had found a gift for myself that she wouldn't have! Before they got wrapped, though, I got a picture of a festive Frankie excited to meet them.

Don't unwrap your parents 'til the 25th.

But Christmas has come and now the dolls are fully mine. So let's look at the match made in hell, shall we?

The Skullector line maintains the classic G1 Monster High art style, which makes sense since the adult collectors who form the Skullector market will have been more familiar with and (I think justifiably) attached to the G1 aesthetic that defined the brand and made it a toy icon. Post-G1, I believe only two MH collector releases have used a non-G1 aesthetic-- the Ghostbusters Frankie Stein and the Electrified Abbey Bominable, both of which were G2-styled.

As mentioned above, these dolls are more literal screen-accurate translations, which formed their main appeal. They're deliberately not screen-accurate, and like the rest of this collector line, they go a little extra with the fashion and include some non-canon details to reference other parts of their films (because this is Monster High). But these are just the characters to me. Other Skullectors can seem like cosplays or "inspired by" concept dolls (while I think the Betelgeuse doll is visually awesome, this factor keeps me from wanting to get her and Lydia). 

There's also a strong appeal to seeing licensed Universal Monster dolls in the brand after MH built itself on unlicensed characters heavily derived from the Universal brand. It's like "yes! Full circle! Now they can just make the classic Monsters!", and the Bride of Frankenstein set being so faithful makes it all the better.

I was able to purchase a Bride of Frankenstein set that came with its original brown cardboard Mattel shipping box, but that wasn't super special to me. The real box is what counts.

All of the Skullector dolls have a similar packaging style, coming in a wide, fairly thin rectangular box with two folding panel "doors" over the plastic display window and doll(s) inside. The boxes depict photos of the doll(s) on the doors. 

A collector box just has to tease you to hype you up!

It's a fairly boastful move, because with real photos on the doors, the copies of the dolls inside have to look just as good. The boast can fail, unfortunately, since there are some Skullectors that get wonky printing. I'm glad mine are not some of them. The doors also feature the logo of the film they come from. 

The doll box-set title is rendered as "The Bride of Frankenstein". While the film these monsters shared was billed that way on posters and is often colloquially referred to as such, the title as rendered in the film itself is just "Bride of Frankenstein" (no "the"), and that's its official title on the books.

The side adjacent to the Monster's door has the title on it.

The side adjacent to the Bride's door has a neat portrait of the two dolls, with the Monster's face lit from below in a really neat way.

The back of a Skullector box has a more typical MH flavor text block written in a character's perspective. This box has the Monster's perspective and the text incorporates more quotes from the film, but the copy is overall pretty corny. MH always has been, though. It's part of the deal. 

Look, man, you may have no life experience, but this is not the way to view women.

The bottom face of the box was the only place on the external packaging where I could find the Universal Studios logo denoting this as an officially-licensed piece of merchandise.

The dolls are legit, folks!

Inside the box, the Bride and Monster are posed in a laboratory backdrop, which continues on the interior of the doors. The film quote "We belong dead" appears on the right door, and the background art looks pseudo-realistic and desaturated. The dolls are posed pretty amicably, with the Bride placing her hand in the Monster's open palm.

I don't know if I love the double-door box style. I feel like a single door held closed with velcro or a magnet would have been more display-friendly, since the doors here are merely bent cardboard and they don't want to stay fully open or fully closed flat. There's no real way to make that happen, either, since they're two doors meeting over a plastic window. Good thing I'm not leaving the dolls in their box.

Let's take the backdrop out of the box for a clearer look.

I love them so much already.

The set includes two doll stands.

[Hurrah!
Please start using them on the main dolls again!]

Despite knowing this ahead of time, I genuinely second-guessed myself upon opening the front panels because the box has no false back and the presence of the stands is really very well-hidden given the dolls and the background art distracting from them. The only evidence of their presence is riiiiiiight….

..there! Just behind the Monster's left foot--the stand poles are slotted under the electric machine pop-out between the two dolls' legs. Tricky, isn't it?

That little rectangle slip on the floor of the box in the above photo is just noting that the box is recyclable. 

Unlike many of the other Skullectors, the Bride of Frankenstein set includes no handheld accessories for the characters. It makes a degree of sense since the first two Frankenstein films don't really have iconic items that these characters use, but I think a flower would have been extremely appropriate for the Monster given the river scene from the first film and the context of romance.

Deboxing this set is very similar to deboxing the classic original dolls. I've already shown that the backdrop slides out, and the top of the box opens with interlocking tabs that are impossible not to rip, being as narrowly fit-together as on my Creeproduction Frankie. Most of the tags and bands can be cut from the front, but to free the Bride, you have to undo some tape on the back to slide the plastic head cushion out from the front to get access to the tie tags that go into her head. I really wish they had just left them out. 

Goodies! And way too much tape!

The back of the backdrop holds a couple of things. First is a little packet with the dolls' certificate of authenticity, which includes a signature from Monster High character designer Rebecca Shipman. This is the other place the Universal logo appears in this set.

I'm not taking this piece out of the plastic.

 It's great to see Shipman is still with the brand (perhaps she's become a senior designer by now, if she wasn't already?) and if her signature indicates she designed these dolls in particular, then brava! Like the back of the box, the certificate refers to the set as the "Bride of Frankenstein Doll" in the singular, which confuses me.

The back of the backdrop also lets you access the little packets containing the stand bases and clips (two packets, each having one of the bases and clips), which rest inside the lab-machine pop-out. It's clever how it works. The pop-out pushes forward to provide a sleeve to hold the stand poles on the front side, and it creates a recess from the back side to put the bases and clips.

Alright. Monster first!

HELLO, HANDSOME!

The Monster is so far unique within the Skullector line for being its first male doll. Every other male character adapted in the Skullector line (Betelgeuse, Pennywise, Dracula) is flipped into a female doll. I can think of two reasons the Monster is still a dude:

1. Flipping him into a girl would likely amount to reinventing G1 Frankie and create a confusion or redundancy (as seen with the way the female Dracula Skullector unintentionally can't help but resemble Draculaura).
2. Pairing a female Monster and female Bride could be a little too sapphic for Mattel…or otherwise just confusing. If the set includes the Bride, everyone expects the monster to be the male Karloff character, and in the context of licensed memorabilia, I do too, so I'm pleased to see the more direct adaptation being done in this sense as well.

And this way, with perhaps a few wardrobe changes, the dolls can be treated like canonical dolls of G1 Frankie's parents Mr. and Mrs. Stein. They also have a little detail we'll soon see that aligns them uniquely with G3 Frankie, which I think is smart so the dolls can fit in the world of G3 too. The Dracula Skullector is more clearly incompatible with the mainline canon, since she breaks the MH pink-vampire style rule and obviously isn't Draculaura's dad. Furthermore, it would break with canon, since in the G1 lore, 'Laura's dad was eventually established to not be the Dracula but rather, an older vampire whose name got ripped off by the infamous one. Mattel clearly got a little spooked about legal trouble, and that narrative change was just one of their sweeping efforts since the start of G1 to distance their original cast visually and narratively from the Universal brand that inspired it to begin with.

The Monster's head sculpt is very obviously unique to him and made just for this set.

Who else'd this mug belong to?

 I don't know if I'm wild about it, though. He's immediately recognizable due to that list of iconic physical traits that Universal locked down in copyright...

Colorized photo of Boris Karloff in makeup as the Monster.

These photo recreations with the dolls are fun to make.

...but part of me finds him too sweet and youthful. He is meant to feel like a lost, confused child in portrayal, but the doll's face makes him look physically younger and more friendly than the character strikes me in the films. In person, the doll looks better than he did in photos, as I find the eye shading more effective and the sculpting, in the right angles, makes him look more haggard and grim. 

His small eyes make him look more grown-up than other male MH dolls, and he looks really great at angles and in full profile.

I mean, come on. He looks fantastic.

 The smiling expression puts an inaccurately happy spin on this duo, but it's sweet. I really like how his sagging eyelids are isolated within the sunken airbrushed sockets--we haven't ever seen a half-lidded doll in this brand, and he has a great tiny little detail of a zigzag eye reflection shaped like a lightning bolt. The Bride also has this, and this is a trait they also gave, with slightly different execution, to G3 Frankie. It's a really clever touch and I like that they found a unique consistent flair for their newer Frankenmonster designs. 

The eyes of the Monster, the Bride, and their G3 child.

The Monster's skin tone is new among the many greens within the MH cast, being a medium dusty green tone that's darker in value than any of the older green dolls. It stands apart from the other green dolls, and I really like the color. 

The head has great detail with the cut and stapled scars on the sides of the Monster's forehead, which are actually dimensional! The cut is indented and the stitched scar has a groove where the flesh meets, which, while not depicted as bloody, is still one of the most gory touches MH has ever done...just overshadowed by a small mile with the rotted muscle of Neighthan and the sliced-off domes and exposed brains of the Inner Monsters.

Show-offs.

The forehead gash.

The scars on his right and around the top.
Also, his ears are very large!

The scar on his left has nicely-painted white stitches and much subtler staples circle a seam around the top of his head, unpainted within the black of his hair.

The Monster is MH’s fourth male doll with humanoid hair to have that hair as part of his head sculpt, following after Manny Taur, Hexiciah Steam, and Dracula from G2. Every other male doll with humanoid hair had it rooted and gelled into style, with the inhuman hair like fins, flames, and snakes being sculpted. It was an admirable effort to make the male dolls as on par with the girls as possible, but admittedly, often resulted in poorly-styled hairdos at the factory and a weaker resemblance. Some dolls I've handled, like Porter Geiss, actually had to be de-gelled and get a haircut to accurately resemble their characters. I remain very proud of my Porter hairdressing and wish I had kept him for that. Look up any other photos of the physical Porter doll-- they don't look right. But I think I fixed him:

My screen-accurate Porter hairdressing job.
(Apologies for the bad photo; it's the only one I still have of this doll or his makeover.)

For the Monster's bizarre flat-top hair, rooting wouldn't be easy or even effective (I think you'd actually just have to glue loose hair down from the top), plus they'd have to account for his staples, so I doubt they ever even considered trying to root it. And in the end, I always trust sculpted hair more than rooted hair that seriously requires gel to keep shape, because gel isn't permanent or always done well. 

The fact that three of the male MH dolls with sculpted humanoid hair are limited-edition collector releases and one is a cheaper doll from the more kid-oriented G2 suggests to me that Mattel might have deliberately avoided sculpting human hair in the mainline because kids responded well to hair play on the boy dolls as well as the girls, and so when they had the budget, they kept rooting every hairstyle that wasn't made of an inhuman substance. In collector dolls, there's no need to appeal to hair play...and given the display purpose of collector dolls, the hair is usually styled elaborately enough to make fiddling and alteration taboo, not just unwise. The lady of honor here is a very strong example of just that. Absolutely not a hair-play doll.

On the Monster, the hair is actually a separate piece snugly fit and glued onto his head, much like the scale caps used for Gil and Deuce's non-mammalian hairlines. The hair being a separate piece is a nice move that ensures there's perfectly clean color separation between hair and skin, and it allows for the scar on the left side to be sculpted a little under the hairline without an awkward junction that could occur if the hair was part of the same sculpt.

In Bride of Frankenstein, the Monster's makeup was altered to account for some of the damage he would have suffered in the windmill fire and collapse that he was defeated by in the previous film, so he has notably less hair in that film. I understand why they went with the more classic hairstyle from the original film on the doll, however, since that's the look people remember and would have expected from the doll if that wasn't what they had gone for already.

Like Frankie, the Monster has bolts in his neck--as if there was any question that the originator would have them. 

His bolts are larger and squatter than G1/G2 Frankie's (G3 has none) and aren't hexagonal at the ends--they're round. His bolts are a nice metallic silver color that's brighter and feels more deluxe than the pearl tone on most Frankie dolls. All versions of Frankie have a line of staples or stitches encircling the neck that the Monster does not.

G1 Frankie's tiny hex bolts and neck scar.

Even though he's a tough masculine dude and dressed pretty nondescript in the films, I appreciate that they still found a way to bring some MH flash and pizzazz to the Monster's costume for the doll. 

The Monster's coat and trousers are a black fabric subtly patterned with repeating lightning bolts in a slightly lighter shade that keeps his clothing looking pretty classic and drab while also having a very stylish extra flair when viewed more closely. I like it a lot. The fabric of these pieces is pretty hardy and not too flexible, but they're well-made and attractive, and I didn't encounter any issues bending his elbows inside the jacket sleeves.

He's got to stand on top of my new desk frame since the black iron blends into him!

Under the coat, the Monster has a pretty simple black tank with wide arm holes, made of a smooth stretchy knit. Most dolls with jackets are sleeveless on their under layer to make it a lot easier to re-dress them in their coats.

If you see purple in the photo, it's lying--in reality, the shirt looks completely black.

 I'm confused and a little annoyed that it doesn't open completely down the back, but perhaps they felt velcro all the way down would get in the way of the stand clip? The stand as it is needs to slip under the back of his jacket to clip onto him due to the thickness of the coat, so I guess that makes sense.

The Monster is a pretty big guy, standing notably taller than a G1 teenage girl and a G3 boy doll. 

But a notable amount of that height has to be credited to his footwear!

The Monster's shoes are pretty fantastic, being highly caricatured oversized clompy boots. The pieces incorporate stitches and staples to match the Monster's body.

"THESE BOOTS MADE FOR STOMPING. STOMP ALL OVER YOU."

Taking just one boot off really shows the ridiculous amount of height they contribute to the doll. I'm sure this is similar to the way the boots worked on Boris Karloff!

He's totally fudging that 7' 2'' declaration on his dating profile.

The feet stop completely above the huge platform of the boots. The cartoony look of the shoes actually balances really well against his face and head proportions to make the whole doll look like a really rounded stylization of the character.

Oh, and here-- enjoy the absolutely deranged lazy way I decided to photograph the soles.

I was curious about the body sculpt used by the Monster because of his stand. It looked like he used the G3 boy body, which is notably more broad and muscled than the G1 and G2 body. I was also curious about the doll stand, since so far, because G3 has no stands, that male body hasn't been paired with one yet. 

But I didn't fully expect the Monster to have a unique body size!

The only G3 boy body so far, modeled by Deuce Gorgon, and the Monster's body.

When undressing the doll, it became obvious to me that the Monster was beefier than the G3 boy body, but fully undressing him and G3 Deuce to compare really reveals their differences. Every piece of the Monster's body is a slightly larger and thicker equivalent to the G3 boy body, with the stature being taller, the arms, legs, and torso being longer, and even the feet being just a tad larger. 

Silhouette comparison with Deuce in front of the Monster.

The two bodies' side profiles.

Back view of the two bodies.

The Monster's hands popped out easily, but gently pulling did not see the forearms separating, making me suspect that maybe they are not removable. I didn't want to risk any damage, so I stopped when nothing happened. The only thing that strikes me as weird about the body is how stubby the forearms can look. They don't seem quite long enough, but the arms still look good as a whole and when posed. I hope to see this larger body get more use, perhaps as a way to have more diverse male character sizes within G3. If we can get different body types for the ghouls, why not the mansters as well? G3 Manny Taur could probably use this body in the toyline. I'm hoping the presence of the bolts doesn't mean this body was created as a one-off that can only be used for the Monster, but the fact that it's stamped 2022 and not 2021 could indicate that it, having not been developed earlier, wasn't meant for wider use in the G3 range. Still, the fact that the height is achieved pretty significantly by his shoes rather than his body feels like a sign that perhaps the body was designed to serve more purposes.

[UPDATE: It's been suggested that this body used on the Monster is the Ever After High boy body with bolts put in and new hands. That explanation sounds plausible to me, and falls in line with the fairly economical approach to the Skullector dolls, which otherwise have no new bodies and stick to the standard mid-size teenage shape for the female characters. However, I don't believe this is actually the case. I feel like, from photos, the shape of the ab muscles on the Monster matches G3 MH more than it does the EAH sculpt, and the forearms of the Monster also seem different to me. However, those could be tricks of the eye. What isn't is the underwear sculpting. The Monster has more detailed briefs than the EAH boys, and they match G3 Deuce's pretty exactly, so to me, it's gotta be an entirely new Mattel-standard male body sculpt from scratch, designed specifically for use in their current Monster High output. Sure, it still could be a modified EAH sculpt or modified from another Mattel body, but I can't see it being worth the time or money to Mattel to take an older body and go out of their way to change the undies to match the G3 boy dolls so precisely. They could have rereleased whichever body untouched (except for the bolts) just fine. It makes more sense to me that the sculpt would have been done from scratch with the intent to match the G3 style, and that the 2022 stamp is, in this case, a result of the body being entirely new. And yet, the Monster's briefs don't have the MH logo in the front that the G3 boys do, so who even knows anything anymore?]

[AUGUST 2024 UPDATE: No. No. I was wrong. Disregard that whole mess. It is the Ever After High sculpt after all and they brought it back for the Monster. It's a clear match and I don't know where I was seeing any discrepancy before. Here, look:

The Monster next to EAH signature Alistair Wonderland.

This mystery was far less mysterious than I led myself to believe.]

The Monster's stand clip is fairly wide, but I don't have other male MH clips to compare it to right now. It doesn't look as wide as the huge Manny Taur clip, but it's got to be wider than the G1 boy clip.

Deuce clips beautifully into the stand (it also has to go under the jacket on him).
My Deuce stands so poorly that he could really use it, but I think the
 Monster's just too special not to keep it for himself.

Also note the painted stitches on his limbs under the Monster's heavy clothing. They're all black and similar to G3 Frankie's. It's great they gave him those details even though in most poses while he's dressed, and in the display in the box, you'll never see them.

It actually took me most of the year after first publishing this post to finally notice one more detail--on his left wrist, the Monster has just a single silver staple painted among the stitches. I never had his sleeves rolled down and his forearm turned in the right position for me to catch that before!

Even if the body won't be, the Monster's hands are clearly character-specific sculpts, which was absolutely warranted given how essential they are to his lumbering physicality. The classic "Frankenstein silhouette" is a giant man lurching forward with huge hands outstretched on rigid arms in front of him, after all. 

The hands are very large and feel pretty detailed, with a grasping pose and stubby fingers. This guy's got some big ol' dude hands.

So overall, the Monster proved to be a far more interesting and attractive doll than I expected him to be, with some surprise details and a whole unique body I'm glad I could show off, since I haven't seen discussion of it elsewhere. Really great doll. 

Now, the lady.

Amazing.

The Bride's coloration has never been fully static in the popular consciousness due to the film being black and white. The posters indicated her famous hair was actually somewhere between auburn and ginger in color...

My Blu-Ray demonstrates.

...which The Rocky Horror Picture Show replicated with the redhead Magenta's costume parodying her.

Magenta's final costume from The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

I've also referenced this with a small art piece depicting a gender-flipped "Groom of Frankenstein":

Lance Chesterton, from my 2020 second series of "Creepy Cards" artwork.
Click for a better view. 

In the end, though, pop culture at large has determined based on the black and white footage's contrast that her hair is black with white streaks, which makes a lot of visual-appeal and narrative sense (it invokes the nervous volatility of a skunk this way) and looks great. 

That's not the only color that's been up in the air. Since the Monster became overwhelmingly green-skinned in pop culture, it's very common for the Bride to be depicted that way too, but pretty often (and much more so than with her partner), you see her with a normal light Caucasian or more deathly pale skin tone. Recent licensed Universal merchandise, including some action figures that interested me, have given her a slightly yellowish-grey deathly pale tone with black hair and dark red lips, and the doll here does the same. 

The 2021 Bride of Frankenstein action figure by Jada Toys. Photo by them.

It's kind of like a scary Snow White! This visual congruency across recent merchandise suggests that this is the current color palette Universal wants to push for the character as the official look, maybe signifying bigger plans for the character or just that her look has now been given a definitive palette by her copyright holders. Defining her look likely allows Universal to establish a stricter copyright over her image and may allow them to pursue works that even coincidentally used a similar palette, which is annoying, but it might also mean that more divergent depictions of the Bride, like those which are green-skinned, may now be rendered safe(r) to use without legal trouble. 

(Pretty sure the hairdo is something Universal has locked down to a degree, though. It's probably why, to my eternal disappointment, the Bride is the iconic monster most visibly absent from LEGO's wide collection of classic horror minifigures.)

Whatever was behind the decision, this palette looks fantastic on this doll and it's nice to see a new body color for a Monster High doll as a result. It's actually a basically perfect match for the skintone of the paler Mystixx dolls, and allows for rebodying those characters, as I later discovered...but this isn't a very accessible or expendable source for bodies in that color at all!

The Bride of Frankenstein icon was made by her hair and the doll lives or dies by it, so it had to be done well. The impossible-looking dark frizzy beehive with white lightning-shocked streaks is one of the most famous and recognizable fictional hairstyles of all time, and was likely massively influential on punk and other alternative styles. The style itself was inspired by images of Nefertiti.

The bust of Nefertiti.

 Achieving this hair on a human was tricky, so doing it with fiber on something as small as an eleven-inch doll had to be a daunting task, but my god, they did it. It looks fantastic.

The hair is tightly permed and thick and feels soft, springy and dense. No styling product was detected. The top of the hair that's a little bunched up is pinched by an elastic band. It's the linchpin of the whole 'do, making it so the vertical hair strands don't splay out and collapse downward. This small gather at the top of the hair is pretty inconspicuous and blends well into the rest of the hairstyle. If I had the money and motivation for a second copy of the Bride, I'd absolutely take the hair band out and experiment with the style and texture, but no way for this. It will never be messed with even remotely. So there's no reporting on that...not that you need any more content in this review!

Since elastic bands decay over time, I think it might have been wiser to tie the ends of the hair with a thin thread or ribbon. That might be a modification to consider for longevity if I didn't worry that would prematurely undo the hair and create the problem I'd be trying to avert!

One thing that seemed very odd to me is that the white streaks seem to be rooted in a deliberately asymmetrical manner, with the streak on the viewer's left being higher than the one on the right. 

???

This struck me as blatantly incorrect and it didn't satisfy my sense of symmetry. But I'll be absolutely damned because I was so curious, I stopped and looked more carefully at pictures of the film character…and learned that the wig Lanchester wore had those white streaks in precisely the same asymmetrical placement!

Huh.
(Publicity photo of Lanchester as the Bride.)

Silly Dmitry.
(And hey, reader: Don't slide the Bride's claws into her hair. Bad idea.)

So I have no critique. They weren't flubbing something with this odd choice on the doll--they were showing that they paid scrupulous attention!!! Maybe I've discovered another mass pop-culture mismemory, because I think everyone probably assumes the Bride's hair is symmetrical, especially since this is the very first adaptation I've seen of her look that replicates the original asymmetry. So color me extremely impressed-- by questioning this doll, I just learned something really overlooked about the Bride's famous costume and I can now see that this doll has a genuinely exceptional level of accuracy simply for correctly capturing a detail that literally everyone reasonably assumes was different. It's a wonderful demonstration of love and passion for the original horror source material (because this is Monster High).

The "accurate" shape of the hair is a bit hard to pin down. Sometimes, it looks fairly short and rounded, but in other shots (and the Jada Toys figure), the hair feels a bit longer and splayed into a wedge at the end. The angle of the hair behind her head is also something that varies in depictions of her, with many unlicensed Brides doing a vertical Marge Simpson look instead. I think MH's version looks good. It's pretty big but it's not too long or vertical.

The Bride's face looks great. 

But how could it not?

Her eyebrows are the distinctively narrow and straight shape seen in the film, and she has lots of lashes. Like her mate, her smaller eyes frame her as more mature. I can definitely see pupils when I really hold her close, but her eyes are so extremely dark, they're pretty much indiscernible. Her face paint colors are dark and desaturated, which to me aligns well with the dramatic black-and-white contrast of both the film and her hair, but there's a bit of color in there, like the subtle red of her lips and a band of orange above the eyes, to make it clear she's not a grayscale doll. The red lips pair very well with G1 signature Frankie. The face makes this doll look very appealingly stark and high-contrast even though it uses color, and it's an incredibly gorgeous effect. As mentioned above, she has lightning-shaped light reflections in her eyes.

If these dolls really are Rebecca Shipman's work, then she seems to have a special love for (and skill with) vintage-style female faces with dark lipstick, since signature Robecca Steam had these traits and was named for Shipman, and the "R.S." initials attributed to Gooliope Jellington's unknown scientist creator make me suspect Gooliope was Shipman's work as well.

The head has an iridescent shimmery effect like we've seen from the brand before which makes her head look very unreal and eerie and pretty. Flash photography captures the effect best.

One detail I was really glad they included on the doll is a subtler touch of the Bride that can be easy to miss-- the stitched-up scars running from her jawline and branching out around her ears. 

These are just painted on, which makes sense given how Frankie's are as well. Technically, these should connect to each other under her chin, but it's okay having them just on the sides. I can understand how printing that would have been too difficult. 

Nothing under the chin.

Aside from these stitches, the Bride character design otherwise doesn't feel quite as cobbled-together and freakish as her mate, but these scars are distinctive and creepy and the Bride being better-made makes a degree of sense given that she's Frankenstein's second project and one under in-universe design pressure to be pretty. She more than makes up for it horror-wise by being so uncanny.

Not every Skullector doll has a bespoke head sculpt-- the Grady Twins used G1 Twyla's head and Lydia Deetz used Vandala Doubloons'. [UPDATE: And Elvira seems to be using Spectra's very distinct cheekboned head (not her softer-faced Indonesian alternate sculpt). Or perhaps it's the Bloodgood head? I think they're different sculpts?] I haven't seen any sources either way, but I wouldn't be surprised if Pennywise's head was reused as well. The Bride wasn't immediately clear, though I knew it would be easy to check if it was new by looking at the copyright stamp on her head. A reused doll sculpt would have a conspicuously older stamp, and the year would provide a good ballpark to guess in to find the doll who first used the head. The sculpt is usually finalized, produced, and stamped a year before the doll using it gets released, though there might be exceptions where it's the same year, and the very earliest G1 head sculpts from the first released characters were finalized and stamped two years before the brand debuted on shelves.

I bet another good tell when tracking sources of a MH head you think is reused would be to check the ears. MH ears have a lot of variety, with the style narrowing things down, and they're a sculpted feature that's easy to compare between heads since they're isolated features and not covered in distracting and deceptive factory paint. 

Without owning the doll, though, her sculpt looked like it was made for her. It has Elsa Lanchester's chin dimple and seems otherwise well matched to the character. Sure enough, she had a 2021 stamp.

All Elsa.
...Mattelsa Lanchester.

(If I somehow get a reader who owns and has deboxed the Pennywise doll, then hi! Do please tell what date her head is stamped with!)

The Bride's dress is an embellishment of the white sheet dress, cape and bandages she wore in the film. The film costume was less haute couture and more not couture, since the Bride was fresh off the table in a loose sheet and bandages she was wrapped in for the laboratory. Not exactly a designer gown. The doll's costume is.

The costume is in two pieces. The body is a one-piece dress with a sheer white layer over a shorter layer of very ruched fabric as well as ruched puffed sleeves. The ruching scrunches up the fabric a lot and gives it a resemblance to the bandages the Bride was wrapped in. 

The ruched under-layer of the skirt is loose in the front, but sewn to the sheer layer at the back. 

The sheer layer of the skirt hangs lower at the back and forms a nice train. You can't appreciate this when she's clipped into her stand. This is a doll who would have benefited from a saddle stand that attached underneath her so her outfit would be completely unobstructed.

The Bride has a belt shaped like a line of staples cinching her waist. This feels a lot like a repurposed older Frankie piece, but it seems to be entirely original to this doll. I may be wrong. It's a simple piece that adds nice contrast to the Bride's visual design.

 Her cape is a separate piece attached with a tight elastic loop that hooks under her arms from behind.

This is how it goes onto her body.
Hope it doesn't loosen too much with time.

The cape removed.

 The cape is a sheer piece overlaid with three rows of many fluttery dramatic sheer ribbon strips to further invoke bandages and amp up the look more. These bandages really tend to hook onto each other, so to spread out her cape to the best effect, you have to kind of finger-comb through the strips. 

The three rows of strips-ringing her neck, crossing her shoulders, and at her waist.

One of the rows lifted up.

When the Monster said "did you get a peek at her shoes" on the back of the box, he wasn't joking. (Say it with me...because this is Monster High)!

The boots are bandaged on top and have a lab-device and chemistry-bottle texture on the translucent blue platform. 

But the real showstopper here is that inside the heels are tiny figures of twirling ballerinas!

They strike me as very similar to, and strong competition for, oversized doll Gooliope's skeleton carousel-horse heels.

Poorly-cropped photo of the shoes from the Gooliope I once owned.

The similarity of the shoes is another reason to suspect Gooliope was a Shipman character design. The Bride's shoes might be even more impressive to me, though, because they're half the size of Goo's!

There's a reason these awesome ballerinas are here, and specifically framed inside a translucent shoe platform--they're a reference to one of several tiny people in jars Dr. Pretorius created and shows off in the film.

The ballerina jar as seen in Bride of Frankenstein. 
Pretorius' other tiny homunculi were a king, a queen, a bishop, a devil, and a mermaid.

So yeah. These shoes rule. But I don't love them because I think they break pretty badly with the tone and aesthetic of the rest of the doll. The style feels more modern to me and the saturated translucent blue color boggles me because it's absolutely nowhere on the rest of these dolls and sticks out pretty sorely.

Would you pair this top half...

...with these boots?

These are her Rightful Shoes and they're awesome alone, so I'm keeping them on her. But I'd have given her some kind of heel or boot in black or white to make her feel more cohesive. Or just make the translucent platform grey-toned or uncolored.

I was curious about which body the Bride would be using. Given that the Bride was not physically teenaged and that her mate was taller than other male dolls due to his boots, I thought it would make sense to give her the adult-proportioned "big-sister" body already used on an older character for the parent-aged Bloodgood doll. With that body, the Bride would be taller and suit the character better. Then again, it didn’t really seem like other Skullector characters whose source characters were clearly adults, like Pennywise and Betelgeuse-

Ya called?
(photo by Mattel)

Huh. I have typed her name three times thus far, haven't I.

Betelgeuse Betelgeuse Betelgeuse-

--those other originally-adult Skullector characters didn't get the big-sister body. Still, with the amount of coverage on the Bride's frame, I couldn't really tell what was the case with her before having her in hand. If anybody deserved the adult body, she did, but who's to say?

In the end, I wasn't too surprised to see her with the standard teenage body size, but I can't say I'm not a little disappointed. If they can sculpt entirely freaking new bodies for Skullector characters, why can't they use their other standardized G1 body sizes for characters they'd suit? Maybe the molds for that were decommissioned and it wouldn't have been worth going through the work to revive the other G1 body types?

The Bride's body sculpt is standard, though her source character was bandaged heavily. A new body or recycled/modified sculpts from the fully-bandaged Create-a-Monster Mummy body could have given her this effect, but it seems like a stylistic choice to have the bandages on her costume rather than her body given that this isn't a directly literal design adaptation and may represent a more self-assured Bride with more agency. Her hands are the standby clawed shape used for Clawdeen, Rochelle, Jane, and the Feisty/Love Inner Monster, which is great. I love that she has talons, and it's a nice tradeoff for bandage hands.

My Bride's body unfortunately and very disappointingly came with a manufacturing flaw. Something in the socket or peg of her right elbow is malformed, preventing the peg from rotating smoothly in a circle. When you try to lightly rotate it past a certain point, it bends back into place, and pushing harder spins it further into another position rather than it rotating any way you want. When I tried to remove her arm with gentle pulling and twisting, it put frightening, near-breaking stress on the peg. I didn't find luck with the other arm either, though that one rotates fine and didn't seem in danger of snapping as I tried to remove it. I'm genuinely unsure now if either of these dolls' forearms are meant to be removable, and that needs to be clearer--or manageable if they are! I don't imagine the joint rotation will be a flaw for other copies of the doll, but on a big-ticket product, it's a letdown for sure and the lack of ease and clarity regarding the removal make me nervous about the arms.

The hands pop out just fine on both dolls. Just go for that. Normally I prefer the forearms to come out because they're a bit sturdier, but on these dolls, don't risk it.

When viewing the two Frankenstein dolls as canon representations of Frankie's parents, then G1 Frankie really does look like a design average of these two, as if the parents, not beholden to genetic laws, built Frankie to fall precisely between the two of them.

Frankie's skin tone is like a blend of the two parents, and her hair and face take after the Bride while her head and bolts and scars take after the Monster. Frankie still has things that make her unique, like her mismatched eyes and blue and red colors among her clothing. Even though the Skullector dolls were based directly on the film characters, I have to believe that there were also a few guiding Frankie dolls being consulted on the desk of Rebecca Shipman and/or whoever else worked on this set.

Next to the other two, Frankie can look unattractively large-headed. The parent dolls have proportionally smaller heads and eyes and it helps them look more mature visually and in terms of age, but it can reflect less flatteringly on Frankie. I definitely objectively prefer the head and face proportions of the Skullector duo, but Frankie still looks good to me. Just maybe a little better when she's standing separately from the parents.

Here's all of my Frankenmonster dolls, with my lovely modified G3 Frankie standing apart since their art design doesn't match the Skullectors quite as well as G1 Creeproduction Frankie. 

And then I just took more photos of these dolls because they're gorgeous. 

We've already seen it, but the Monster can do a phenomenal bridal carry.

Here's a loving family photo:

The family on Christmas...

The Bride needed the larger hat for her huge hair!

G3 Deuce's glasses look amazing with the Monster's lip curl expression.

And the Bride wears them fangtastically well:

...but G3 Frankie's shades might be the solution to balance her color palette.

Is it worth wearing this look, though?

The Monster joined the Frankencollection:

And I felt a proper welcome had to be conducted for the first Bride.

My Frankenmonsters assembled can form a really neat color spectrum from blue to green to desaturated:

These dolls are really striking among the mainline MH toys. They really feel more dramatic and mature.

And at the end of the day, the couple just wanted to relax and see a movie.

"HAPPY...ENDING....RIGHT?"

In the end, I can't say these dolls were anything but worth the price--even the slightly elevated aftermarket price I paid for them. They're exceptionally-crafted, beautiful, photogenic dolls that pay wonderful tribute to the classic Frankenstein films while making it Monster High in a way that still feels very screen-faithful. They're a striking presence on the shelf and perfectly complement G1 signature Frankie. My issues with them are few. The Monster's tank top is harder to take off and put on him since it doesn't open all the way down the back. Something went wrong in manufacturing leaving my Bride's right forearm hard to rotate. I couldn't gently remove either character's forearms, leaving me unsure if they were designed to come out or not--explicit information should have been provided on that. The Bride's shoe design is amazing but doesn't really gel with the rest of her color palette and fashion sense to me. But otherwise, these dolls are a slam dunk. They're mature, arresting objets d'art that make me so happy every time I see them. Upgrading from being a collector to a Skullector was a good choice. I can't wait to see what they do next.

[ADDENDUM:

A year later, here's an even better Stein family photo! My new desk and some magnets and backdrop paper created a great industrial setting, and green paper as a filter created the perfect spooky retro green shading!

Wonderful.]