RESTYLE ICONS: Outta Sight!

Welcome to my next subseries! 

While I love Monster High and so much of its fashion designs and monster executions, there are some characters that just didn't hit the mark for me and either didn't live up to their monster potential or had a design identity I loved on paper while lacking the perfect execution of that idea in my mind. So now, having dived hopelessly into customizing, restyling, and ordering parts, I think I can make some of those characters into things I personally really love. So, RESTYLE ICONS will the review/project format where I make the most of any character who

1. had multiple mass-market dolls and 

2. never really worked for me across them.

RESTYLE ICONS projects are intended to be character-adherent inasmuch as that allows me to connect with them. I'm not changing names, wiping off faceups, or trying to break from the characters' designed fashion senses. I'm just exploring different ways to make the characters' designs click for me in a way their official ensembles didn't, so style diversions are not meant to remove the character entirely from their personality. It's just that, sometimes, a divergent official faceup or hair color for the character will determine the doll used as the base for my personal definitive version. Sometimes the one-off idea Mattel used was the one that felt better to me than the character's standard!

As to where we start, one of the most prominent personal letdown monsters for me was Invisi Billy, the son of the Invisible Man. 

Mattel prototype stock photo of signature Invisi Billy.

Billy was first teased in an April Fool's prank, with Mattel posting a "photo of him in-box". 

Later, Billy would be properly released as the debuting signature character in the back-to-school New Scaremester doll line.

Billy's real box, as photographed by Mattel. Odd that the line's logo on the
box is just "Scaremester"--no "New".

Billy of the unknown surname was a young alternative prankster who developed a relationship with Scarah Screams. That had bothered me during my original engagement with the brand because it felt like Mattel was just not able to keep any of the male students from being in a relationship and Billy/Scarah didn't seem to have any real chemistry.

Anyway, the bigger thing that disappointed me about Billy was that he reminded me very little of his root horror icon. 

Screencap of Claude Rains as Jack Griffin, the Invisible Man
in the famous 1933 Universal film. The gloves, shades, and
bandages disguise his invisible body!

Billy was the last mainline character introduced who was directly inspired by one of the famous Universal Monsters (all the others had already been covered), but since this was at a point after Mattel started deliberately distancing themselves from the licensed characters for legal reasons, pretty much nothing about Billy was iconographically similar to Jack Griffin in the film. No sunglasses, no smoking jacket, no bandages, no potions. And while he had some clever ideas, it felt like I could only see what Billy should have been. I also admit I was more close-minded about alternative styling back then. 

I liked Billy's second (and, as of now, final) doll more than his first. It was in the extremely and unfairly scarce Maul Monsteristas five-pack set and was a lot simpler, but the styling was more appealing to me, and Billy had a unique body color that was completely translucent indigo save for his opaque head and a gradient transition painted on the neck. 

Mattel stock photo of the Maul Monsteristas five-pack. All of these budget dolls managed to
offer unique looks for their characters, and none were released alone, so it's a crying shame
how inaccessible, price and availability-wise, this thing was.

I thought that was a much cooler and more effective execution of the invisibility concept, with better invisibility coloring, than his signature doll. Maul Monsteristas Billy is unreasonably expensive to acquire due to the five-pack being one of the rarest items in the brand, plus being expensive to start with as a five-pack, so he's not the subject of the review and I thought his signature doll had worth and workability. 

Here's Billy as he arrived to me.

Sorry; I had to. Obligatory.

No, here he actually is.

I purchased a complete Billy with his hair untouched, and the copy fortunately included his stand as well. No diary, but that doesn't matter to me.

Man, is this ever a time capsule of a design. Billy's described as a hipster (actually, "blipster", which…what distinction does that make? What the heck does "blipster" mean, Mattel??? Is it meant to suggest he's a visual "blip" on people's radar? I don't think that pun really lands), but I'd say he leans more toward the scene subculture (which can be glibly described as "happy emos"). His hair is the very 2000s flat-ironed long sideswept "emo hair" style and his ear gauges make him a bit more alternative too. The beanie and shorts and ear gauges do all make appearances in hipster style, but I think what really defined "hipster dudes" in the zeitgeist was thick glasses, button-down shirts (preferably flannel), brimmed hats, and mustaches, and Billy has none of those. I'd have described his style as "un-scene" to be more accurate and make a more cogent pun on his invisibility!

Billy's first piece is his beanie hat, which is a bright blue color. 

The hat (at least this copy) is sewn with a point at one end, and isn't pulled super snug over the head.

The hat is sewn into the head with a few blue threads. One of them came hooked around his left ear gauge!

Here it is unhooked.

Billy's hair, like most rooted straight-haired boy hairstyles, is gelled heavily to keep its natural volume tamed. At such a small scale, short haircuts can't naturally fall flat and close around the head, so gel needs to compress the hair for a more realistic look. I view gelled hair as frustrating and paradoxical in a way, since you can't play with it even though it's rooted, so I like to find solutions in de-gelling hair to see if I can either replicate the intended look gel-free or achieve another style. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. In the years since this doll was new, the gel has lightened, but the hair is still tamed into shape by it.

I do like the dark blue and black color blend of this hair. It's a nice mix. 

The hair is a look that not only captures a time period but also feels very dated by 2023, and it really ages poorly on a vibes level as well as just a fashion one. There are obviously lots of exceptions, but as a fan of online content creators or just an observer of creators who leveraged the internet for their careers, I've seen too many alternative edgy guys who got famous with this hair turn out to be really sickening creeps and/or criminal predators who abused their popularity and displayed an alarming lack of empathy. It's a hairstyle that sadly feels like a slimily performative look now and it feels like a red flag these days. I've grown much more open to alternative fashion, but I think as a society, we all need to bury the emo pretty-boy hair and turn the grave into a hair-grease fire. The hairstyle was never something I'd liked, but it's especially unappealing to me now.

Here's his face.

Billy's skin is a very pale greyish white with a subtle blue tone. His face is long with a narrower chin than his forehead and wide-set grey eyes. It seems like this Billy's eyes may have been printed a little too low, but it's not too bad. I appreciate that his eyebrows match his hair!

Billy is the only MH character to have no lip paint in his faceups, and no other MH dolls outside of Billy do the same. This has the effect of making his head look a little more faint and washed-out. It's clever how they used an absence of detail to communicate a visual absence from invisibility. I wish they'd made his eyes look washed out in the same way with grey pupils or none at all, and I would have preferred his hair being light rather than dark, though the dark hair matches his Universal dad.

Billy's ears are made to look pierced with ring gauges that stretch his earlobes, so the doll head sculpt features long lobes and the earrings are small circular studs that push into the ears to complete the illusion. 

The gauges are tiny pieces in a translucent black color. 

I've never seen the appeal in gauge piercings myself, but it's interesting to see them on a doll and I think they'll look better on him with the hairstyle I want to give him.

Over his outfit, Billy wears this weird pouch-bandolier thing for carrying school supplies. I don't like the piece because it's a strange item, and most of the time, it falls off his shoulder and does this.

Not functional.

The piece is translucent black, and has a pin-and-hole closure at one end of the loop.

Billy's hoodie is a really attractive piece, and probably my favorite part of the factory doll. It fades from black to turquoise through a spectrum of blues and has a stripe pattern horizontally across it. 

It has simulated drawstrings!

The ombre section of the hoodie varies across multiple copies, and on this one, it's in the rear shoulders.

The hood isn't really large enough to pull up over Billy's head. It's mostly ornamental, which disappoints me a little since the girl dolls' hoods in MH and EAH are all designed to be wearable. I think a hood should be functional for boy dolls too.

On many female dolls, hoods have holes in the back to tuck their hair through so it doesn't get in the way and push the hood away, but Billy's hair isn't long enough to call for that. Here, the hood is open at the back in order to let the clothing slide down or up off his body. Because the piece opens at the back, his whole body has to go through the hood so the hood ends up behind him.

Billy's body bizarrely sticking through the opening of the hood. 
This is part of the undressing!

Billy has a silver necklace, of a shape I'm not sure the significance of.

It's a simple clip-on piece like any other MH necklace.

Billy has a piece on each wrist, both silver like the necklace.

On his right, he has a wound-up rope bracelet.

On his right, he has a digital wristwatch, displaying the time 10:58.

So yeah, I've published this post at the same time just for fun!

Billy's pants are mid-length patterned jeans with white and blue illusionistic squares. These seem to be derived from the famous smoking jacket in the movie, but checked grids are also the visual indicator for transparency (lack of background) in computer graphics programs! I wonder if there's any deliberate connection there?

The male MH cast feels like it wears an improbable amount of short pants, likely as a budget move to save on fabric or, in Gil's case, to accommodate his leg fins. The shorts proliferation is mostly acceptable, but I think Billy is the most detrimental case of long pants not being given to a costume. This doesn't look good to me as an outfit at all. And yes, I understand that he has a fade effect on his legs that needs to show, but these shorts, on top of being ugly, don't look good with the outfit at large! They'd at least look a little better as fully long pants! Why couldn't he have had fading translucent arms? That was one of the more famous visuals of the film--the Invisible Man removing a glove over nothingness!

Billy wears a white belt which feels very luxury to me while incorporating a version of a checked grid through pyramid studs.

Billy's shoes also feel like luxury items, being white loafers with some black contrast accents that are asymmetrical. It's an odd touch for him to be dressed with such fancy-feeling pieces, and that's part of why my intended fashion direction for him is to be more artsy. 

Billy comes with a folder, just like the rest of the NS dolls. His is translucent black with a scuffed checkerboard pattern.

Inside the folder, it's very similar to my NS Twyla's, but the Skullette is more masculine due to the lack of a bow.

A male Skullette is kind of a linguistic paradox, but 
we accept all gender varieties at Teatime Tangents and
Toys!

Billy's body detail is color-based, as his legs have a fading-to-translucent effect like what debuted with Spectra Vondergeist's dolls.

Here, though, instead of fading to clear, which was Spectra's thing and was shown in the prototype stock photo, Billy's legs face to a bright translucent greenish turquoise, which...doesn't look good. The color feels a bit out of step with the rest of his palette due to how green it feels, and I think fading to clear like the prototype image would have communicated invisibility so much better. While Billy is annoyed by being mistaken as a ghost and that was likely a concern of the design team, I personally don't think it would skew him too much into being misread that way, since Spectra only had the effect to convey she could be invisible, too. It's a cross-monster superpower! Maul Monsteristas Billy instead features a translucent indigo body, which still doesn't feel as invisible as clear, but matches his colors better and feels more in line with the visual than the turquoise ever did.

Like any spray gradient effect on a MH doll, this paint is [unreasonably] fragile and vulnerable to fairly minor abrasion, so the white spray on the lower legs to blend them into the upper legs can be found chipped off on various used copies of the doll. My Billy's legs have only tiny nicks.

One flaw near the knee hinge.

Here's a body comparison with a G1 girl and a G3 boy.

The G3 boy is slightly shorter (!) and broader and thicker all over, with defined muscles.

The G1 male MH body is about as stylistically spooky-slender for young men as the female bodies are for young women, but I don't find the execution on the male body to look as elegant. While both body types are blatantly unrealistic, it's actually the boys that strike me as feeling more unhealthy, though maybe that's due to it being much less common for dudes to be stylized so skinny. For sure, it's an anomaly for a brand's teen-boy doll body not to have defined muscles, and you can see G3 shifted to that standard (as did G2 between them). I don't mind the dudes not being ripped, and in some ways, that's more neutral, realistic, or positive, but it's kind of an eye-opener to realize just how much of an outlier these male bodies are in fashion doll brands. Maybe I should feel more or less alarmed since media has trained me to be less shocked by ultraskinny female representations. But even taken just as spooky fantasy sculpting, the male body doesn't work as well. The side profile of the boy body strikes me as pretty awkward, with the chest sticking out in an odd way. 

They're very strange bodies. Male Monster High dolls had little body detail variance, even considering how the ghouls outnumbered them. Despite the comparatively smaller male cast, I feel like more sculpted body detail should have appeared among them, and we've still yet to see any male characters who received all-over unique sculpted body pieces. The few male dolls with unique body sculpting either had divergent proportions (Manny, whose new mega-jock body was all in the proportions, not detail--such that it was reused for Hexiciah, and Finnegan, who had a merman tail and unique torso proportions) or they had partial unique sculpts, with some of the pieces being the parts used on the standard male body (Gil and Neighthan were the most sculpt-detailed takeoffs on the standard male body, but neither had entirely unique sculpts). Otherwise, the sculpting has been limited to the limbs, like Clawd's clawed paws, and later, his fur in G3. 

The male body articulation has some advantages and disadvantages next to the girls. The arms don't fold up to be parallel to the collarbone, which is frustrating, and they can't come as close to each other, either. The G3 boy body has improvements in this area, since the arms fold up all the way. On the other hand, the boys in all three generations have rotating ankle hinges so their flat feet can fold down to let them come out of pants and shoes more easily, and the ankles give them a few more standing pose capabilities. The first G1 boy bodies bizarrely lacked articulated wrists, leaving them with one-piece forearms and less versatile posing, but this was a stupid design decision Mattel corrected very early in the game. While some boy dolls only had two releases, Mattel ensured that none of the early G1 mansters were left behind. Each of the earliest boy characters got at least one doll with the improved design, even if (poor Holt) it was their last release.

Largely, the G1 boys pose well. 

So I needed to figure out a better look for Billy based on the film. 

For a new hairdo, I thought of cutting the sides and back off to leave spiky hair on top to loosely evoke Jack Griffin's disguise where he uses fake hair and a fake nose sticking out of his bandages to look... less sketchy?

Not effective, but good effort.

Here's the haircut I got (hair still wet). The hair isn't terribly thickly-rooted, but it works fine.

Re-assembled, I already prefer Billy just because of the new hairstyle!

Billy needed another outfit, so I figured I'd go straight to the source and steal from his dad!

Mego has made figures of the Invisible Man, including a more generic interpretation.

This figure is neat, but he's based on the concept, not the film.

But they've also done a licensed version wearing the film's black-and-white checked smoking jacket. I thought that would look great on Billy as some kind of edgy-slacker fashion statement. I found a listing for just the jacket on eBay and snapped it up. This arrived to me before I got Billy, but I wasn't surprised by that. I'd ordered the jacket before the doll to make sure I had it regardless of when I eventually got Billy. Offerings for him would continue to exist, but only one for the jacket had showed, so I wanted that piece locked into my project stock. I found a Billy to purchase a few days later, so it wasn't too distant!

The jacket includes the coat and a separate belt to tie it closed--the coat has no closures of its own. The pockets on the jacket are not open and functional; they're just patches of fabric sewn on.

Despite being sewn for shorter and smaller frames, male Mego clothes fit G3 MH boys pretty cleanly due to their close torso shapes. I knew the jacket would be looser on the G1 body, but for a piece of clothing that's meant to be more loose and comfy, I didn't think there'd be a problem at all. I was interested to see how the proportions would reframe the piece on its own, since it'd be shorter on Billy and feel less like a coat, making the piece feel like a reimagining of the costume even though technically, from a certain mindset, the piece is just literally exactly what his dad wore.

Just to get a slightly better idea of how the idea would pan out (remember, this was before I received Billy himself), I tried the jacket out on G3 Deuce. And I got very excited for Billy because I think this looks incredible.

Unironically the future of men's fashion.

The coat hangs longer on the torso than I expected, and I love it! The pairing of the (on MH) half-length sleeves and long hem, plus the jacket not having a dress shirt underneath, give it a tunic-like effect that looks super cool to me but in a very artsy way. While I knew the fit would change on Billy, this look told me the instinct was good. The coat could totally match Billy's alternative vibe, and a looser look could be its own asset for the tone of a more relaxed and more indie-flavored alternative hipster. 

I also ordered long pants for Billy--signature Heath's simulated jeans.

And I grabbed the checked Barbie Extra Minis sunglasses I had to go with.

Here's the new look!

I think this comes together pretty darn well! This is what I'd have expected Billy to be if he was released earlier while MH was more direct with the Universal references. The jacket looks different on Billy's body, but it doesn't feel at all ill-fitted, and this look is compelling and feels like a more timeless encapsulation of his alternative vibe while playing better into the luxury aspect of his wardrobe.

And one last thing.

It wasn't reasonable to get Maul Monsteristas Billy with the rarity he had and the ridiculous aftermarket offerings, but who was to say I couldn't enjoy a little of his unique translucency? Like, say, getting his right forearm from a listing online to swap in on the signature body?

MM Billy's right forearm.

This arm's joint was stuck in place, so I had to heat it up and trim off a little of the hinge ring to get it moving. It's still stiff, but it does bend now. I just need to be extra careful and roll up the sleeves sometimes to check which way the joint goes before bending the arm. 

And I like the effect it has!

I hadn't thought this doll was very complex and I worried maybe I'd missed something, but I can't deny how photogenic he is! The more great pictures I get, the better I know the doll is!

So there's the first RESTYLE ICON: Invisi Billy done closer to his famous dad, and a much more striking, appealing, and harmonious design as a result! I think the character feels a lot more interesting and visually impressive with the glasses, coat, and asymmetrical arm fading, and I'm satisfied with my decision to get NS Billy and add his MM arm to get the best of both dolls. I can't do anything about the ugly leg translucency color, but it's not too bad and I don't totally disbelieve that Billy could have multiple degrees or colors of invisibility. I'm not going to be entirely finished with invisibles, but my next project with this monster type will be an original character. Stick around for that and more RESTYLE ICONS projects in the future!

[UPDATE: This is not Billy's final form! I decided to revisit him a couple of months later to address a few issues and bring him even further into a worthy vision in this post here. Please take a look to see Billy truly done justice in my eyes.]