Mechanical Marvels, Part 2: Monster High's SKULLECTOR Robots!

How's about a sequel to a post I never thought would get one? Turns out, there are now two more robots from Monster High, albeit licensed adaptations, and both are characters who play with the fusion of doll and robot themes in an intriguing way. Neither doll quite convinced me alone, but together, they made for a compelling discussion. Both are also very recent icons adapted to Skullector, and both are from series of media with their next installments releasing June 27, or at time of publishing, tomorrow, this year! It's meant to be. 

Red Light, Green Light: Young-hee (Squid Game)

Uh...this is an odd choice for this doll line. And this is another doll who got me to watch something! 

Squid Game barely needs any introduction. In 2020, this Korean Netflix drama series swept the world. Through loser POV character Seong Gi-hun, we see a dystopian contemporary South Korea where poverty and debt are common and the desperate are recruited onto a predatory secret show-style competition run by a shadowy organization. The competetition is actually unnamed in the show; it is not officially called the Squid Games. The title of the show actually derives from the Squid playground game played in Korea which appears as a motif in the series, though binders for the organization are labeled "Squid Archive". 

The contest has a massive cash prize which is balanced by death being the way players are eliminated for failing the challenges--and each player death adds their individual share of winnings to the pot which survivors stand to gain. The story is a bit like The Hunger Games but also a bit like the Canadian thriller film Cube in some of its aesthetics despite a very different plot and concept. Squid Game does have a unique feel with the games' bright and clean look and the motif of childhood playground games turned horrific, and is more of an examination of capitalism and exploitation and the one-percent, with the government not coming into play.  Season 2 is the first half of a sequel story, seeing Gi-hun  trying to get revenge and bring down the games, but he ends up in another competition cycle with no way out. Season 3 completes the story begun by Season 2--Season 2 ends halfway through the contest's scheduled six-game cycle.

Just as quickly as the show caught on after Season 1, it was immediately flying over the heads of viewers and merchandisers and Mr. Beast who saw a fun thriller competition setup and didn't really absorb the implications. But...uh...even disregarding the completely hypocritical capitalistic participation in the show phenomenon for marketing and merchandise...where the heck does Monster High come in? Squid Game never quite struck me as horror. Horrific, certainly. But it's a bit on the edge for the realm of broader horror genre merchandise.

Well, part of it is timely promotion. The doll released around the time the second season of the show was premiering, and now I'm getting to her at the time of the third season. It kinda works for Skullector? 

The subject of the doll is Young-hee, an odd but highly recognizable icon of the show. In the first game of both Season 1's and Season 2-3's competitions, an oddly elaborate challenge is shown-- a version of the children's game "Red Light, Green Light". In a huge square open-air enclosure painted to look like a wider landscape, the 456 game players are told to approach the opposite side. A giant animatronic doll (named Young-hee but not identified as such within the show) faces a tree with her head turned away. 

She sings a little tune, or in the English dub, just says "red light!" and "green light!" (I favored the original Korean audio, subtitled), and while she's singing or after she says "green light", the players are free to advance. The second Young-hee stops singing or says "red light!", however, her head spins completely backward and the cameras in her eyes move independently to track the field of players, who are supposed to freeze while she looks at them. 

Young-hee's face in the Season 2 game--her design was changed a little.

The cameras moving independently in the Season 1 game.

Any players the motion sensors detect are killed by human snipers (only seen in Season 2) scanning the crowd and picking off eliminated numbers, with the deaths immediately telling the players just what the stakes of this challenge really are. The freak-out after the first deaths creates a massacre as so many players are moving in panic that they all get shot. After that, the game is re-explained to the remaining players who now understand just how serious this competition is.

Young-hee's camera feed catching the second player to fail the game in Season 1, marked red while still players are green. The player on the ground was already shot; his bro going to check on him is about to be.

Because several players die every time the doll turns around, the field becomes a gruesome visual of the dead forming rows crawling toward the other side but never reaching. The first game kills about half of the 456 players who entered in Season 1, but the death toll is significantly lessened in Season 2 thanks to the presence of a strong commander player who understands the game and leads far more people to victory. 

Young-hee will appear as another, separate animatronic late in the second contest concluded in Season 3, in a different costume and paired with a boy animatronic doll named Cheol-su during a jump rope game. The Monster High doll is based on her "Red Light, Green Light" animatronic, not her jump-rope one. Both animatronic Squid Game characters are named after vintage Korean schoolbook characters.

So...this is about as abstract as a Skullector license may possibly get. Young-hee really isn't a monster and really isn't a character. She's a non-autonomous non-AI moving mechanical statue of a doll with camera scanners used by the game operators. She's not even able to walk. Still, she's a creepy doll and a robot, suiting Monster High just fine...and I'll admit the positives of getting the first Korean MH character (even if through licensing) and a doll with a new G1-style body type outweigh the "why though?" factor. Doesn't hurt that she paired really well with another Skullector on the theme of doll-like robotics.

Young-hee was ordered about the same time as M3GAN, but came significantly later, nearly blowing my projected time of posting before these dolls' sequel media dropped. I was lucky she arrived two days before that time so I could get this out by then! This is Monster High's second Netflix license after the Wednesday collaboration.

It seems all Skullector boxes are now going for the two-half shell method of forming an outer layer, and I like it. The front features the English Squid Game logo and the Netflix logo, and a simple portrait of the doll's face in front of her tree with a fluttering bat--part of recurring attempts in the packaging to make Squid Game more "spooky" and Monster High, which doesn't really work and frankly misses the point. The Netflix logo is prominent, and makes me all too aware of how eager the distributor is to hold exclusivity and name recognition for its properties. Funny--the Wednesday dolls would give you no idea the property was hosted by Netflix, but maybe the greater licensor of MGM superseded them. Squid Game is a Netflix baby through and through. 

The sides feature a portrait of Young-hee and and the show logo.

The back features the famous colorful staircase network seen in the games facility, which has an Escher-esque effect. Players fill the maze of stairs at the start of the games, but they become increasingly empty as time goes on. Several false doorways are included in this maze to make intruders or fugitives lose their sense of direction and their head starts. Guards are depicted in this scene, while symbols from the second game in the first season, and spookifying bats and cracks and webs plus a Skullette, decorate the stairs beyond the way they appear in the show.

Here's the doll display.

Very correctly, Young-hee is packaged in box in her most recognizable pose--head turned backward, body facing away. I'd probably not have asked for this or thought of Mattel doing this if she'd been packaged facing forward normally, but seeing that they did do it this way, it feels like it would have been totally wrong for them not to. It would be an obvious choice for Mattel to do a solo Skullector Regan MacNeil from The Exorcist, whereupon I'd expect a similar packaging pose. In the show, while the tree the doll poses against in the show is physical, the field and sky backdrop of the game setting is 2D on a wall. Here, of course, it's all cardboard and the tree is not a pop-out element. For this doll, the scenery has been modified to have a spookier purple sky and bats. I'd have liked to see a timer countdown on the wall, like there was in the show, and the white line on the floor in front of the doll which the players cross to win the game. 

The sides of the inner box have one portrait of Young-hee split vertically down the middle and divided across the two sides.

The text copy on the back of the box is appropriately bilingual, being printed in English and Korean. Here, Young-hee speaks to players about her game.

While the principle of the game is the same in Korea and the USA, there's a key difference in the way players are cued. In Korea, the person making the calls says the phrase mugungwha-kkochi pieot-sumnida ("the hibiscus flower has bloomed!"--referring to the mugungwha national flower of Korea, known in English as the rose of Sharon). While the caller is saying/singing the phrase, players may move, and they stop when the caller is silent. In English, there are two separate vocal cues for "start" and "stop", which makes timing less easy to get down, because you never know when the caller will say "stop". In the Korean version of the game, you have an ongoing audio with a known endpoint to time yourself with, as depicted in the show, where Young-hee's singsong is easy to match one's timing to, even when her speed fluctuates from round to round. In the English dub replacing her song with "red light!" and "green light!", the actions of players starting and stopping don't sync up as well because that wasn't the way the scenes were filmed.

I noticed immediately that Young-hee had a saddle stand, but I was momentarily disappointed to see the pole went into a normal stand base. On Howliday 2023 Skelita, I found the pairing of a saddle pole and a standard base template to be a mistake because the doll's center of gravity in a saddle is different from when they're in a waist grip, and Skelita toppled over backward too often because the base had no surface area behind the pole to brace the doll's backward lean. 

Howliday 2023 Skelita's stand, using a new saddle pole in the standard-template base created for 2016 collector Skelita. This didn't work because there was no platform projecting behind the stand pole and Skelita wanted to tip over a lot.

The stand that came with Young-hee solves this issue by simply having the pole angled forward so the doll's center of gravity is in the right spot. I also appreciate the stand pole being black plastic rather than clear. It'll be less fragile this way.

This is my first time encountering this exact stand design, but it might have appeared previously in the Hocus Pocus set--at least for Winifred and Mary. Sarah would be the odd one out if she didn't have a saddle stand as well, but her pole would need a differently-sized cradle for her skinnier G1 "standard" body sculpt.

The certificate of authenticity on the back of the box backdrop was flipped to the generic side, so I had to take it off to read the print specific to this doll. Usually, these are taped to the box so the doll-specific print is facing outward. 

Signed by Rebecca Shipman, though since she's evidently the senior character designer, I can't say she was the one who made Young-hee specifically.

Here's the doll unboxed and presented. Her feet hover a bit over the stand base, but not in a way where she feels desperate to tip over.

Part of what makes the contest in the show so twisted is how inappropriately colorful and fun the production design is. The challenges are all based on children's games. The players pass through pastel candy-colored Escheresque staircases. The Young-hee animatronic herself is designed as a bright and innocent doll. As such, the fashion doll looking bright and friendly is not Mattel overstepping like they did with the Sandersons. It's entirely accurate to tone.

Young-hee does lose a little in translation just by virtue of her medium here. Jointed dolls are simply what Monster High does, so a character designed to be a jointed doll doesn't stand out as such in this medium among other jointed dolls who are just that way by default of the toy design. You look at the Young-hee animatronic in the show, and she's weird because she's not only animatronic, but she's visibly designed to look like a children's doll. Here, the doll element is simply inherent to the form and no longer so emphasized and uncanny. I think it also comes of the Monster High art style and more teen styling of the doll that she loses some of that toylike oddity. Living Dead Dolls are good at making dolls look especially "dolly" on purpose when desired with their paint and costume cuts, even though all of them are built on a classic dolly look. Young-hee in this form reads as a more humanoid girl and her doll manufacturing is easily ignored as a facet of the toy medium. She's not an oversized doll either, losing the uncanny scale of the entity in the show when placed with other MH output. She's still cute, though!

Young-hee's hairstyle closely mimics the animatronic in the show, but the hair length is a tad longer per Skullector style. She has center-parted black saran hair and straight bangs across the forehead, with her hair tied into low side pigtails.

She has purple hair accessories derived from the show. On her left, there's a barrette directly copied from the show's animatronic sculpt, depicting the show's recurring circle, triangle, and square symbols which happen to be stacked here in a loose mimic of the Squid game court diagram. Her pigtails are tied with lavender elastics and purple Skullette bands are clipped around the pigtails and intertwined with the elastics. Young-hee in the show is sculpted with hair ties made of round beads.

The Squid game court--so named because it loosely looks like the narrow pointed shape of a squid's "head" with eyes on the sides.

I left the hair clip in factory state rather than taking out the elastic, just because I wasn't in the mood to find it less stable upon doing so.

The bangs are gelled and I left them that way. One of her pigtails had a really disobedient piece that didn't boil straight, and I cut that part shorter to get rid of it.

Young-hee's head sculpt is curiously stamped for 2025 despite the doll releasing in 2024. I don't know how that came to be.

Her face is a fair tribute to the show character. She has pale human-colored skin and stern faint eyebrows, while her lips are a cheery red and have a pouty shape mimicking the dolly look of the show robot. She has few eyelashes and her eye makeup is just golden-orange with a fade effect. No eyelid crease painted here. 

Per the design from the show, the only clearly robotic visual trait of Young-hee is her camera eyes. These are accurately made to look like grey apertures with ominous red pupils, and are a more realistic/contemporary/gritty take on the similar designs for Elle Eedee and LDD Resurrection Isaiah, whose camera eyes are more colorful and futuristic.

Here's all of my camera-eyed robot dolls together.

I love the predominance of warm colors in Young-hee's design, and the saturation on the Skullector doll makes her feel all the more striking. Skullector Young-hee's face is very clean and dramatic despite its simplicity.

Young-hee is a rare Monster High doll without earrings, and it's fairly shocking to see for a collector doll. If they were required, I'd have gotten some basic purple spherical studs in at the least, but it works for her to not have any.

Young-hee is wearing a take on the costume depicted on the animatronic--an orange overall dress over a yellow shirt. Here, the orange dress is rendered in translucent plastic sheeting and has ruffled straps and a printed layer, while the yellow section has a satiny body and sheer puffed sleeves. Show Young-hee depicted a humbler costume that would likely be matte fabrics if rendered in cloth.

The print on the skirt depicts a take on the facility's staircases. While this looks like it might be attached to the yellow so there's a full separate dress layer under the orange, the printed skirt is actually sewn to the orange dress. The print underneath the plastic layer is tinted orange even on its own thanks to the base color being orange. Pink and black define the rest of the pattern.

The back of the dress has a big waist bow which is not functional. The dress velcros down the back.

The Skullector label is sewn into the underskirt.

Underneath are two surprises--the yellow piece is not a shirt, but a bodysuit--and it velcros in front!

This outfit reminds me a bit of L.O.L. O.M.G. Fierce Neonlicious with the orange plastic over a yellow layer, but Neonlicious had a full two-layer costume where the yellow was its own complete dress, and the doll had different colors.

Young-hee has thigh-high socks with lace trim at the top. 

They were plain white in the show, but here they also have golden outlines of four shapes, also seen on the staircase scene on the back of the box--circles, triangles, stars, and umbrellas. These refer to the second game in the Season 1 challenge: dalgona. 

Oh Boy Let's Talk About Dalgona

The game is staged in an oversized playground set, but the gameplay is disconnected from the scenery, and involves the dalgona Korean street-food treat-- circular thin sugar discs imprinted with symbols by using a cookie-cutter-like tool. The show translates them as "honeycombs" half the time, referring to the flavor of the candy (which contains no actual honey). The imprint in the dalgona does not cut all the way through, so the traditional challenge for eaters is to break away the shape from the rest of the circle without breaking the shape itself--typically, with the vendor offering a kid a free extra dalgona if they do so. A harmless fun activity for kids, but the game players in Squid Game are shot if they fail. They're given the discs in circular tins and are only provided a needle to help them, and those who picked the umbrella shape before learning the concept of the challenge end up with the hardest dalgona pattern to win due to the umbrella's complex outline and very fragile handle. Most umbrella players end up losing because the shape is so delicate. Guess which shape Gi-hun chose.

Player 1 working on his star dalgona.

Gi-hun making progress on the most difficult dalgona shape--the umbrella.

Most players try to carve out their shape using the provided needle, scratching through the indented groove outlining the image. Two unscrupulous players use a shared lighter smuggled in to heat the needle, using the setting to their advantage by hiding under the giant slide in turns. Gi-hun has some unlikely brilliance and realizes he can melt the sugar from the back by licking the disc, extracting the rest of the shape by dissolving the outline from behind--a strategy discovered by series creator Hwang Dong-hyuk as a child. Most players who see this begin copying him and some are saved by doing so. Another player, Ali, a Pakistani immigrant previously unfamiliar with dalgona, finds the circle he chose can be extracted purely by careful breaking of the outer candy, without carving, heating, or licking. The other shapes are too delicate for this method, and triangle is considered the easiest shape to remove.

Because I value immersion, research, and education, I had to try making dalgona myself--my vision was to imprint it with a Skullette shape as a token specific to this Skullector version of Young-hee. I ended up pretty miserable.

Dalgona is made from just two ingredients--sugar and baking soda. The sugar is melted in a pan or ladle and then a tiny amount of baking soda is stirred in, giving the candy a creamy, foamy texture. The mix is quickly poured onto a surface, then pressed flatter, and a cookie cutter imprints the shape on top. This all sounds very simple, but simply making the candy is a game-show contest unto itself. As with any confectionery, it's delicate and finicky. The sugar must be melted slowly and evenly and not overheated. The baking soda proportion must be small enough, because too much makes the sugar bubble up into a foamy sponge, which will also quickly burn and blacken and smoke from the heat of the ladle the stuff was melted in. And the timing and tools for pressing the mix are tricky, too. Press too soon and the sugar sticks to the pressing object and forms strings. Press too late and you can't make the imprint symbol. To make my Skullette imprint, though, I did have the perfect tool--the doll stand from the Inner Monster dolls, whose base is the outline of a Skullette. It's a thicker line imprint than a cookie cutter outline, and proportionally larger in the circle than the dalgona shapes traditionally are, but Mattel didn't make any actual cookie cutters or smaller Skullette pieces that would work and I wasn't in this enough to buy a fanmade cookie cutter for the project.

The dalgona in the show look near perfect, being very thin and circular. These criteria were big stumbling points for me. My first attempts to press the candy all ended with it stuck to pieces and too thick for what I wanted. I found my first success thinning the candy by spreading it with the bottom of a pan...but then it wasn't circular. I thought maybe I could cut the candy out by quickly using a circular plastic ring as a cutter like this...

But I was failing the dalgona game trying to remove the ring itself from the internal circle. It got stuck, and the candy broke in cases trying to take the ring out.

The best I was able to do was pouring and then pressing with the flat bottom of a pot. I had one nearly passable dalgona really early on, but the internals of the stand base where the pole clicks in created an unwanted impression on the candy and the stamp was too faint on the lower half. It's not actually as good as a cookie cutter because the hub where the pole clicks in makes the pressure very finicky.

This just wasn't good enough. 

I'm pretty sure the next four+ hours resulted in more than thirty attempts, and included lots of tedium plus unwanted excitement from burning my thumb (though fortunately not severely). I tried everything to get a good flat round circle, but every failed mixing proportion of baking soda set me back at least seven minutes each time. I was finally reaching a modicum of consistency when I decided to call it a night. By that point, I felt I was getting good timing by pouring the candy, waiting 10 seconds as recommended, pressing with the pot, and making an imprint. The following morning, I knocked out a few more tries until I finally got a decently round candy with a clear stamp and no disturbance from the interior of the doll stand base.

Again, this dalgona is rougher and thicker than the pieces used in the show, and the imprint isn't as deep or thin as it should be, but I felt I simply had to call it here. It's recognizable and perfectly photogenic for my purposes.

The Squid Game series production shot the second game with real dalgona made by a local street confectioner, and from the setup, I'd guess that the candy mixture was actually poured into the round tins and pressed flat with a tool that fit precisely. My attempts to get the candy thinner with pressing didn't work because it would only flatten so much and its viscosity increased by the second, so I think it would have to be smaller pours into the tins, flattened just to size, to consistently create the thinner candies that were filmed. 

I can now attest to having eaten the candy, though! It's quite pleasant, but I wasn't necessarily adoring it after the difficulty it put me through. The candy is stickier than I expected, but, naturally, it's all sugar. 

And you know what? I am extremely stubborn. Now that I was onto making dalgona more consistently, I refined my process even more. I changed the presser to a flat-bottomed glass jar that let me see exactly what I was doing from the top. I pre-loaded baking soda onto a spoon before each try so it was ready to mix into the sugar and guaranteed to be of the right proportion with no guesswork. I got the pressing thinner more consistently. I pressed onto a baking disc with slight oil, enough for the dalgona to stay on the surface without getting too stuck that it broke when trying to move it. I also broke out the internals of the doll stand and glued the pole to the top so the bottom was hollow and wouldn't disrupt the stamp while not preventing the stand from being used as it's intended, for dolls. The piece had been broken a couple of times before, anyway.

I sanded this down, too.

With those steps done, I was able to produce dalgona like the one on the right, which do actually pass for the show's quality:

I wasn't able to stop there and use that copy as the final for multiple reasons. For one, the dalgona on the left above was my previous "final", but in storage in the fridge, it had bubbled like it was licked and breaking down, so I was understanding the candy wouldn't really keep and isn't the kind of thing to pre-make. I wasn't sure if it was because the can wasn't airtight or not, but it didn't look good. Also, the successful dalgona on the right wasn't pressed totally level...and then it broke on its own inside the tin in the fridge, suggesting maybe it was a temperature shock and it was put in too early without cooling for long enough outside. The center of the tin is also raised a bit, so I put magnets in to even the surface that future dalgona would rest on. I got another workable one from this session, but the mixture was too marbled and it got pressed too large to fit in the tin. Now that I was confident I could get a workable dalgona within 10 attempts, I decided I'd be making the final photoshoot piece more immediately before its use in photos to guarantee it looked its best. I didn't even have Young-hee yet when going through my personal torture here, though having the time to experiment and learn beforehand made things smoother. I was desperate and furious from the first night, and more confident the second day, and even though it sucked, I also take some value and amusement in this experience making me an expert on such an arbitrary skill. Like, I don't ever anticipate the need to do this ever again, but...I can do it now, pretty well! I love when things give us really out-of-the-box special talents and skills and when people find themselves becoming experts on random subjects or tasks.

In Season 2, Gi-hun has a nightmare about being in the dalgona game again, having advised everybody to pick the triangle shape so they have the best chances, only to open his tin and see that this is now what "triangle" means.

We'll get back to dalgona in a bit with my final results. 

Young-hee's shoes are platform Mary Janes with a bar between the toe gap, like the LDD classic shoe, and the heels depict the heads and shoulders of two of the many operators of the games, who wear pinkish windbreaker jumpsuits and black faceless masks with white circle, square, and triangle symbols comparable to PlayStation game buttons, though the shapes are also found in the Squid game court.

The symbols on the guards' masks in the show indicate rank--circles are workers, triangles are soldiers (armed and mostly tasked with the penalty murders of losing game players), and squares are managers giving orders, with managers having the highest rank of the staff in pink. Young-hee's shoes both depict workers. I'm surprised two types of guard weren't used. I know only two masks could have been used for the heels, but why not a worker and a soldier? I do like that the black part of the shoes is the same texture as the masks, and it's fun that the soles of the shoes also look like the head and shoulders of a guard in silhouette, though there's no molded detail.

Skullector Young-hee's purse is a miniaturization of the massive piggy bank prize ball which the game producers lower from the ceiling and fill with bundles of bills representing the pot of winnings, which grows with every elimination as the forfeited potential winnings of the dead get added to the total the survivors stand to win. The prize ball is the sole incentive for the people taken into the games to continue. 

The prize ball is clear in the show, but is most often illuminated with golden light, making the translucent yellow of this purse a good choice.

Let me tell you, I got through all of Season 1 without ever realizing this thing was a piggy bank. Oops.

The number 456 molded on the purse is not only the initial total of game players in Season 1, but is also the player number designated to protagonist Gi-hun, as well as the numerals of the ultimate prize total, ₩45.6 billion (in the Korean currency by the name of won, pronounced "wan". 45.6 billion won equals over 36 million US dollars). Gi-hun also wins and physically loses 4.56 million won betting on a horse race early in the season, and "0456" is the bank PIN the game administration puts on his credit card after winning. 

The handle on the purse is static but the piece opens on a genuine hinge to reveal exactly what you'd expect--₩45.6 billion, as depicted by a piece of pearl gold plastic molded in the shape of a ball of bills.

The ball of money is a close fit in the bag to give it that stuffed-full look, and may need some rotating to the right position so the piggy will close. It doesn't work as well removed from the bag because money needs a container to form this shape. It looks like a stringless piñata outside of the purse. 

One of the reasons I wanted Young-hee was her body type. When the Skullector Hocus Pocus dolls were revealed, I was let down. I love the movie, but the dolls looked kiddie and cheap with their oversaturated colors and clunky vinyl harnesses and belts. I didn't and won't get them, but I was intrigued nonetheless because Winifred and Mary Sanderson were visibly not on classic G1 bodies, having thicker legs and a silhouette that didn't match the three standard G1 femme shapes. I wondered if maybe they were on G3 bodies, but it turned out they were on a new body sculpt with a chubbier figure, which is ostensibly a post-G1 answer to G1-style dolls' poor body type diversity. I also learned Young-hee was on a very similar rendition of the same body type as Winifred and Mary, just sculpted with smaller breasts. I wanted to have the body to look over, since it's fascinating to see G1 shape diversity retroactively expanded through legacy dolls.

Here she is next to the original G1 body types--little-sister, mid-teen/standard, and big-sister. 

Young-hee is the same height as mid-teen but significantly curvier and heftier. The body has thicker limbs and larger breasts, and a wide waist and hips. No torso joint, which is normal for G1. Her elbows rotate perfectly and pop out, though her head could tilt more. Her feet look standard-size for G1.

She has the trademark swayed back of the G1 style.

Strangely, her body is stamped 2024 while her head was leaping into the future when the doll released with its 2025 stamp.

This is definitely sculpted as a Monster High G1 body to belatedly add to the canon of G1 body types; the swayed back and the underwear texture put her in the same company. This isn't a recycled body sculpt from anywhere else in Mattel's work.

Here's all of my curvy Monster High dolls together--it's so nice to have a G1 example now!

There are some similarities to G3 Draculaura, enough that I can't discount the possibility their limbs share some molds or sculpts, but their torsos are definitely different, even if I was comparing Young-hee to a budget Drac without the torso joint. Young-hee's waist has its pinch right below the breasts and it's much subtler, leaving the curve into her hips much shallower. Drac has her waist pinch a bit lower on her torso and her hips look wider thanks to the bigger curve line. 

This next photo is not mine, but it shows the Winifred/Mary Sanderson body next to Young-hee. The most significant difference appears to be bust size.

Photo credit to Oskar Bora on Facebook.

The Sanderson sculpt was already a welcome surprise, so the Young-hee one as a minor variation is even moreso. I wonder what the future mileage of the sculpts will be. I can't see Mattel retconning any G1 characters' body types with new legacy dolls, even though I'd be okay with it. Maybe the sculpts can be employed for new G1 original cast through the Designer Series, or just for further Skullector dolls. Whatever the case, I'm delighted to see this body type with Young-hee. I'm glad Monster High G1 got some late body diversity rather than being doomed to forever be limited and skinny. Sure, it doesn't change the record that G1 proper failed on the point of body diversity, but G1 dolls are still being made and now have a wider palette of shapes.

I wonder if this body type dictated the doll's use of a saddle stand, perhaps because Mattel didn't want to make a new waist-grip for the body shape or found the sculpt to work less elegantly pressed against a G1 stand pole? Of course, it could be more arbitrary than that and I'd have to know what Winnie and Mary Sanderson had for stands to get a better idea of why Young-hee has the stand she has. I'm certainly not complaining. It works fine.

The first thing I did with the doll was create the "Red Light, Green Light" arena. I used printed paper with clouds on posterboard for the back wall and twigs for the tree, with brown paper for the sandy floor and Mega Bloks Twyla as a Monster High mini monster for scale so I could play on Young-hee being large. 

I then did a lot of photo editing to clean up the scenery and make it a bit more accurate to the show.

I took another picture with another tree prop (from real log building blocks) and edited Young-hee's gaze to split while tracking players.

Then I entered the dalgona process yet again now that I was ready, and fairly quickly ended up with a slightly-uneven but absolutely-good-enough result.

Then I had to actually do the challenge.

I didn't bother with the needle at all and went straight to Gi-hun/Hwang Dong-hyuk's licking method. The show wasn't lying--because the sugar is thinnest at the back side of the imprint, licking it away is the best way to break away the surrounding candy.

What I wasn't prepared for was the sensation of licking sandpaper--this candy gets bumpy and rough real fast when licked, and it was painful to work at it. I gave myself no time limit, and probably would have died in the time it took me were I in the contest, but I got it done.

I did take a picture of the same pieces as a failed result, too--after I secured my victory.

That was an unnecessary amount of difficulty for a little novelty experience and some photos, but it's weirdly cool to have gotten there. I can't believe the show shot game 2 with the real-deal candy, though. Authenticity, sure, but that had to have made so many things harder in exchange.

Then I took some photos of Young-hee with her prize bank of won.

Here she is against a pink backdrop.

If there was any feasible way to stage her in the staircase scenery, I'd have done it, but that's just out of my reach given how complex a scale imitation of the stairs would be.

And last, here she is with the Squid game court drawn in chalk. It's a little undersized, but suitable for photos.

Young-hee is still an odd choice for Skullector at the end of the day. For however brutal and eerie Squid Game can get, it's still not classically spooky horror, and the genre label of horror isn't universally used for the series. The dissonant spooky elements added to the box art prove as much. However, the doll is certainly well-executed even if its market aims are misguided. Her colors are bright and her look is clean in ways accurate to the show's aesthetic, and all of her elements elegantly translate the show's iconography to a fashion doll tribute. I love her face paint and her socks and purse in particular, and I'm pleased with her hair clip, too. I also appreciate the more functional approach to a saddle stand on a base with a pole at the back. It was fun becoming a viewer and fan of the show very quickly for this doll and to recreate elements from the series for her and myself alike as experiences. I also love the new body type.

My criticisms of the doll are pretty few. Her hair was messier than I expected, especially with that one disobedient curly lock, and I don't feel great about her hair accessories being so usable when the elastics decay. There is also the aesthetic limitation of the medium--her doll jointing is no longer pronounced and strange, and she's no longer physically huge in her medium. Otherwise, for what she is, she's a good doll and she's a classy, slick design paying tribute to the show.

She is Titanium: M3GAN

It was a delight to witness the birth of a new horror icon before her movie was even out in theaters. 

Still from M3GAN (2022).

Gerard Johnstone's film M3GAN is a PG-13 sci-fi satire horror comedy/drama about Gemma, a roboticist for the toy corporation Funki who ends up with custody of her preteen niece Cady after Cady survives a car crash that kills her parents. Feeling unequipped to raise a child, Gemma turns to her pet project M3GAN (the Model 3 Generative ANdroid, name pronounced "Megan" for short) as a potential companion and carer for Cady. M3GAN is built on a military-grade frame and is hyper-capable and extremely intelligent as a doll-like advanced robot, but her directives to care for and protect Cady take her to dark, violent places as it turns out Gemma hasn't done her due diligence to limit M3GAN's capabilities or instruct her morally, in a sense, making errors in parenting toward her niece and M3GAN. 

The film was destined for a sequel even from its first trailer, because immediately people fell in love with the poised, sassy, unhinged robot girl--particularly with an enchantingly odd moment highlighted in the trailer where she dances down a red office hallway (seen above) to grab a paper slicer blade for her next victim. When the movie came out, it was a shocking hit for its release time (January is not the time to release a movie you want to go big), and its satirical and campy charm validated all of the pre-release adoration for the M3GAN character herself. People weren't falling in love with a shadow--the film backed up the trailers. M3GAN 2.0 comes out this month, with this doll's release coming as another very timely promotional move. 2.0 visibly embraces ridiculousness, seems to drop some of the prior film's aspirations toward drama, and makes M3GAN an anti-hero fighting an even worse android, so it ought to be a total blast. I like M3GAN and I love new blood in the horror pop culture, I enjoyed the first film a lot, and this doll has a pretty killer gimmick with a removable faceplate to show her internal head mechanics, briefly seen (before the robot was fully made into M3GAN) in the first film. Monster High's gimmicks are always hard to miss. M3GAN also loosely fits my June 2025 spirit of celebrating Monster High Pride--the film quickly gained a reputation as being beloved by gay audiences, because...obviously, and overshadowed the concurrent romance film Bros which was actually about gay people, prompting remarks of "the gays showed up for M3GAN instead of Bros". I hope there's at least a little wink to the queer audience in the sequel because M3GAN is a camp icon. She's the Terminator if he slayed.

I think this is one of those perfect storms of a character. The concept. The look. The name. The performers. The writing. It's all ideal branding to make her stand out and shine.

M3GAN is second for the prize of the shortest time elapsed between media debut and Skullector doll debut, with the doll coming three years after the film. The winner, though, is the Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, set, whose film released the year before the dolls. It's explicit that the set is based on the second film, but I don't like acknowledging that because it's not a great movie and the doll costumes are closer to the first film's rendition of the wedding garb--Lydia has no veil in the sequel's redux of the wedding theme, but the doll does. Wedding Lydia also looks no older than the teen Lydia from the first Beetlejuice movie's Skullector set, making her seem even more like a design based on the first film. The second film's attemtped wedding scene is marginally less horrific because this time Betelgeuse and Lydia are both adults, but you wouldn't know it from the doll set bearing the sequel's name. She's on the little-sister sculpt, for crying out loud!

Here's M3GAN's box.

Because M3GAN has two faces, the shells of her box are visually split to show half of each--uncovered robot head on the left, faceplate on the right. The box features the film logo in the top left corner and the Skullector logo in the bottom right, and is covered in glossy print of binary numbers mixed with Skullettes.

A stripe is cut out of the pattern to include some text. 

"Model three generative android (M3GAN for short)".

The sides of the box feature a bigger portrait of M3GAN  on the half with the robot face, and the film logo on the half with the faceplate.

There's another hidden message on the portrait side: "Nice to meet you Cady".

The back of the box shells features a single image of M3GAN posed in her twisting dance in the hallway. The lighting is uneven, though, and makes it look like a composite of two pictures the way the face turned out.

The text "YOU SHOULD PROBABLY RUN" is hidden in invisible gloss print in the corner of the wall. There's also a cobweb added to the scene to make it a touch spookier, which, like the Young-hee spooky box imagery, doesn't fully click.

The top faces of the shells have two more messages.

Taking the shells off reveals the doll, set up fully assembled inside.

The back of the box has text copy in M3GAN's voice. There are no messages hidden in the binary here.

The sides of the internal box feature a portrait of M3GAN with her purse (on the side to the doll's left) and a pair of portraits on the opposite side showing the head and shoulders of M3GAN with both faces.

Only the two-faces portrait side has a secret message.

I like this little gimmick of hidden print details.

The display of M3GAN herself is framed as Gemma's workspace in the Funki engineering department, with M3G in front of the rig she's held up on during work and maintenance.

I'm surprised they didn't frame it like she's actually on the rig in the arm-hanging pose in the film.

The overhead light has the text "is that a doll?" and under the doll herself is the answer: "This is M3GAN"--another line from the film.

Every quote hidden in the box art is taken from the film--and most of them are in the trailers. 

The monitors on the left have design files for her faceplate and body and shoes/purse, which I'm betting are presented versions of the real doll-designer 3D modeling files for the doll, made during development for this release.

A G1 doll diary is seen on the desk, and Skullettes are seen on a file folder and a canister in the corner. The floor of the scene has a circuitry pattern.

The certificate of authenticity in back bears Rebecca Shipman's signature as usual, and the doll stand is packaged in a recess.

Here's the doll unboxed. Because pulling her head from the front would just pull her face off and mess up her hair, I pulled the doll shell out of the backdrop to cut the head tags from behind.

M3GAN's look is retro with 1950s/60s/70s influences, and the outfit immediately became iconic with its striped sleeves, prim and clean frock and bow, and the girl's luscious honey center-parted hair. The doll is based on the first film--M3GAN 2.0. visually ages the robot up a bit since Violet McGraw (playing Cady) and Amie Donald (physically playing M3GAN) have grown, and the 2.0 costume follows similar beats but has different details and silhouette. I really respect that they aged up the characters instead of recasting them, and it's interesting to think of M3GAN's models changing to reflect someone a bit older. M3GAN isn't alive and isn't organic, but a slasher villain aging is an interesting idea, and I sincerely love the loyalty to the original actors that fueled the story change of letting their roles grow older. Even if Cady had to grow up, M3GAN could have been recast and could have stayed the same "age", but they loved Amie Donald's physical acting/choreo (I did too!) and so they kept her on.

M3GAN wears her fair share of chic costumes in the first movie and I love her visual aesthetic feeling more throwback while she's so so futuristic in capability and construction. As with Young-hee, the Skullectorification of it all is pretty faithful, but changes the shaping of the costume a bit, widening the skirt, and it adds more iconography from MH and M3GAN alike that wasn't in the film costume. The main difference is how computerized the outfit is. While the film character is designed to look pretty darn human and more like a doll if not seen as such, the MH costume embraces her robotic nature by covering her in tech visuals.

M3GAN's hair is rooted into her true head and does not come off as a wig attached to her external face or otherwise. Like the film character, it's a blonde color center-parted into waves in a classically 1970s look. The hair is totally ungelled--the factory didn't roll her hair into any specific curls. It's actually a little shapeless for what I expected, and I may add a slight wave to it later. The hair is saran, and proportionally longer than the film character's.

The hair feels nice, but wants a wash to get the factory out of it. I would have accepted a slightly more golden-brown tone for the color, too. This feels a tad too light.

M3GAN's outer face is pretty good. 

I think the Monster High art style suits the spirit of M3GAN as an uncanny figure, even if it doesn't look like the actual exact likeness of M3GAN. Monster High is so stylized and suited to supernatural characters that the art style can look weirder the more normal and human a character in the art style is designed. I definitely get that from M3GAN, which is perfect. She feels true to the vibe if not the exact physical look.

M3GAN's eyes are part of the true head, with the faceplate having empty sockets that frame the eyes and fit closely. The irises are a pale greyish blue and have horizontal circuitry lines in white across them, while power-button symbols serve as themed light reflections. Her lashes are heavy and she has faint sunset orange eyeshadow above the eye. Pink tear ducts are painted in the inner corners of her eyes, both on the plate and on the eyes themselves. M3GAN's eyebrows are many-stroked and blonde, the cheeks are lightly blushed pink, and her lips are pink and smiling, though her expression avoids looking directly sweet and innocent.

I was disappointed to see the faceplate molded with a flaw, as her forehead looks a little dented and catches the light poorly. M3GAN's irises aren't very even, either, with the faceplate highlighting the disparity. She looks fine and passes for wistful or side-glancing, but they should have been more symmetrical.

The forehead indent.

M3GAN's faceplate includes the humanoid ears, and fits closely to the base head in the form of a piece that completes the head, rather than a mask layered over the head. The top of the plate comes right to the rooted hairline, but I expected the effect to look worse. It's about as seamless as can be expected--and again, this isn't a human we're depicting here, so any fake offness about it is warranted.

The face is mostly exactly fitted, but there are gaps around the ears. 

The base head is entirely copper vinyl, meaning the head color shows from angles of the assembled head which aren't straight-on. I'd wondered if the base head would be cast in the skin color with the internals under the faceplate all painted, but they went for casting the head all copper and didn't disguise the rest of the outer surface. That's fine. She works well from most angles, and I don't mind her robotic elements showing through. It's part of the fun, and MH gets away with it by already emphasizing her electronics elsewhere in their adaptation. 

The effect of the faceplate here is similar to the Inner Monster dolls' faceplates, but the true heads of the Inner Monsters were "blank slate" normal faces and had inset eyes and a mechanical feature where a button flipped the eyes through three painted designs! The Inner Monster faceplates were also clip-on masks that layered over the head rather than meshing into it. Because this plate includes the ears and meshes perfectly with the base head, it's actually more like a Return of the Living Dead Dolls face--but now that makes me wish M3GAN had an alternate faceplate to change her expression! Missed opportunity.

I guess if you got two M3GANs, you could repaint one of their faceplates to have a swap option yourself, but that'd be pretty wasteful.

Return LDD faceplates.

The M3GAN faceplate is not soft vinyl--it's a slightly springy harder matte plastic. A tab on the forehead slots into the doll's true head, and round bumps under the ears fit into recesses on the sides. The plate presses on more than clipping in and can take some fiddling to align it right so it stays on and tight.

The internal face mechanics of the doll are based very closely on the visual while Gemma is building the robot, before the M3GAN project is completed and brought into her home for Cady.

The black section of the forehead includes the slot the faceplate plugs into, and the sides of the head elegantly accommodate the faceplate ears. 

With the eyes uncovered, grey bands creating a shadowed effect are easier to see, as well as the tear duct detail being accounted for on this layer, too. The sculpt is noseless with a small closed cavity filled in with black. This is MH's first noseless sculpt if you don't count the skull inside Symphanee, and it shouldn't have been; the G1 skeletons ought to have been brave enough to be the first. 

Late in the film when M3GAN is actually damaged and loses her face, she loses most of the copper-colored pieces and the humanoid eyes and is reduced to this:

I'm actually surprised this isn't the under-face visual we were given instead--the eyes could have been part of the faceplate and this could have been the view underneath. I'd have found it much more relevant to the film than the intact under-face, but perhaps they didn't want a doll who could never have a glam display. This is Monster High. You simply must serve face--even when the face itself is out the window and down the street.

M3GAN's internal face is the third robotic-style face sculpt from Monster High after its original G1 characters Robecca Steam and Elle Eedee. It's actually something of a stylistic midpoint. The black and copper colors are very Robecca, but the more advanced futuristic android styling is closer to Elle. 

M3GAN's head vinyl is a bit more golden than Robecca's, but it's just as shimmery. I repeat: Where is Robecca today? Bring her back, Mattel!

Quick updates on the other robots--for one, I re-waved Robecca's hair. It's unforgivable how I left her hair in my review of her last year, and she looks wildly better this way.

A grimmer update for Elle--after going to the effort of ordering gala Elle's earrings to complete her, their coloring stained her ears.

I didn't know that could happen, and I don't like it. I think I'm basically stuck with it--nail polish remover didn't help, but at least it's not worse.

M3GAN's removable face is a really cool novelty feature, but the bare head is not a super appealing display. I think the rooted hair kind of kills it. If the doll had a faceplate and separate wig to build her pretty look while her robot head could be displayed totally bare, it would work a lot more for me. But the bare face paired with the hair isn't something ever seen in the film and it doesn't feel right. I know Mattel wigs aren't the best, but I feel like only the full look for M3GAN is worthwhile for display. The removable face is a super fun interactive feature, and I prefer the doll having done it to not, but I'm only ever going to rest M3G on the shelf with her faceplate on.

M3GAN's costume is pretty darn close to the original. The first thing you notice is the big pussycat bow at the neck, which is sized up a touch for this version of the design and features a plastic Skullette decoration sewn in the middle (though the Skullette itself has no head bow). 

The pattern of the bow is accurate, but also adds blood droplets in the MH touch. I'm surprised, not only because MH doesn't do violent gore (they reference blood more often with Skullectors, though), but also because M3GAN as a film was re-cut to remove the gory parts so it could be bumped down to a PG-13 rating! Making the doll costume bloodier(-themed) than the film costume is quite strange for this particular character, but it works. 

Under the massive bow, there's a rudimentary collar, and a high waist seam.

I miss the bodice tailoring and double-breasted buttons. Those were great features in the original costume.

The sleeves are puffed and have cuffs at the end of the shoulder and the skirt is very wide and has a few pleats loosely gathering it, as well as a white tulle layer underneath.

I think it was a mistake to change the lower sleeves (implying shirt sleeves on an under layer) to netting. The stripes were such a strong element of the original.

Ignore the packaging elastic still stuck on her wrist.

The dress's main fabric is beige like the film, but is printed in a dark fine circuitry pattern, pumping up the robot theme. Skullettes are hidden in the print.

There's a fun extra element with an invisible gloss layer of patterning that has a second layer of circuitry which doesn't match the dark print below and is only visible when light bounces off the dress. As such, when the doll spins, it creates a hologram-like shimmery illusion that makes the dress look really futuristic. All just from colorless gloss print.

The velcro section on the dress is pretty thick, and the stand clip wants to tear the velcro open when I put M3GAN in.

Under the dress, M3GAN's white tights have also gained some pattern through MH. The tights are high-waisted and repeat the binary-and-Skullettes of the packaging with a grey print.

The dress has a Skullector tag sewn in.

The shoes are shaped like Mary Janes in the requisite arched heel form, and have black tops and silver Skullette buckles on the outer sides. The platforms are silver with Skullettes on the front and circuitry texture.

The heels are different. On the left-foot shoe is a depiction of Bruce, the heavy, strong robot built by Gemma before M3GAN, whose motions are linked to a human-operated glove-fist  device, allowing Bruce to be puppeted by Cady to destroy M3GAN at the end of the first film. The right heel is the paper slicer blade from the hallway scene.

No extra detail on the sole under the toes.

M3GAN's purse is a PurrPetual Pet--the film's obvious satire analogue for high-tech "interactive pet" toys like modern Furby, which are shown in the movie to essentially be crack for children and the bane of parents' patience. 

PursePetual Pet.

Gemma works for Funki and the PurrPetual Pets line, finding competing brands ripping off the concept, but then her pet project M3GAN is pitched to the company and M3GAN becomes Funki's new headliner--though, fortunately, the launch never occurs and more copies are not made. Skullector M3GAN's PurrPetual Pet is styled as a bat, a visual not seen in the film but very in keeping with Monster High. Possibly too much in keeping? None of the film is Halloweeny or Gothic in style, so a more direct PurrPetual Pet design might feel less like Monster High tonally overstepping. Thos feels more like Count Fabulous cosplaying for the movie, except M3GAN isn't being played by Draculaura. I also didn't find bats to work with Young-hee.

The purse has a handle on a swinging hinge, and the top has a tulip-shaped opening, but the opening is too small to squeeze open for the purse to actually be functional.

I guess it makes sense for M3GAN's purse to essentially be a robot toy's version of a taxidermied animal corpse. She's brutal enough for that, but it's mostly just a fun film reference because M3GAN doesn't carry a purse in the movie.

The hair tuft of the PurrPetual Pet is so high that the purse handle needs to be swiveled forward or back for it to slide onto M3GAN's arm, since there's otherwise no room for her arm to fit between the strap and the bag.

M3GAN is appropriately on the G1 little-sister body sculpt and follows the Grady sisters, both Lydia Deetzes, and non-Netflix Wednesday Addams in using this sculpt after G1. I was way off before in my assumption that Wednesday was the first to bring the body type back. It's been back since the start of the Skullector line!

Mattel is finally using the sculpt for one of their own characters in order to bring back G1 Twyla through a legacy Sweet Screams doll!

I love the faceup and the button eye idea, and she does mesh with her playline original doll line in a way SDCC Freak du Chic Draculaura didn't. But the rest isn't as good as the first two Sweet Screams dolls. The Sweet Screams drip motif makes her cotton candy theme too easy to confuse for ice cream, which Abbey did. I'm also not impressed by the tulle. Or the pleather.

M3GAN's elbow pop out fine, but her neck also has poor mobility like so many new MH dolls, which is unacceptable. For her, I had to do surgery...which didn't go as planned. My first attempt to swap the neck out was hindered by the neck cracking while I was removing the original innards, and when I popped the replacement peg in, it was anchored too high, so the head kept popping up to the top of the neck instead of sitting at the correct position. Trying to take the peg back out broke the neck in two, requiring glue, and trying a new peg from a button and wire also didn't go well, with the neck breaking off a second time and getting the top of the neck trapped in the head. Things were already screwed, so I  knew the only way to reassemble M3GAN safely was to cut the bottom of the head out so I could remove the stuck pieces, wire in the new neck peg at the right level with the base of the head in place, then glue the neck back together, then glue the head back together. All of this resulted in a sloppy, fragile doll whose head is a little loose and floppy in part of the up-and-down. I am so sorry.

My system for getting the new neck peg in without breaking the doll another time--cutting the joint ring from the head and tightening the replacement wire-button anchor to the right position, then putting the head back together (imperfectly) later.

This neck break and repair is very fraught.

The head tilt does work now, though, despite all the problems, and careful photos and also post editing will hide the faults I gave this doll.

"Hm. I guess I was constructed worse than I thought. Isn't that so crazy? Too bad I survived...for Mattel, at least."

I'd absolutely take a second M3GAN if given the chance. I'm sure she'd also need a neck fix, but I'd ensure it was 100% a fix if I had a second go. I'd need another G1 neck peg to spare and the hole for the pin through the loop would need to go lower, but I'd be able to avoid the disaster I gave myself. If only Mattel had just made the neck better and prevented the issue to begin with.

If me speaking to Mattel helped get them to fix the G1 doll elbows, maybe I needed to ring the alarm about the neck joints now because this is too consistent--every recent G3 doll I've handled, and even Corazón Marikit, has been suffering this issue. I used M3GAN as my soapbox to air my customer service complaint, because I'm not going to sit by and let subpar dolls be made now that I've been given reason to believe speaking up to Mattel can have an effect. And if I was somehow offered another M3GAN in apology, I was taking it because I actually needed one after my messy fix-and-break-and-fix. I haven't heard back yet on that complaint, though.

If you wanted a custom doll of Gemma, I have a suggestion for a face sculpt--this is one of Ariel's sisters in the Disney live-action Little Mermaid dolls, and I sincerely wondered if the character would be played by Allison Williams based on the face (she is not).

Allison Williams has much better things to do than play a bit part in a Disney remake, but the face looks like her to me.

The stylization of humans being Barbie-style while M3GAN is a Monster High doll would be effective.

I did go ahead with re-waving M3GAN's hair after I felt confident her neck wouldn't break again so long as I was gentle. After washing, the hair feels super silky and luxurious in a way a lot of saran hair doesn't quite reach. I wouldn't expect this to be a different fiber, though.

I'm fortunate enough to have a room with red walls that's ideal for shooting the dance scene. I put some fake plants in a silver cup for the planter, and posed M3GAN to the best of her ability.

And I had to mimic the movie poster. Barbie Yaga unmasked stepped in as the foreground face because her expression was right.

I then set up a loose evocation of the minimalist play space showroom Gemma debuts M3GAN with, bringing Cady in for M3GAN to meet and pair with. 

Here she is in blue lighting, like when she sings Cady to sleep with David Guetta/Sia's "Titanium", whose lyrics are considerably literal coming from her.

Then I put her in a metal cabinet to play with her robotic theme and robot face.

Then I undressed her and put Robecca's hands in as well as some other metallic pieces to depict her more like her pre-skin assembly stage, undergoing maintenance. Her doll stand is used as a diegetic prop here and I put some wires in to suggest her arms being rigged up. Her costume parts are held to the wall with magnets.

I don't have adequate clothing pieces to recreate some of M3GAN's other awesome chic retro costumes, but here's a weak approximation with a jacket and shades.

And here she is mimicking the shot in the toy pile seen at the outdoor alternative school Gemma enrolls Cady in. M3GAN is left with the toys until she encounters a bully and kills him.

The design of the M3GAN doll is pretty strong. She captures the spirit and personality of the film character pretty well, and while I disagree with a couple of aesthetic aspects (I think Mattel took out the best elements of the dress and made it worse), it doesn't kill the doll. I genuinely love her. 

Her faceplate gimmick is also well-engineered so her completed head looks pretty seamless and inconspicuous. It's a really cool interactive gimmick. The quality control left some to be desired. My M3GAN's faceplate had a molding dent, her eyes aren't as evenly painted as I'd like, and like all current Monster High dolls, her neck had poor mobility, leading to a series of traumas trying to improve it. I messed with my doll and that's on me. I know what I did wrong and it won't happen again. The stiff neck at the start was not my fault, though. Despite it all, I can't help but feel a very strong sense of affection to the doll. She's got the right M3GAN energy and she's really beautiful and looks great on the shelf. 

Living Dead Dolls and Monster High have been neck-and-neck with the same licenses recently. They dropped their Lost Boys David dolls at basically the exact same time just recently (haven't seen the movie, so I have no opinion other than that the Monster High doll should not have been turned into a woman) and they've also got a M3GAN. Theirs has a hair color and costume that get closer to the film, though the Monster High doll has the articulation advantage and the face gimmick. The LDD is nice and great for the film design, but you can do less with her.

Surprise, surprise, though--LDD will evidently not be competing with Mattel on the matter of Us because God forbid LDD depict Black people ever. (I'm so so impressed with the Skullector Adelaide and Red set and I'm dying to know when they'll release because the hair and paint and details are amazing.)

These dolls kind of made me wish Mattel gave some Skullectors alternate clothing pieces. Imagine M3GAN with a chic coat she could wear, or Young-hee with a green player tracksuit. Alternate costumes wouldn't have to be especially accurate or worn by the doll character in the source material. It'd just be fun.

In a fight, there's no question of who'd win. Young-hee is a glorified camera tower. She's only as dangerous as the snipers tracking her camera data. M3GAN, on the other hand, is the T-1000 for your child's everyday needs.

Here's the four robots together. I'm not counting Dracubecca in the group because I don't have an untouched copy, though I will discuss how that doll factors into the robot history of this brand.

Elle and Dracubecca are the only robots without purses--Elle had no accessories to hold in her two dolls, while Dracubecca held an umbrella. Elle and Dracubecca are also the only MH robot dolls to be unambiguously nonhuman in coloring. On one level, Robecca is literally meant to be made of copper metal, but there's a good argument for it doubling as a brown Indian skintone given other elements of potential Indian coding to Robecca and her father. Robecca is the only one with a pet, though M3GAN's purse comes close to being one. Young-hee is the only one with no robotic sculpting. Young-hee and Elle's eyes both depict camera apertures, while Robecca has cogwheel irises and M3GAN's eyes just look computery without looking like analog cameras. Of the dolls who have robot sculpting, M3GAN has the least since hers is only under her face, while I'd argue Elle has the most if we're going by intricacy. Robecca and Dracubecca are covered in sculpted texture too, but Elle's texture is far more elaborate and varied and would have required a lot more mapping out and planning. On a scale of least to most robotic, it'd be Young-hee, M3GAN, Robecca/Dracubecca, and Elle.

Of this new duo of robot dolls, it's probably M3GAN I like more as her own doll and character design, though both are fairly even in terms of design quality and doll quality. M3GAN is just a better fit for horror and I had a lot of fun with her. She also gives "robot" to a much higher degree, owing to the character being a highly-advanced autonomous AI, while Young-hee is literally set dressing in her origin work. It's slightly arguable M3GAN is the worse doll in production because her stiff neck is a bigger detriment to her presence. All Young-hee's head has to do is rotate backward, so head tilt, while always welcome, doesn't ever feel lacking on her. M3G, however, needs good tilt range and Mattel's factories are screwing up the neck joints these days in a way that caused me to try to take action and break my doll. M3GAN does have luscious hair, though, and her faceplate gimmick is awesome.

To make the cover photo, I painted some poster board red for another version of M3GAN's hallway and framed Young-hee in her box art to make it look like the Funki offices opened to the game arena. I also made M3GAN's eyes glow in post and added Squid Game marks above the door.

That does it for this review! It was a bit of a rush job, but I got it done. Squid Game season 3 and M3GAN 2.0 are moments away! It was fun to look at their franchise's dolls.