Picking Bones, Part 1: Skelita's Debut, and Difficult Concerns

This post might be a bit grim. I'm bringing in a character I find very tricky to talk about, but I find it fascinating how complicated she is. She has a lot of good and bad that's worth discussing, but it gets dark on the bad side.

This post will engage with the topic of anorexia as it pertains to the optics of this doll's design. Because I found the topic to be a persistent concern in the overview of this character, there was no way for me to section it off into a single skippable block of the review. I don't encourage you to read this post if this discussion will distress you. Thank you for visiting all the same!

Since I started this blog, this was one of the characters I knew needed a feature here. I think she's essential to any Monster High collection and beautiful...but I can't help but find her iffy and potentially poorly-executed and loaded as well. At least, at her start.

Skelita Calaveras is the topic at hand for a very deep dive here. She's a Mexican Dia de Muertos skeleton doll sculpted entirely as semi-real bones. On the one hand, she comes across as a loving tribute to a culture's traditions and celebrations done by people from the community, and she's a wildly fun spooky fashion doll with a unique body sculpt that makes any edition of her a must-have in any Monster High collection. She’s one of MH’s coolest toy-design novelties displaying the brand's freaky cred and artistic caliber to a great degree and she leverages the appeal of her unique monster type and doll body in order to provide a cultural representation element and increase the visibility of her holiday and culture.

On the other hand, Skelita initially struck me as flattened by her cultural theme and her skeleton doll body can also give pause. It may be needlessly contoured and inappropriately feminized, and its necessary thinness and the tailoring challenges arising therein may be alarmingly tone-deaf and concerning in a world where fashion dolls are a common scapegoat for body-image and weight debates. There may be a case to be made that MH's first release of the character contributed to this negative perception of her depiction by not considering the body design well enough with her clothing fit, debut styling, and doll stand. We'll get to that.

At the end of the day, though, I do remain very attached to Skelita because an anatomical, if clearly unrealistic, skeleton fashion doll is just too cool not to have around, and still regret giving up the one I used to own. I want to examine bits of the history of Skelita, looking at her first and last G1 dolls, and her two collector dolls, which include her sole G2 entry and then bring her up to her new 2023 Howliday collector doll contemporary to G3. This should form a good picture of how the character's execution has evolved and how evaluations of her possible pitfalls may have been a part of her design history. 

This will be a long one. I don't know if I've spent this much time writing, revising, and pondering a post. I've tried to be as honest, thoughtful, sensitive and frank as I need to be. I had a lot to think about, and I hope to approach it with grace. 

(extended) Prelude: Discussing cultural concerns within Monster High at length

Skelita debuted in the special and doll line Scaris: City of Frights, which took the main cast to Scaris to meet fashion designers. I love her concept as a holiday character and I embrace all of her Day of the Dead theming because it's a fun cultural spin to make the skeleton monster type more interesting and meaningful than just a generic bony spook, and it serves as a vehicle to include a Mexican character in the cast. Beyond that, however, Skelita's iconography has included imagery like lucha libre masks and a piñata, and I admit my initial reaction was not positive. I wondered if those were shallow or tourist-y images, and if it was weird for all of her iconography to be iconically Mexican. Her Dia de Muertos stuff feels rich and meaningful in such a way that it sparks interest and can teach non-Mexican audiences about the holiday, and I don't begrudge Skelita at all for always being done up in celebration year-round. My room always has some Halloween in it! Her extravagance also suits a character rooted in a festival. But my first reaction to the other visual symbols they gave her, back in the first phase of my hobby, was that they felt stereotypical because there was no indication those icons were related to the interests of Skelita as her own person rather than just being further associations with the culture she's depicting.

Now come the big disclaimers! 

I am not Mexican, and today, I have a more nuanced reaction to representation. If I see it's in the hands of the people represented, I'll tend to defer to the people involved unless it feels really ugly in such a way that it earns critique even when the creatives are from the group. Skelita's certainly not the latter, and I think I would be talking over Mexican voices here if I took the stance she was doing a bad thing. I think I formerly gave less credit to the voices behind Skelita than I should have. Skelita was at least initially designed by a Mexican-American designer, Natalie Villegas, and an outsider like me would be wrong to claim that Mexican creatives are doing something wrong for celebrating a lot of Mexican stuff on their Mexican character. I haven't seen actual Mexican people raise any concerns about Skelita as a depiction of them, either, so I can fully rest that thought here. She seems to be all right, but finding her overdone in my unqualified eye was an opinion that's always been entangled with my evolving assessment of Skelita and I felt like it bore mentioning. Today, I can put that concern away.

Even though Skelita hasn't appeared to be a culturally problematic character, I do feel like the circumstances and executions of some foreign G1 characters can bear questioning and I want to shift to that because it's been on my mind for ages and I don't know where else to include the discussion. Do feel free to skip past this section if you like! 

Multiple G1 non-American characters in Monster High may approach caricature, and those portrayals don't appear to be in the hands of creatives from the corresponding background. G1 Monster High on the whole has visually defined multiple foreign characters by the most distinctly foreign iconography of their countries, and I have to question how productive it is. There are foreign MH characters who feel more gracefully depicted, with culture being prominent or relevant to them without it being their only trait, or else they're visibly foreign without being treated as a poster child of their country.

But then some characters feel worth a raised brow.

Monster Exchange's Lorna McNessie, who I was admittedly pretty fond of as a doll, nonetheless strikes me as a bit laughable by being near the most Scottish portrayal you could give to a Scottish character.

Official artwork of Lorna.

She has the most blatantly Scottish name a foreigner could devise for a Loch Ness monster ghoul, her hair is red and curly,  her outfit is very traditionally-influenced with a tam and plaid skirt, she has Celtic knots all over down to the scales on her body, her diary is written in Scottish dialect, and her favorite food is haggis! The only thing they don't do is associate her with the bagpipes! What, was that too far for them? In some ways, this makes sense. Lorna was a one-off character from a line themed on cultural crossover, so exaggeration was kind of in the mission statement, and they were trying to depict the age of the Loch Ness legend and the long history of the country. It still feels odd. Unlike Cleo, Lorna is not a monster who's lived for centuries, so the extent of the historical and foreign iconography can produce a character who feels more like a joke or stereotype than something real or respectful. I do find her look very appealing, but it is a bit ridiculous. Natalie Villegas has been credited with designing Lorna too, so in Lorna's case, her character designer shared no background with her.

Then there's Isi Dawndancer, a Native American deer-spirit girl, also from Monster Exchange.

She caused controversy and even prompted an apology from a Mattel executive by trying to represent multiple tribes the deer-woman legend belonged to and thus unintentionally homogenizing the Native American diaspora which is actually composed of multiple specific cultures. Isi was only "Native American" in the generic sense, but real Native people belong to distinct tribes and cultures and don't want those erased and blended together by outsiders and their media. The backlash to Isi might even be a factor explaining why, in G3, dreamcatcher iconography has been visibly excised from Twyla's character designs. Mattel might be trying to tread more carefully now to avoid mishandling Native imagery and themes, and I don't know if Isi stands a chance of being resurrected--they might have better success by trying again with a new Native character overseen by a Native artist who can make them truly authentic. This is apparently a Villegas design too, which would place Isi's look outside of the hands of a Native designer.

I guess I don't really love the approach of Monster Exchange itself. I feel weird about cultural diversity being the primary selling point of a character because that can flatten them, and it's possible to integrate culture and tradition in characters in ways that are more graceful and dimensional than this. Characters can introduce cultural variety and be diverse and even quite influenced by their culture without that being the only thing they're known or marketed for. 

Also, please don't take this as a condemnation of Natalie Villegas. Skelita is in her wheelhouse and she also did work to represent less commonly-depicted cultures of the Latin sphere with the other Latin characters in G1-- Costa Rican Batsy and Pervuvian Marisol. I can't determine whether she did well there, but they don't bug me like Lorna and Isi, and the wider rep is an admirable mission that helps show that Latin people aren't a monoculture. The characters Villegas is credited with designing have also brought some of the most elaborate and groundbreaking anatomical sculpts to the brand and include some personal favorite designs or characters of mine, like Cupid and Operetta. But I think some the cultural characters she had no shared background with could have been better, even if just by semantics, if they were overseen by people with more connection. It's probably the consequence of the design team being so small--you can't get as much connected creative oversight or authenticity...but there could be some way to bring in other voices with cultural qualifications to review the impact the representation will have. 

Jane Boolittle might be the most irresponsible-feeling foreign concept to me. 

Jane was a vaguely non-white jungle girl adopted and raised by British scientist explorers, based on fantasy stereotypes of spooky voodoo witch doctors. The first apparent problems are that spooky fantasy voodoo in media disrespects real vodun/vodou spirituality (there are multiple traditions with varied spellings, including ones I haven't listed), and Jane is another character who doesn't fully represent something because she's kind of from nowhere. My first visual read on her, further informed by her invocation of voodoo and her discovery by Brits, was that she was meant to look like a tribal African girl, but then the animals referenced in her diary and pet would place her home in South America...and the ones she alludes to in the webisodes would put her in South Asia! Perhaps she's traveled around with her parents and seen multiple groups of animals and she's supposed to be South American first? But why can't they just say that, and why bring in confusing connotations of Africa by invoking voodoo tropes? 

Jane's whole concept as an atypically unidentified monster type based on a shamanistic witch doctor also ends up invoking a mythology of adventure stories rooted in colonial and imperialist narratives which sensationalized uncontacted tribes and land they hadn't charted as foreign, wild, dangerous, and mysterious. It's almost too on the nose that Jane was adopted by Brits--that's the demographic of the colonial explorers and mythologizers that shaped her uncomfortable fictional archetype! Jane's fashion sense also looked asymmetrical and had ragged aspects, and was adorned with feathers, fur, and even Skullette belts invoking headhunter imagery, which feels all kinds of distasteful to me now. It feels like Jane very directly inherits from old portrayals that framed tribal people as "wild", "mysterious", "spooky", and yes, on the visual level, I'll even say "savage". Mattel may, in some way, have been wary about their own design, because Jane's color palette has always struck me as exceptionally unrealistic among the MH cast, with her skin being purple and her outfits having neon and generally toylike colors. Maybe Mattel knew there was no way they could look at all okay trying to market a spooky foreign tribal doll with feathers and bones and tatters unless they made all of her colors really fake. Alternatively, they thought kids would be scared of her look and toned it down with the colors...but why even attempt it if it's either questionable enough to censor with bright colors, or too scary to sell without them?!? Jane's ambiguous ethnicity and details that could split her two or three ways across the globe may be ignorance, but may also be an attempt not to pin her to one place so nothing is explicitly being harmed. If so, that's not quite how that works.

Overall, she's a mess of confusing signifiers and narrative tropes that feel harmful. I think Jane could possibly be salvaged if she was portrayed with more specificity and respect to a distinct tribal culture, or was shifted more to feel like an herbalist physician or veterinarian of the modern day, lab coat and all. Her G1 signature doll did have an antique doctor's bag. She could still look like she's from...wherever she's from. Mattel would have to pick and confirm a place for her. But I still wonder if the root concept of "spooky tribal witch doctor girl" is just too colonialist to reattempt. Bringing her back would probably require a lot of input from voices that could reclaim the archetype. Jane had a beautiful face sculpt, and I liked her personality in the webisodes a lot, but I can't overlook the baggage she carries from her concept and design. 

At the end of the day, cultural heritage is important and differences are special, and I tend to have faith that Mattel has pure intentions with their diverse characters even if I don't think they've come off too well. But real multicultural friend groups at school probably won't look like a World's Fair exhibition. I think we should provide kids with both specificity and nuance within portraits of diversity because I think it's more realistic and useful to them as they grow up in a diverse globalized world. 

G3 MH seems to agree. Characters are given different specific backgrounds and even mixed demographics without it defining their whole fashion sense, and some cases have even demonstrated heightened sensitivity to cultural mythology, like Abbey being correctly portrayed as South Asian and Twyla no longer using dreamcatcher imagery.  

Skelita review section!

So, finally to Skelita's actual dolls. 

Almost. (I'm so sorry. Really living up to the blog name this time.) 

See, Skelita is not the first skeleton character in the doll line. First, there was actually a tiny figurine of the Skullette icon rendered as a full-bodied character. She was included in the release of Ghouls Rule Draculaura as an accessory. 

I had to get this just for the novelty of the Skullette being made as kind of a character like this. The figure's only point of articulation is the head, which is on a ball joint and can pop off.

The bow also pops out on a pin, but that wasn't exciting enough to photograph. The body is pretty soft and bendy to avoid breaking but cannot be posed. The figure is about the size of a large toy when compared to a doll. We'll see more later.

Then, they released the Skeleton pack in the Create-a-Monster series (more on those dolls here). 

Mattel photo of the Skeleton on a pink 
CAM body base.

This Skeleton doll was generically goth-themed and debuted skeletal doll sculpts in the brand, likely testing out the idea. (CAM seemed to be a testing ground for lots of radical monster concepts.) The CAM Skeleton was one of the sparer add-on packs that didn't include a full body. The white supplemental torso that was available direct through Mattel and compatible with her color still had upper limbs and a torso shaped like the standard sculpts. The upper arms were covered by her dress, so they weren't an issue, but the upper legs poked out of the dress looking conspicuously fleshy. The white torso was also able to work with the Ghost add-on pack, so Mattel might have chosen not to design the Skeleton her own torso because they could get away with releasing one generic white body sculpt to complete either character.

Skelita iterates on a lot of the style of the Skeleton CAM while adding Mexican Dia de Muertos flair and a complete bony body sculpt.

At long last, the first doll we're looking at is...the first doll! Scaris Skelita was never on my wishlist out of all of her dolls. I didn't love this look for her, frankly, but I do value her unique orange-and-black hair and she has several points I'd like to discuss.

Mattel stock photo of Scaris Skelita.

Scaris Skelita was released eleven years ago and that just makes me feel ancient and disgusted by time. The copy I selected also looks a bit like ancient disgusting time because, while complete, it's obvious she hasn't been touched in those eleven years and it's done some stuff to her. 

For Skelita, withering to bone was not a side effect of a decade on a dusty shelf! She started that way!

This doll was evidently detached as as simply as possible from her box and then promptly left alone, with none of the ancillary factory packaging for her outfit removed from her body. Dust had filled the molding of her stand base and I had to run it under water after this photo.

Skelita's hair is a mix of only orange and black, which is unique among her dolls, and no other MH doll has had this specific combo either.

The orange color is meant to evoke the marigold flower iconic to Day of the Dead tradition. The majority of the hair is black while just two orange streaks are rooted at the front. All Skelita dolls have black as the base hair color, and her three hair color accents across her dolls have been orange, teal, and magenta. Her second doll pairs orange and teal, her third doll has teal and magenta, and the last three of her so-far six dolls have just black and teal. G3 Skelita, if she is made into a doll, should complete the list of accent pairs, since her cartoon design's hair has a combination of orange and magenta streaks in her black hair. We still have yet to see a Skelita design with only black and magenta hair.

As manufactured, the orange streaks of Scaris Skelita were initially gelled into rolled tubes of curls, but either the previous owner de-gelled this doll, or else the gel simply decayed into atoms and vacated the premises with time, because the hair is not rolled, stiff, or crunchy. The front of the hair is an off-center part, but the back is not parted, and Skelita was styled with a mini-ponytail on top that created a small hair-bump silhouette. The hair was shaped mostly as manufactured after being tied up for so long, but the elastic band for the ponytail itself had long since disintegrated and was found in pieces in her hair, and so the ponytail section, while bent in its shape from the dead band, was no longer standing up much. 

The hair combed out pretty well and looked better...

....but it felt a little sticky on top and I worried about glue seepage, so I later washed her and gave her a (hopefully successful) degooping treatment. 

Skelita's head design blends a living, fleshy human face with a skull and features makeup patterns inspired by sugar skulls (calaveras), confections and craft works which are the most famous icons of the Dia de Muertos holiday. 

A Google Images collage of calaveras.

Skelita's eyes are depicted like a living human's. They're very large, and Skelita dolls in G1 were prone to having their left eyes printed drifted off to the side. It seemed like bigger-eyed head sculpts were a more prone to wonkiness in general. You can see this Skelita has that issue, too. It really hurts the character of her face and can take the sassy tones of her styling into vacant or vapid territory. Skelita is never given lower lashes, possibly to imply her upper lashes are just painted on?

Skelita's lips are lined around the edges and the middle to create a more graphical look and invoke skeletal tooth lines. This was first done on the CAM doll. Additionally, Skelita introduces more airbrushed skull tooth lines extending past her mouth. It's a little Tim Burtony in look, but it works for a calavera and leaning her into a slight goth style is totally natural for MH. These lines do not connect to the corners of her painted lips. I don't love the weird thick line in the top middle of her lips, nor the way the black fills the gap in her lip sculpt to make her mouth look pursed, or even puckered. That open-lips look can work for a sweet character filled with wonderment, but the puckered look of the lines, pale pink color, and modern hairdo and dress feel like a different persona from the canon personality Skelita is written with. 

Skelita's nose is dimensional and sculpted like a fleshy one, and a nasal cavity design is just painted on the end. This was previously done with the CAM Skeleton with a light grey, and while the black on Skelita is better, I find the decision to give them fleshy noses to be cowardly. Was a realistic nasal cavity really too edgy? The lips being more human is fine by me, but the nose feels unnecessary. Maybe they're blurring the line deliberately between humans in skull makeup who celebrate the holiday and an actual skeleton celebrating from beyond the grave, but I feel like a skeleton should just not have a full nose.

Despite her lips and nose, Skelita's head does have bony aspects. She has a defined brow ridge, and no ears, both to feel more like a skull.

Skelita's color is a bony off-white, though this doll is old and has yellowed some, most visible on the forehead. The CAM doll and Jack Skellington are a starker paper-white color.

Skelita's other calavera makeup details include dots and swirls, with some in airbrushed brown and others in graphical black. Around her eyes, she has prominent blue shading with the black dots and some starburst designs. I think it's a little much against her hair and outfit, though the color contrast of the hair and makeup is almost working for me. I think if Skelita had a full head of orange hair, the makeup would work really well with it, but it doesn't fully click as it is. This blue eye makeup design was used on three of Skelita's four G1 dolls. Her second doll (Art Class) used lavender eye makeup with flower designs, and that probably should have started a train of every Skelita having new eye makeup to reflect the diversity and individuality of sugar skulls...but they reverted to the original design for the rest of G1. I believe the swirls and mouth paint designs were basically the same on every G1 Skelita, but her lip color did change a bit, being either magenta or red. 

I think Skelita's face does a good job of evoking calavera artwork without going really far with graphical bright colors and details. I can see how more elaborate paint could make her face look more mask-like or clownish and make it harder for her to fit with the rest of the brand...and that'd probably also be really unreliable for factory painting and budget-unfriendly. I would love to see a Skelita really really go all-out with the makeup in a collector release, but we'll see later that her collector dolls have gone more soft and ornate than bold and layered. 

One last detail on Skelita's head is incredibly hard to find--under her hair, on the back of her head, the name "KATRINA" is etched.

Outlined in MS Paint to give a better idea of what's going on. 

This alludes both to the tradition of carving a name in a calavera, and also to the iconic character of La Catrina, a skeleton Mexican noblewoman in a large hat first drawn as a political cartoon who then became a mascot of Dia de Muertos!

Skelita's head etching looks more like a stamped factory manufacturing code since it's just in generic typographic letters, and maybe it is a manufacturing code...that the team deliberately chose to reference La Catrina and make sense as a diegetic element of Skelita's head sculpt! It wouldn't be the only time manufacturing elements were made diegetic-- Robot character Elle Eedee had her factory stamp moved to a sculpted rectangular panel on her leg to turn it into a literal in-universe feature of the character!

The first piece Skelita is wearing is a large ornate orange necklace.

It's a pretty piece and feels mature and traditional. 

Skelita's base costume is probably the only one in her repertoire which fully captures the feeling of modern fashion mixed with traditional Mexican iconography. It does strike me as a fashion designer's effort to blend the past and present.

Up top, Skelita has a halter piece in black. The edges are alternately trimmed with magenta and purple ribbon, and the grey patterning has twisting forms resembling both spines and flower stems, and Skullette marigolds.

A photo of one of the marigolds, which aren't on the front of this piece.

Skelita's skirt is three tiers of solid fabric printed to look like lots of multicolored and finely-cut panels of papel picado (cutout paper) banners--common decorations for the holiday. Non-Mexicans like myself might still recognize them from their creative animated implementation in the prologue of Pixar's Coco (a film Skelita pre-dates).

There's an impressive illusionistic quality to this skirt, because it's easy to mistake the panels for individual pieces or actual cutout pieces from afar. I've heard, though, that the pigment on the skirt is not colorfast and can rub off, which is unacceptable. I didn't find anything happening when I rubbed the skirt myself, but maybe it's so old that's no longer a concern? The fabric is fairly stiff, but that works for something that might literally be constructed from paper pieces in-universe. Fashion designers get avant-garde like that, and I do find a real charm to Skelita making a skirt of real papel picado squares. The improvisational artist in me approves. I can relate to her as a creative, and it's really fun to see her outfit tell her cultural story while illustrating her passions and instincts as an artist. The storytelling of her outfit rounds out her character a lot more for me than I had expected.

Skelita's dress is actually two pieces, and not in the way you'd think! She actually has a full skinny dress under the skirt!

While part of me thinks there's a whole dress underneath because trying to align and tuck in a top and a skirt on this body would be impossible, this outfit could have just been one piece, so they made a choice here to give her two display modes. This also feels very "fashion designer" to me, and it works in-universe-- if Skelita's skirt is all papel picado, it makes sense to have a full dress underneath for decency! The skirt opens all the way down the back, meaning you don't have to worry about pulling the dress through the hole at the top. You can just undo it and wrap it around her waist when putting it back on.

Skelita also has a belt and a bracelet, both in textured brown vinyl to look like stamped leather.

I appreciate what the muted tones are doing to ground the vivid costume a bit, and they work with the necklace to bring some vintage into her costume and suggest age and history more.

Skelita's shoes are woven sandals in green with brown soles. They're very skinny in shape and not much larger than her feet. The platforms match the leather bracelet and belt.

Man...I'm a little surprised. I went in saying I didn't love this Skelita outfit, but I feel like I've found a lot of virtues in it. It's the best illustration of what Skelita does as a budding fashion designer because it feels improvisational, self-made, and fun. The two-modes construction with the full dress under a separate skirt is great, and the look demonstrates a modern sensibility more than any of her other dolls. Maybe her face and hair aren't quite it with this outfit, but I've become a lot fonder toward it just by thinking about it more. This costume I formerly dismissed has significantly improved my assessment of Skelita as a character and I find it much more stylish now.

Her suitcase was one of several in the Scaris line, since everyone but Catrine was flying in from somewhere else. Skelita's is pink and somewhat unsettlingly shaped like a banner with a rounded lower edge that my brain wants to invert so the flat side is on the bottom!

The handle is vaguely spinal.

The suitcase opens and is fairly roomy and textured inside. Skelita has nothing obvious to put in the case, though--no handheld accessories or spare clothes, though it could hold her skirt when she's not wearing it. The handle retracts nicely.

The case also has rolling wheels on the back to let it be pulled for play. It's a great piece.

Now, the great and terrible--Skelita's body sculpt. For that, I'm glad to finally bring Maudie back on to lend her comparison services.

Bam!

Skelita truly is all bone, sculpted in the shape of the typical be-fleshed Monster High body sculpt. 

You can see the silhouette is imitated pretty exactly, so Skelita's ribs are curved in the shape of breasts. 

Here's Skelita next to mini Skullette.

And next to an Inner Monster doll. The Inner Monsters were Create-a-Monster spinoffs with translucent torsos (which were removable plates) and skeletons inside with pinholes that could be filled with emotion charms that looked like organs. Their skeletal cores are smaller than Skelita's torso to fit fully inside the standard body contour represented by the removable shell.

Skelita's sculpting is very cool.

The gaps of the ribs and neck detail are really impressive.

Her pelvis features a sculpted horizontal bone crack on the front for some reason. 

And that continues on the back...where there's a vertical crack too.

Um.

Skelita's hands are very delicate, and seem very similar to the CAM Skeleton's, but her forearms are fully new, featuring an indent, but no full gap between her radii and ulnae. 

Here's Skelita's lower legs and foot bones. I love her kneecap detail.

The CAM doll also had gaps in her leg bones, something Skelita lacks. Skelita's leg bones are sculpted to be adjacent just like her arm ones. The CAM doll is the only MH skeleton to date with gapped leg bones.

Skelita's body is made from softer, more flexible plastics to avoid breaking. This is a good thing and a bad thing. Her upper legs feel too bendy, and the Skelita I used to own had her leg warped and bent out of shape because of the softness of the plastic. 

MH doll boxes used to have paper slips telling you about the dolls' removable forearms and hands, but Skelita's paper uniquely advertised that the lower legs also pop out!

This is a seemingly unique joint attachment. It's not the same as CAM dolls.

While it's possible that there wasn't a good way for Mattel to manufacture permanently-affixed legs in this shape, there does seem to be a utility to this--Skelita's knee joints can come pretty sticky, so it's best to pop her legs out first to push the knee peg and loosen it for posing, since trying to bend her knee without doing so will often just lead to you flexing the plastic of her upper leg and getting nowhere. 

I discovered with the new Jack Skellington doll that his skeleton body sculpt gave him increased hip mobility that permitted great posing options other MH dolls could never approach.

I never ever thought to test years ago if Skelita had extra posing options, but now I had to! 

While Skelita's pelvis isn't as skinny as Jack's, she can still bend her hips out and then much further forward than the norm. 

Skelita does the hug-the-knees pose better than Jack because her legs are less disproportionately long. Here's Skelita doing the pose, next to Maudie's best attempt at the same exact thing. The standard body just doesn't get close.

Skelita's knees can't come very close together this way, but it's still awesome to see a doll that can affect this kind of pose. Fleshy contour can really get in the way for hard plastic toys! 

Skelita can also do okay side-splits, if you don't require her legs to be flat on the ground.

She also splits easily front-to-back, but I didn't think to photograph that.

So. On the one hand, this is incredible. Skelita's body is all bone in a way that sets her apart immediately. It's super cool and artistic and weird and does justice to the skeleton doll concept. The doll body is a fascinating art object that's spooky and pretty beautiful. I stand by Skelita being one of the essential characters for any MH collector to have because she's so out-there and well-sculpted. 

But then we get to the concerns. 

First is the idea that Skelita is inappropriately feminized. And I can get behind that to a degree. Real skeletons don't have lips, noses, breasts, or rears, so those details feel a little odd, and I can see why it could be insulting, too. Monster High has already been accused of its art style choices setting an unrealistic skinny beauty standard, but now even the literal skeletons don't get a pass and they have to have glamor bodies with boobs and butts, too? Skelita never even has pants that would justify a butt shape to fill them. It can be argued that Skelita defies anatomy in the pursuit of conventional beauty standards. Media has been criticized for shaping female characters into the desires of the male gaze for a long time, whether that be through uniform appearances, impossible proportions and contortions in artwork, or outright depicting fantasy female nonhumans in the form of conventionally attractive human women when that has no logical necessity. I get why Skelita can be seen as the latter, though in regard to the shaping of her body, it's most likely motivated by upholding the clothes-swap play of the dolls so anyone can wear Skelita's clothes and vice-versa...but there may be another reason. 

This begins the darkest portion of the discussion which was warned about at the top, and it will trickle into the review of the next doll in this post. 

Skelita has evoked much darker concerns regarding anorexia, a mental illness and eating disorder that causes people to starve themselves compulsively due to a disturbed perception of their body and an obsession with achieving and maintaining a lower body weight. 

The issue starts right at her concept--a fashion doll character literally made of bones is a super touchy visual hurdle to overcome--not only in a world where fashion dolls have always been accused of pushing beauty standards of skinniness onto young girls, but also within a brand that had already faced accusations of its stylized spooky-skinny body design invoking malnourished and starved bodies akin to the physical toll that anorexia takes on people with the disorder. It's honestly unbelievable that Mattel gave Skelita (or even her Create-a-Monster predecessor) the go-ahead because it really feels like the kind of radioactive concept that they would never greenlight. It feels like a malicious parody that people critical of fashion dolls would construct--"Skeleton Barbie: This is what little girls are being sold!" Except Mattel literally did sell that skeleton fashion doll! The optics facing Skelita were naturally stacked against her. 

In that regard, it's probably the Dia de Muertos theme that saved her and gave Mattel faith in the doll, because that gives her a clear association with a lovely cultural tradition to let her sidestep the "glamorized teen skeleton" issue that could otherwise sink her. However, her first doll still had issues that could play into these concerns. 

Skelita's body is hard to sew attractive clothes for, understandably, primarily since she has no waist to speak of and because her overall contour does fill a little less space than the standard body. The logistics of skeleton couture are also probably why she has breasts and a bit of butt, since they didn't want her skinny figure to look outright malnourished. In that sense, her unnatural silhouette is actually a safeguard against the concern of her body looking starved and aberrant.

...it evidently wasn't enough, though.

One big thing I held off on mentioning until now is that G1 Skelitas were packaged with disposable body plates made of plastic slipped under their clothing to fill out their clothes better. These pieces were also used as dress mannequins in the "I Love Fashion" dolls' packaging.

I was actually very glad to discover this Skelita was untouched because I wanted to get one with the plate still included so I could discuss it better. 

The body plate goes over the legs a little, so Skelita can't sit while it's under her clothes.

It's a little disturbing the difference that results when the plate is taken out of Skelita's outfit. Suddenly, the halter dress feels like it's overly loose at the sides of her chest, and there's nothing padding out around the absence of waist. The piece can be pinched in at the waist and it shifts side-to-side out of alignment much too easily, altogether making the dress feel poorly-fitted, and that can be upsetting. It's just not a wise cut for her to wear because this is not inclined to sit right.

I would feel so much less weird about this if Skelita were not sold as a teenage glamor fashion doll. It's just such a loaded context for a bony gal in ill-fit couture to be in. 

Signature Skelita was also given a normal stand, which meant the clip only securely held onto her when she was wearing the dress form under her clothing. There's nothing to firmly clip onto otherwise.

Since that was a piece of packaging intended to be discarded, the result was that buyers would be left with a possibly vacant-looking glamor doll that was too skinny to fill her ultra-skinny doll clothes and couldn't even use her doll stand well! The feminine fleshy contours and the holiday concept likely tried to keep this perception at bay, but it didn't work. That dress form feels like a patch job that doesn't adequately solve a problem which Mattel clearly saw had been created.

I was struck with the idea that maybe layering a dress under Skelita's costume to function like a slip could add some structure to her outfit and fill it out. I tried out a CAM Insect dress I had cut the sleeves and collar from. The strapless shape and slightly thicker fabric seemed like they'd help. 

It's pretty successful. The halter dress still feels too awkward and hard to align and the sides show the dress more, but she is padded a bit now. 

It helps her fit in her clothes and her stand. Fabric padding in her clothes or an additional layer underneath would have been a viable approach to making Skelita's clothes less upsetting and more practical, and wouldn't deny other dolls the ability to wear her pieces. But a halter cut just wasn't a wise choice for this sculpt, unfortunately. At least not a halter cut sewn to be wearable by fully-fleshed dolls.

Later Skelitas seemed to revise her approach to mitigate this issue. Her fashion sense started trending much more humble and traditional with cuts and styling that felt a bit more modest, if maybe going a bit outright frumpy from time to time. I think they decided to downplay the modernism and fashion-designer angle a lot because modern outfit cuts and glamor edge would lend themselves more to poor fits and/or wouldn't allow for the body plate to be hidden under them. And maybe trying to put a skeleton on the cutting edge of fashion was just too loaded of an aesthetic. Skelita migrated from fierce to sweet...which does admittedly suit her written personality.

Art Class Skelita is notably more humble in aesthetic, and her hair looks almost 1950s-retro, walking her far away from the juxtaposition of bone skinniness with high fashion and/or modelesque beauty.

Note her unique eye makeup, and pay attention to her vase. 

Art Class Skelita also included a new stand clip just for her, which hugged her around the ribs to support her better and I've heard it worked. An adjusted stand clip is a great reworking that means her body is being accommodated for as its own thing, rather than being undermined by a body-form device that makes her real body feel inadequate and out of place. The body plate feels like the denial that confirms there's a problem with Skelita, and adds to the unpleasant vibes. Having a system designed so Skelita's body just works with the stand removes that feeling of something being not right. It's a shame the clip was only used on this one doll release and that only one Skelita got to benefit from it. Her next two G1 dolls had no stands, and the collector dolls don't use the Art Class system.

I Love Accessories/Scaritage (the doll line has gone by both names) Skelita looks more girlish and modest, with a boxy poncho bodice and fairly demure hairstyle. This look doesn't feel like a modern-style fashion designer. She looks like she's wearing something from her grandmother--and that's completely fine, but the vibes have totally shifted.

While it meant the sacrifice of modernity and edge, Skelita started feeling more like what she was supposed to--just a skeleton girl whose lack of body mass was part of the fantasy holiday monster type, and not a disturbing display of an unhealthy frame. Maybe edge and modern cuts just couldn't coexist on her without being a little bit upsetting.

G3 cartoon Skelita looks to have a stockier silhouette, which was exactly the solution I thought they would go for--keeping her all anatomical bones, but divorcing her figure from the look of skinniness or unhealthiness. G3's overall more robust toon body proportions lend an inherently less troubling design schema to Skelita's concept, anyway.

I look forward to her doll debut. It promises to lack all of these wearying complications!

Here's Scaris Skelita with her hair retied and treated. 

Post-treatment, the hair is less glossy than I'd like, but it's mostly fine. 

I decided to pack something in Skelita's suitcase and try one more thing out--a jacket.

The piece came from Cleolei.

I think this jacket looks really good on Scaris Skelita! The piece looks modern and the teal color is perfect to bounce off her skirt and contrast her hair. I think it puts the contention of her hair and makeup in order by making the contrast feel more harmonized. The jacket feels like an extra flair on top of the costume to make it feel more active and cohesive. She's keeping it!

The biggest appeal and biggest downfall of this Skelita edition is her modernity. It's the only release of Skelita's that adequately makes her feel like a junior fashion designer doing fun handmade blends of modern and traditional clothing, and there is something very valuable in displaying a modern aspect of Mexican cultural expression for representation purposes. Skelita's outfit is creative and polished, and it conveys a lot about her art practice in a way that makes her character feel more dimensional than just a Mexican poster child. However, it also displays a fiercer vibe and personality that feel quite incongruous with the quiet, sensitive ghoul she was written to be. Worse, the glam vibes and modern clothing unfortunately don't mitigate a distressing connotation of anorexia formed primarily by the poor fit of the clothing on her bare body sculpt. This doll also had a doll stand unsuited to her, resorting to using the body plate they stuffed her dress with as a tool to get her in a normal stand. That all makes her feel pretty troubling, and this release is dragged down by the ways her engineering detracts from the full picture of what she was supposed to be--as a toy and as a visual. I like her design on paper way more than I had ever expected to and I value her quite a lot. But she also unsettled me in quite dark ways because of how poorly she was engineered.

That brings me to my favorite Skelita doll, the only G1 edition I didn't discuss prior--her Scarnival release. I bought my original one at Walmart because I needed to have a Skelita, but she also remains my favorite casual styling for the character. Back in my old collection era, I was fixated on finding the perfect "basic" or "everyday" look for every character, to get the doll releases that felt the best-suited for everyday school attire or casual teen clothing, and while that's less of a concern for me now, I still think this is the ideal Skelita for that purpose. 

Scarnival Skelita is a budget release from a school fundraising-fair line. Her activity was a ball toss, and her accessories were a piñata purse and luchador-themed pins and a ball. I don't love the style of her accessories, but the doll herself was great. Her dress felt like the right mix of traditional, casual, and modern without looking scary on her bony frame. I also loved her rich red lip color and teal/orange contrast. My previous copy had a warped upper hip, and that was disappointing to me. Here's her:

Photo of the bygone old Skelita I owned.

The new copy of Scarnival Skelita lacks her extras, but she's kind of an upgrade because I think her face and hair are better than my old one!

Scarnival Skelita's hair is voluminous and has a small parted section that hangs to her right. It's mostly black with one teal streak within the front of the part. This was one of my first dolls originally, so I think the older one must have been a victim of the doll-care learning process, since I remember her hair ending up completely shapeless and hard to display in an appealing way, which means I probably boil-washed it out of shape and couldn't locate the part again. As I had her, she was never flattered by her hair.

This copy, however, looks untouched and stunning, and seeing how good her hair was in the listing was one of the major factors in me getting her. Her part is distinct and the volume and wave are wonderful. I also love the bold contrast of the teal in the hair with the reds and oranges of the rest.

Gorgeous.

Scarnival's face is markedly more appealing to me than Scaris's.

Scarnival's eyes are definitely wonked and it's arguably worse than my original Scarnival copy, but the wonkiness here creates the effect of her eyes being a little wider, and even though her gaze still isn't even, she either looks more focused, or more pleasantly dreamy or adrift, rather than vacant. I think her lips also do a lot. The rich red is my favorite Skelita lip color, and the line painting has changed subtly so she no longer has that puckered look to her lips, and that changes her expression. She doesn't look like she's pouting for a photo, and the relaxed mouth shape makes her gaze look less vacuous. I'm not bothered by the rest of her makeup being the same, since the teal works great with her color palette here.

Scarnival Skelita is a comparatively newer doll (no don't tell me she's eight years old don't you do that to me), so she's not really yellowed and her bones are whiter than Scaris. I think that flatters the color-pop aspects of this doll design really well. 

Scarnival Skelita's styling is my favorite for her because it adapts to the tonal need for Skelita to be less edgy and glam-forward, but doesn't lose a youthful, fun charm. Her loose wavy hair and sunny orange dress feel age-appropriate while also being stunningly pretty and pretty flattering. It feels traditional but not at all dated or overly formal or old. I love the dress's colors and cut. The collar and skirt fabric is multiple patterns on one design, so different copies of this dress will have the patterns allocated slightly differently in the collar and skirt portions.

Unfortunately, the dress is not too thick or opaque, so Skelita's ribs do show through it in a way that can be distressing. I must not have noticed before, or else overlooked and saw less of a problem in it back then. Today, I think it's something to address and it disappoints me. I'll try to see if this costume can be given a slip layer, too. 

Skelita's shoes are red-orange recasts of her Scaris ones and have no paint detail. I think they still look pretty proper with this outfit, though. 

I feel like this Skelita can come across as a thematic blend of Jack Skellington and Sally a little, with her colors and mouth feeling like Sally and her bones being like Jack! She is a holiday-themed character!

To fill out her dress, I tried out the plain white Etsy Kosucas dress I used for one of my Maupet ensembles as a slip for Skelita (that doll is in of the Cleolei post linked earlier). The white color was needed to not show through the orange dress, and the fabric felt hardy enough to block out any bone imprint.

By itself, this looks entirely ghoulish on Skelita, and this picture alone is a strong argument for why she's been kept in looser and less modern clothes since her first release.

The Scarnival dress looks a lot better with the white dress under it.

You can see a little bit of the white dress when looking at the neckline from above or the sides of the arm holes, but it's not obtrusive. It's more visible at the bottom of the skirt. I might order another copy of this dress just for her use and trim off a bit from the bottom.

I shouldn't have had to take these steps to make her clothes look fine with the body plate gone. But Scarnival Skelita's look is otherwise wonderful. 

I tried her out in the Scaris outfit to see how that would look. It's not that bad.

I think the more attractive swap might be Scaris in the Scarnival outfit.

This might look even better with all-orange hair.

I also tried Scarnival Skelita in a spare copy of the Witch CAM dress, yellow Inner Monster shoes, and the teal jacket. I think this is a fun look in her style.

I'd love to see a real Skelita with true-yellow emphasis.

Okay. That's finally the end of this part.

Conclusion to part 1

It all feels terribly unfair to Skelita that I found her mired in these concerns about her body, because she was supposed to be an innocent, beautiful, spooky cultural tribute and a cool monster just like anybody else. But I do think the engineering of the doll betrayed her and compelled this discussion because her context and tailoring has created inescapably grim impressions regardless of whether that's fair to her or not. Ideally, we wouldn't have to have this discussion and we could just look at her as a cool skeleton. Skelita should just be able to exist. But this is media, and the concept of a skeleton fashion doll does bear a significant responsibility with it to not step into upsetting territory. Mattel didn't fully achieve that. The team did take meaningful actions to shift her tone and improve her engineering to avoid upsetting imagery...though, at least at the the end of G1, she still had a costume problem.

G1 Skelita is earnest and well-intentioned and worth praising for her detail, artistic production, and her cultural concept and interesting traits. She's also inextricably loaded in ways that bear consideration, and her problems are stark enough that I find it genuinely hard to say whether she's a net positive or a net negative. I'd still prefer to come out of this with the charitable takeaway. I do like Skelita and I came away appreciating her a lot more from looking at her Scaris doll more closely. She needs help that Mattel didn't fully give her, but she is worth having and celebrating for her intended purpose--a tribute to a vibrant cultural tradition that brings people together. 

We'll see her most directly celebrating her holiday in the next post, discussing her collector dolls. I promise that post won't get nearly as heavy as this one. See you there.