Monster High was massive in the toy world, and any smash success will have imitators trying to tap into the same theme.
Monster High's imitators, like the imitators of anything, found themselves at a pretty signficiant disadvantage. For one, they had to go against a juggernaut brand, and for two, they had to chip into the juggernaut's market without being able to do the same thing that made the juggernaut what it was. In terms of the monster dolls, the imitators concluded (perhaps correctly) that they had to restrict themselves to a focus on one kind of monster (witches for Bratzillaz, aliens for Novi Stars, zombies for Jakks Pacific Zombie Girls, and vampires, then zombies for this brand we're diving into today) while MH pirouetted around with huge horror and folkloric diversity. The other appeal of MH was its wide variety of facial and body sculpts, which was something imitator brands didn't or couldn't offer. I think they had some intrigue purely for choosing to exist in the shadow of a smash success, and it's always intriguing to me what these imitators do to successfully or unsuccessfully differentiate themselves. Does the brand develop compelling rival characters? Is the character design compelling and unique? Does the toy production and manufacturing quality stand competitively?
Or does it just go for a gimmick?
Mystixx was a brand produced by Playhut, a company whose output I'm not otherwise familiar with, but I gather they're not generally known for dolls. They seem to specialize more in large kiddie play forts and structures. The Mystixx brand debuted in 2012.
The four Mystixx characters from left to right--Siva, Azra, Kalani, and Talin. |
The secret was they could transform into vampires!
The quartet in vampire mode. |
Yes, Mystixx was a line of vampire fashion dolls with human alter egos, and each doll had a transformation gimmick with two wigs and outfits each to make them over. But how did the faces change like that? Well, uniquely and very excitingly, these characters had just one doll head, sculpted with a face on either side! This let the head spin around to transform the doll facially, with the wigs covering the face not in use. Wicked.
I've always been intrigued by multi-faced dolls since there's something so bizarre and fascinating about the sculpts that are needed to achieve a head that can spin around for another face. One of my most prized antique-shop finds is a three-faced doll with a porcelain head and hands.
I call her Baby Faces. |
Like so. |
Beyond the idea of the transformation gimmick and the head sculpt, I don't find too much compelling or unique about Mystixx as a brand. The name of the brand seems like generic supernatural terminology made "edgy" and doesn't communicate anything about the concept, and the vampire dual-life concept feels like more transparent cashing-in on the Twilight craze than MH was...with, perhaps, a little Hannah Montana mixed in? The tagline, "The doll you can change the face of", is also awkward and clumsy. I appreciate the unusual names of the Mystixx characters, but I'm not aware of any tie-in fiction to the brand that lends these characters any depth. Tie-in fiction isn't necessary to guide kids in their play, and I can certainly understand opinions that toys shouldn't prompt kids with other people's stories, but next to Monster High's developed world and highly creative cast, Mystixx doesn't put up much competition. The brand had a few waves of dolls, including where where the characters were zombies instead, so despite there apparently being only four characters in the whole brand, the idea feels a little unfocused to me.
One thing that makes the Mystixx brand feel a little ahead of its time is the way its signature characters had monochromatic theming. Kalani was green, Talin was pink, Azra was blue, and Siva was purple. One of the biggest doll brands right now is MGA's Rainbow High, which is built on this same color-coded conceit!
I found character bios posted on the Mystixx Facebook page, so I was able to learn a little more about the dolls.
The Mystixx artwork looks hyper-caricatured and airbrushed way past the point of appeal to me, and the bio, like the brand's tagline, seems to have some grammatical issues, but Azra's character is interesting to me.
Here's the bio typed out:
Azra
Loves being outdoors. She is competitive and driven and plays on the school's basketball, soccer, and tennis teams. Her favorite sport is snowboarding, so in the winter, you'll find her enjoying the brisk air out on the slopes. While other girls are chasing boys and shopping with friends, she's busy beating the competition out on the field. Boys love being around her, but her adventurous spirit keeps her interested in other things. She's very direct and says what's on her mind, [which] often gets her in trouble and can hurt other's feelings, but once a friend you know you can always count on. [but once she becomes your friend you know you can always count on her?]
So the wintry vibes of her outfit are tied to her being a winter sports athlete--really fun for the cold undead vampire concept! I also like that she has no interest in boys and that she's a little blunt and hurtful.
The other characters' bios don't appeal to me as much. Quick rundown:
- Siva is a royal old-blood vampire who tries to hide her background but still has a bit of an imperious demeanor as a result of her upbringing.
- Talin is a girly popular girl who splits the opinion of her classmates, wants a boyfriend more than friendship, and loves pink. Seems shallow. Still, I enjoy that she's described as exclusively carnivorous.
- Kalani is a shy awkward nerd who was homeschooled. She only eats green vegetables, and secretly envies the popular girls' allure with boys.
I think there's some clever color-coding with each character, though. The blue girl is a little frigid and associated with actual winter. The green girl is an envious vegetarian. The pink girl is a hyperfeminine carnivore, and the purple girl is royalty. I appreciate that color resonance and it gives me more appreciation for the line. Sure, the color theming is maybe a little basic, but it's something and it's fun. While Azra's name seems tied to color by sounding loosely like "azure", none of the other girls' names seem related to their visuals.
Siva is the only doll who wears the opposite of her signature color in her human guise, with her ensemble being mostly yellow in direct opposition to her vampiric form's purple. This might be tied to her deliberately trying to hide her prestigious background from people, given the association of purple and royalty her design plays on. While I appreciate that Talin, Kalani, and Azra's outfits go with each other to offer a more consistent and mixable fashion pack for each doll, on a conceptual level, I think it could have been fun if each girl wore opposite colors between their two forms.
Here's how my Azra set arrived to me.
The first-wave signature Mystixx dolls were packaged in their vampire guises, with their human stock being placed on a cardboard cutout of the doll with the human face displayed, and my Azra arrived in the same setup, with the dressed doll in vampire mode in one bag and the other bag containing the cutout with her human stock and her brush. It seems like she hadn't been played with and had just been deboxed at the most basic level and packed up for resale. I'll never understand the people who do this, because I always want to play with a toy, but I can certainly appreciate it as a buyer who likes to get complete toys on the aftermarket. For a doll that's eleven (!!!) years old like Azra, getting a set complete sans box is a pretty good deal and so these "instant-repacker" resellers provide a good service. Symbiosis!
The full contents of the package. |
The signature Mystixx quartet had two skintones. Talin and Siva were a light purple, and Azra and Kalani were a greenish white pale tone. The signature versions of the quartet had budget rereleases with half the pieces of the full pack and a unique pale pink skin tone, likely a move to make the human guises look more natural. For the zombie Mystixx dolls, they had a more yellow-green and a darker-purple skintone.
The set includes a small hairbrush for Azra, and it's like any doll brush--not really worth the time.
I had to mention it, though. |
Since she started in vampire form, let's look at Azra that way first.
Vampire Azra reminds me quite a lot of Ghoulia Yelps' Freaky Fusion doll, which is styled in a faux-fusion costume to emulate Draculaura. A blue-haired vampire image with bangs and dark lips will do that!
Mattel stock photo of Fusion-Inspired Ghoulia. |
I'm struck by the point that Kalani is the only Mystixx character who can't really be compared to an MH vampire design. MH did pink and girly with Draculaura, purple and royal with Elissabat, and blue with bangs for fusion-cosplay Ghoulia. A green vampire was done by MH with Batsy Claro, but her shade is so much lighter and her overall aesthetic and execution is so different that I don't really see any comparison to be made. However, the first Mystixx dolls pre-date the releases of Elissabat, Fusion-Inspired Ghoulia, and even Batsy, so those parallels, if they're there, are all Mattel's doing. Playhut can only really be accused of imitating Draculaura.
Azra's vampire wig is an electric blue color with a small tie at the back of the head pulling some sections backward.
The fiber feels glossy and pretty nice, but it's a little messy and could benefit from a boil. The styling is unnecessary, so I think I'll be taking that out.
The vampire face is sharp and angular and has a few similarities to MH faces, primarily in the paint.
The nose shape doesn't feel as elegant as MH sculpts, and the eye reflections are subtler. The mouth is also smaller than it would be on an MH head, but the similarities are there. Azra's eyebrows are brown, which bugs me. Her mouth has two crisp and well-aligned fangs painted on in the MH style and the lips are dark red. Her eyeshadow has glitter in it, and her cheeks have blush.
Vampire Azra's outfit consists of a shrug jacket, a dress, tights, and slipper-like shoes.
The shrug is two types of dense mesh fabric, with blue trim and a white body. The dress is a shiny sparkly smooth grey fabric with blue lace trim, a belt with a blue strap and silver buckle, and white fluffy velour on the bottom to suit Azra's wintry side.
Azra's tights are very reminiscent of signature Draculaura's, being mesh leggings that don't go over the feet. Azra's are blue, while Draculaura's were black.
The shoes have wide sculpted fur trim and silver bows, and are shaped like wedge heels.
I like the design of this vampire character. The colors are restrained and the costume feels personalized but mature and cohesive. There's a somewhat grounded quality to the Mystixx outfits that reminds me of the darker early MH days.
Now let's look at human Azra, the look that drew me to this doll.
I had to unfasten the wig and outfit from the tags holding them to the cutout, which left the cutout more dismembered than it was.
It never had legs, though. |
A plastic dress form, similar to the ones used in MH fashion packs and to fill out the clothing on Skelita Calaveras dolls, was used over the cutout to hold the dress.
The MH equivalent is much more contoured to the shape of the doll body. |
Here's the human look.
Human Azra's wig is a black shoulder-length bob, but it does not look good as it came to me. It's not hanging flat or long enough and the hair fiber feels coarser and less pleasant. It seems like the vampire wigs have been reported as nicer than the human ones in general in the line, and I don't get why that would be. I could kind of squash it into a nicer shape...
...but this wig will need proper treatment.
The human faces are a little odd, but I don't dislike them.
The sculpts are weird with the round cheeks and pointed chin, but it's not too off-putting to me. The faces look sweet enough. They're less glam on this side because the makeup doesn't have glitter.
All of the Mystixx dolls had the same head sculpt and their signature faceups on either side weren't meaningfully different from each other. The human faces looked the same on pretty much all of the Mystixx releases, but the monster faces changed with the zombie Mystixx dolls. The standard zombie faceup had pale pupil-less dead eyes and no fangs, and the two Rococo Zombies had ghoulish white paint covering the face and tiny heart-shaped lip paint. The Grimm masquerade/fairy tale line had more elaborate fantasy makeup for the characters on both sides, and since they were framed as unique fantasy figures when transformed, the dark side had more divergent gothy humanoid faceups which weren't specifically monstrous. I believe every single Mystixx doll had the same sculpt, or at least every Mystixx doll after the first wave did, given that the wig system changed a bit. This means the human faces were always roughly the same and the spooky faces were reliant entirely on the paint to change the monster type a given doll was depicted as.
Azra's human outfit is very appealing to me.
They seem to have yellowed a fair bit with age. |
You can appreciate the pointiness contrast of the sculpts this way. The vampire side has a lower chin. |
The mythology nerd in me is getting strong Janus connotations. |
The wig hole on a CAM MH head. |
The wig cap's shape over the covered face. |
Or to show off two faces from one side. |
Maudie's loving the work, though! |
But what to use?
Uh-oh. |
Thank. Goodness. |
Right after I'd used the pair floating in my parts bag, the wings are going right back into it! |
I'll never tire of how well the Monster carries her! |
Mattel stock photo of signature Jackson Jekyll. This was actually his second doll, and it was released after Holt Hyde! |
Mattel stock photo of signature Holt. |
Jacqueline Haydn
Monster Parentage: My great-uncle(s) were Jekyll and Hyde. I didn't inherit anything from him like my cousins did, but as a baby, I had a run-in with his formula. I think I'm more in control than anyone in my family has ever been, but transformation is still part of the package.Killer Style: I go formal Victorian, in an outfit that'll suit me whether I'm feeling wild or proper. So much of the feeling of an outfit truly comes from the person's demeanor, and it's such a hassle to change clothes whenever I change faces.
The owl would work for a character with a spinning head, but he's not associated with this doll project--just in the photo at the same time. |
You see why rebodying was necessary. |
Meanwhile, because I wanted the hat to stay on, I tried to find a headband I could put it on. And Getting Ghostly Twyla's worked pretty well because the sculpted bow squeezed pretty well into the hat!
This allows the headband to be used on its own as a bow, or to serve as a mount for the hat with no gluing at all!
I thought the pink cauldron mug would work as her potion. |
The headband is far from the best shape for the head with the wig on, but with fiddling, it'll stay on.
Then I found a couple of wooden pieces in my craft supply and made a simple walking stick for Jacqueline. It was essential to complete the Victorian ensemble, and because Hyde beats someone to death with a gentleman's cane in the book.
Yeah, that's kind of a whiplash sentence.
I don't think Jacqueline is a murderer, but it was a fun devilish reference to include.
The stick balances well under her hand...
And the knob allows it to rest delicately between her thumb and forefinger.
As I treated her wigs, I decided to do some minor touch-ups to Jackie's faces.
I love her dark mode, but we need to give her light mode some attention, too! |
The extra-nice thing is that Kiyomi was a socked doll, so these shoes will be wide enough to accommodate Jackie's stockings.
The purse is a translucent purple heavy bag with a chain handle and charms, and features cutouts and zippers that form contrasting faces.
And Hyde mode:
It's pretty tricky to pose this doll due to the joint issue, the weight of the bag, and the tricky balance of the cane, but it's also very rewarding due to the way this doll's body language can change, and her cane adds tons of dynamism. I think the cold, restrained colors make her very striking and creepy, and the doll works great as a transforming character who doesn't need a change of costume. As long as her head, hat, and purse flip around and you switch her hair and posture, she can go from one persona to a very different second one! I love how she came out.
And so, after all that, what do I think of Mystixx?
I think the dolls offer an appealingly unusual play feature paired with pretty cohesive character design and nice clothing pieces. While it's plainly derivative of Monster High, that also kind of works to its benefit because the two doll brands are largely clothing-compatible.
This doll's greatest letdown is its bendy and minimally-jointed doll body, which utterly pales in comparison to the display and play value offered by its inspiration's doll engineering. It also irks me a little that there were no compatible MH body colors for this doll release when Mystixx was active...and that the only option was from a much later and pretty much unexpendable (to most sensible people) collector doll when it happened. I would have been stuck with a very limited doll body if I bought Azra before 2022, or else I would have had to make a more fragile and unpolished recolor repaint job on another body. The body swap worked out fine for such a big risk, but I feel like I would have ended up frustrated by Azra during my original collection due to her being stuck with a cheap body. Maybe that's why I never sought to get one of these dolls back then. Had I known about the budget rereleases of the signature dolls, I could have gotten that copy of Azra and completed her with an easy Draculaura body purchase and the original pack for the rest of the Azra stock...but that's a waste of money I would have resented as well.
I also felt a little creatively limited by the way the wig cap covered the opposite face and prevented both from being treated as present at the same time. The first wave of Mystixx was the most limited. Later dolls had wig caps that didn't cover the other face, and the line got more articulation toward or at its end...but the bodies still weren't as good as MH and the appearances of the more jointed Mystixx dolls were extremely few. I am mentally considering getting one of the pink budget Mystixx dolls, maybe Talin if I can track down a good deal on her (nobody is really selling these dolls; they were not a phenomenon), and giving her a Draculaura body for another, genuinely two-faced character, since those releases have "peekabo wigs" and offer a much easier rebody color option.
Ultimately, it's hardly a compliment to conclude that a doll is its best when turned into another character and put onto the doll body it was modeled on. That casts negativity upon the creativity, personality, and build of the doll as sold....but at its core, that's just the reality of it. Mystixx was a weak imitation of MH that harnessed appeal with the purest definition of a gimmick--a single unique exciting feature hoping to smooth over the inferiorities of the product. I still value Azra as a wildly fun doll gimmick who inspired me to create a custom character I truly adore, but as a standalone toy, it needed to be able to match the appeal of the toys it was cashing in on. With that body, it just couldn't hope to.
The least a toy should do is inspire the imagination and creativity, so in that light, Mystixx succeeded. I don't know. I love Jackie more than Azra, but Azra is the root that made Jackie possible.
Glad to see a review of mystixx from you! I found them to be such a fascinating weirdo of a doll line, especially for one so openly aping something more popular. :) They're so bizarre and it's a delight. And credit where due,the outfit seems nicely thought out and constructed.
ReplyDeleteYou are waaaaaay beaver than I would have been for that particular body swap, super glad it worked out well on all accounts. Jekyll and Hyde was a great idea for mystixx.
I was pretty impressed with the outfits as well. And I don't know about "brave"-- I'd say I was probably just impulsive and then very careful about how I executed that impulse! It was definitely a good result, though, and it led to personalization of a doll I already loved!
DeleteThe articulated MH body elevates this doll so much! I really like Jackie, especially her Hyde side.
ReplyDelete