Anniversary Reunion, Part 3: Lighting Up the Deep with Kala

 Lastly, my third inaugural doll returns!

During that first shopping trip, Kala was the second doll I picked up at Walmart. I've always been a passionate fan of cephalopods, and I think I was excited that Kala had four arms and a curvier body type than the standard. 

Like with Gooliope, I owned two copies of the doll in my original collection due to damage occurring. Kala I had one of her lower tentacles (more accurately, they'd just be called arms, as wrong as that sounds to the lay person) split partially down the seam and fall off the ball joint. Kala II had a face I liked more, but both had the same frustratingly puffy hair fiber. There was actually a lot to dislike about the way Kala was made, but her aggressively colorful, almost psychedelic tropical look was so stunning, and I loved her sculpts. I hoped I could get a better result this time around. 

Go here to read my first post in this series, and here to read the second.

Kala Mer'ri is from the Great Scarrier Reef movie line (read more context on that here). She is the squid-mermaid daughter of the mythical Kraken who fears her scaritage being found out, since her father is reviled, and she is Lagoona Blue's ex-friend from their shared hometown. They used to be on the same dance team until a childish misunderstanding caused Lagoona to alienate Kala through Kraken-phobia and Kala retaliated by essentially traumatizing Lagoona out of being able to perform capably on stage. In the GSR special, Posea Reef, the meddling daughter of Poseidon, recalls Lagoona to her home so she can fix her unresolved problems and save the magical flower in the reef that represents her lifeline. Kala has a two-ghoul clique in conjoined Hydra sisters Peri and Pearl Serpentine, but Peri is less on board with Kala's cruelty.

I always thought the dolls had some accidental ugly implications when the story of GSR was dropped, since there had been instances of Kraken imagery being evoked for fear in their designs. Student Disembodied Council Lagoona, released before GSR, has a dress with a print of ships attacked by the Kraken, which would be extremely hateful given Kala's baggage--and it's worn by Lagoona, the monster who hurt her most with that attitude! Later, after GSR, G2 Shriekwrecked Rochelle Goyle has an outfit with scary tentacle imagery and a headband of a ship being attacked by a Kraken. That's cute and all...if the G1 lore hadn't featured a story that made those fashions look like out-and-out bigotry in this universe. 

The Kala I got this time was incomplete, just missing an earring, so I ordered another set on the side. The replacements took too long to arrive, though, so I ended up finishing this post without the second earring. They're symmetrical, so it's not like I'd be lacking some visual documentation without both.

Kala's aesthetic is deliberately overwhelming, mixing bioluminescent neons with tropical reef colors in a really successful, arresting manner. While the GSR line is overall very colorful and a bit kiddie as a result of the Monster High brand's developing shift to a younger audience, Kala's brightness and high visual activity feels very effective and intentional and I wouldn't want her palette reduced or darkened.

While her natural counterpart would be the giant squid that likely inspired Kraken mythology, Kala is far more vivid than giant squids are. 

Kala isn't the only squid doll in the GSR line. Very cleverly, Draculaura was transformed into a vampire squid! A good while ago, I did a custom-character project with the GSR Draculaura body, and after a long wait to see if it was all for naught, the custom dye has actually survived within the vinyl, so she might be ready for sharing now. I'm still not quite sure she's finished, but she won't need much. Maybe her post will come before the month is out, since other things feel a little stalled and she's a good candidate for keeping things moving here!

Back to Kala.

Kala's hair is a beautiful blend of thick stripes in midnight indigo and neon coral. The coral stripes are subtly two-toned with strands of neon orange and pink together. The hair is the biggest problem with this doll. It's a very wavy, puffy, dry fiber that was also featured on signature Jane Boolittle. 

Neither Jane nor Kala is White-coded, so maybe it was chosen for a certain texture? But the fiber is very frustrating. It puffs out to a ridiculous degree when combed or brushed, and that really hurts Kala, who's supposed to look like she has a high ponytail and can't with how curled her hair is. The other problem with this hair is that it straightens instantly in hot water and loses its shaping, and that straight hair doesn't feel or behave great either. My first copy demonstrates through archival photos:

(It's actually very useful, for discussion and my potential success with this doll, that she's not my first Kala!)

I think there were some straight-haired dolls with fiber like this, too. I recall I Love Fashion Iris and Boo York Cleo having very similarly unruly coarse hair that could have been the same fiber--Boo York Cleo especially, since her color might be the same as the blue in Kala's hair. Londoom Elissabat's hair was also coarse and difficult, but hers felt thicker than Kala's and didn't have the same instant-straightening effect in hot water.

While I'd tried a possibly-useless method I'd heard of washing doll hair alternately in boiling and cold water back and forth during my original era, that did nothing for my second Kala--her curls went right out the second she touched the hot water, just like the first.

So I was intimidated by the prospect of working with the third doll. I figured I had two options that felt practical--one, I would try combing her hair out wet in lukewarm water and give her a fabric-softener treatment to see if that did anything to tame and soften the hair and improve its texture for the intended shape. And two, if that failed, I would just add a second hair tie further down her pony to keep its volume in the correct narrow silhouette. I wanted to err on the side of doing less this time.

This hair would have been incredible in microbraids, maybe even wavy ones like G3 Venus.

Kala's skintone is a deep magenta color leaning a bit closer to purple than pink. She's the darkest pink doll released in the brand, indicating she's probably meant to be coded as dark-skinned.

Photo from a review of Kjersti that never was, taken years ago.
(Left to right: Feisty/Love Inner Monster, Gigi Grant, Kjersti Trollssøn, Kala Mer'ri)

Gooliope, Kjersti, Kala, and the Create-a-Monster Blob are the most saturated pink-skinned dolls in the brand.

Kala's face is very bold and has a lot going on. 

Her eyes are wide and blue, with opposing eye reflections that make her look wall-eyed and fishy, aided by blue pupils like the Serpentines and Posea. Her orange eyebrows have a crinkle-fry kind of shape. Orange fish fins seem to come from her eyes with wavy lashes, dots go over the inner eye curve, and her lips have sucker-like yellow dots on them.

She also has symmetrical paler patches over her eyes that might be referencing Aboriginal Australian face paint. Kala overall looks like she might be attempting to reflect indigenous Australians, given the ancient age of her monster and the location of the movie. I have no authority on how accurate or respectful Kala's representation, if it's representation at all, actually is. The Aussie element is pretty underplayed in the GSR media (only Posea of four debuting characters has an Australian accent), and the Kraken comes from Icelandic/Norwegian folklore, so I wonder if a hypothetical G3 Kala would change her nationality to be more accurate to the folklore like they did with G3 Abbey.

Kala's expression isn't fierce or cruel, and I can't help but feel like it would have been if she were an earlier-G1 release. Then again, G2 tested more animated facial sculpting with Moanica, a mean ghoul who looked like a conniving villain, so who knows? I remember finding my first Kala to look a little sad, so I chose a copy that looked a little warmer and happier for the second. Kala III's face feels pretty neutral to me, but has an element of eagerness or wonder to it that I enjoy.

Kala's earrings are dark blue translucent hoops with spikes on the bottom. They match her hair but not her lower body. Her ears are round fleshy protrusions that seem to be mimicking the water-jet siphons on the sides of a cephalopod's "head". They're very cool. 

Kala has small bumps on her chest for more texture, and there are more down her spine.

This texture doesn't feel very authentic to a real squid, but for a destroyer-monster supernatural squid, it's appropriate.

Because Kala is a squid mermaid, four of her eight arms are humanoid, attached to her torso. It's possible, but not confirmed, that her name may derive partially from the Hindu goddess Kali because of this, as Kali is a death goddess portrayed with four arms. Of course, the more direct and obvious basis of her name is a pun on "calamari" (cooked squid, usually fried in batter) and "mermaid". 

Kala is the only MH doll with four humanoid arms, but she's not the first with extra arms--she's beaten out by Wydowna Spider and her six arms. I Love Fashion Wydowna is a doll I need back in my collection, but I owned Kala first. Like Wydowna, the arms are stacked on top of each other in the side of her torso, and pose as normal, allowing Kala to multitask or display multiple two-arm gestures at the same time. You can even mix her upper and lower arms together to make diagonal arms cooperate for a two-arm pose. I can imagine living with two sets of arms would lead someone not to distinguish between the upper and lower sets when using them.

The ball shapes of the arm hinges are ringed by fleshy lines that remind me of the edge of a squid's mantle above its eyes and arms. Some more little bumps also appear on the arms. 

Kala's twenty fingers are sculpted with suckers on the underside!

Her upper left, lower left, and upper right wrists have bracelets. The upper right and lower left share a sculpt but are different colors. The sculpts look like coral and an urchin skeleton!

Kala's outfit is pretty simple. She's wearing a sheer yellow sleeveless overcoat over a bra-like top.

 

The coat has a very cool pattern of black squids, and the edges are finished in neon coral.

Over her waist, Kala has a midnight blue belt with a spiky texture. This is the worst belt/doll pairing I've ever dealt with in MH.  From my experience, it's way too tight and very very difficult to stretch and close in back, and the slippery material of her coat on her body does not help remotely. It's a fight to put this piece back on, and it feels like the belt wasn't even designed for her, though I think it was. I think this piece was reused for the Skullector Betelgeuse doll in black, but it had to have fit her better because it was going around a smaller waist.

While I later got this belt back on Kala in record time (I don't recall taking any less than three minutes to achieve it in the past, while it was about 1.5 minutes this time), I still resented the difficulty and I won't concede anything to the design. It should have been less strict.

Underneath, Kala's top has clear elastic straps and only covers her breasts, mermaid-style. The pattern is similarly abstract to other GSR clothing.

Kala's lower body could serve as a complete squid in itself, with the shape below her waist forming a loose squid's mantle, arms, and feeding tentacles. The majority color is a dark purple that doesn't match Kala's hair color.

Kala's squid arms are yellow and made of a slightly rough-textured hard plastic. Each arm is bent in an S-style shape, and each has just the one joint, with cups that clip onto balls on the end of her body. 

This is the source of one of her other big problems. Her hard-plastic arms are made of two pieces of pressed-together plastic each, and the material couldn't be a worse choice. The ball joints aren't very tight on this copy, and never had too much friction on the older Kalas, and I'd observed one Kala's arms splitting down the seam enough to not be able to stay attached to the joint. The hard plastic also offers no friction on a surface, so with looser joints, she's not the most stable. Posea Reef had none of these issues. Her three seaweed tentacles were also ball-jointed, but the pieces were a sturdy, springy softer plastic with perfect friction on the joints and the surface she stood on. I wish Kala's squid arms had been made of the same thing.

The feeding tentacles (or, pedantically, her only true tentacles) are a singular piece mounted on a pin under her body. This allows them to rotate a little bit.

They're a glossy hard plastic, but they're springy, hopefully to keep from snapping, and they're Kala's glow-in-the-dark element, glowing a pale typical green color. It's not spectacular enough to photograph, especially because the glow color doesn't match the plastic. Posea Reef proved Mattel could make that happen, but most of their glow stuff is the same green.

There is no color transition from her upper body to her squid tail, with the magenta skin cutting off abruptly at her torso piece. The pink print on the squid tail does not match her upper body. The upper part of the purple tail section is sculpted like it's still part of a humanoid torso, including a navel, but the coloring of the pieces makes Kala look like her humanoid half just ends at her breasts. Was it too scandalous for Kala to have a bare magenta midriff?

Kala's torso has a joint, something Posea in the same line also had, and the yellow hub her lower squid arms attach to can rotate with a ratchet joint that turns into set positions. I always found Kala's torso joint limited in motion, though I think Kala II's was better. Getting Posea and seeing her torso joint, however, proved that any Kala's torso moved less than it ought to. 

Like several other MH merfolk, Kala has a waist joint, but doesn't sit fully upright.

I took her down for a comb and fabric softener treatment to see if that would improve her hair any.

After treatment, her hair is softer and more orderly, but the volume is still massive and puffy. Tying it down with another band didn't help much, because the ponytail doesn't hang directly downward. 

And I forgot to discuss Kala's body type. One of the reasons she was so striking to me was that she was tall and fuller-figured. I had assumed she was taller and curvier than the big-sister adult G1 body, but looking now, the differences aren't all that stark. Without doll stands, Kala at her tallest height and Bloodgood are about on par. 

It says something about how starved G1 was for body diversity for me to have come away thinking Kala was the "big girl" rep of the cast when dolls like curvy Barbie and G3 Catty now clearly show that Kala's not very plus-size. Like, yeah, her hips and butt are wide, but this is a mermaid doll. Her arms are just as skinny as the big-sister sculpt, and her breasts are about the same size, if not a bit larger.

Kala's body type is by no means invalid. But I don't think it's as standout or groundbreaking as I had previously credited it.

I then set to taking some photographs. I found the most perfect neon paisley fabric to use as a backdrop,  and it contained all of her colors!

This one with her reclining was my favorite, though. I tried crossing her squid arms over a little like she was crossing her legs, but I don't think it came through.

And I took a picture of her with a dark backdrop and color-boosted and tinted the piece for a blacklit bioluminescent effect, like what I did with Neon Frights Frankie.

And here's Kala with her best ghoulfriends Peri and Pearl. 

I reminded myself how much I loved them after my restyle when I took them out!

I'm probably going to find myself getting the fourth GSR character with Posea someday, because I remember coming away feeling like she was the best-made doll in the pool of new characters.

And here's my trio reassembled.

I'm not happy to say it, but I think Kala is the least of the three dolls I picked as my firsts way back when. Her manufacturing just isn't satisfying enough. Her hair fiber can't really be directed or reshaped with any grace, her yellow tentacles aren't tight enough and can break, and her torso joint isn't very mobile. Her belt is also very frustrating to use. She's a really striking design with some awesome sculpting, but workable Operetta and high-quality Amanita beat her in terms of the toy experience. 

By no means does that mean Kala was a waste. She's an unforgettable doll for toys at large as well as Monster High. She's a bright spot in many ways.