Mechanical Marvels: Monster High's Robots!

I've always loved robots.

I was fairly obsessed with tin toy robots and android characters as a child, and I've already turned the Dracubecca fusion doll combining Draculaura and Robecca into a toy-robot original character. I suggest you read that post, which might offer valuable context. 

And so, while it's not entirely because she's a robot, one of the dolls that's captivated me for most of my new doll era has been G1 signature Robecca Steam from Monster High. Since I got back into this, she's been high on my list but never a priority, and I finally realized she'd be a great Christmas treat for myself. I just needed a good time to bring her into my collection, and that was it. While it's very likely this Robecca could get a Creeproduction release in 2025, I will not wait that long, thank you. It's been long enough!

I left her in the box she was mailed in until Christmas, but added (unimpressive) thematic doodles on top to decorate.

It turned out to be a wise choice to order Robecca ahead to open on Christmas because I needed a bit of joy after COVID interrupted everything and dissolved the structure of the 2023 holiday for me. Fortunately, the lovely Robecca was there to keep me company and she was a wonderful present to open on the atypically lonely day itself, and certainly the most exciting of the lot I prepared for myself.

My personal Christmas doll haul--I've already published a post about the Cleos.

While robots have never quite been horror icons or widely seen as "monsters", they're certainly horror-adjacent, as lots of thrillers and sci-fi movies use robot antagonists in ways that mingle with traditional horror--Fritz Lang's Metropolis, the film which defined the robot archetype and the look of other classic metallic androids like C-3PO and the Cybermen, even codified the robot as a threat, so as long as they've been in film, robots have been tied to fear.

The Maschinemensch, or "Maria", the defining robot from Metropolis.

One of the newest horror villains to make a splash on the big screen, the doll-like AI companion M3GAN (pronounced "Megan"), also directly cements a robot as a massive horror icon for maybe the first time. 

The copy of Robecca I purchased was advertised as incomplete, though I honestly would have had zero issue with the seller calling her complete, because the only things she seemed to lack were her diary and stand. She was entirely complete by my own looser collecting standards!

Robecca is a Victorian-era steampunk copperplate automaton billed as the daughter of a mad scientist. 

Prototype stock photo of signature Robecca. She's more shiny, her boots have more detail-washing, and her pet has more paint than the produced toy.

Robecca is an atypical take on robot horror, but she taps into the contemporary growing popularity of steampunk during the 2010s and does it gorgeously. Futuristic robots would also be covered later on with Elle Eedee, the second character in this post!

Robecca was the first British character in the brand, and used blue and copper colors (purple later became her tertiary color) with a steampunk modern fashion sense. She was characterized as a daredevil who did stunts with her rocket boots. 

[I wonder if a G3 Robecca would have to change her color palette since G3 Cleo has commandeered blue/black hair and shimmery brown skin. I feel like today's Mattel would take the coward's route and make Robecca purple and pink instead of blue, but ideally, they could switch her to having darker brown skin than before and give her orange hair and clothing accents--or Victorian green!]

Robecca's unknown scientist father would later receive characterization in the special Frights, Camera, Action!, as well as in the SDCC pack where he was released as a doll. 

Stock photo of SDCC Robecca and Hexiciah.

Hexiciah Steam was a man of three halves--half-fairy, half-human, and half-machine. He built Robecca to be his daughter and to store the ancestral Vampire's Heart artifact, key to the vampire coronation process, safely away. Time-travel shenanigans result in Robecca herself being the one to inspire Hexiciah to build her, and the two briefly reunite before Hexiciah returns to his own time. FCA Robecca joined her dad in the SDCC release, with Robecca having a unique vac-metalized chrome finish to reflect her newer days. That doll pack is where Hexiciah's fae scaritage and a romantic past with Nora Bloodgood (and Bloodgood's first name!) are revealed--those weren't known at the time of Frights, Camera, Action's release.

Robecca is also a milestone in MH for being the first character to fully showcase the levels of lavish sculpted detail the bodies could offer, and broke a lot of design ground.

Unpackaged, my Robecca came with her hair tied back, and it was quite gluey, so even though she was still absolutely stunning, I took her down for a glue treatment before commencing the review. I popped off her head to see if I could take some glue chunks out of it, but it didn't seem like there were huge globs I could tweeze out, so I just went to treat her hair. She finished off my bottle of Goo Gone, so I crossed my fingers that the first treatment round would suffice...and made a note to restock.
The hair, fortunately, turned out well, and didn't feel overly thick or tacky anymore. It's maybe a little dry and fluffy, but not too bad.

Robecca's neck peg was also super tight inside her neck and reduced her head articulation range, tilting her head up by default. The Dracubecca doll had the same issue, so maybe there's something about the Robecca body construction that made the neck too tight, and that issue persisted for the modified version in Dracubecca? I can't say whether my other Robeccas had this issue. Since I felt that this Robecca was far too special an acquisition to be cursed with a stiff neck, I decided to go radical and perform the same neck surgery I did for Gilliana--this time, out of preference, not necessary repair. It was really difficult to pull the peg out and then break the bar inside her neck, but I got it done, stole another neck peg from another going-nowhere CAM body, and put it in, confirming it had the correct freedom of motion, and then bored a hole through the neck and put a sewing pin in and glued it to anchor the peg. 

The visual actually works pretty well for the riveted robot, but the silver color is wrong. Her head covers it, though, so no real issue. I wanted this ghoul's head mobile!

Okay, here's the final result looking incredible. 

Robecca's first piece is her steampunk goggles, molded in a redder copper tone than her body. The lenses have two different textures and there's an antenna on the left side, and the arms are made to look like leather straps, suggesting the idea that these could buckle behind her head. 

The goggles slide onto her face like glasses, but they definitely look best perched on top of her head. 

The fit is better than the Dracubecca version of the goggles on that doll's face, but it's still not super elegant. Mattel has these on her head upside-down so the antenna comes down over the side of her head, but this isn't really practical for Robecca to pull them back on, and the bend on my copy's antenna gets in the way of her face, so her goggles are staying on top of her head turned upright. 

Robecca's hair is a mix of royal blue and black, rooted in large chunks of color. 

Her hair is parted and made to fall to her right, but not in a way that it crosses all that much of her forehead--it really needs to be combed to go over her face, and it doesn't fall far over it even then. While a robot having fiber hair doesn't make a ton of sense in some regards, it's pretty easy to assume she was simply given a wig or wigs to give her the best analogue to human hair by her dad building her.

 

I would have loved to see an edition of Robecca with her hair blend much subtler and more dense, with thin alternating stripes of blue and black. That might have looked really cool. 

I've always found Robecca to have one of the most beautiful MH faces, but signature is certainly the best of the Robeccas. 

The main thing that sets signature Robecca apart from the others is her gorgeous dark brown lips. They make her look dark and edgy, but also very vintage-glam. Since she's named for designer Rebecca Shipman, and Shipman's name floats around other dolls with vintage dark-lip aesthetics, I have to assume this lip color is another direct Shipman design influence. Future Robeccas gave her bright red or lavender lips, neither of which were as nice. The dark brown flatters her face and hair and makes the lips look almost like tarnishing masquerading as lipstick, contributing to an aged-copper feel. 

Robecca's irises are depicted as brown cogwheels, which is a fun touch. I don't know what the white sclerae would represent materially or how these eyes would be constructed, but the visual is cute.

 
The only thing I don't adore about this faceup is the pink in her eyeshadow. It's so subtle, though, that I think it would be pointless and foolhardy to try to change it.

The other Robecca that interests me a lot is from the Gore-geous Accessories line, and for kind of the opposite reasons the sig doll compels me. It's the only other Robecca base and costume to lack prominent purple and red, and her vibe is much lighter in contrast, with a nude-esque gold lip, all-blue hair, and a light skirt. Unfortunately, the two GA dolls were apparently very rare and go for stupid prices on the aftermarket. Both have so much potential and I'd love to work with them, but they are not accessible acquisitions.

Photo of GA Robecca in her box.

Robecca is the first MH doll with sculpted monster texture that enters her frontal face region. This remained fairly rare, and I don't like how that was, since it maintained a discrepancy between smooth pretty faces and heavily textured bodies. Robecca's face doesn't match her body texture either, but I always appreciated the dolls that had some head/face detail to blend better with the body. On Robecca, the detail consists of rivet lines above her eyebrows, and a riveted seam all around her face which even goes around her ears and under her chin to suggest her face is one contoured plate attached to the front of her head. 

There would be no reasonable way for the face to articulate, like, at all, with this construction, but it's still really good detail. Realistically, it could make sense for Robecca to have been built with a static mask-style face, given her time period, but that would be too uncanny to animate and/or make her animated model look unfinished, so they didn't go that way in the cartoons and her face moves like anyone else's.

Robecca was one of, if not the first, in the brand to have a shimmery vinyl head, which helps make her copper face look more metallic and gives it a warm, pretty aged luster. She's lucky; she could have aged worse and gotten all patina-green like the Statue of Liberty! (Hey, Mattel: idea! Oxidized Robecca!) Robecca would look a little more fake and plastic without this shimmer finish. Even her body feels adequately lustrous, though, which surprised me. 

I don't recall the Robeccas I owned before being so evenly glowy in tone, but no, her body does not look like flat plastic next to her head. It's beautiful.

The fact that they could achieve shimmer like this so early in G1 means there was no excuse for G1 Abbey to have used nasty physically-encrusted glitter glued over her body...and to continue to use it in her Creepro doll.

Robecca's facial features, Victorian British background, and metal-brown body color might visually code her as Indian or otherwise Desi in ethnicity, which is supported by her (semi-)organic father Hexiciah also looking like he could be. Even if it wasn't intentional, it's a reading I embrace, particularly since it would make for a case of G1 diversity that didn't feel ham-fistedly exoticized. 

Robecca's signature earrings are long pendants with multiple doodads hanging from them, cast in the same reddish copper tone as her goggles.

I felt very nervous reinserting these into her ears, though, since the pegs did not slide in too easily and the earrings are a bit flimsy. I was worried I would bend them too far or break them and it was quite a push to pop them in. That's why I declined to take them out for the rest of this session.

Despite being a quintessentially steampunk character, Robecca's signature doll actually has the least Victorian-vintage costuming of her doll repertoire. All of her fabric hugs her body and there are no puffs, buttons, stripes, or ruffles of the kind her later outfits would sport. Monster High has always fused antique with modern for the most old-fashioned ghouls, but signature Robecca's costume feels more modern than the rest of her dolls' outfits. 

On top, Robecca has a highly shaped shrug jacket in black vinyl fabric with gold trim. The piece has a tall sculpted neck and triangular shoulders. For a doll as old as she is, I expected a lot worse from the vinyl fabric quality, but it doesn't seem to have aged poorly at all. 

Underneath, Robecca has a one-piece dress with blue ribbon shoulder straps. 

I'm glad they're ribbon because elastic-band straps yellow and age poorly. The top of the bodice is blue with a diamond-and-dot pattern in gold and copper, and the lower half of the bodice has some ornate patterning suggesting gadgetry, though the blue lines look like they might be standing in for dimensional straps...and that feels like a cheap-out move. They already broke out the blue ribbon for the shoulders; they couldn't have wrapped that around the torso too? The rest of the dress is a faux-leather miniskirt in solid black, which is very short. I had to get creative during my photo session because she does not sit decently in it. The top of this copy of the dress isn't sewn quite right, so the angled line of the bodice isn't fully aligned even when the dress is twisted to her right.

Over the skirt, Robecca has a cage belt in blue which is parted at the front and secures at the front with a pin closure. 

The piece looks like an industrial framework, but also like a cage crinoline which would create the silhouette in a huge fabric hoop skirt. I think that's very clever. It makes total sense that a steampunk robot would wear the cage without the fabric overskirt. If Robecca had been the Fang Vote doll instead of Rochelle (and I firmly opine that it is a travesty she wasn't), I have no doubt she would have had a floor-length crinoline frame for a ballgown without the gown! Though Vampire Heart Draculaura did that idea too.

It might have made more sense for this cage to be the same copper color as her boots and goggles, particularly since the blue doesn't read metallic in the same way, but it looks fine the way it is and suits her color balance. Dracubecca's equivalent to this piece was copper. SDCC Robecca also has a very close imitation of this piece in copper, which is also sculpted with more things dangling from the bottom, perhaps suggesting it was the cage belt in an earlier day when it had more pieces attached.

Robecca's right arm features a long gadget bracer in blue. One yellow-painted panel displays a digital timer interface displaying the time 8:00...which happens to resemble the word "BOO" in a move I'm assuming was intentional.

One of the textural details on this bracer is a melting clock face referencing the iconic imagery in Salvador Dalí's The Persistence of Memory. Given Robecca's involvement in time travel, the imagery of wonky clocks is appropriate...though we can't know if that plot element was in consideration at the time of this doll's design.

Robecca's boots are pretty spectacular pieces, and are probably her most directly Victorian element in this ensemble. They're almost knee-high (few MH boots are quite that tall) and feature laces all down the front, but they also have piping, gears, engines and fins on the sides, and the platforms and heels are all exhaust boosters because these boots give Robecca rocket-propelled flight!

You can tell this doll is one of the earlier MH entries because the boots have been aged with a wash of darker brown to bring out the texture on the side. 

The rest matches the goggles and earrings. Prototype Robecca had a more even washed paint job here.

I can't recall many other Mattel pieces that use color-washes like this beyond Monster High Cupid and the good days of Ever After High, where that was de rigueur. 

I love the booster cones on the soles!

The Dracubecca version of these boots was more frilly and batlike per Draculaura's vampire aesthetic, and didn't have rocket fins on the side. 

Robecca's purse is solid blue and shaped like a clock. 

This is actually where she's incomplete, and I now see why the seller listed her as such--this purse originally had a little dangly pendulum on the bottom that hooked onto a loop on the bottom, but that piece has been lost. 

No pendulum.

This seems to be common with copies of this doll, so it might not have been very secure to begin with. It disappoints me a little, to be sure, but it's such a small thing and it's easy to overlook when you remember the rest of her is incredible. 

The purse has a plate-textured back and opens on a real hinge. The back texture carries inside. 

The only things Robecca would really want to carry in this purse are her earrings or bracer, since she has no other accessories.

Gore-geous Accessories Robecca reissued this purse in dark purple. For a budget line with the gimmick of "two purses", that felt a little lame to me. Honey got two unique purse sculpts, one of which even matched her purse-less signature doll. 

Robecca's pet is Captain Penny, named for the most famous copper coins as well as the penguin species he imitates. He's got an aviator's cap and a jetpack, serving as a joke about penguins being flightless birds--this robot one has been built the means to fly artificially.

His belt is painted black in the prototype stock photo, but is undecorated in the released version. A Creeproduction Robecca would do well to add in that detail, authenticity be damned. 

Robecca broke major ground as the first character in Monster High with a unique textured sculpt for every piece of her body...though, admittedly, the texture can feel a little basic compared to later dolls. 

Robecca is covered neck-to-toe with irregular plating and rivets, plus a few simulated flathead screws, but this texture is very uniform and leaves little detail for speculative robot mechanics to be seen. We don't see anything suggesting more intricate mechanisms, so this detail might feel a little underbaked...at least, compared to later dolls. There are characters that justify a uniform texture, like the Create-a-Monster Mummy just being bandaged all over, but a steampunk robot feels like she should have just a bit more going on externally, no matter how beautifully-engineered she's meant to be. I want to see more clockworks, and maybe even elements of steam power, like vent exhaust spots somewhere? I do appreciate the fake screw joint sculpting at the knees and elbows, and the simulated finger joint seams, and one of her chest plates is heart-shaped. That works nicely just for the anatomical gag, but Frights, Camera, Action would later reveal she has stored the Vampire's Heart artifact in her torso, giving this body detail an unintended second meaning.

Not all all-over-textured Monster High body sculpts include underwear sculpting. I think Robecca and Honey Swamp are two of the only cases that do. The other all-over dolls tend to have uninterrupted texture on their torsos.

While Robecca's body could have been more intricate, one detail makes me forgive that entirely.

Robecca's coolest feature, which remained un-imitated even with the fusion doll in the mix (Dracubecca didn't get it) is the gears in the backs of her legs. Just below her knees, on the back of her thighs, each leg has a gear half-inside the leg, and these gears are little wheels that can freely spin! 

No other MH doll had a tactile feature akin to this, and the effect is so charming and unusual. There's the feeling that these gears would either always be spinning, or they'd spin when her legs were in motion, and it's great that they found a way to include a more dimensional representation of gears on her body. The only real issue with this idea is that it kept her from wearing full trousers or leggings, but that's not so unusual in this brand. The fish monsters never got to wear full-limb clothing due to their fins, so Robecca's just part of their club. 

Robecca is one of the dolls who debuted just past the elastic-hip-joints cutoff, so her dolls have always been manufactured with the newer, sturdier plastic hip joint. Good. I'd be annoyed to have to do a body swap on sig Robecca to upgrade her. Hair care and neck surgery are quite enough restoration work.

However, Robecca's body has always had the bizarre quirk of knee joints that are able to bend a fair bit forward the "wrong" way. She can even come close to a digitigrade-like stance, like she's a satyr!

I don't know how this came to occur, but the leg sculpts here just don't lock her knees at the same range as every other doll. The designers never adjusted her body sculpts to remove this quirk, either--her final doll to date, the SDCC exclusive chrome edition, still had the odd knees. 

However, the Dracubecca doll body, which is closely based upon Robecca's sculpts with some alterations (changing the rivet shape to hearts, adding wing holes, and removing the spinny gears), does not have the odd knees. That doll's legs bend the normal amount. I hadn't even thought to check that doll body then because I forgot pure-Robecca dolls were different! 

Tinny Tinkerpins demonstrates that the Dracubecca body has a normal knee range.

This might confirm that the Robecca quirk was an accident and that Mattel caught onto it and eliminated the oddity when they had the one chance to iterate on the sculpt with Dracubecca. Otherwise, though, it would have likely been deemed unjustifiable to redo the Robecca body and retire the active molds just to remove a harmless weird feature. Perhaps the legs were corrected as a consequence of the choice to change the rivet shape and take the gears out with the Dracubecca fusion--if the fused ghouls were going to get unique leg molds anyway, then Mattel might as well correct the knee articulation at the same time. 

If Mattel makes a G3 Robecca (do it do it I dare you, make a G3 character with all-over texture), I would expect nothing atypical about her knee articulation. 

Robecca represents huge steps forward and a bold commitment to fully going there in the brand. Because of Robecca, we have every other fully-textured doll we were treated to in G1. And even putting aside the ground she broke for the brand, sig Robecca Steam does a lot just as herself that's special. The color palette is dramatic and beautiful. It feels right in the sweet spot of being vibrant enough for a kid's toy while not going pastel or shoving in a prominent color that doesn't work. And Robecca enjoys a level of detail unique to her--her head sculpt has a level of texture that remains rare to this day, and those great spinning leg gears are entirely her own--never imitated, never challenged. 

I decided to take her down for a photoshoot. The best setting was the boiler pipes in my basement! I tried two iterations with orange paper as a light filter to color the scene, and did a sepia version in post.

Robecca was entirely worth the wait. She's not only one of the very most beautiful dolls in the brand, but she's also one of the coolest.

Now for the second (and so far, last) Monster High robot--the ghoul of the future! And there's two of her!

Elle Eedee (say it aloud) wins the "highest proportion of  'e' letters in a name" award. She also always stood out for me for looking unusually sophisticated, ethereal, and artistic. She has possibly the most intricate body sculpt of any Monster High character and uses a restrained all-cool color palette to very eerily beautiful and soft effect. No Monster High doll looks quite as much like a one-of-a-kind artist piece to me, and her aesthetic and detail have always been some of my favorites. The copy of deluxe Elle I own now has been in my collection since before I started publishing for this blog (I got her last winter), but I never reviewed her because I was waiting for a listing for her earrings to finally show up (she lacked them). Now, she's complete.

Boo York, Boo York was the penultimate Monster High G1 special and movie doll line. The movie focuses on an alien comet arriving in the city and Nefera de Nile trying to pass her sister Cleo off to an arranged marriage with the Ptolemy Egyptian royal family because Nefera doesn't want to take on the marriage herself. The Boo York dolls all have a crystalline theme with vac-metallized accent pieces, translucent crystal elements, and shimmery skin for almost every doll. The doll line was unique for featuring dolls of every standard body type (standard ghoul, two little sisters, one big sister, and one boy) and for having two releases for some of its new characters within the same line. This was well after the point where new movie characters had been doomed to be one-offs, so to have two editions of new characters within one movie line was not only unprecedented, but it was quite strange in an era of MH where movie-debuting characters only got one doll in their lifetime, period. The main trio of new characters in the doll line were Mouscedes King, the daughter of the Nutcracker Rat King, Luna Mothews, the Boo Jersey daughter of the Mothman, and Elle Eedee, daughter of robots. The standalone deluxe versions of the characters dressed for the gala are billed as "Gala Ghoulfriends", while the basic versions in casual clothing all came in a "City Ghouls" three-pack which lacked shimmery skin for Mouscedes and Luna. I believe Elle was the only doll to be shimmery in both editions, and I think City Ghouls Mouscedes and Luna and the Out-of-Tombers three-pack of Catty, Clawdeen, and Draculaura were the only Boo York dolls not to shimmer. The non-shimmery dolls also had no vac-metal chrome pieces.

The fourth new character in the Boo York doll line was Astranova, the alien glam rocker riding the arriving comet. She had only one doll bundled with a playset, but very bizarrely, she was released in two variants--a screen-accurate doll with dark blue skin, and another version unchanged but for the fact that her skin was very pale mauve for no discernible reason.

The last new Boo York main character was Seth "Pharaoh" Ptolemy, the mummy rapper Nefera tried to marry Cleo off to, but who was more interested in Catty Noir himself. Pharaoh had no doll release despite being an important character and a male mummy being something the brand hadn't done yet. Boy characters in girls' franchises have it rough. It's not only Ken's problem.

I loved Luna's gala doll and will probably reacquire her. She was incredible--just not as immediately meaningful to me as Elle. I can actually see myself working with the two different editions of Luna, Mouscedes, and Astranova, too, so stay tuned for whenever I want to do that.

I always liked the subtle theming tying the three main Boo York ghouls together. Although they're entirely disparate monster types, they reflect a primary-color triad as well as a temporal one. Mouscedes is coded with the color yellow and has a vintage socialite theme and comes from an old fairy tale, so she represents the past. Luna Mothews is coded with red and is a modernist goth from an enduring cryptid legend, reflecting the present. Elle Eedee is blue and represents a speculative technological future. 

We got a few mainline MH doll releases that felt like collector editions. Sweet Screams was a big one, and I think the Gala Ghoulfriends are also on that level. They have fun extravagant costumes with more fabric than a doll is usually afforded, and their shimmer and vac-metalized pieces adds another level of splendor to them. I also believe the dolls were slightly higher-priced. 

While I intended this just to be a late review of Gala Ghoulfriends Elle, I became increasingly interested in having her City Ghouls edition on hand to explore a different side of her. City Ghouls Elle has some parallels to signature Robecca's design which I think are fun, and I thought some minor restyling and repainting could be fun on that doll to try out some things her deluxe doll doesn't achieve. You'll see what I mean. We'll start with the gala doll.

I got this Elle last winter before Christmas, sans earrings. She was clearly deboxed very minimally, with all of her costuming elastic bands for packaging still on. I think she might have even still had a small plastic tag pinching her cape together, which was done to control its position and volume for the box. Because she was so minimally handled, it was especially perplexing and frustrating that her earrings were absent. I don't know how that happened.

I did really like the golden art-deco Boo York box design, and Elle, contrasting with her blue tones, looked the absolute best in the factory boxes out of the dolls in the line. 

Photo of Elle in her box.

I always thought it was interesting how Elle was blue like Robecca, suggesting an internal worldbuilding theme that robots are blue-toned in this world. Things like that had been done before, like every mainline vampire being a shade of pink, the G1 zombies having grey skin, the G1 ghosts having colored translucent-looking sclerae, or the shadow characters having purple skin and limbs that dissolved into grey shadow. 

Elle Eedee in the movie is a popular street DJ who has trouble dancing anything more complex than "the robot", since she can get overexerted and start glitching if she moves too much. Elle is also the receptor of the signal from the approaching comet, causing her to glitch even more.

Elle's first piece is a ponytail clip with a decoration shaped like signal dishes surrounded by crystals. The piece is a shiny teal, and for whatever reason, the decoration is a separate piece that pops onto a ball knob.

Elle's hair is in a wavy high ponytail composed of thin streaks of black, teal, and violet. Yes, you read that right: none of Elle's individual hair colors are actually dark blue, and yet that's exactly the color they all blend into when you look at her! 

Not pictured: dark blue!

The thin colored streaks remind me of fiber optics. In the movie and 2D art, Elle has a wedge-shaped widow's peak hairline, but lacks it on her dolls. I don't mind that at all. Her smooth hairline actually makes restyling her much easier!

Elle's factory hairstyle had two twists pulled from her forehead that wrapped around the base of her ponytail, but I found this unnecessary. The style was the same on her City Ghouls doll, which means Elle might be the only one of the Boo Yorker trio with the exact same factory base doll in both editions. Mouscedes and Luna were unshimmered in the three-pack, and Luna's bangs were rooted way farther back and curved out from the forehead while her gala doll's bangs were flat and didn't come from a weird spot.

Elle's hair is quite voluminous and thick, and is probably more hair than the doll strictly needs. 

Elle's face is gentle and wistful with a slight upward gaze, and her head is the most uniformly textured of any Monster High doll's. Plating and seams cover her face in subtle grooves, and she has other details. 

There's a molded and painted power button in her forehead, which, like...is that safe for Elle to have? Is it ethical to put an accessible off switch on her if she's no danger to anybody? I've also heard interpretations likening the power button to a bindi because it's a circle on the forehead, but that doesn't click so much for me personally. I don't think both of the robots are South Asian, but I won't tell anybody they're wrong for viewing Elle that way. The power button is engraved and printed over with purple, but the purple is slightly misaligned on my copy.

I really like the jaw seams that give her a slightly skeletal face structure, as well as pairing with her lips to give her a warmer smile to counter her wistful eyes and cold colors. All of the grooves in Elle's face plating are illuminated in neon blue in the Boo York special, but it's a lot to look at and it would have been prohibitively difficult to replicate on the doll.

Screenshot from Boo York, Boo York.

I prefer the subtlety of the doll. You really have to hunt for her details (which is the most fun part of a Monster High doll) and the subtler plating lends a sense of closer mimicry of a human form. I get these are loud-and-proud monsters, but the robot elements being less glaring adds to the air of Elle being extremely advanced and futuristic. 

Elle's face paint also includes some fun details. Her eyebrows are broken into rectangles at the end in what must be an allusion to the famous Back to the Future logo, and her eyes are depicted as camera apertures! Her face colors make her feel very airy and delicate, and her face paint is some of the lowest-contrast and least-graphical in the MH playline. Her eyeshadow is just airbrushing!

A common problem with G1 faces is that the most canonically energetic characters usually had very neutral or somber dolls due to the G1 brand favoring unemotive face sculpts. While this is a problem with Elle as well, I can't say her look doesn't flatter a ethereal android. She looks like the eerie, powerful innovation of intelligence that stories want us to fear, even though she really isn't feeling boisterous and fun. This dilemma is why I decided to add City Ghouls Elle to this review and my collection, because she'd be a great candidate to try modifying this faceup into a more punchy and alert and MH-typical form. Gala Elle is too beautiful to touch. 

Elle's face is quite shimmery, and her body matches the effect pretty well. Her color is more clearly grey up close, but from a distance, she looks strikingly pale and ghostly. 

Elle's ears are unique, being round discs that I promise you are meant to be microphones. 

Everywhere else, I've seen people interpret them as speakers, and yes, they look that way, but if her eyes are cameras, a machine that "sees", then her ears have to be a machine that "hears". It wouldn't make any kind of fantasy-logic sense for Elle's ears to be a noise-producing machine. Her ears are also unique because their earring hole is on the lower side of the disc and it's completely vertical, essentially disqualifying Elle from wearing most earrings that aren't her own. The earrings are metallic purple and shaped like dangling techy beaded rods.

Elle's dress is all one piece, unique among the Gala Ghoulfriends. It's wide-cut around the shoulders with a strip of black down the middle printed with colorful circles that visually abstract beats and waveforms from her DJ job. The rest of the dress is a metallic dark purple. 

Attached to the shoulders is a sheer triangular cape covered in circuitry patterns. The cape has a hole in the back. This makes it easier for the dress to open down the back and slide off her body with the attached nature of the cape, and also allows for the stand pole to slide through so the cape doesn't have to be flattened between Elle's body and the stand pole.

It's slightly "Queen Elsa" in tone.

This cape was also coated with some kind of microscopic shimmer particle that shed and rubbed off pretty easily, so I rinsed it to try to get that out. This was something I also experienced with the train on Luna's gala doll, but I don't think Mouscedes had this kind of thing because none of her outer fabrics were sheer.  

Over the dress, Elle has her designated vac-metalized piece, which is a large silver cage belt that clips around her waist and wraps around her hips. 

The piece is chrome silver with an art-deco design of cascading circuitry.  It was a risky move to make this chrome silver when none of the rest is, but it pairs well with her body and it ties the whole doll together way better than making it teal to match her hair accessory would have. It also works because there's no discrepancy in finish. If the vac-metal piece matched the color but not the shine of another part of Elle's costume it would make the other elements feel skimped on, like why aren't all of the pieces in that color chrome-shiny?

This piece is the aspect of gala Elle which is most like signature Robecca, as both robots have a framework belt around their waist. This cage belt essentially locks Elle's hip joints into an upright position, so she cannot sit or lean while wearing it. 

While the art-deco aspects of Boo York might seem contradictory to the overwhelming futurism of Elle's visual aesthetic, the retro 1920s aspect serves well to make Elle feel like a descendant of the robot from Metropolis. I'm pretty sure she's throwing a little bit of tribute to that major facet of robot media history, and it helps her feel more justified within the Monster High brand, which, by this point, felt like it was really reaching for new character types--I mean, a daughter of a character from The Nutcracker? That's an Ever After High character and you know it, Mattel. If you hadn't arbitrarily refused to do fully anthropomorphic animal characters in EAH, Mouscedes would have zero reason to be in MH.

Elle's shoes are wedge heels with gaps in the middle, such that the sole of her foot is not in contact with anything and only her heels and toes are touching the shoe.

The shoes are made to look riveted and crystalline, and add pretty much zero height to the doll, making her look pretty short among most MH dolls and their crazy platforms which are more common in the brand's footwear. I don't love these shoes for two reasons. For one, they're hard plastic, giving them no traction on her stand. Also, they're a translucent light blue that's matched by none of her other colors, save, perhaps, some of the designs on her cape. I feel like a more saturated look might have worked better. Catty Noir's Fierce Rockers shoes would be an easy swap to match her hair accessory and maintain the general look and crystal theme. At the same time, though, the delicate glass-shoes look does work with this Elle's ethereal coloring, and in conversation with the cape, the shoes just barely get by.

If you couldn't already tell from her head, Elle's level of body detail absolutely obliterates Robecca's. Every part of her is textured and intricate and it truly feels like you could build her "in real" at life-size because of how ornate and plausible she looks. Robecca's a tin can next to her. Which is really only proper, isn't it? Advances in tech and such?

Centuries of difference.

Part of the reason I wanted to spotlight Elle on this blog is because I feel like she's been a fairly overlooked character as a late-G1 two-off, and that means people have been sleeping on her incredible body detail.

As with the jaw seams, Elle's body continues the suggestions of creepy human-based anatomical workings in its mechanics, as well as featuring sleek plating and fake screws. 

She has a neck that looks both spinal and muscular with its ribbing and contours. This kind of detail also features in her elbows and her ankles to suggest flexing materials. 

Elle's belly and limbs feature a lot of flowing, graceful paneling. 

Elle's hands have detailed suggestions of futuristic joints, and clean palm plating.

On the back, Elle has an exoskeletal spine detail above a flexing waist core!

Also note the head plating going all the way around!

Elle's forearms and head have yellowed slightly with age, and I found no real change after trying to soak her in peroxide in the sunlight.

Elle's legs continue the great detail, and her ankles have cutout sections with simulated flex cores to suggest ankle articulation she was built with. Like any femme MH doll, she does not actually have a joint here.

Now, my absolute favorite detail, which might be one of the best things any Monster High doll has included. 

Most Monster High dolls feature their factory stamp on the small of their back. 

Elle, as you've seen, does not. She has some detail there that takes a little space that the stamp might not be able to occupy. So what did they do about that?

They moved the stamp to her right hip...and placed it within its own isolated panel in her leg sculpting, implying the stamp is a canonical, diegetic feature of Elle as a result of being artificially manufactured as a robot!

It's possible this is not the intended implication, but it would have been so easy for Mattel not to call attention to the new location of the stamp. The fact that they highlighted it with a distinct textured panel indicates they were turning the stamp into an aesthetic feature on purpose for a character who could realistically have a maker's mark like that in-universe! Mattel has also done something to turn a manufacturing feature into a monster detail before--G1 Skelita's head stamp code, normally just a manufacturing artifact out of view under a doll's hair, was chosen to read "KATRINA" to reference the Dia de Muertos icon La Catrina and turn the factory stamp that any doll would have into a reference to the Dia de Muertos custom of carving a name into a sugar skull! Post-G1 Skelita dolls do not have the same stamped head code, so they lost that thematic detail.

Elle's midsection and spine are a tad thinner than the typical MH doll. 

I can think of two reasons for this. One would be to emphasize a sleek, streamlined design and align with the robot-exoskeleton sculpting motif to show how compact her mechanics are. Another might be to give her cage belt a smaller waist to clip onto so it looks less bulky and creates a sharper hourglass contour. These differences are fine, but Elle does not fit in the unaltered stand clip shape that well because of them. With the loose waist hug and her shoes having no traction, it's very easy for Elle's legs to slide forward toward the edge of her base, and I think she'd fall out of the clip if the stand toppled forward.

The other G1 dolls I know who have significant contour differences within the typical G1 body template are Avea, with a different skinnier version of the torso shape but who needed no stand due to her centaur body; Luna, who has slightly bigger hips for a bug theme; and Jinafire, whose torso and limbs are observably beefier than the norm. I guess Skelita also counts, but she had no choice but to have differences.

Elle Eedee also left a tangible echo in another toy brand--the parts-swapping blind-boxed Capsule Chix mini dolls from Moose Toys! As to why I'm claiming there's any connection, it's because the Capsule Chix are futuristic android dolls with textured bodies and round disc ears...and the smoking gun is the fact that the Capsule Chix brand was headed by Monster High founder Garrett Sander after his understandable departure from MH post-G1. He had his eye on both robot designs, so there's gotta be a link. While the level of Elle's detail reminds me of characters designed by Natalie Villegas, Garrett Sander might have designed her and then adapted her traits to Capsule Chix...or else he took inspiration from his MH co-designers' work on Elle when working on Capsule Chix.

Stock photo of a Capsule Chix doll.

I actually ordered a group of some Capsule Chix dolls, hoping to use them as live photo reference, but they didn't come in soon enough and I got impatient, so I'm using this photo here to get this post out. If you'd like to see me talk briefly about the Chix when they come in, I can certainly do that!

I took Elle down for some photos. I wanted to stage her in a chair with a passably futuristic backdrop of whatever I could find, aiming to loosely homage Metropolis. I used the same candle holder I did the Gilliana shoot with, and a mirror as well as a hexagon-textured tablecloth pad for a floor. 

With the right lighting, I got some good pictures!

Gala Elle is an art doll masquerading as a play doll. She's exceptionally pretty and lavishly sculpted. 

Then, City Ghouls Elle arrived. 

City Ghouls Elle can show you the the wrapped ponytail hairstyle I took out of the gala doll. Two twists from the front encircle her ponytail.

This doll doesn't have any hair accessories, so the hair wrap actually serves a greater purpose on her to make her hair look more polished. Doesn't matter to me, though, since I've realized the perfect futuristic hairstyle for this doll will be to have her hair all combed over to fall to her right in a cyberpunk fashion. 

Elle's face screening is also unchanged, and as mentioned, she is the only City Ghoul not to have lost her shimmer. It makes sense that between a bug, a rat, and a robot, Elle would be the one who's inherently sparkly. This Elle's power button is printed perfectly.

Since this Elle has no earrings, I was curious if her atypical piercings would be punched in for this doll. They are not.

This Elle's head feels rigid and full of glue, and her neck peg isn't rotating properly. After these photos, I took her down to address this. Pulling gently on her head showed her neck seam was already splitting, so I just yanked and her peg popped out of the neck pretty easily, taking the internal bar with it. I then heated the head and used a fork to grab the loop and pull the peg out of the head with no damage--great! I don't have to harvest another doll's this time! I then took Elle down to perform the same neck surgery, first cutting some excess plastic out of the neck cavity so the peg would rotate properly, then popping the peg in and putting a pin through the neck to lock it in. 

Elle is the character this DIY artifact looks the most natural on, by far. It fits a silver robot.

Back to the review. Elle has a crystalline teal choker around her neck in this outfit. I think it looks off with her factory hair, but it should look great with the style I want for her. 

Elle's first similarity to signature Robecca is in the presence of her shrug jacket. Elle's jacket is purple and denim-like with sparkly thread  all the way through, and is constructed simply. It has half-length sleeves and no lapels or collar, lending it a sleeker tone.

Elle has a one-strapped dress with a circuitry print. This gives City Ghouls Elle her biggest design-scheme departure from gala Elle--this dress has prominent true green in it, a color absent from her other doll, and it adds a significant amount of pop and makes her colors feel more original than her other doll, beautiful though it is. I might try leaning into greens with my restyle touches so this meshes better and sets Elle apart from her other doll in a more meaningful way. I want the doll to be distinct enough even as a base so both editions are really worth having.

Elle's tall boots are her second similarity to Robecca. Rather than being jet propulsion, the pieces have platforms that appear to be hovering on energy or else just pretty futuristic tubing. I like the idea of these being levitating boots to complement Robecca. They're metallic purple with the floaty bars being translucent blue. Elle's boots are a more flexible plastic than Robecca's.

The boots make Elle very tall, standing half a head above her gala doll, and even making her taller than sig Robecca in her own big boots.

City Elle's body is yellowed comparably to gala Elle's. 

Alright, restyle time. Besides the neck surgery, I made a few visual changes. I took her hair down and boiled it a bit to remove the twists and shape it right for the style I wanted--swept over her head to fall to her right. While I was thinking of this style in cyberpunk terms, it also took on a distinctly emo or scene connotation that fit Elle surprisingly well and made her look more like a DJ! I just tied some of the hair on her left down later so the hair volume would remain to her right for that faux side-shave feel. 

The hair also works with the face sculpt to lend Elle quite an androgynous tone that suits a futuristic aesthetic really nicely. 

I knew I wanted to adjust her faceup, but wasn't sure which changes to make. I tested painting one of her pupils black to ground her gaze, but quickly wiped that back off when I saw how much more human it made her eyes look. The purple camera irises are well-chosen to look more eerie and robotic, and I wanted to keep that once I realized darkening the eyes would be losing something. I decided instead to darken Elle's lips and brows. I painted her lips dark green to bring that unique aspect of the City Ghouls color palette out, and then I somehow managed to paint her stuttered eyebrows over pretty darn cleanly to change them to midnight blue. I thought this faceup felt meaningfully distinct and fit with the look. 

To build out her ensemble a bit past basic-tier, she needed some form of belt, so I tried out the silver Barbie Extra Minis belt from my character Aleka. It's not a big piece but this outfit shape doesn't need one. It just needs a belt, and this was the only option I had that made sense. I also decided to add one of O.M.G. Fame Queen's silver crystal earrings to the side not covered by hair--because it's a dangle charm, the pendant still hangs down when the stud is put into her vertical piercing--and I gave her Scaris Deuce's dark green futuristic shades--bending them in a bit let them fit her head, though her large disc ears don't fit together with them. Lastly, I squeezed her right hand into a spare Luna Madison fingerless silver glove and gave her Fearidescent Frankie's purse. 

I'm so pleased with the result! 

City Ghouls Elle looks really different and has a truly unique appeal from her gala doll now. I also think she fits the theme of a day out on the city much more with the styling changes, and looks more like a robot DJ. Elle's face is not fierce, but I feel like I'm getting more of the character's gregarious energy in this styling. She seems more cheery. Also, she's just plain cool.

I think this Elle makes a great counterpart to signature Robecca as the futuristic parallel to her design.

And the two Elles are so distinct now that they have different faces and hairdos. My City Ghouls Elle now feels like a proper basic/signature counterpart to Elle's party look, and she stands apart as her own doll.

Here's some portraits with her.

This doll is so awesome. She's become my favored Elle! For all the gala doll meant to me, I'm surprised to have found a take on her I might like even more! I'm just so captivated by the energy of my restyle. 

Here's all three of my robot characters together.

I've had a great time with the bots in this brand. Robecca is beautifully vintage and represents key milestones in design. She really set the blueprint for innovation, not just as a robot in the fiction, but as a doll in the toyline! Elle, meanwhile, displays gorgeous intricacy and really fun futuristic theming that feels dipped into retro in just the right ways. She's one of the most impressive examples of sculpting in the brand and is very pretty. Her City Ghouls doll was meh as sold, but with some new styling to set her apart, she became the superior Elle Eeedee.

I hope to work with more Boo York characters in the future, and maybe Gore-geous Accessories Robecca if a reasonable offering for her ever pops up. For now, though, I'm very happy with the robots I have.