A Third Try in the Three Rings: Monster High Gooliope Jellington by Mattel

I think my experience with this doll would best be compared to Avea Trotter--a doll whose concept and novelty I couldn't stay away from, but whose actual execution didn't click. With Avea, I squashed my issues after working with her as a first-time member of my collection this year. With this doll...it's my third time owning her.

This is Gooliope Jellington, a pink circus goo girl who's also a giant. 

Official artwork by Mattel.

Her monster concept is a direct combination of The Blob (previously explored outside of the mainline with the Create-a-Monster Blob--my review here) and of the well-known sci-fi B-movie Attack of the 50-Foot Woman. 

Here's an old photo of my first Gooliope playing the latter role in a LEGO street.

Gooliope headlined the wonderful vintage-circus Freak du Chic novelty doll line as its debuting main character, and despite her not actually being my favorite doll from that line (that'd be Toralei, followed by Frankie), Gooliope was definitely an indispensable entry in the greater brand purely for the novelty of being a giant character represented by a giant 17-inch doll. Her new body size also allowed Mattel to put in a higher level of articulation which they'd shortly mimic closely for their premiere Made to Move Barbie bodies, making her landmark role in Mattel's doll engineering another reason to add her to the collection beyond the aesthetics.

However, despite owning two copies of Gooliope in the old collection (one of which broke and was replaced by the second), I was never fully satisfied with her execution. Her factory hair was notably listless, failing to match her bouncy-curled artwork, and her hair texture was dry and fluffy, making it ill-suited for restyling or brushing due to its distinctly unslimy look. I also found her head too large and her dress too small. I know most of the budget went into her body and yes, her outfit being small emphasizes her size and the paucity of resources to more extensively clothe a giant...but man, I wanted a bit more presence to her costume. It felt like they only capitalized on a huge doll's potential for higher detail in a couple of places.

Well, we're going to see how a third attempt works out now that I have customization tools that have made me happy with many dolls and characters that previously missed for me. Fortunately, I recently got back to checking Gooliope listings on eBay and after ages, finally found another listing that was complete and came with the designated 17-inch doll stand she was released with--that was something I couldn't forgo. The fact that Goo was mostly untouched as well was a benefit, giving me a good starting point to review the way she was made and then jump off toward working to make her more of what I wanted. 

Even though my Gooliope was opened and I normally don't care too strongly for packaging, it'd be a travesty not to discuss the way this doll was originally boxed, because it was genius. Gooliope was essentially crammed into a box that was as close to the dimensions of the 11-inch doll boxes as she could fit into, and bent in an awkward way to emphasize that yes, this character is a giant and she is part of the mainline! 

Photo of Gooliope's box. The box was really not much taller than the 11-inch dolls', but was a fair bit deeper.

I think if they had had her upright in a skinny tall box, they might have gotten people assuming she was a novelty large version of a doll, rather than being a doll who just happens to be large in a novel way. Cramming her down let the designers emphasize that Gooliope's doll is part of the standard collection and is actually huge in the perfect manner. 

In addition to that, her box window also had circular glass-impact marks sculpted in, with her hands held in position behind them as if Gooliope was banging on the box to break out because she was confined in an overly small space! I can't recall another time Mattel ever played upon the fourth wall this way and had the doll interact with the box, but it's super charming and clever and this is honestly one of the dolls I'd be easiest to convince to keep boxed up because the presentation is so good. 

Gooliope's second (and so far, final) doll which released in G2 of the brand repeated this scrunched-up trick conveying her size, but there was also another release of the same doll which was packaged upright in a skinnier box, and that's the one I encountered in stores at that time.

Gooliope's story is that she's experiment 816, batch 8708 (the numbers translate to BIG BLOB) of a scientist's work, and the scientist themselves realized after her successful creation that what Gooliope really needed was a suited parent, not a lab expert. As such, they left their young giant goo girl by the Freak du Chic circus with a note, expecting rightly that an eclectic carnival of unusual monsters would be a good family for her. Now colorfully named by her circus family, Gooliope helps to run the show, serving as an acrobat/contortionist. She struggles with her size in the outside world but hates discrimination against anybody deemed "different". As a pink creation of science, Gooliope more closely matches the 1988 film depiction of the Blob, which was a mutated pink government experiment. The original 1958 movie Blob was a red space alien.

Gooliope's creator is never identified by name or gender, though they signed the note "R.S." I don't think we're ever likely to get an in-universe reveal of what that stands for, but I'm pretty sure in the real world that it's a covert signature from Monster High creative and character designer Rebecca Shipman. Just from her look, I have multiple reasons to believe Gooliope was a Shipman character design, and the mystery initials seal it for me. Robecca Steam, a character named after Shipman, would be an in-universe match for the initials, but it would make no sense whatsoever for a teenage Victorian steampunk robot to have been Gooliope's creator. I think it's just a way for Shipman to have put her signature on her work.

Here's my Gooliope unpacked.

If you've gotten familiar with my desk backdrop, you might already
see how much larger she is against it!

My meeting with Goo 3 didn't start off so hot, since her stand, that essential stand, really doesn't work. For whatever reason, the pole isn't properly clicking into the base, so it easily rocks out of the base and makes Gooliope fall over when her weight shifts too much--which is likely and often due to how top-heavy she is. I'm getting nasty Shadow High reminders. I had to superglue the pole into the top, and add more on the underside, and fill in the gap with some hot glue too, since I want to be able to think pleasantly of this stand and make use of it. Such a shame, since the two copies of this stand I owned previously clicked together like a charm.

The stand itself is essentially just an upscaled copy of the 11-inch classic MH stand, though I think the base is proportionally larger and wider on the 17-inch stand. It's a welcome tweak to make sure Goo is even more stable with it. 

When the darn thing stays assembled, at least.

While TT&T MH body model Maudie is usually the ghoul I would use for comparisons, I thought it would only be proper for Oozie to stand in this time, blob-to-blob. This is the first time I've had both blob dolls at once, and since they're the same monster type, comparing the execution is important. And maybe Maudie was still hesitant after she messed things up meeting another unusual ghoul with Avea.

The 17-inch "Frightfully Tall" scale is obviously less than twice as tall as the 11-inch dolls, but dang, Gooliope still looks massive. While Gooliope has unique body sculpting and all of the 17-inchers have more joints, the shaping and proportions of the Frightfully Tall bodies are still pretty much exactly the same as the 11-inch scale. 

Gooliope remains the only character portrayed solely by this body size. Other Frightfully Tall dolls were upscales of signature Frankie, Clawdeen, Draculaura, and Elissabat which didn't totally hit the mark in terms of likeness for me. Credible but blurry photographs also emerged in 2016 of an apparent 11-inch Gooliope prototype with a purse, and I'm very glad that never entered production if it was real. It would have been a complete mistake to portray a character whose life is so affected by the physical otherness of her size in a more "normal" alternate format. This is Gooliope, and loving her this way is what MH is about. Making a small version would have come across as erasure and defeated the whole point of her signature doll.

Gooliope's diary indicates that every piece of her costume was a 16th birthday present from her circus family.

Starting on top, the first piece of Gooliope is her amazing headband. It's made to look like a toothy monstrous calliope steam organ, the instrument for which she's named, and the source of classic carnival music, especially the creepy kind. I love the design turning the organ into a monster, and the piece fits well on her head. It's the perfect topper to her silhouette, and makes for a wonderful circus tiara that plays on the wonderful theme of Gooliope's outfit being scavenged and constructed from large fairground accoutrements that are tiny on her body. 

This piece was factory-tagged to her head through holes at the ends, and cutting the tags out was tricky. Once the first one is out, you can just yank on the band to get out the second. 

While Gooliope only got one further doll, I did like that they kept the wacky headband idea as her signature, as her Shriekwrecked doll had a headband with a shark-faced steamboat on it!

What in Dayna Jones' school locker she was doing in the brand's next, pirate-themed,
specialty line, I will never understand. One heck of a weird second
doll release.

Signature Gooliope's hair is the first thing I don't love about the doll. It's a pretty blend of primary yellow and rich pink. It's mixed more at the front, while the back is mostly yellow on top and pink underneath. The front of the hair is combed to her right across her forehead and gelled into shape, and terminates in the tightest curl on her entire head of hair.

As Toy Box Philosopher Emily pointed out in her review of Gooliope, it seems similar to a red and yellow gummy worm in coloration, suiting a gooey character who loves gel-like treats. I don't like this hair much, though. Its texture feels fairly dry and coarse and the factory attempt to give her corkscrew curls really didn't work, leaving her hair a little droopy and messy and never that pleasant to the touch. The hair has defined ringlets, but it ought to have a bouncy vintage wave with a far rounder silhouette. And the letdown from this style is intensified by the fact that brushing and boiling her hair for something new is definitely the wrong way to go.

Poor old Goo 1. 

The hair she needs really is the style she was designed to have...but the factory hair didn't live up to it.

Fortunately, C.A. Cupid showed me that I have the power to create the correct style with some scissors and pipe-cleaner curlers, so that's on the list as something I think will help this doll's look a lot.

Gooliope's head feels oversized even for the typical MH proportions, and depending on the angle of her torso joint, it can feel even larger and jutted-forward. I really recommend keeping her torso tipped as far back as it will go so she doesn't look like she's vacantly craning forward with a planetoid for a noggin. I also don't adore the way it's made. In making the head in this larger scale, the vinyl seems to have been made much more solid, as it's much more thick and very heavy. It's completely inflexible and contributes the vast majority of the doll's mass, making her feel unduly top-heavy. I understand they didn't want her head so flimsy that it compressed instead of moving when you tried to pose it, but this feels a bit overly firm and heavy. 

There is a chemical process to shrink vinyl doll heads at the 11-inch scale, but Gooliope's head is too large and heavy and the head is prone to tearing while in the phase of expansion and softening that is part of the process. Unfortunately, these are the proportions she's stuck with even for daring dolly mad scientists.

Gooliope's face is pretty fancy due to the larger surface area they can print on a head this size. 

Her skin is an opaque bubblegum pink, and her head has a shimmer effect. Oozie's skin is translucent to varying degrees and is more magenta.

Gooliope's eyelashes feature looped lines above them and circusy dots above and below, and her huge eyes feature swirls in the irises and radiation-trefoil symbols as light reflections. I think the bright blue color pops really nicely against her red/pink and yellow/gold colors. Gooliope's lips are dark red. I don't know if this is variable, since I've seen some Gooliopes with lips that look dark brown, and others that look closer to candy red. Maybe it's the lighting or a variable manufacturing difference...but what I'll say is that her face looks massively better to me in photos where her lips look dark brown. She's a vintage girl, and she needs that really dark vintage lip to sell the look and click her face together. I want to paint my doll's lips darker to bring that out. In fact, the vintage dark lip element is another one of the reasons I think Gooliope was a Rebecca Shipman character design, since it reminds me of signature Robecca Steam (named for her) and the Bride of Frankenstein Skullector doll (whose certificate Shipman signed). 

Gooliope's eyes also feature a sculpted eyelid ridge, which also featured on the large-eyed 11-inch Iris Clops head sculpt, and Kiyomi Haunterly. For the latter character, I assume it was to define her face more in the face of her lack of face--most of her features were painted in white outlines, so the sculpt served to define the head of the faceless ghost more.

Gooliope's ears feature a drippy lower edge, being the first aspect of her slimy body sculpting.

Gooliope has a large pair of golden earrings that seem to be made of some kind of wheels. The ends have hearts where they go into her ears. Comparing these earrings to an 11-inch doll indicates the cart or mechanism these wheels came from would have to be pretty small, since they're about dinner-plate sized at "human" scale. 

Gooliope wears a ringmaster-styled epaulette collar, which, based on the 816 engraving, looks to be visibly constructed around an old metal collar she once wore in the laboratory. The piece just clips on at the rear, and can spin around relatively easily when handling the doll.

Gooliope's diary describes epaulettes and an 816 pendant, but the doll costume equivalent really looks like it's built around an old ID collar. The piece is a fun idea and I like the backstory built into her costume design, but the piece is a little fiddly and even if she likes it canonically, I don't personally buy that Gooliope would wear such a depersonalizing piece of jewelry. I would think being treated as a lab experiment by her creator would be a point of pain for her and that any remnant of a lab collar she wore would bring back physical and emotional discomfort she's since moved past. As an adoptee myself, I don't think Gooliope would wholly resent her creator, seeing as they recognized her needs to have a family and friends and that they gave them to her in the best way for them (finding her a suited family), but I feel like being handed her old collar in a gift assortment would really sour the mood of her birthday. It just doesn't seem like the kind of item that could be reframed like that. At the least, I think it would make way more sense to reclaim an ID collar as a bracelet than to reclaim it as a collar or necklace. There's just something so much more violent about the collar to me. It's possible the intention wasn't at all to make this look like a recycled ID collar, but that's the inescapable implication the design is giving me.

I also just think this epaulette piece comes in the place of styling options that could have improved the presence of her outfit on top, and a more properly theatrical circus look for her would have more volume to the outfit around the shoulders, like the collars of FdC Frankie and Honey gave those dolls.

Photo of the FdC Frankie I used to own. She looked
awful in-box, but the hair brushed out made her one 
of my favorites!

Gooliope's dress is pretty simple despite her size. It has a sweetheart bodice stitched together with a thread, thin black ribbon straps, and a black-and-white attached belt over a puffed tattered skirt with a tattered vintage-striped petticoat. 

11-inch MGA clothes hugely outclass 17-inch MH clothes.

This striped fabric featured on every Freak du Chic doll in some variety. Gooliope, Honey, Toralei, Clawdeen, and Twyla had black-and-white fabric just like this, while Frankie had blue fabric, Rochelle had pink, and Jinafire had red. The stripes and texture were the same regardless. 

Gooliope's dress patterns are meant to indicate her costume is sewn from circus tent fabric, which is conveyed well with the colors and flourishes of banners and bunting, and I appreciate the further use of the radiation symbol, but the dress just being a print makes it feel lacking in dimension and polish. It's also super casual and short on Gooliope's body. I can understand that being a cost-effective measure and it does work under the lens of "clothing a giant ain't easy", but not having a dramatic, big costume on the huge ghoul who's lived and breathed the circus all her life misses the point for me.

Monster High is already sort of famous for its insanely elaborate doll shoes, but Gooliope's may be some of the best among them. Her heels are pink sandals with skeleton carousel horses at the back, painted with an aging effect, to boot!

Of all of the pieces Gooliope wears, the heels are the most obvious as not being full-sized objects. These can't be argued as real carousel horses being repurposed. They're just decoration that acknowledges Gooliope is large without being real large objects genuinely dwarfed by her. 

I mentioned in my Skullector Frankenstein review that these shoes, with their figurine-style heels, struck me as similar to the Bride of Frankenstein's shoes, which had jars with ballerinas inside as the heels. 

Shot of the Bride's ballerina-jar heels.

Since the Frankenstein set's certificate was signed by Rebecca Shipman and these shoes struck me as so similar to Gooliope's, I think that's another point toward Gooliope being designed by Shipman.

Gooliope has no purse or pet, and either one or the other probably ought to have been included. For a pet, she could have an animal that would be too large to be pet-sized at human scale! Gooliope's second doll gave her a recolor of Vandala Doubloons' anchor purse, shrewdly recognizing it matched her repurposed-object theme and the pirate context.

Here's Gooliope's body.

The 17-inch body introduces some new points of articulation. As this doll is a little aged, her joints are now a little creaky and squeaky. Following from her ears, Gooliope's body is sculpted all over with dripping slime, far more than Oozie's body, which just had goo drips on the underside of her forearms. It's a fair trade, since Gooliope doesn't have the translucency or glitter factor Oozie does. Increased sculpted detail for her works out. The body is mostly made of sturdy but lightweight hollow plastic, and the double-joint junctions of her elbows and kneecaps are vinyl that's slightly darker. The body is nice, but man, her head throws it off balance.

First within the raised articulation is something seen on a few smaller MH dolls previously- a torso joint. This allows the breasts-and-up portion of Gooliope's torso to tilt side to side, forward and back, and to spin in a full circle. Again, I think the doll's proportions look best when her torso is tipped all the way back because her head is so large and her neck is sculpted with a prominent angle. Counteracting the forward slant of her neck by tipping the chest back keeps her head from looking even larger.

The torso tipped sideways.

The torso twisted and tipped to the side.

The torso tipped forward, creating a slouch
and Planet Head Syndrome.

The torso tipped backward--the ideal posture.

Next is double joints in her knees and elbows. It's a style seen on a lot of high-end dolls and action figures, where a small hub connects the upper and lower parts of the limb and allows each section to bend within it. These allow her limbs to fold much more than the 90-degree bend a single joint typically allows, so Gooliope can make more expressive and realistic poses. 

The arm bent to 90 degrees-the elbow range of
the 11-inch dolls.

The arm bent all the way.

The knees make for a good full kneel, but Gooliope's legs are way too long to allow for any kind of graceful one-legged kneel.

You can get some good work out of these joints. They also, fittingly, allow for some bizarre contortions the 11-inch dolls couldn't quite do.

I already had a photo of my first Gooliope to 
demonstrate, so here it is! 

Because the mid-limb joints cannot rotate, Gooliope's arms and legs are slightly re-engineered so the upper limb is on a simple rotation peg to let the whole limb rotate as a pretty good substitution for the rotation of the forelimb on the smaller dolls. In the arms, the whole limb can separate from the shoulder joint at the rotation point... though I have no idea why. 

I hardly think this is necessary since the hands are easy enough to remove and for sleeved Frightfully Tall dolls, the arms need to be attached for putting the costume on. Gooliope's hands pop out like a normal MH doll's, and her legs cannot be taken apart, which is also the same as normal.

So how do we make Gooliope really click for me?

The first instinct for fixing the outfit was a trick I've employed twice before with my Create-a-Monster Witch and my Rochelle Goyle restyle-- double-skirting! Taking a second copy of a doll dress and sliding it up under the first layer can help to lengthen and/or volumize an outfit whose coverage seems skimpy while avoiding all issues of it not matching, since it's just more of the outfit's top layer. I'd actually considered trying this with my second Gooliope, since I had a second dress from the first, but back then, I missed the obvious fact that the second dress could slide under the first one intact, and made the mistake of cutting the second dress and unrolling it with the mistaken intention of affixing it underneath afterward. 

This time, I bought an intact second dress and merely cut the straps off since they won't be needed and it marked the dress as the bottom layer during early work.

The addition of the second skirt did help quite a bit in upgrading the presence of her outfit and making her look more complete, so I knew I was on the right track. 

It's longer and puffier, and a big ghoul should have a BIG outfit!

I knew I still wanted to build on it with some loose accents to make it look more textured and eclectic because 94% percent of the lifting in the "circus-tent dress" concept is done by a flat print, and that isn't enough for me. Both skirts got some "ropes" of mixed red-and-white twine I had available. I glued each piece to the skirt portions at each end so her skirt had more dimension and detail. It's a very small change, but I think it makes a big difference. 

I also decided to commit to replacing the collar. Since I was four or five at the most, I've had had a Christmas-tree angel with a gold dress that had a big flared vertical ruffle collar. The angel was broken down and I hadn't used her in forever, so I decided to tear the dress off and steal the collar. I thought gluing that onto the bodice would complete the proper silhouette for the outfit and replace the uncomfortable collar she had before. I also thought widening the silhouette around her head would help to downplay its size, something the epaulettes did absolutely nothing to help. 

Here's the finished modified pieces!

Are you excited yet? I was!

The collar is glued at the front of the bodice, and the two halves are glued together at the rear, but just at the top. This means the collar can part far enough at the rear to slide over Gooliope's body. 

I'm really glad I figured out that judicious gluing allowed the dress to go on without me having to devise a closure for the collar. 

However, the addition of the ruffle collar does justify the strange removable arms--I actually found removing them very convenient for making sure the dress slid up all the way because the shoulders poked through into place much easier with no arms attached! So I guess...thank you, Mattel? That feature was unnecessary until I decided to do this! Go figure.

And I decided the collar will make a bracelet. I think it's a stronger message that the depersonalizing piece is being reclaimed if it's also being fully repurposed as something more visually casual and more like jewelry. Treating it as a bracelet also connotes that she outgrew the piece, as if it neither fits her neck nor her current identity anymore. To make the collar a bracelet, I cut off the epaulettes and then folded and glued the ring together to form a closed loop and tighten it so it would work as a bracelet.

Meanwhile, I painted Gooliope's lips to make them firmly dark dark red/brown, and I tried to get her hair in curlers. 

I just don't think this is the hair fiber you want to use for curly dolls, since her hair didn't come out so tight, but I still find it an improvement. Here's what she had right out of the curlers.

To get back the hair part across her forehead, I didn't use gel-- I just tied that lock to a lock behind it, and voila! Perfectly placed.

I trimmed her hair a bit more and fully dressed her. Her ear holes needed to be reopened for some reason. But the result....

There we go!!! 

For what I feel were fairly simple changes, the impact is massive. The huge collar balances her head and gives her costume the oomph she deserves as the headline character of Freak du Chic. The texture and metallic color make her outfit feel much more deluxe, which it absolutely should for a character with a size and aesthetic so ripe for detail. Her design is essentially just "Princess of the Circus" anyway, and this makeover brings that so much further! It's kind of crazy to me that my specific circumstances gave me the ideal fabric elements to upgrade Gooliope through an old Christmas decoration I held onto for long enough to get this idea!! The double skirts and the ropes glued on also help the outfit feel suitably theatrical and bump up the circus-tent concept more, and the collar becoming a bracelet fits the costume while feeling more proud and comfortable regarding its use and history with Gooliope. With all of these changes, Gooliope feels complete, premium, and absolutely vibrant, vintage, and gorgeous.

I think she was excited to casually show off her new look to Oozie.

As always, the mark of a wonderful doll is how much fun I have photographing them. Usually, I end up with about two more-produced "art" photos of a doll in my collection (usually just a cover and closer image), but Gooliope gave me several! Her new look really brought out all of the vintage-circus potential she was lacking with her original hair and outfit and I got quite inspired. She's grandiose and gorgeous now, and so fun to play with.

This may be a record, and if not, certainly a top contender for one of the most rewarding photo sessions. It's so nice to be so drawn to the visuals of this doll now!

I'm glad I'm finally proud to display a Gooliope Jellington. She was a wonderful concept and an eye-catching doll, but now I think I've drawn out her vibe and personality more so she stands on her merits as a character as well as a novelty doll. And for a character who lives with a sense of physical otherness, it's only correct that I now love her for being her, and not just for being tall. I don't think the factory design quite made her feel complete and compelling as Gooliope, and that's a shame. But I had a blast exploring her potential after her upgrade, and was well rewarded by the gorgeous pictures she gave me. She was objectively a must-have Monster High doll at the start...but now she's personally a treasure to me as well.