Teatime Tangents and Toys: REVISIT: The Monster High Monsters Frankenstein

For a doll so compelling and gorgeous as Monster High's Bride of Frankenstein, I really didn't do her justice. Nor, for that matter, her Monster mate or Mattel's derivative character, G1 Frankie. Their reviews were too early in the blog (like, literally my first two reviews) for me to have gotten into my current photo practice.

See G1 sig (Creeproduction) Frankie's here and the Bride of Frankenstein licensed Skullector duo's here. I can proudly say the writing quality/analysis of reviews was always there, but the creative photo work was a growth process that these monsters preceded by being so early.

That's not to say I didn't get some things done when I wrote them up.

It wasn't a lot, though.

After I first reviewed the Bride, I swapped her body because I needed to steal it for the purposes of making a Mystixx doll more articulated. It's still wild that this collector doll released years after turned out to be such an ideal color match for the Mystixx. I ended up putting the Bride onto the Create-a-Monster Mummy body, since its entirely-bandaged sculpt aligned with the film character.

I also took a better photo of all three Frankenmonsters together. I appended this to the prior post, but it bears placing here too for those who wouldn't have noticed.

The other update since I first wrote the post was learning that the big, buff body I couldn't ID on the Monster wasn't actually as confusing as I thought. Turns out, it is just an Ever After High boy body with bolts put in, as handling Alistair Wonderland informed me.

It's definitely a weird and unlikely move (I would have thought EAH and its molds were dead for good), but I overthought things and convinced myself the Monster had differences he didn't. Besides, the two were sister brands, so a body sculpt crossover is fine.

Touching up the Bride was where I started things now. I've been disappointed to realize most all Monster High dolls have slipped back into stiff necks because their neck peg sockets don't have enough space for the anchor pieces to move back and forth. That reminded me that the Mummy CAM doll was from a G1 spree of stiff necks, with the Create-a-Monsters of this era having poor neck tilt. Such a special doll as the Bride deserved better, so I gave the body my usual neck surgery to replace the pin holding the anchor in and hollow out the socket a bit for better mobility. Doing this actually gave me a valuable piece of information. The Create-a-Monster Mummy has grey bandages, but metallic gold accents highlight the body in a way I personally found a bit annoying for this rebody because it doesn't make a lot of sense for this character. I was stymied by being unable to remove the gold, however. It wasn't coming off with nail polish remover, and my thought was "Dang, if Mattel can make paint this adhesive, what gives for every other painted limb pieces in the brand?" Well, doing neck surgery dropped the revelation on my head when I saw gold inside the neck too. It was never paint. The body is cast from marbled plastic with metallic gold as the minority portion of the mix! All of the gold is baked in!

It's so subtle and carefully blended in the casting that it truly looks painted onto the surface rather than swirled into the plastic. The grey is so dominant I never would have guessed it was blended plastic. It's a really clever effect, but also, there's no getting rid of the gold without a repaint, and I just don't want to do that for myriad reasons.

The other thing I wanted to do was fix up her hair a bit. The texture and shaping of the hair from the factory was very successful. It's just really curly and loosely bunched together at the top with a black plastic elastic that keeps the hair from collapsing and lets it stand upward.

I felt like I was noticing some strands coming loose, though, and I worried for the longevity of the elastic. When it eventually disintegrated, the hairdo would fall down. As such, I pulled it off and tied a piece of black twine on for a stable hair tie to keep the effect. I also stuffed some pieces of paper towel into the hair and arranged things around so it would stand up more and be more vertical and narrow, because with nothing propping the hair up inside, it rested in more of a ball shape that's not quite right. Here's the hair adjustment. It's subtle, but effective.

For Frankie, I decided to keep working at the shape of the bouffant, which I'd re-tied before, because I wanted it fully defined and bigger. I wiggled around the hair ties and fibers until I got it a bit more puffed.

Factory shaping.

Adjusted.

The first thing I had in mind was photographing the Skullector monsters in different clothing for a fashion-model shoot because they're glam enough for the job and I wanted to try them in different looks. First, I put the Monster shirtless in a silver Ken coat and G3 Deuce's shades (the latter of which I'd tried on him before) and the Bride in the Spirit Queen white top and skirt which look like bandages, plus Luna Madison's sandal boots and G3 Spectra's shades.

I put together a couple of other looks for the Bride.

Karla Choupette's shirt and Symphanee Midnight's skirt--they don't fit well together and the shirt is too big, but it looks amazing.

An Etsy black dress with O.M.G. Neonlicious's jacket and the Bride's belt.

Here's some model shots of the Bride's original outfit to showcase the train of her dress which never gets to flourish because she doesn't have a saddle stand.

Here's some photos with atmosphere akin to the Universal movies--I started with the Monster putting his Bride together on the table.

Putting the Bride on this body was such an upgrade, honestly. The texture molding matches the character, the elbows aren't sticky and defective like the original Bride body's, and the disassembly of the CAM dolls suits a Frankenmonster well.

Then I recreated a scene of the two monsters at their meeting.