My Luckiest Shot: Monster High C.A. Cupid by Mattel

Every collector in a fandom pertaining to collectible items will eventually determine their “grail”--their most desired (and usually hard to come by) item released by the brand.

 

The grail is foremost an item of strongest appeal, but what keeps it a grail rather than just a really nice offering is its difficult availability--if you could get it easily, it wouldn’t be a holy grail (or a pipe dream or white whale, if you prefer). As such, a grail item is pretty much always something shared--nobody is going to be the only person with that grail.

For me, with Monster High, I pretty quickly discovered my grail doll: Chariclo Arganthone Cupid, daughter of Eros. C.A. for short, but people just call her Cupid.

Prototype stock photo by Mattel. 

It was far from unusual for her to be my grail. She's many many fans'.

What I really loved about C.A. Cupid’s design was how bold and creepy and goth it looked--not goth in the sense of an alternative person participating in the goth subculture a la Draculaura (though in truth, Cupid really was essentially just in costume) but goth in the sense of a character from a goth fantasy story like a Tim Burton film. I totally buy that Cupid is what Valentine cherubim would look like in a world of monsters, and I’ve always found her design really appealing in its limited palette, popping colors, and unnerving antique touches.

Cupid is also quite a curiosity in the Monster High brand for multiple reasons. She’s a “first” for a couple of production reasons I’ll discuss. She was also quite atypically released twice in two separate formats!

Cupid's first release in the Sweet 1600 collection tying into the special
Why Do Ghouls Fall in Love?

Cupid's standalone signature release. 

(The only cited differences with the second doll are that her hair is looser and a bit more on-model, her wings have more brown in them, and her eyes are wider. I think I see that her bangs are larger/longer as well. These are the type of subtle differences you'd see in copies of one doll manufactured at two sites, so I'm assuming that's what happened--Cupid was produced somewhere else for her second edition.)

Cupid was also the first link between Monster High and the sister Mattel franchise that launched a few years into its run--Ever After High, a school of fairy tale characters’ children grappling with the conflict of tradition and their own desires. Cupid is the only character to have lived in both worlds and been released in both brands, being a “transfer student” who left MH after one doll and migrated with a setting-appropriate makeover to EAH. 

Mattel stock photo of signature Ever After High Cupid.

In EAH, she became a staple character with multiple dolls despite being no more of a fairy tale character than a monster. In fact, as Eros’ adopted daughter, nobody really knows what kind of being Cupid qualifies as by birth. MH’s use of mythical monsters kinda canceled out the potential for a Mythic High setting, but since she's not confirmed to be born to that sphere, Cupid still might not have fit there. She’s kind of a mystery.

For how unusual and significant MH Cupid was as a doll, I'd probably consider her one of the "essential texts" of the brand that every collector ought to own. Unfortunately, any collector owning her isn't the most realistic thing to ask for. Listings on eBay knew her high resale value but weren’t always complete, and I resigned myself to admiring her from afar even after coming back to MH as an adult. That was until I looked through the outgoing doll collection in my boss’s storage room and saw a white heart-link shoe sticking out of a white wrapping. I think I audibly gasped, or my heart at least skipped a beat (haha, but seriously). It was a very physical reaction that confirmed undeniably how much this doll still appealed to me, and she looked to be in acceptable condition when unwrapped. 

The shoe that stopped my heart.

I'd told myself I wasn't as invested in getting Cupid anymore, but my delighted shock, as if I was in the presence of a legend, served as quite a reality check on how much I still wanted this doll in truth. And in terms of completeness, she just needed her ring and original stand color and those were solvable. A couple of months later, when we had the time to go through those collected dolls in the storage room, I told my boss I wanted to be able to buy the Cupid, so we priced it and set it aside for me when I felt capable of making the purchase.

It's finally now!!!

The Cupid I acquired was not in perfect condition, so this isn't the holiest of grail acquisitions at the end of the day. But I felt like I could complete her and work with her to bring out her best. Here's what was in the bag.

Even like this, it must be appreciated how extremely special it is to
C. A. Cupid on my desk!!!

My first order of business was giving Cupid her rightful pink doll stand, the color she was initially released with. Fortunately, I had gotten one with a doll I ordered for parts and makeover before. 

Matched!

The black stand she was packed with clearly happened to be one of the older high-quality ones, though, since its base is really solid and level. I'm definitely happy to have gotten that too!

MH Cupid dolls have more "pristineness" conditions they can fail than many other dolls, but the most impactful hard-to-find-pristine element might be the hair. When I saw that shoe, the hair was the first thing I was anxious about seeing unwrapped, even moreso than the face.

Cupid's hair in the 2D artwork is a fluffy short wavy bob....

...while in the animated special, it is composed of several tightly-rolled curls that lends the hair the appearance of a rococo wig:

Small doll heads like MH's aren't so amenable to precise styling, particularly not when they're mass-produced in factories, so the Cupid doll design had long wavy hair that was rolled up and gelled tight to create a bob shape with a single rolled tube curl for the lower edge, essentially splitting the difference between the drawn and CGI models. You can see what her dolls looked like in the earlier photos. While I enjoyed the factory look a lot, the issue was that it was one of those hairstyles that required gel for upkeep, and a doll as old as Cupid is going to be hard to find still looking that way...and mine was outright de-gelled. 

This look is honestly closer to her EAH hair. Not so sassy or tight.

The other unusual things about Cupid's MH doll are that her bangs, which are rounded across the forehead in her media appearances, tended to fall asymmetrically, and that she had a pretty darn improbable twist crossing her head and forming a heart-shaped loop on top. My doll is a far cry from her media look.

Sideswept bangs and a head topped by Just A Circle.

For a moment, I was baffled by Cupid's twist, since it appeared to be coming from nowhere, as if the hair had been braided and rooted into a loop with no source, but I eventually poked around more and unburied the ends. The twist was all in place as it had been manufactured but got covered up by the rest of her hair.

The twist is tied to another section of hair to keep the whole thing in place.

To be fair to my Cupid, though, it's not like the heart shaping in the twist ever really worked out that great on new Cupids. This hairstyle is just far too small-scale for the visual to have been great. I know it's absolute heresy to suggest this and I'd never do it on a doll I expected to let go of in the future, but I think I need to bring out some glue to pinch this into a passable heart because that part of the visual is important to me and there's just no other method I can deal with.

It's easy to see why they replaced the hair-heart with a headband decoration on EAH Cupid. 

The first step I took toward revitalizing and improving Cupid's hair was to trim it down. I also extracted the twist and got it back to crossing over the top of her head, and pinched the loop into a heart shape and glued it. It's not an open loop, but it simply couldn't have been to work. With the cut, I tried to get the right bob shape and length, but even after all that, it was too straight and flat, so I decided to try curling for the first time. After struggling to figure out a device to hold her hair in place, I read that pipe cleaners (of course!) were a good tool, and got her ready. With her hair length and small head, I did not get thorough or precise wrapping done, but I thought it would be okay. 

Like Medusa crossed with a rose blossom.

And...I think it worked!

The curl is not really very tidy at all because of how messy the wrapping was, but the hair has the bounce and volume I wanted. A little too much, in fact, so I trimmed it a little more to make it less triangular and wide, and...

...I think this is better than Cupid as freshly manufactured! It's way closer to her 2D artwork, and the body of it isn't shaped by any gel!

And now I think a proper review can commence. 

Cupid's hair is a watermelon pink color that doesn't match most of her other pinks, and I think that works out well to give her some punch and nice balance. EAH signature Cupid would inherit the same color and similar bangs.

MH is hugely exceptional among any doll brand for the sheer breadth of its face sculpts, such that practically every one of its highly numerous doll characters has a head that was sculpted specifically for them. C.A. Cupid, however, is the first of a minority of MH characters who repurpose a prior face sculpt.

This head sculpt was used most often as the face of G1 Ghoulia Yelps, the character it was designed for and who continued to use it well after Cupid's Monster High doll.  You wouldn't really notice the reuse, though, and I think the head choice really sells the doll's striking, creepy look. Cupid's skin is one of three MH mainline characters' to be in a stark white color (the others were Spectra and Catrine, the latter of which was the only one whose body was entirely solid white), and her face is painted with makeup that contrasts brightly against it. Her eyes are a bright blue with heart-shaped light reflections, and have bands of pink and blue eyeshadow. Cupid's lips are especially striking due to their tiny puckered china-doll-style paint that forms a heart just in the middle of her mouth. Paired with her sharp face shape and eyebrows, her lip paint gives her an unemotive or harsh expression that lends her quite an air of menace and also give her an iconic retro-doll look. Her cheeks have some airbrushed pink blush, and miracle of miracles, Cupid's brows perfectly match her hair color! You cannot ever take these things for granted!

My Cupid's face screening isn't perfect. Her left eye is larger and wider than her right, but it's not an appearance-ruining distracting discrepancy to me. I believe based on the look of her face that this copy is from Cupid's unthemed standalone release with the wider eyes--her second edition.

There wasn't really a place it fit in to mention it earlier, but I did give Cupid a peroxide bath in the sunlight to treat some yellowing that had set in on her plastic. It definitely made an improvement, though more time probably would have helped even more. I don't think she looks bad at all, though.

MH Cupid's earrings are a white heart-tipped arrow and a white bow. 

The prototype stock photo showed that the arrow was at some point planned to have a pink heart tip and the bow was partially or entirely pink. I'm not sure if either the prototype or released version is the best, though. I think black accents on these earrings could help (bow arc and arrow tip painted black, perhaps) and make the earrings stand out more against her face, but I don't think that's necessary and I completely understand why it was deemed infeasible to have these pieces in multiple colors from a manufacturing perspective.

Cupid was the first mainline doll to have wings…maybe. We'll get to the "maybe" in a second.

The shape of the wings is completely awesome. It's a ribcage and spinal column curved in the shape of a heart and angel wings, and it's grotesque, anatomical, and artistic all at once. 

The wings have an aging effect with a brown paint wash to make them even bonier and more unsettling. I don't know how well this brown aging works with the pretty stark and pop-goth look of the rest of the doll (perhaps grey would have matched better), but there's simply no way to criticize such a badass set of wings. The piece is a fairly soft and flexible plastic to make them less fragile with their tails and cutouts, and the doll stand clip is able to slip between the wings and around the "spine" while gripping Cupid's waist. 

I always appreciated that EAH Cupid's more wholesome feathered signature wings still had the same silhouette (minus the spinal column) and the same color and aging effect.

While Cupid was the first MH character released with wings, she likely wasn't the only doll with wings being developed at the time, since the Create-a-Monster starter packs were released later in the same year and introduced the system of wings that plugged into the back. This doll mechanic would be adopted for Rochelle Goyle the next year with slight modifications that rendered the CAM and mainline wings incompatible with each other for some stupid reason. Indeed, all future winged MH characters except the supplemental Inner Monsters would have wings that plugged into the back in some way. The Create-a-Monster series was often used like a testing ground for more radical body details and monster concepts before those concepts released in the main line, so it's possible they didn't make Cupid's wings plug in because they were trying to see how it worked in the CAM line first. 

But there's also the interesting angle that perhaps Cupid's wings are meant to be taken as fake due to the way they clip on with a collar on the doll and her 2D artwork. Cupid isn't actually a monster, after all, and even within EAH, her wings go through multiple distinctly-different styles while attaching around her neck, suggesting that maybe all of Cupid's wings are costume pieces and nothing more. Ghoulia guessed Cupid was a bone elemental, so maybe the wings we see her with are just exceptionally good fakes. Perhaps they’re designed to physically embody her adoptive dad's legacy in the only way Cupid can manage, since she doesn’t have the genetics for wings, and they likely help to blend her further into whichever fantasy sphere of the world she's sent to.

All the same, Cupid's 3D model in the animated special Why Do Ghouls Fall in Love? does not feature the wing collar, and all of the EAH dolls' wings attached to their collars because EAH was very reluctant to sculpt new bodies or put holes in them…even though they were willing to give Way Too Wonderland Kitty a proper tail??!?!? So...suffice it to say that whether Cupid's wings are part of her anatomy or not is a bit of a mystery, but I lean toward viewing them as a costume piece. They may not have envisioned Cupid as migrating to a sweeter aesthetic in the future while making the CGI special.

MH Cupid's outfit is a one-piece dress with enough layers and details to make it feel more delicate and ornate. There are no separate layers and she wears no belt.

The dress would be considered strapless with a wide skirt if not for the presence of the sheer black fabric that folds across the front, frames the shoulders, and wraps around the back. It's a bit like a shawl and it feels very bold and chic while bringing in a subtle hint of Ancient Greece in the way the fabric sits on her frame and crosses over. It's a nice touch. The dress does have clear elastic straps, which have yellowed with age. I'm not sure they're entirely necessary given how they've visually degraded, but they do keep the dress held up on her bust.

The bodice of the dress under the black wrap is pale pink and sewn through with glittery threads. It feels a little more comfy and less chic than the rest, but not in a way that brings down the look. Under the black part of the bodice over-layer the skirt transitions from it with a black dripping design that carries from the wrap as if the top of her dress is oozing down and staining the skirt. Very goth. And very nice! The skirt itself is white that fades into pink at the lower edge and is decorated with lacy black hearts that flip back and forth between upright and inverted as they ring the skirt. The very lower edge of the skirt has some more sheer black fabric to trim it. 

The prototype stock photo of this dress had a couple of differences. There, the "shawl" straps in black crossed directly over Cupid's torso without going onto her shoulders at all, and the black trim under the skirt was notably longer.

Cupid's right arm features a long pink bracer that's meant to resemble a quiver. It's a really clever feature to further the archery motif of a Valentine cherub that fits into an edgier, tougher fashion sense. 

The one piece this Cupid didn't come with was her ring, which I was committed enough to to order separately. Rather than having a full-size (or "full-size", EAH's is still pretty tiny) bow, Cupid instead has a loaded ring she can wear on her hand. 

A loop centered under the arc can slide onto one of her fingers.

Putting it on her middle finger would center this piece, but
that would be rude, wouldn't it?

Maybe this is just jewelry, but I'd like to imagine it's a fully functional tiny weapon she uses her other hand to launch like a crossbow!

This piece could be a fun interpretation of the youth having more compact, efficient, and tiny tech than the previous generation. Cupid is characterized in both MH and EAH as being a messy shot with her love arrows, thus commenting on how adolescent love is known for being tumultuous, confusing, and inconvenient.

Cupid's body is one of several MH dolls' to fade into a separate color at the extremities, with Cupid having a pretty dramatic fade from stark white to stark black. Her forelimbs resemble dark gloves and stockings as a result, in an uncanny way since they’re not defined as fabric or a layer over her skin. Cupid's hands and the fronts of her legs are also printed with white netted lace that has heart designs on the hands to heighten the effect. 

It's really cool, but admittedly feels pretty skimped on overall. The lace printing only appears on Cupid's hands and the very front surface of her legs. The prototype photo showed a wider and different lace pattern on her legs. If the forearms and legs were encircled with white lace designs, the effect would look more complete and arresting, though I understand that making this happen from a factory production standpoint probably proved easier said than done. Also, like all MH dolls with gradient limbs (or, in G1 Lagoona's case, translucent parts on one-piece limb molds), the paint sprayed over the base color (white on black in this case) is pretty thin and very susceptible to scratching off, which feels cheap and disappointing. I even had to touch up this Cupid's legs with some white paint after she got some abrasions in the short time I've had her. A black spray onto white limbs would probably have offered a better fade with starker colors and some kind of sealant on the paint to make it less fragile would have been great, though I can understand that they wanted the shoes and ring of the doll to be on the solid color of the plastic rather than the painted color to reduce the risk of those pieces damaging the paint job when pulled on and off. 

It also baffles me that Cupid's wrist joint pegs are white when they're located entirely in the black part of her arms. 

I was quite worried that Cupid, as a consequence of being one of the early MH dolls, would have the infamous elastic-strung hips that plagued the old releases. Elastic was a bane due to its poor longevity--it loosens over time, making the doll legs floppier and less tight in their sockets, and it had the other side effect of sometimes getting stuck on clothing fabric that slipped into the joint. Mattel wisely shifted to a sturdy and tightly-closed plastic hip joint system pretty early in the brand, with divergent body sculpts (like the adult body debuting with Nefera, and Robecca's all-over unique body sculpt) being given plastic hips from the start. I believe by the end of 2012, all doll bodies in the brand were being made with plastic hip joints. However, Cupid was evidently one of the dolls that made it past the cutoff and so she has plastic hip joints! I believe this applies to both Cupid releases under MH, so it wasn't a case of good luck meaning I found a copy that got the newer joints while other copies wouldn't. She was simply lucky enough to have been released just late enough in those early days to benefit from the improved body.

Cupid's shoes (the shoes that changed everything for me!) are black platforms covered in white heart-shaped links that wrap around the ankle and include a couple of pink links mixed in on the front and sides. The heels reflect the earrings, with one heel being a bow, and the other, an arrow.

These shoes were modified later for the Feisty/Love Inner Monster, with red platforms, black links, and no heels at the back.

So that's the base Cupid! It's so incredibly special to finally have this doll, and I'm delighted I was able to bump up her look a little to make her even stronger. 

And I think you can see how she was a bit of a guiding star when designing the first custom doll idea I had, Dahlia Glazer.

And because this doll is so so very special to me, I decided to treat her to more clothes. I thought she'd do well with some other pieces I'd spotted. The first natural choice was this character's second-ever dress, from her EAH signature doll. I had a strong feeling that, despite its sweeter fantasy/mythology bent, it'd still look amazing on monster Cupid.

EAH Cupid's dress is more directly classical Greek in influence, with the bodice having straps and an overlapped wrapping robe design that feels more ancient and traditional. Her dress is rosy pinks with vintage-style gold tulle over it, and her skirt features a pastel cloudscape overlaid with hearts and arrows. I appreciate the continuity of the color palette between the Cupids, as a few of her EAH dolls, including signature, committed to the black she sported as a gothic monster and managed to make it work for a fairy-tale rendition. Here, you can see a similar black trim on the skirt, though the shaped lace here is much nicer than what the MH dress got. I think it would have been easy and understandable to write the black off as unworkable in a more sincerely sweet cherub design, and some EAH Cupid dolls do discard the color, but they made it work in her signature look to keep her monstrous past with her and that's wonderful.

I knew the dress needed to be paired with some retro sunglasses. I had ordered a Barbie Extra Mini with black round shades that had pink hearts painted on them, thinking they'd be perfect, but they're too exaggerated for the MH head size and the lenses were both too large and too far apart. I ended up using the spare Scarah shades I had, which were perfect. I'm not sure right now if the character I wanted them for will pan out, so Cupid can take them in the meantime. With the black umbrella as a final touch, I think she looks fabulous this way as a complete summer look!

!!!

The exaggerated glasses and doll lips and pale skin all give her the air of poppy, glamorous visual camp that makes her super vibrant and striking. I love this look for her.

And I just had to take a picture of summery Cupid on the grass on a sunny day. I think she looks wonderful in this setting.

For a third look for her, I tried out something built around Scaris Rochelle's Eiffel Tower dress. Pink and black and vintage white from the city of love felt like a good match for Cupid. I gave her a pair of spare Catrine arms to get rid of her "gloves" for this look and ILF Scarah tights and tried Rochelle's beret over her heart twist.

It's not mind-blowing, but it's cute. Better than some of the ILF outfit combos at least.

I then followed a couple of weird whims and tried out the Feisty/Love Inner Monster parasitic spider-leg wings and the Barbie glasses I had rejected before, and, as with my Scarah, I stumbled upon another potential Power Ghouls character. Presenting: Love Bug!

In this context, the shades being misproportioned adds to the supervillain look! It's a sci-fi flavor of camp that has its place--its place just wasn't at all with the summer look.

Alright, that's enough playing with my heart. 

C.A. Cupid is a hallmark in my collection. She's an old, rare, coveted and sought-after doll, and I now have one of my favorite MH character designs standing on my shelf. She's flawed and aged, but I improved aspects of her look beyond the way she would have arrived mint from the box, and I found a couple of other fun looks for her too. I don't know if I feel starstruck looking at her anymore--I'm comfortable and pleased to have her, and I think she is in many regards just "one of the gang" now among the others I've collected and worked with. But wow nonetheless. Even if we're pretending she was a common acquisition, she's still a striking, creepy, visually iconic and compelling doll. I'm very proud to have her.

J'adore.