Altogether the VERY Ookiest: The Monster High Skullector "Addams Family" Set By Mattel Creations

I was torn deeply about the Skullector Creature from the Black Lagoon, but I basically forgot all about her once these were revealed. There wasn't a question in my mind: I needed these and I would get them. I haven't found a Skullector release so good or so relevant to my interests since the Bride of Frankenstein dolls.  I immediately shuffled out a space for them in my budget. If I couldn't get these at early-access or standard launch, I didn't even care about going aftermarket. There was just no missing these for me.

Get ready to read exhaustive analysis of this franchise. Take it as encouragement to pursue the works I'm gushing about if you haven't already, because oh my gosh-

About the Addamses: They're Creepy and They're Kooky...

I was actually a Munsters kid growing up, but in recent years, I've come to really treasure rival franchise The Addams Family and its cultural impact, and have since become a pretty fierce fan and nerd re: the franchise. I haven't dived into every incarnation, though.

Created as a dark parody of the American nuclear family in The New Yorker magazine cartoons by Charles Addams, the Addams family who took his name are codified by the original one-panel cartoons and the TV series adaptation, the latter of which named and fleshed out the characters. The core family is father Gomez, mother Morticia, daughter Wednesday, and son Pugsley. Uncle Fester and Grandmama live with them, and each has been inconsistently placed over the years re: their side of the family. Zombie-like butler Lurch serves the family, and "handyman" Thing serves as a helper and companion, always being depicted in some way as a hand or arm without a body. 

In the TV show, Thing was performed practically and thus manifested as an arm that always came out of a container somewhere, while the Sonnenfeld films used visual effects to make Thing an autonomous crawling severed hand, a portrayal which continued to the MGM animated films and Wednesday. The films raised Thing's importance as a character, and show him communicating with gestures, Morse code, and ASL, which continues into Wednesday. There, he tags along to Nevermore Academy as Wednseday's companion, and often acts as her conscience and brings out her most empathetic side.

 

The other main recurring Addams is Cousin Itt (spelled "It" in some incarnations), a diminutive person covered with (or possibly made of) long hair who only speaks in high-pitched chatters the other characters can understand. He typically wears a bowler hat and circle-lens sunglasses.

 The Addamses are old-money and idly wealthy, and the original TV series shows they're currently profitable through Gomez being an investing whiz. Despite this, the family has never been portrayed as monetarily driven, miserly or snobbish, and I choose to believe they'd give money easily to anybody in need. Nothing about them smacks of malicious or self-protective wealth to me.

The main gag of the Addamses themselves is their off-kilter grim nature contrasted against sanitized cheerful society. The Addamses are eerie figures who tiptoe just over the line of the supernatural and alarm polite society with their love of the gruesome, cruel, and ghoulish. Torture is harmless play to these people, darkness and gloom are their beauty, and while they're evidently mortal, they can't be hurt, killed, or destroyed easily, if at all. With the lack of a solid identifier for what the Addamses' nature truly is, "Addams" serves as a type or identity as much as it is a family name; to be an Addams is its own classification--though, of course, these creepy people are textually able to come from anywhere since many Addamses married in like Morticia did. 

The Addams clan see nothing strange about themselves, of course. At the same time, they're an incredibly loving, kind, tight-knit family unit with far healthier dynamics interpersonally than most comedy families of the time. Morticia and Gomez have an egalitatian marriage where they-co parent and operate without deception, and are forever madly in love. The kids are always indulged and supported to their best benefit, even when the parents disagree or have doubts in their children's wants or needs, and as a result, the kids adore their family. The Addamses create some compelling social commentary beyond the gags--their biggest inversion of the archetypal family dynamic might actually be how functional and happy they are! Maybe there's something there about how the norms are dysfunctional and that happily weird people pursuing their interests are healthier...

The live-action 1960s TV series was essential to the Addams brand, as it named and defined the characters for the first time and dropped one of the most catchy and iconic theme songs ever written onto the world. 

Today, in "images you can hear..."
(dun dun dun dun-*snap, snap*

The show did suffer the pitfall of having to tone down its dark theming a bit for a general TV audience at the time, so the macabre-ness of the show has less bite than the Charles Addams cartoons or later incarnations of the franchise.

After the first TV series and some TV cartoons that kept the name going, the 1990s Barry Sonnenfeld live-action film duology produced one of the best and best-loved takes on the Addams Family universe, and despite me first viewing the films in 2022, they quickly became my favorite take on the IP. The films were impeccably cast, like, how did everybody feel that perfect and, while they were family films and not obscene, they still brought in a newer level of edge with toothier gags and more textually sexy (even kinky) passion between the already-amorous parents. It all felt authentic and the comedy was spot-on, only buoyed further by the second film's villain Debbie, a gauche Barbie-girl black widow played by Joan Cusack holding her own phenomenally against the powerhouse returning cast. (Mattel, I beg you, make a Debbie Barbie doll.) Both films focus on scammers targeting the family, oddly enough. The first film feels more built on gag vignettes adjacent to the ostensible plot, provides a backstory for Fester, and is a bit more indulgent in spooky atmosphere and visual drama, while the second film is more plot-driven and consistently comedic and politically pointed in its B-plot at the summer camp. Grandmama Addams was recast in the second film.

The Sonnenfeld films' biggest impact on the Addams brand is definitely the way they permanently reshaped the personality of family daughter Wednesday Addams through Christina Ricci's perfect reinterpretation, turning Wednesday into the standalone icon she is today. The films also feature the intriguing note of a "normal" becoming an Addams through the character of milquetoast Margaret Alford falling for Cousin It and the family, and marrying It and having a baby with him by the time of the second film. 

The Addams Family brand has stayed relevant in the time since the movies due to the Sonnenfeld films' enduring popularity, a series of MGM animated films that are largely known as just okay (note that MGM is the current rights holder/licensor for the franchise), and the most high-profile recent Addams project-- Tim Burton's Wednesday Netflix series, starring Jenna Ortega as a teen Wednesday at a monster academy. (Season 2 is on its way, and surprisingly, Season 1 just dropped on physical media, which is very rare for a Netflix property.) Notably, the Wednesday take on the family makes Gomez explicitly Latino in accordance with his name, and he and his kids are cast in accordance with this. (It's not clear if Fester is his brother in Wednesday, but the casting would allow for that theming since Fred Armisen is part Venezuelan.) 

The Wednesday series features brilliant work from Ortega in a role previously unimpeachably owned by Christina Ricci, and the other Addams characters are great and highlights of the show...but the series otherwise has cliché and inauthentic-feeling adults-writing-kids YA TV scripting, and I don't know how much its more mature tone suits it. I hope Ortega's increased creative influence in Season 2 improves the show's writing for the non-Addamses. By all indications, Ortega had the best creative instincts for the project out of anybody, given the way she was reported to have held the reins firm on her character to avoid performing material that would put her in the pitfalls elsewhere in the writing, and Ortega and her role shone among the rest of the show as a result. Her stubbornness behind the scenes has been controversial, but I completely agree with her understanding of the franchise and her role, so I applaud it. I wouldn't want to perform the YA teen scripting of the rest of the series, either! Series 1 of Wednesday is not a very good show, but Jenna Ortega put everything in and held strong on her vision to make a great performance. Wednesday has definitely left its mark on pop culture, and despite its uneven quality, I'd consider the series to be a part of the major pantheon of Addams works alongside the original TV show and the Sonnenfeld films. I'm cautiously optimistic for Season 2.

Modern viewers resonate with both the countercultural darkness and the radical love the Addams family has come to represent, and there's been a progressive political bent too-- the second Sonnenfeld film, Addams Family Values, directly lampoons conservative social politics and shows how monstrous "normality" can get through a toxically cheerful and aesthetically Nazistic summer camp. Both Values and Wednesday have it out for the Pilgrims too, each taking their stances on demythologizing the story of the USA's colonization, though I think Values (while having its own things to interrogate) does things more intelligently and was more radical and significant for its time.

In all, the Addams family are so lovable because they're interesting and they (ironically) feel like a group of people you could trust and be safe with. They're the right side of weird. 

We'd heard about an influx of Addams dolls coming to Monster High in 2024, with a Wednesday collection and a rumored pair based on the older Addams Family films. For a while, it was floated as a Gomez/Morticia pair before being stated as a Wednesday/Morticia duo instead. I was excited for the prospect of Monster High dolls from the franchise, and the final product absolutely blew me away. The dolls looked ten times better than I could have expected, and felt very much like the actual canon characters popped into the brand--my favorite mode of Skullector adaptation. And oh my gosh, they finally brought back the other G1 ghoul body types???? They couldn't have picked a better opportunity, I'll say that much.

This property is also a perfect match for Monster High. Wednesday goes to a similar supernatural school in the Wednesday series, and people like the Addamses, if not explictly nonhuman, are nonetheless not "normies" and would have an easy time enrolling in the school. 

The pairing of Wednesday/Morticia is a bit unusual. While Wednesday is very much her mother's daughter, not much is especially made of their specific mother/daughter relationship until Wednesday explores a strained version of it with Wednesday as a teen. Morticia and Gomez would have been the expected choice especially since they're such a beloved and enviable couple, and I'm a little sad that there's pretty much no chance there would be a Gomez now--solo Skullectors are female, the only character he'd reasonably pair with is Fester, and there are no male-only Skullector two-packs either because the market has created a structure of having as few boy dolls as possible. I'm certainly not unhappy with what we have, but I wish it wasn't doomed to be all we get from the more classic Addams-verse.

Mattel did take the opportunity to leverage the dolls as a Mother's Day celebration, though only the purchase was possible for the holiday occasion. It was disclosed and proven that the dolls would not ship until June.

These dolls are a legacy adaptation not anchored to one portrayal, and are taking bits and pieces from the franchise's history, which I'll discuss in more detail as I go.

The Dolls and Packaging

I was disappointed at launch to see these dolls were more of a pre-order than an immediate release for buyers, since the dolls were listed as being shipped as late as June (specifically, "June 28 or before") despite the drop being in May. That's not typical. Despite this, I was there for Fang Club early-access (it could finally be useful to me!) to get the best chances with these dolls. Sure, I'd swallow aftermarket costs, but not if I can help it!

Unfortunately, I seemed to have been flagged as not registered in the Fang Club, so I was directed to re-purchase that membership (should have definitely checked on that status before, oops) and by the time I found myself back to the shop page, early access had sold out in three minutes. Mattel were kidding themselves by pretending the purchase window would be open for hours.

I have zero reason to cease being bitter and cynical toward this system.

I crossed my fingers intensely that the public access would work out. The next day, I speedran the Captcha and got into a queue, and I was able to check out! I waited a little to ensure the confirmation email would come and validate that nothing had gone afoul, though. Of course, it came just minutes later. Success and no aftermarket cost!

Internally, I was shouting for joy and running a victory lap.

On Instagram, I was just outright screaming.

Perhaps Fang Club early access will help me another time. The RuPaul "Dragon Queen" doll, while cute in concept, had no draw to me, so maybe another Garden Ghost or some upcoming surprise reveal will be the one to test it on.

Morticia and Wednesday have a new Skullector box design, at least for what I've gotten. I didn't pay attention to what the Creature had. 

The two panels on the front and photography look familiar...

...but the split wraps around the box--this isn't a box with folded door flaps, but instead, it's a box in a two-piece shell!

Photos of the dolls are on the side of the outer box, and Wednesday and Morticia are framed in front of their house on the back.

One major point The Munsters always had over The Addams Family was that the Munster house had an iconic address you could refer to as the house's name--1313 Mockingbird Lane. The Addams mansion never had a name or address and that's remained consistently disappointing. Both families' houses are characters in their own right, but only the Munster home can be named per its address.

Here's the shell sliding off to reveal the back of the inner box.

I like this system of covering the inner box. The shells are sturdy cardboard and they work better than the folded panel doors which never laid flat. This system almost feels like parting curtains for a grand reveal, and that's really fun.

The copy on the back of the box is a dialogue between Morticia and Wednesday referring to you as a guest who has just arrived. I think the first red line is the visitor, while the rest are Morticia in white and Wednesday in red. It's a little confusing who the first line is.

The front of the box has a window over a backdrop styled as the foyer of the Addams mansion. An A monogram can be seen in the scenery, and a double staircase is behind the characters.

This scenery is derived from the MGM animated films.

These dolls are not directly based on this incarnation of the family, but it's clear it factors in. Unsurprisingly, MGM is the credited licensor on the bottom of the box, though they would have been regardless of the visuals.

There were two Living Dead Dolls releases based on the MGM animated family-- a two-pack of Gomez and Morticia, and Fester and It (the latter not using any LDD doll parts).

Fester has unique body sculpts in addition to his unique head, lending him a big, potbellied physique!

Morticia and Fester look really good, and It is fun despite just being doll hair on a felt tube. I'm really only interested in LDD for its original characters, of which there are far too many left on my list, though the Addams LDDs are the most tempted I've been by any licensed offerings.

Back to MH. The clear window fits into the front of the inner box and pulls out, and the doll backdrop also comes out of the front. Most MH boxes with separate backdrop inserts have a top-loading box design where the backdrop pulls out of the top.

The dolls also appear on the sides of the inner box.

Morticia's side.

Wednesday's side.

The back of the backdrop has access for the stand bases and clips and certificate of authenticity.

Unboxing the dolls wasn't too difficult, but with this style of enclosed backdrop, the sides had to be unfolded to let the stand poles slide out. Easily done. The two stands are identical in height and clip size. 

I welcome this being the new style of Skullector boxes, but Mattel has kind of abandoned consistency with its Skullector releases having variable box construction now, so who knows what the next two-pack will have.

Morticia Addams

The Addams mother as illustrated by Charles Addams.

Morticia in the MGM animated films, which draw heavily from the style of the Addams drawings.

Morticia Addams, née Frump (pet-named "Tish" by her husband Gomez) was first played by Carolyn Jones in the sixties TV series, and then portrayed especially brilliantly by Anjelica Huston in the nineties movies and Catherine Zeta-Jones in Wednesday. Huston was particularly born for the look and she played Morticia beautifully with a sweet icy grace. Her Morticia also had lots of the funniest moments in either movie, with Huston dropping macabre punchlines out of left field perfectly every time. Zeta-Jones gives Morticia more of a steely side as she struggles with her past and her relationship with her daughter. I can't say either is better; they're both great portrayals. I suppose I'm most partial to Huston myself, but I think Zeta-Jones is incredibly strong in her own ways.

The best way to describe the icon that Morticia has become would probably be that she is the "killer woman", but I'm using this to mean something different from "the femme fatale" because Morticia isn't a seductress or a driving force for a male narrative--she's just the epitome of grace and glamor and she's mysterious and dark and deadly and is capable of destroying you without ever raising her voice. Her look has always been vampiric (the Sonnenfeld films even give her special Dracula lighting with a constant band of light across her eyes) while her macabre behavior has mixes of witchcraft and serial-killer. Morticia is composed and often serious in cases where you might expect levity, and she's more dangerous the softer she speaks. So a Monster High doll had to capture a lot--sleek, dark, intimidating poised beauty and wicked danger...and they absolutely did it.

(Of course, through this all, Morticia is quite a warm, loving, sensible lady, and she and Gomez are extremely passionate partners. The Addams adults maintain a sense of wonder, curiosity, and play as well, making them great, healthy companions to the children.)

Here she is in Monster High form.

Doll Morticia's hair is long, black, center-parted out of her face, and all swept behind her back. Of the major portrayals, this is actually closest to the way Catherine Zeta-Jones wears her Morticia hair in Wednesday. Carolyn Jones and Anjelica Huston have some of their hair falling in front of the body, and Jones wore her hair wavier. CGI Morticia's hair is shorter and also falls in front a little.

This hair is saran that feels nice, but is the kind of fiber you need to re-comb every two seconds after motion or touch messes it up. It's a little frustrating.

Morticia's face is gorgeous.

The first thing to strike me about the dolls was their striking pale skin tone, looking deathly and cold. The dolls are white with a touch of pale flesh blushing on their cheeks, creating a unique translucent pallor illusion that feels far more artsy than previous dolls in the brand which look more solid-colored. This paint job makes the Addamses look washed-out in a very cool way. I also think the vinyl itself is mildly translucent. The doll has a very frosty look that isn't as opaque or stark as other dolls I have in this range.

The effect isn't as obvious as the translucency of the Haunted dolls in G1, but I think there's something similar going on here.

Morticia and Wednesday are both depicted with purple eyes, and Morticia's have light reflections shaped like coffins! 

Morticia's lips are a dark red color, and while it looks great and I'm typically a huge proponent of dark lipstick, this is actually a doll that could have afforded to go brighter. In the nineties films, Morticia has bright red lipstick that pops against her pale skin and dark hair and dress, and that could work for the doll given the bright red nails. 

Anjelica Huston doing the best.

The dark red is true to CGI Morticia and Zeta-Jones, though.

I could have sworn Morticia was reusing G1 Cleo de Nile's head because those cheekbones, eyes, and chin look so similar.

Cleolei, whose sculpt is built off G1 Cleo's face save for the ears, demonstrates.

However, Morticia is stamped with a 2024 copyright on the head. That's actually not conclusive to me, because Cleo got her Creeproduction doll new this year, meaning it's possible Creepro Cleo re-molded her old head and updated the copyright, and thus Morticia's head really is Cleo's. But I don't know why Cleo's head would need to be updated when G1 Frankie's wasn't. Her head from the first-batch Creepro release had the 2008 stamp. I can't be convinced Morticia would need a new sculpt if she's so extremely similar to Cleo, but without looking at Creepro Cleo, I can't be certain this is actually a unique face. If this is Cleo's face, the choice is perfect for refined spooky beauty, and if it's not, it still looks great!

This Morticia doesn't look a majority like any of her previous specific portrayals. She's sharper of face and aesthetically more luxe than Carolyn Jones and her face isn't as long and caricatured as the looks sported by Anjelica Huston or the MGM animated Morticia--she doesn't have the arched shadowed eye sockets with the almost drag-style makeup that they do. Her eyes also aren't as narrow as Huston's or Catherine Zeta-Jones' Wednesday portrayal. This feels like an original rendition of the classic character who nonetheless ticks all the boxes. If anything, she feels like a mix of MGM Tish with the color palette and Zeta-Jones with the hair shape and vague facial resemblance--and those are Morticia's two most current portrayals.

Her ears are slightly lengthened on top.

Morticia's dress is a body-hugging number as is typical for the character, entirely overlaid with spiderweb lace that also covers her collarbone and arms with no under-layer. The sleeves have a flowy tattered effect to look grand and gothic.

The sleeves are fiddly because the netting can catch on her fingers and the strips can fall across her arms in strange ways.

Over the bodice, Morticia is wearing a beaded silver chain harness that makes her look quite opulent and glamorous. It's entirely unique to the doll--no Morticia has looked as bejeweled as this before, but it's really nice. 

Morticia's visual motif for MH is roses, given the long-running character gag of Morticia being a gardener who prunes her flowers by "decapitating" them with shears. This originated in the TV series, continued to the nineties films, and even got a nod in Wednesday when Morticia leaves a rose on a grave of a bitter past acquaintance--pulling the bloom off with her hand before dropping the stem onto the plot.

Carolyn Jones' Morticia pruning a rose.

Catherine Zeta-Jones' Morticia about to behead a rose at the cemetery.

I already showed Huston's portrayal doing the same.

As such, this harness features a rose charm in the middle of the chest, and also features shears dangling from one of the bead strings. 

These are part of the mold of the harness, but I think these depict a real functional piece attached to her jewelry, like it's being used as a chatelaine belt of utility items to keep handy. The other charm you can see is a spider.

The harness loops around her arms and fastens with a wide plug and loop on the back, with the plug facing outward. This was very tight and hard to open, so I trimmed the plug down a little for future uses.

Morticia's hands are the claw sculpt and have red nail polish (she's my first factory MH doll with nail paint!) and she's wearing a red coffin wedding ring on her left hand, a necessary detail for one of the most happily married women in fiction.

This ring is pretty directly lifted from the MGM animated character design, being the same color and shape. The MGM films have some cartoon design instincts that align very well with Monster High's trend of shaping mundane things into spooky imagery, so this ring is something the designers would have probably come up with if the MGM films hadn't first! The ring is facing outward so it's upright when she extends her hand to a viewer, and this is accurate to the MGM design, but I think I prefer it facing upright when Morticia looks at it herself.

Like so.

The ring is attached with a clip rather than a full loop, which is new to me for dolls. Other MH / EAH dolls with rings that I've seen have had loops.

Morticia's dress has a mermaid silhouette that splits into wavy tendrils like tentacles or a spider. It's one of the defining aspects of her base character design through all incarnations. This Morticia dress has a slit in the front that's more to her right. 

For the doll to have any leg mobility, the dress couldn't be as exaggeratedly pinched around the calves and ankles, but if you get her from the side, you can pick up some of that caricatured silhouette.

A goddess, I tell you.

Morticia's toenails are painted!!!

She's wearing toeless sandal heels with platforms and backs that look like shrubbery, and the right heel has a rose bud on it.

I don't find these heels too clashy because they match her accessory and won't be seen too often anyway under the dress.

Morticia's handheld accessory is a deep magenta rose with a long thorny green stem. I was delighted, after the horribly un-ergonomic flowers in the Howliday Valentine 2024 set, that the rose had a finger loop for easy holding.

I just had to see if the bloom was a separate piece, because it would have been incredibly wrong for it not to be. Pictures indicated it very well could be, with a clean color break that indicated a seam where the head of the rose popped onto a pin on the stem. I crossed my fingers, and...

Phew. The design got it right. We were going to have words if this feature wasn't included!

The rose blossom has a little three-hole ghost face on it!

I was beyond delighted to see in the promo shots that Morticia stood a head taller than Wednesday, since it could only mean the return of the adult G1 ghoul sculpt that could serve future Skullectors depicting adult characters. We've already had too many dolls stuck on the teen body when they probably shouldn't have been. I think that even included Elvira! With that doll, Mattel relegated the three sassiest icons of horror to a modest teen shape? For shame! 

And sure enough, Morticia is on the big-sister body.

Her body has a slightly pinker cast than her head. Her elbow pegs are not removable, so Mattel is making their terrible new G1 body standard universal. I'm a broken record, but I just can't understand it. They managed to make functional removable G1 elbows for years, and G3 still has them. At least Morticia's elbows turn properly, but that's not a guarantee for any of these individual G1 body copies these days. 

Morticia just looks so incredible on this frame. Being tall and imposing is a big part of her character, and I would like her much less on the standard shape. 

I'm suspecting the real reason Morticia got this, though, is because G1 Nefera will be making her return in a new collector two-pack with Cleo, necessitating the revival of the G1 adult female body and opening up its use for other characters as a result. The RuPaul doll might have actually been the first to bring this body back, but the Dragon Queen might have a thicker body (maybe a G3 sculpt?) I wasn't interested enough in that doll to get it and check. Let me know if you know!

It's also just correct for Morticia to be taller as the mother to the young and fairly small Wednesday. And yes, Wednesday is small--she's reviving the little-sister body. I was actually able to confirm that early by comparing the height gap in photos to the height gaps of G1 dolls I had on the three sizes. A big-sister and standard doll had a smaller gap than the photos of Tish and Wednesday, so I knew Wednesday was on the shorter frame! I wonder why they brought the younger body back right now, since there isn't a rumored G1 little-sister return on the books yet. Maybe it was purely for Wednesday's benefit. She does benefit, and I won't look a gift horse in the mouth. But Mattel would have been able to get away with putting Wednesday on the teen body. 

Maybe the Clawdeen/Howleen G1 two-pack with sig Howleen will be getting Creepro'd, or else G1 Twyla will be coming back and this Wednesday was a good character to bring back the body with early? I don't know if Jenna Ortega is small enough to necessitate the body being revived for use with Netflix Wednesday.

Morticia's signature pose is crossed arms, but the doll isn't really built for the same. The elbows don't bend far enough, at least.

Well, let's look at the younger Addams now.

Wednesday Addams

The Addams daughter as illustrated by Charles Addams

MGM animated Wednesday.

Wednesday Friday Addams is the female child of the family, though whether she is older than her brother Pugsley varies from adaptation to adaptation. Wednesday gets her recognizable unique name from the old "Monday's Child" nursery rhyme about children born on different days of the week, which states rather cruelly that "Wednesday's child is full of woe". Not so for her first full depiction in the original TV series, where young Lisa Loring played her as a sweet little girl, macabre interests aside. 

Wednesday would be forever reshaped by Christina Ricci's portrayal in the Barry Sonnenfeld films, where Wednesday is somber, cunning, sadistic, academically inclined, and antisocially dour in cheery situations, becoming quite an intimidating child and a snarky voice for teen goths of the era. Ricci didn't fully create the re-characterization, of course, but she certainly made it so massively successful and contributed her own touches, like sleeping in a corpse-like burial pose! Moody Wednesday carried on as her definitive personality after Ricci's turn, up to Wednesday deconstructing the iconic persona with Jenna Ortega in the role portraying the maladaptive side to being superior and antisocially macabre once teen Wednesday finds herself in a group of people who are also spooky and her adversarial mentality deeply hurts well-meaning people around her. (It's also fascinating to see Tim Burton heading a story rebutting the loner weirdo mentality after making so many stories romanticizing such outcasts.)

Here's the doll.

Wednesday's hair is black, center-parted and out of her face, and is styled in the character's iconic de facto shape of low twin braids. This rendition is most like Lisa Loring's hair. The braids look very similar in proportion and the hairline matches (Ricci's Wednesday had a widow's peak).

Lisa Loring as Wednesday, carrying her iconic decapitated doll.

Ortega's is the only Wednesday so far with bangs, and this doll would have no reason to reference her because that Wednesday is getting her own dolls. MGM animated Wednesday had a really fun idea by tying the ends of her braids in nooses in the first film, but this trait disappeared in the sequels.

As with Skullector Annabelle, Wednesday's braids are rather large because her head is fully rooted. If they did what LDD did and only rooted the outside, Wednesday would have smaller braids that looked more proper, though Loring's braids looking so big does justify it here. I'm expecting similar overlage braids for the signature Nevermore Academy doll of her Jenna Ortega incarnation, and it might not look as good there. (The other Netflix Wednesday doll is to be styled after the famous Rave'n dance scene, where her look has an updo.) 

I did expect the hair to be more distracting than it is in reality, though. It helps that her braids are sideways and look thinner from the front.

Wednesday's face is like Morticia's with the translucency and blushing, but her lips are pale lavender to look more nude-toned and she has eyebrows with attitude. Her eye reflections are spiders, and it's a cool idea but it can leave her eyes looking hazy or blurred the way it's done. The detail is too fine to parse from a distance.

I wasn't sold on this face, but I like it better in person. Her nose is a really rounded button shape that has a lot of character!

Wednesday's head is also stamped 2024, indicating it's newly sculpted for her. The face doesn't feel especially distinct to prior Wednesdays to me.

Wednesday's dress feels very distinctive to how Christina Ricci's Wednesday was dressed, as her costumes took the sixties modest dress cut with the pointed white collar and cuffs and brought in a more modern lower-contrast patterned fabric, and that's what the doll does as well.

Ricci's Wednesday in Addams Family Values next to brother Pugsley (left) and summer camp friend Joel Glicker (right).

The doll dress pattern features angular cartoon skulls with a few MH Skullettes mixed in. The button accent under the collar looks misaligned and it should be moved over to the right more to be centered. The skirt is bell-shaped with a black ruffle on the bottom, and the sleeves are sheer with white cuffs and puffed shoulders. This costume is much more flouncy than I expect for Wednesday, and that might be a misfire.

The Wednesday series' take on the iconic dress is black with white patterning of small skull-and-crossbones motifs dotting the fabric, mixing the nineties patterning idea with the classic stark black/white contrast.

This outfit is apparently set to be a separate fashion-pack release that can be put on the Nevermore Academy Wednesday doll to give her the Addams-classic look.

MGM Wednesday's dress is a dark teal. That would look incredible next to the red bag, and would coordinate with Morticia's greens better. I prefer that this Wednesday's dress is grey, but if it was teal like the MGM animated design, I wouldn't be mad at it.

Wednesday has a dark reddish cross-body octopus purse, which is so cute and weird and fun.

The octopus has glam yellow eyes and the strap is textured like an octopus arm and closes with a pin on the shoulder. The implication is that two of the arms are longer and forming the strap. This octopus really looks like a G1 pet design, and it'd be awesome if it was a full animal, not a purse. The bag has no opening and is a solid piece, so maybe this is supposed to be a live monster octopus being worn like a bag? 

 Wednesday having an octopus theme is, at the root, a reference to the design on the foot of her bed as drawn by Charles Addams and depicted in the Sonnenfeld films. 

I think Wednesday has great taste; I was an octopus kid too. 

The coloration of the octopus bag comes from the MGM animated films, where Wednesday evidently has a red octo as a pet, also in reference to the Addams bed design.

Oh, corporations. Ever trying and failing to use relatable language.

This is another reason the bag could be read as a live animal consenting to being worn as an accessory.

I like the color this bag adds to Wednesday's look, and it's so much fun. Like the beads on Morticia, it feels like a defining unique trait that sets the MH adaptation apart as its own take on the characters.

Wednesday is wearing stompy strappy knee-high black boots that suit a goth teen rebel, though these are also quite different from the fashion choices of actual previous Wednesdays. The heels feature renditions of Thing (depicted as an autonomous severed hand per the Sonnenfeld films and animated films) and Cousin Itt (as depicted in the animated films). 

It on the heel has a lot of textured lines that look like cracks, but they don't look intentional enough to read well.

Thing in the TV show, performed live under tables and behind walls as an arm that emerges from things. He was portrayed by the same actor as Lurch.

Thing in the Sonnenfeld films, portrayed with visual effects as a mobile severed hand.

Cousin It on the shoe is identifiable as the MGM animated rendition by the separate "mustache" cascade of hair.

On the shoe, he's golden-colored.

Whether Itt is a person or a monster or purely hair is a mystery, and he's very short and only speaks in garbled chipmunky sounds. Seeing Itt here on the shoes was what first made me aware this set wasn't strictly based on the Sonnenfeld movies, because those did away with the black sunglasses and had It (spelled with one "t" there like the MGM cartoons) hatless more often so he was just a short pillar of hair. The duller look for the character is the biggest adaptation failure of those otherwise-brilliant movies. 

It wooing Margaret Alford in The Addams Family (1991).

I prefer the sixties TV/MGM CGI designs.

Itt in the sixties show.

The platforms of the boots have more detail of bugs and snakes.

Very cool pieces.

While Wednesday is the OG goth character design in this dress, visually derivative character Sadie beat this Wednesday to the doll market by over twenty years. 

As noted earlier, Wednesday is on the little-sister G1 body shape, though her elbow pegs are also affixed, and her elbow pegs don't turn smoothly. Ugh.

Wednesday looks whiter than Morticia. Morticia's purplish cast mutes her skintone a bit in an interesting way.

Wednesday and Morticia both lack the finger-snap hand sculpt used once in G1 for the Witch Create-a-Monster. 

Huge wasted opportunity, given the iconic finger-snapping theme song from the original TV show where the cast all snapped along. I understand that mold is probably long long gone, or maybe the Wednesday dolls will bring it back because there's a gag about snapping twice there, but I'm not holding my breath.

Both dresses have Skullector tags sewn in.

Now for photos! 

First, I had to show Morticia gardening.

And then I had to shoot a more elaborate scene. I realized Treesa undressed would be a perfect greenhouse tree, and Secret Creepers Chewlian and a G3 Chewlian pot would dress the setting nicely.

Absolutely stunning.

I cast Jackson Jekyll's arm and hand as Thing, opting to explore both the "emerging arm" and "crawling hand" versions of the character. If the Wednesday dolls include him, it's sure to be a fully-sculpted severed hand piece, but I can't help but feel like leaning into the medium and doing the design as a typical doll hand like this would be way more charming.

"Phone call? For me? Thank you, Thing."

"Sublime, you found my doll. Thank you, Thing."

Then I had to take Wednesday to play. She had fun assembling a torture kit for her doll while Thing watched.

(The "doll" is the LEGO Minifigures Series 12 Spooky Girl sans head.)

Then they discovered Thing was very good at driving a toy motorcycle (sourced from the G3 Coffin Bean two-pack and made for Deuce's pet rat Perseus to drive):

And Morticia had a nice sit on a gravestone. The weather was horribly sunny for her standards, but at least it was ghoulishly humid.

Aping one of the Haunted Mansion stretching portraits here.

And some portraits.

Neat. Sweet. Petite.

What beautiful dolls.

The fun of this release is primarily in the color palette, which skirts very close to greyscale with high-contrast and low-saturation colors. It's a great interpretation of the Addams aesthetic which originated in black-and-white media, and it's fun to play with color using the dolls to stand out among saturation or blend into muted tones. It's more rich and interesting than straight-up greyscale dolls would have been. The dolls also do cement their place as unique depictions of the Addamses. They have the most iconic traits of the characters, but add new details like the luxuriant beads of Morticia or the bag on Wednesday, and Wednesday tries out a whole new costume silhouette. These are my favorite type of Skullector adaptation, where it's just the real characters with a makeover, and these designs could helm their own complete adaptation of the franchise. I just want more of the family now! Gomez at the very least!

I think Morticia is the better of the two because her visual execution is just 100% on, but she's not the winner by as much as I'd expected. Wednesday has a lot of charm and looks better in-person than I thought she would. Her face and hair are more appealing than I expected, and despite her wardrobe departures from precedent, she works as her own take on the character. Both dolls are lovely and beautiful. The color palette, paint work, and detail gives them the beauty and gravitas the Addams ladies deserve while having some welcome color and fun. They're some of the best Skullector designs and I loved working with them for photos both spooky and glam. The photo session was nonstop and fluid and full of inspiration. I just really clicked in with these dolls.

Morticia's hair is frustrating to keep tidy and I resent that the revived G1 older and younger bodies shifted to the affixed and often sticky elbows. I also didn't find Morticia to clip in very easily to her stand, and the train of her dress doesn't play nicely with being pressed against a pole. These are ultimately minor frustrations that I have signed onto knowingly by this point, and they don't ruin the dolls for me. I don't want to roll over and accept bad design with the arms, but these two are good enough to push through as excellent dolls. 

Here's all of my Addams paraphernalia-- a set of the TV series Season 1, the Sonnenfeld films, Wednesday Season 1, the dolls, and an Itt finger puppet.

I don't know if I'm going to get the Wednesday dolls. I have no need for a doll of Enid Sinclair personally (unless Season 2 makes her click with me more), but I also don't need Rave'n Wednesday, the solo doll. I guess I could try the Wednesday/Enid two-pack and the fashion-pack black dress if the final dolls look good, but early leaks have me very skeptical about the face designs. I might end up just sticking with generic Skullector Wednesday instead. But that's to be seen.

For now, I've had a great time and my Addams appetite is sated. These might be highlights of the year!

They really are a screa'm. The Addams Family.

Dun dun dun dun (snap, snap).