Swimming in Thunderstorms: Monster High Skull Shores Frankie Stein (Black and White) by Mattel

I don't normally go for beach dolls, but this was an interesting one!

Escape from Skull Shores was an early G1 animated special and produced G1's second beach doll line. In addition to debuting Gil Webber to the toyline, one of the more interesting moves in the Skull Shores doll line was making its Frankie doll greyscale just like the classic Frankenstein film! This greyscale Frankie was also MH's first special release timed for a Friday the 13th date. Escape From Skull Shores itself features flashbacks to a woman who looked a lot like Frankie, possibly implying Frankie was built from her pieces, possibly not. 

This is not Frankie's only doll with the old-movie greyscale gag. She had a San Diego Comic-Con exclusive greyscale rendition of her G1 signature doll, and that doll preceded this one. Perhaps the Skull Shores edition was a bit of a "second chance substitute" for audiences who didn't get the exclusive SDCC greyscale doll. Her Voltageous Comic-Con doll much later on is more colorized but still has a mostly greyscale theme. There's a MEGA building set themed on Frankie with her little doll figure and the model being greyscale, and Reel Drama has made five of six Original Ghouls now with mostly-greyscale palettes except for hair and eye color accents in one color derived from the original doll. Frankie, frustratingly, chose blue when green would have looked so much better and more spooky.

Now that Cleo got added as a late Reel Drama addition debuting this year (I'm gonna get her), the only missing Reel Drama character now is Ghoulia, because of course she never catches a break. It's possible she'll never come since she's not descended from the Universal Monsters pack the Reel Drama line is loosely homaging, but zombies like her still got their start in a famous black-and-white movie, so I think she'd be fair game. A Reel Drama Ghoulia could have used Frankie's blue shade as her accent had Frankie not chosen it, and Lagoona uses a lighter turquoise, so I doubt (hope) a pale powder blue would be added to the Reel Drama accent range. That would leave the line too monotonous. That leaves either a red-themed Ghoulia, or maybe a green-themed one, though red is her most prominent color that the other Reel Drama dolls haven't claimed. Picking green for Ghoulia's theme color would also be great, but it's her least prominent color. I'd absolutely love a red Reel Drama Ghoulia. That'd be sick. Ghoulia is the only Original Ghoul who's grey-skinned by default and thus wouldn't need to change for Reel Drama, while the other Reel Drama dolls had to turn the ghouls grey from their original tones. 

Skull Shores was Frankie's only mass-market fashion doll to do full greyscale, though. It's possible this was the very first playline greyscale fashion doll, well before Shadow High did it, and even SH didn't fully commit. Wave 1 SH has color accents in the eyes. Skull Shores Frankie is designed to be 100% colorless.

This doll's packaging was also greyscale and special to match her, which was the correct thing to do. I wish Shadow High had done the same with its first wave.

The shoes here are signature Frankie's, not the design the produced doll is wearing.

It's funny how much this makes her look like a rare chase variant of a standard-release doll when this was her standard solo release. Full-color Skull Shores Frankie as seen in the animation was released, but that version was technically the special variant here. She came exclusively in a Skull Shores repack five-pack, not any solo release, and looked like this:

She's cute, but it's amazing how much less notable she becomes when rendered in color. This photo shows the correct shoe mold.

The other dolls in the Skull Shores five-pack didn't have any special changes, so the Frankie color variant was the motivator for collectors to pursue the five-pack even if they had the other dolls already.

I got my greyscale Frankie through an unboxed copy, and I had to piece my copy together by buying her skirt wrap separately. Nobody seemed to have both the doll and her wrap. I wasn't expecting the best results from her right away, since I suspected there would be some yellowing to take care of, plus the doll has elastic-strung hips that didn't get me in the most optimistic mood.

Here she is all presented, but this wasn't how she arrived. This is after working on her.

I didn't realize until later that this doll was wearing the wrong shoes. She'd been put into shoes from a Spectra fashion pack, which, to be fair, seamlessly match this doll. 

Frankie's hair is a short bob cut of the kind you don't get much on Mattel dolls these days, though they've gotten a little better about shorter hair recently--sometimes. It came to me still gelled, though very heavily yellowed. I gave it some hydrogen peroxide and Goo Gone treatments, and that got rid of the worst of it, though white saran will always yellow or stay a little yellow. I haven't observed my polypropylene-haired G3 Frankies' hair yellowing, which might mean poly, for all its faults, won't discolor?

Treatments helped a lot. It's still visibly yellower than her greyscale theme demands in certain lighting, but I made improvements, and color tones in photos can be edited for staged shots. Here's the result now.

The whitest it tends to look.

Saran hair yellowing is such a frustration and a problem, but it's even worse on a doll meant to be greyscale. 

 

Frankie's bob is asymmetrical and side-parted to her right where it's longest, and the cut has no bangs. The haircut length disparity means it can be combed wrong with longer parts falling on the wrong side of the parting. The hair blend is Frankie's typical balance of white with black streaks and the coloration is fully unchanged from normal. This isn't one where the greyscaling changed the hair color. Full-color Skull Shores Frankie has no hair saturation.

Frankie's face is pretty typical for G1, save the coloring. Her heterochromia is preserved by making each eye a different grey value. 

This is the oldest G1 Frankie I've owned, so it's interesting to put her next to Creeproduction as a remake of the G1 original. They're actually closer than I expected. I'd seen photos making Creepro dolls look like noticeable changes from their true originals, but at least this old Frankie and the Creepro are painted about the same. The placement of the older Frankie's cheek scar is different, being closer to the eye and looking a little larger, and their lips are differently shaped.

When I put them both into true photographic greyscale, Skull Shores has a slightly darker skintone, but it's nothing that couldn't be explained by a beach tan if you needed a justification. Full-color Frankie's eyes have less shade difference in true greyscale than they do on the stylized greyscale edition, but that's because they use color as differentiation.

I forgot that early G1 Frankies had vac-metal chromed silver neck bolts, and unfortunately, I can't show them to you because I ruined them trying to fix her hair. The bolts' chroming wasn't replicated on the Creeproduction signature edition, which used the pearl silver bolts of most later Frankies. I think the chroming was a touch that made older Frankies look more special...but my soaks to de-yellow Frankie's hair got rid of the chrome coating in a way I didn't foresee. Her bolts ended up a translucent grey color from the plastic underneath, which does match her bracelet and shoes so it's visually okay, but I wish I had realized the chrome was vulnerable and just soaked Frankie's disembodied head. I wanted to keep her special shiny bolts!

I could try re-painting these, but the finish would be inferior to the original chrome and the paint likely wouldn't be durable enough to make it worth the hassle. It's such a small part of the doll, too, so that would be an annoying thing to paint, and for little benefit. Translucent bolts read more like jewelry than metal, but she'll deal with it.

Frankie's neck joint ended up in such a way where the anchor peg inside let her head tip backward, but not forward. I gave her neck surgery to replace the pin and widen the torso neck socket so her head got more range, including a lot more range side-to-side as a consequence. Frankie's one of the characters who makes a degree of sense with a metal pin head in her throat, so I didn't try disguising it.

Frankie has translucent earrings shaped like crystalline hex nuts which sit right at her earlobe without hanging on anything. 

The texture makes them feel like a Boo York piece! If Frankie had a doll in that line, she could have reused these.

I actually have two copies of the left-ear earrings, and I don't know if this was an error original to this copy of Frankie, or if the previous owner replaced a lost earring with another one from the same side without noticing the issue. These were manufactured symmetrically as two different molds for this doll release, so I know I have a mistake here.

I kind of want to get a new set so they're proper, but it's less of a priority than getting the correct shoes.

Frankie's other jewelry is a translucent flat bracelet invoking another hex nut, placed on her left wrist.

Frankie's costume is a bathing suit with an optional wrap skirt layer. It's typical for swim dolls to have full outfits with optional pieces to switch from a more fully-dressed to a pure-swimming look--usually, optional shirts for the boys and optional wrap skirts for the girls.

The bathing suit itself is kind of sewn as a two-piece, but connected together as one piece at the middle of the torso, with the top and bottom halves being wrapped around a hexagonal ring which seems to be another copy of her bracelet. That's actually pretty clever, since Mattel just needed to make another copy of the bracelet when constructing her outfit rather than molding a separate ring element.

The top is a fabric matching the skirt, depicting a black-and-white thunderstorm design that's really funny for a Frankenstein swim doll and quite dramatic in this greyscale. The skirt velcros at the top and comes off easily. 

The contrast has been upped a bit for style points--the color version of this doll isn't quite as dramatic when edited to be drained of saturation.

Color Frankie's contrast level with zero saturation.

The top of the bathing suit is cut as basically two vertical strips covering Frankie's breasts with nothing across the middle, which is a little more mature than I think later G1 or any post-G1 dolls would cut the costume. I also felt like Gloom Beach Cleo's bikini, with the bandage strips connecting the top and tiny bottom, was slightly more mature costume design than I'd expect from the dolls today, though her skirt helps a lot to make her more teen-friendly. The upper half of the costume has some stray threads.

The bottom of Frankie's suit is metallic silver fabric which covers her belly button in a way that feels like 1960s design, where the navel was censored and considered scandalous, leading to scenarios like Gilligan's Island or I Dream of Jeannie having midriffs bared but zero belly buttons exposed. I don't think this silver fabric is very flattering for the lower half of this bathing suit, with or without the skirt, and some alternative probably would have been better. You could have sold me on the weird ring-joined assembly of this outfit if the lower half was the same fabric as the upper half, but this silver is just ugly to me. 

What gets me is that the color version of this doll has a printed fabric for this section which, while not matching the upper half, still suits it a lot better.

I'd honestly love this costume if I could swap out the bottoms and cut off the silver part from the torso ring, leaving the upper half intact. This silver fabric is just not graceful or flattering here. I have the bottoms I cut from Gloom Beach Cleo's swimwear, which could probably be dyed solid black, or maybe the swimsuit could be deconstructed, the lower half dyed, and then put back on? The outfit works fine with the skirt, but I just can't without it.

The costume has two velcro closures in back, on the bottoms and on the top, and the top ties behind the neck with ribbon strings. The strings are mercifully long to make it easier to form a bow from them.

It feels like Skull Shores should have been too late in G1 for the dolls to still have elastic-strung hips, but I already knew they did thanks to my exploration of Gil's dolls. 

The hips on this Frankie have held up well so far and are not dramatically loosened and floppy. The hips joints don't hold a splayed-out pose like plastic hinges will, but these are in good condition. 

The incorrect shoes I got with Frankie are from a Spectra fashion pack and depict minimalist wedge sandals with chain straps. They suit Frankie well enough that I wasn't compelled to order her correct shoes at the moment. It's not a priority in my collecting right now to have this doll wearing her exact right shoes.

Skull Shores Frankie is a nearly-perfect doll let down by a hideous swimsuit lower half. Thank Ra for her skirt, because it makes her so much more presentable.

She looked great against a yellow background, with G3 Spectra's shades and Monster Fest G3 Frankie's drink turned to the colorless half.

I also tried the round Barbie Extra Minis Shades on her against a black background. This one is a greyscale edit, not a color photo.

I then put her in a tub of water darkened with inert dye powder, playing with different lighting. Blacklight helped make her look like she was glowing as if struck by lightning.

I edited the latter piece with water reflections from the other photos and added some lightning to make the image read the best. 

I don't have a beach I'd be able to comfortably photograph Frankie on, so I made do with just the water. I'd have considered bringing her along to my lake vacation this year (now concluded) but I knew I would be more occupied during the trip this year, and less able to steal away for discreet toy photo sessions--plus, my packing capacity was smaller with us traveling by air rather than car this time. That's why Vandala's review also got posted the way it did--she could have been a lake doll, but I just got it done here.

Unfortunately, inert dye or no, some black marks got into pores in Frankie's vinyl on her jawline which was where the water level rested around her face as she floated, so I tried dipping her carefully positioned in bleach where the stains got in. I was glad to have already done neck surgery at this point because her head popped off easily with my modifications! 

The bleach didn't work somehow and Frankie seemed to have gotten Living Dead Dolls-level unfixable stains from that photoshoot, so I decided this would be the straw that broke the camel's back and the signal to get another copy of the doll. All of my previous and even recent experience left MH dolls unharmed by colored water with unactivated dye. Go figure. 

It wasn't worth it to me to order a pair of the correct shoes alone, but I'd now basically ruined this doll, and a new copy could fix the face, earrings, neck bolts, and shoes all in one go. That would call for more hair cleanup and possibly a neck surgery repeat, to be sure, and I do regret the mistakes that took the first copy down this path, but enough was enough. This Frankie sacrificed for some good pictures, and maybe she's salvageable for a custom, but Skull Shores greyscale Frankie will be done real justice with another copy I won't screw up.

My replacement Frankie didn't come with her skirt, and she didn't have her earrings, but she does have the right shoes and a clean body. She was advertised as having some untidy stitch paint and a pink mark on her back (where on Earth do these pink stains come from?), but that was fine. 

Here's Frankie II.

The hip elastic is possibly looser on this copy, but again, not loose enough to be unposeable. 

At one point, I lost one of the first Frankie's earrings, giving myself a second problem with the earrings this copy couldn't fix, but the hair is long enough on her right that I can just use the earring I have left where it will be visible on the other side. 

This is the correct shoe design.

I popped Frankie's head off to give it glue treatment and a peroxide soak for de-yellowing, and did neck surgery on the body to give her head more mobility. Here's the tidied doll put together, sans one earring.

I'd have been interested in restyling this doll to a less specific context so she could wear everyday clothes, but at the moment, I don't have much black-and-white G1-compatible clothing that I thought suited her (I tried Netflix Wednesday pieces and wasn't convinced; I think she needs trousers to make the jacket work), so I'm keeping her in her original stock for now.

Here's an artsy photo showing off her intact chrome bolts.

I didn't need her for that many more photos, but I decided to give Frankie more of a glamor swim in my sink basin as a doll-size hot tub. 

This is a fun novelty release that suits a tribute to old monster movies while also making for quite a pretty doll. This is more appealing of a fashion design than I would have expected from a swim doll, and the greyscale version here is largely superior to the more canonical full-color variant. Really the only thing wrong with the greyscale beach Frankie is the ugly silver lower half of her bathing suit, but her skirt does wonders to remove the issue. The doll is chic, she's creative and humorous with her old-movie and lightning-storm swimming imagery, and she's aged better than she needed to for an old G1 doll. Her hair's a mess on any copy you'll find these days, but that's easily enough restored. I think this is a fun little treat of a doll that elevates a budget swim release into something more collectible and artistic.