Witchy Wonders 3, or, "MGA, Stay Subtle" : Bratzillaz Switch-A-Witch

In the eternal MGA/Mattel feud, Monster High's monster success spawned two cash-ins by MGA: the alien-focused figurine/fashion doll line Novi Stars, and the more direct competitor: Bratzillaz. And it's high time I talked about the latter.

The Bratzillaz (great name) are counterparts to the Bratz who have similar (or...just the same) first names and are witches. Meygan's counterpart is Meygana, Sasha's counterpart is Sashabella, Cloe's counterpart is Cloetta, Yasmin's counterpart is Yasmina, and Jade's counterpart is...Jade. Geez, really? 

Bratzillaz core wave 1. Left to right: Cloetta Spelletta, Meygana Broomstix, Jade J'Adore, Yasmina Clairvoya, Sashabella Paws

I can't fathom why Bratzillaz was not simply framed as an alternate universe, because trying to pretend this is the same world is messy. 

Bratzillaz ran only a short while, from 2012-2013, and bears the same burden as some other Monster High imitators--the need, possibly self-imposed rather than truly mandated, to restrict oneself to one monster archetype while the inspiration prances around with every monster type under the sun. Once Upon a Zombie was zombies and fairy tales; Mystixx was vampires, then zombies; Novi Stars was aliens, and Bratzillaz is witches (though it squeezed in a mermaid and vampire witch). Had the line continued further, Bratzillaz was set to break into a few more monster types with some admittedly blatant MH inspiration, and the cancelled wave would have made for really cool dolls. I'd have loved to get their ripoff of Wydowna Spider.

Unreleased six-armed witch Ludwina Crawlz.

Bratzillaz was always on my radar, but never too strongly. The art style shifts in the line definitely made the dolls favorable to classic Bratz in my mind, and the fantasy theme didn't have the MGA trendy-shallowness issues I see in a lot of their content. While Bratz has a minority male population in the toyline, Bratzillaz' doll line is monogender, with only female dolls. This doll line is worth discussing, especially now that the line seems to be relevant again--for one, it seems like Mattel have tried to eat the nachos of their own past competitor with their Moonspell Magic spinoff of G3 Monster High focused on witches...and they may have actually done it to beat MGA to reviving Bratzillaz, as there are rumors that BZ is set for a return next year as trademarks have been re-registered...all of this is while MGA is also launching a princess highschool doll line which could be accused of taking from Mattel's EAH in the same belated decade Mattel is taking from Bratzillaz...these companies are insane.

Don't get too excited for a Bratzillaz relaunch, though, as current rumors suggest the supposed 'zillaz revival might just be limited to a line of MGA's abysmal Labubu-esque Bratziez dolls, though, and I don't want that at all. The trend the Bratziez were created to cash in on is already dead and nobody wants the Bratzillaz back in that form.

I don't really love the Bratzillaz. Not enough to justify the aftermarket prices on most; these go for crazy amounts. There are mainline Bratzillaz I like. None I love. Not enough to spend a ton on putting them into my review conversation, at least. I collect for passion, not obligation, and the BZ aftermarket is absolutely vicious.

But I did always have an attraction to Bratzillaz' blatant take on the MH Create-a-Monster line. MGA called it "Switch-a-Witch".

Pretty much exactly like Create-a-Monster, Switch-a-Witch sets came with disassembled dolls with parts that could mix and match to create your own characters. At the time, some Monster High fans were mad about this, calling it blatant theft. And...well, yeah. Kinda. But it's called "competition", and is perfectly allowed. Sometimes, it produces the better version!  These were not generic humanoid witches that fit with the mainline Bratzillaz, though. These dolls went for a poppy modern-art abstract style with vertically divided split body colors and high-contrast motifs and patterning that capture the artsy visual energy I love most from MGA...while admittedly being harder to read, characterize, or define as examples of the witch archetype.

Switch-a-Witch had a few responses to CAM's implementation of the "build-a-doll" concept that I think can be called serious improvements--for one, the Switch-a-Witch dolls mixing and sharing parts created less obtrusive visuals thanks to their abstract colorful designs and more generic tone already being loud and chaotic as coordinated builds. Patchworks of colors and patterns from blended dolls' pieces work fine for dolls whose "canon" "whole" looks are already multicolored and patterned. You were kind of kidding yourself if you thought CAM parts really successfully intermixed with any CAM bodies but the ones they were designed for. The colors and textures were typically too disparate to pass, give or take an odd duo of releases which happened to be good color matches. MH leaned too far on designing concrete characters with CAM, so the dolls ended up more as novelty take-apart pieces and ways to merchandise memorable background extras from the cartoon, rather than truly successful fuel for mix-and-match beyond wigs and clothing. 

Switch-a-Witch also flipped off CAM in one very deserved manner--no Switch-a-Witch characters had incomplete bodies. There was an infuriating class system of CAM dolls, where some "dolls" were just extremities to build onto a torso core that would not match them or complete the design properly, or else the matching torsos were only scarcely available through Mattel direct. The solo packs in the CAM line were always this incomplete type, while the duo packs used to have one character suffering an incomplete lot of body parts...and even the duo sets with two complete clothed wigged dolls only included one pair of shoes. With Switch-a-Witch, every single witch character represented by a unique doll head is packed with a complete lot of matched body parts, and the Switch-a-Witch solo packs built complete dolls all on their own, with a wig and complete costume too. That must have felt so damn good to achieve from a product-design pettiness standpoint. I am often on Mattel's side in the corporate rivalry, mostly favoring Mattel aesthetics and content, but when MGA outshines on product value, which they frequently do, I will always credit them. If I was designing a toy to compete with CAM, ensuring every character was a complete doll would be my first impulse, and Bratzillaz did that. I was aware of one drawback to the dolls--different body types offered with differently long leg parts which could not be functionally mixed as thoroughly as the rest. But you know where else Switch-a-Witch wins, over mainline Bratzillaz and Create-A-Monster? 

The complete packs are more affordable in 2026! Sorted!

Switch-A-Witch is a much smaller product line than CAM was, since Bratzillaz ran so briefly. The Switch-A-Witch line consisted of two waves and six characters total--a duo pack and a solo pack in each wave.

I got the Wave 1 Switch-a-Witch deluxe set, which builds a black-and-white doll with check patterns and a purple/white wig and a pastel green-and-pink doll with a curly blue and pink wig. 

This is the right choice for me to explore Bratzillaz with because I've wanted this set since 2016 when I first read the Toy Box Philospher review (which was written when the set was released).

The packaging and branding of these sets is extremely similar to Create-a-Monster, with most of the doll parts detached separately in compartments filling the internal tray. This is a good way to immediately demonstrate the modularity of the dolls and allow kids to build the dolls their way from the get-go with no prescribed asssembly, but MGA went further by putting the doll heads in while attached to the "opposite" torsos. The MH sets had fully detached parts and the two-pack packaging layout did not expressly encourage mixing on the opposite bodies in this way.

The box has a not one, but two shady little highlights advertising that yes, you actually get two full dolls (if you buy from MGA's line)!

Yeah! Get 'em, MGA! Fight! This could hardly be more pointed if the doll hands were molded with middle fingers up! I love watching toy company pettiness.

I'm not sure this little bubble adds much.

The corner has a portrait of the two dolls, but it must be depicting prototypes and it's a fairly poor representation of the contents.

The first issue is that both dolls are shown wearing the same hat, which is not possible with one copy of this set. This makes me think the two dolls here are composited in from separate pictures and were not photographed in one frame. The set has two different hats.

Next, I noticed that the dolls are looking forward, while the actual doll heads have side-glancing eyes, with the duo's gazes mirrored in opposite directions. 

Third, the doll on the right is wearing chrome silver earrings which are nowhere to be found in this product, matching neither the shape nor color of either pair included in the package. The earrings on the black-and-white head are the molds used for the green-and-pink doll in the released set and are the wrong colors in this photo.

It's subtle, but the black-and white skirt has a black line all the way across, implying a belt strap behind the buckle. The produced piece is fully split with no black at all on the white half, and does not have the stitching which separates the waist ring into an implied belt band.

Lastly, the dolls are shown wearing the opposite torsos to their heads, but the green and pink arms on the doll on the left are far more saturated than the green and pink torso the doll is also wearing (you can barely see the color differences and it almost looks pure white). The green and pink head on the other doll matches the left torso, but is also far paler than the arms on the doll on the left.

The pictures on the back of the box, advertising the mix-and-match combos, are shot with the same prototype dolls and contain the same discrepancies with the released product.

These images show another prototype difference--the all-black doll arm in the finished two-pack was apparently, at one point, designed to look like a black elbow glove, with the shoulder section of the arm being white. This might have been done to add one more color alternation where the black arm wouldn't be touching black on the costume, since it would jump from black on the top to white on the shoulder to black on the rest of the arm, even with the line matching up when the arm was lowered and forming another square of the doll's checkerboard next to the white waist segment. See the bottom middle picture on this grid:

I'm fine with the produced arm being all black, though.

The bottom features images of the first wave (one two-pack and one solo) and the upcoming second wave (the same setup). Details vary from final product, and the Wave 2 images fail to show all three wigs in the wave, depicting two dolls wearing the same wig.

The first wave's solo doll is this white-and-yellow witch, who is apparently taller. She's not bad, but her top and hat don't go, and the cape, pants, and wig all seem optimized for the black-and-white doll in the two-pack. Conversely, the wig and cape pieces in the two-pack with purple halves might work best with this doll's yellow elements.

Wave 2 has a bit of a funkier edge to its artsy side, with colored eye "patch" shapes on one half of the dolls' faces and some groovier, maybe seventies-esque patterns. Here's the two-pack dolls. I love the magenta doll. Her limbs are designed to have some color alternation.

The solo doll in this wave is...another yellow and white one? Really? I think this doll is comparatively dull.

I'd definitely get the magenta doll solo if she had all of "her" pieces. I need none of the blue doll.

Back to the wave 1 two-pack. The cardboard backdrop has portrait frames behind the different compartments, and unhooks from the plastic bubble. 

The bubble is a cover taped over a tray where the parts are held.

Many of the parts were held in with clear elastic bands, but every single clear elastic used in the production and packaging was decayed and crumbled by this point, and had to be scraped off in sticky pieces. The clothing and wigs used tape and thread to hold them into the tray, while the hands had their wrist pegs popped through holes (the safest way to get them out was to poke them out from the back) and several pieces were loose. Some of the earrings had migrated out of place into the wrong compartments. Both costumes are two-piece top-and-skirt sets, but the tops and bottoms were sewn together with two waist loops of white thread on the sides for packaging. The belt/train for the green-and-pink costume was velcro'd around the waist of the costume while packaged. The set includes a broomstick-shaped Bratzillaz brush, but I'd much rather have had two doll stands. The dolls can clip into Monster High/Ever After High stands, but the clip goes around the top of the green and pink outfit in a way that grips and stresses the pleather, so I prefer a wider-clip unbranded stand for whoever wears that piece.

The set includes multilingual paper instructions with Comic Sans text and photographic illustrations. The parts are inventoried and you're told how the dolls disassemble and go together. The instructions caution you to only insert pieces in the correct sockets and to not subject the doll hair to high heat. 

Here's the parts out of the tray.

The dolls are designed to disassemble and pop together at every joint except the waist, making them disassemble to the same degree as Create-a-Monster dolls (who have no waist joints).

The CAM Blob fully disassembled.

Because the Switch-a-Witch dolls have zany multicolored bodies, there is a tiny bit of wiggle room and ambiguity for which limb pieces go on which side when assembling the dolls cohesively, but the pieces are still a bit more directional than Monster High's overall. While MH arms are cut with flat cylinder ends on the upper arm, the Switch-a-Witch upper arms have contoured ends which limit where in the forearms' rotation the elbow hinges can bend, and this determines which side of the body each upper arm goes on--the cut of the socket faces forward when the arm hangs down. On MH take-apart dolls, the upper arms can easily be put on both sides of the body with no visual or articulation impediment, though I think Mattel has them marked for one side over the other. The shapes of the Switch-a-Witch hands, thighs, and lower legs also direct the pieces to go on set sides, meaning only the forearms of Switch-a-Witches can be functionally swapped and placed where you please.

Here's the nude base dolls assembled matchy-matchy.

The vertical-split color theming of the Switch-a-Witches is also used, more subtly, as the design motif for Bratzillaz main cast member Cloetta Spelletta, who has heterochromia and split hair colors, but only one skintone. 

The pleather horrifies me, but first-wave Cloetta would be my mainline Bratzilla of choice.

Cloetta looks like a case of genetic chimerism; the Switch-A-Witches are giving full Two-Face! 

Since the dolls have a very theatrical tone and motifs which lean toward "jester" for the black-and-white and "clown" for the green-and-pink, I'm naming the dolls after commedia dell'arte archetypes. The black-and-white doll will be Pulcinella, and the green-and-pink doll will be Arlecchina. In the classic cast, Pulcinella/Punchinello (a male character) and Arlecchino (Harlequin) are both in the category of zanni, comic lower-class character roles in the commedia dell'arte, and where we get the word "zany"! I think these names suit wild-looking witches.

Pulcinella uses a lot of switching contrast for a checkerboard effect, with her two colors going back and forth down both sides of her body, and her non-black arm and leg being mini checkerboards of their own. Her torso is not split at the waist into another alternation of black and white. All of the doll's multicolored pieces are cast in white with the black elements painted on. The solid black and white pieces are cast in those colors. Arlecchina is divided straight down the middle, Two-Face style, with pink on her left side and green on her right. The only color alternation is in her face, where the opposite side's colors are used for the eyes and divided lipstick, but her eyeshadow matches her skintones. The multicolored parts on Arlecchina are cast in the pink, with the green painted on, and her solid pink and green pieces are cast that way. Arlecchina has fewer painted pieces than Pulcinella since she has no patterned body parts. 

Speaking of patterned bodies, I'm surprised only Pulcinella has pieces with a pattern element, and that no Switch-a-Witches had striped limbs, even partially. Stripes are very witchy iconography and this line abstracting stripy tights into asymmetrical patterned stripy limbs could have been cool. 

The split-divided paint jobs are very ambitious and striking, but necessarily have some factory flaws. The checked limbs on the black-and-white doll have more paint and more errors, but some are hidden by the costume, like a nick on the leg that's totally covered by a shoe strap.

The two dolls have subtly different body types, with Arlecchina having shorter legs and a more pinched-in waist.

This is nothing revolutionary in the years after Barbie made real waves with jts new body types in 2016, but in 2012, body diversity in dolls was pretty unusual. Maybe this is a dig at Monster High's body diversity issues, though MH was trying a bit with its three femme body types. They were just most often allotted to characters to set them apart by age groups rather than to depict varied body types in one group.

The two body types are a bit of a hindrance when it comes to swap customization, because the mismatched leg lengths can create frustrations. MGA advertises the Switch-a-Witches like their legs are fully mixable, but for best functionality, the doll needs to have the upper legs and lower legs each from a matched set, or else a long leg and short thigh on one side, and short leg and long thigh on the other. MGA ran into that frustrating problem of diversity, a very good thing, being bad for the purpose of mix-and-match custom kit dolls.

The body design seems to be typical for Bratzillaz disregarding the modular parts, with Pulcinella's representing the standard sculpt for the line. The shape is exaggerated with an hourglass figure regardless of body type, and has much longer legs than torso. It feels like the pieces save the torso and thighs are all vinyl, making the limbs feel a little bendier and flimsier than I'm used to with MH and its harder plastic torsos, upper arms, hips, and legs. The pieces all pop together fairly well, though putting the heads on and pulling them off makes me nervous. It feels like the heads won't come off the pegs, but they do, cleanly with no stress, if you pull and twist properly. CAM heads are squishier and absolutely stress-free in popping them on and off. From the pictures I've seen, the neck pegs seem to be about the same design as the Bratz Head Gamez head-swapping dolls released just over a decade before Switch-a-Witch, but those pegs were fragile and breakable if the head was pulled too hard and not separating. There's a notch molded in the back of the head socket, and I've head you can shove the head down further than it normally rests and then pull it straight off after stretching the neck for a second. That didn't seem to work for me on the Switch-a-Witches, but pulling with a bit of a twist does the trick and I haven't noticed the neck pegs stressing or breaking. I would still feel more comfortable with less firm vinyl heads!

The articulation rises to the standard set by Monster High, being more extensive than classic Bratz, while the feet are part of the legs, not the shoes! The jointing starts with the neck knobs, which give the head rotation and side-to-side tilt, but not front-to-back tilt.

Bratz before and O.M.G. afterward would have this same head articulation style. I don't know why MGA seems to choose this on occasion, since a full ball-joint range would be best. The friction of the neck joint is the friction of the neck peg, since the heads are not that tight on the top of the doll neck. I noticed Arlecchina's peg was loose after taking a head off it for the second time. With a loose neck peg, her head flops back and forth. Pulcinella doesn't have a loose peg and her head stays put where it's posed and tilted. I later worked some superglue into Arlecchina's neck joint to make the peg tight, moving the peg periodicially to prevent the glue from sticking the peg in place while spreading it around as it cured and made the space smaller.

The arms have articulation similar to Monster High except for the limitations in the elbow cuts. 

The waist joints can tip a little bit side-to-side, and on the black-and-white doll, can rotate, but when I try rotating the waist on the green-and-pink doll, it feels like the ball and socket are popping out of alignment and it isn't meant to turn. The waist joint is fairly negligible in terms of impact. I really wouldn't be surprised if it's there just so Bratzillaz could claim to one-up Monster High's articulation. In practice, the waist does very little, and the arms and neck have limitations compared to a Monster High doll [whose joints are all working as intended], so whether Bratzillaz are winning the articulation game is debatable.

The legs work like Monster High, though I had to crack one hip hinge into motion by sticking scissors into the ball cup of the hinge hub and pushing it. The hips aren't as strong as I'd like them to be, nor the knees, though these are issues often shared by the Monster High dolls of the time.

I like the physicality of the Bratzillaz bodies, but the more flexible limbs and the failure to fully one-up the articulation or joint performance of Monster High means I can't say they surpass their rival.

Bratzillaz dolls are a different art style from Bratz. The heads are downsized and so are the lips, both of which are choices that appeal to me. The eyes are also generally wider, though they still have plenty of attitude. The noses are still tiny and detail-less, and like many MGA dolls, the lips are relaxed to show a glamorous/haughty strip of teeth. The Bratzillaz feet are not overlarge like Bratz and work like most fashion doll feet by being part of the body scupt, as mentioned.

Bratzillaz also distinguished itself from both Bratz and Monster High by giving its dolls inset eyes. MGA does a lot of inset eyes in its brands, but two of its biggest, Bratz and L.O.L., use painted eyes instead. Bratzillaz eyes are quite pretty and include some creative designs, like Jade J'adore's heart-shaped irises and Fianna Fins' crescent moon designs. These inset eyes are more basic. They're solid irises with a darker shade ringing the edge with a dot-shading effect. Pulcinella's eyes are blue on her right and green on her left, with her gaze directed to her left. I'd have most enjoyed white and black eyes on the opposite sides of the face colors, or else purple and yellow for a spookier look. The white half of the face has lavender eyeshadow and pink blush, while the black half has silver makeup and no blush.

While the higher articulation and more conventional shifts in the art style endear Bratzillaz to me, I do have to acknowledge that I've never been particularly fair to Bratz before, and that it might be time for that to change by giving at least a single Bratz a fair shot on this blog. I've come around to appreciate the sense of balance and slick caricature in their absurd proportions once I realized the long legs and huge cartoon feet balance the head out pretty well (the 2015 reboot badly overdid this with bulging gigantic featureless lumps for feet which made it not work!), and Bratz was too influential for me to dismiss out of hand. While classic Bratz in all of its glorious 2000s aesthetics would be a good point to highlight, the low-articulation dolls and designs have minimal chance of being worth collecting to me personally, so I might tip the scales in my favor with a more recent collector doll who has better joints. I personally like holiday Felicia quite a bit with her dramatic yellow dress. I was also oddly tempted by the wacky fashion design of Bratzaversary Jade, and that design is more indicative of the overall character of Bratz than conventionally luxe Felicia, but at this point of my collecting career, Jade's pleather just gives me hives. This Switch-a-Witch review will prove why!

I love this black-and-white doll, but her faceup has one concern--the lips are not split, and are a red color on both sides. That color choice ends up squarely in minstrel territory on the stark black side. MGA, for the waves it may have made with fashion and characters derived from Black culture, has long been critcized for colorism and ignorance related to Black representation, and this is one of a few issues I can find in Bratzillaz at a glance. Another would be the 'zillaz being less visibly diverse than their cousins, with Yasmina being the same pale tone as her friends as opposed to her counterpart Yasmin, while it's not as clear if BZ Jade is meant to be Asian like original Jade. BZ does have a Chinese and Indian witch each, though they're so prominently culturalized that it's possible they're not solving much and are instead stereotypical. Also, the Midnight Beach line, which makes all of the dolls cast in glow-in-the-dark greenish plastic, includes the Black character Sashabella whose distinctive skintone is erased by that particular doll line. I can't confirm if Sasha and Sashabella have the same skintone or not, but if Sashabella is lighter, that would not be the best look, and would mean Bratzillaz' counterparts to the Bratz whitewashed both of the Bratz squad's darker colors. (I couldn't find a comparison of Sasha and her cousin, so they may be close enough in truth that this potential issue, at least, is not present.)

Pulcinella needs a lip repaint. I worried splitting the lips black and white on the opposite sides wouldn't totally fix things because racist makeup sometimes used white for the lip color too, but I've seen such a repaint of this doll in practice and it seems to work well. I could always try silver instead, too, if I wanted a single lip color that served both sides. I just worry I couldn't achieve a clean division.

Mattel was guilty of similar gaffes in MH at the same time. Stark black Wydowna Spider's SDCC doll had red lips when silver was right there in her established palette, G1 Black dolls didn't show appreciation for textured hair as much as they should have, and stark black Catty Noir often had pink lips that could create some very uncharitable readings of her design. The brand has its own overdone walking cultural portraits, too.

Pulcinella's black face paint is marred by some shinier spots that catch the light. Because the black half is not the head's cast color, acetone would only wipe away the whole color rather than whatever residue is shining on top. I don't know if this is uneven black paint which dried patchy or if another application spattered the doll.

Here's a look at Arlecchina's face. Her eyeshadow matches the halves of the face, but her eyes are opposite, and her lips are split into opposite colors, matching the eyes instead of the skin.

The costumes and wigs of the dolls are well-considered as a duo, with Pulcinella's clothes focusing on straight lines and Arlecchina's focusing on rounded forms. Pulcinella has straight hair, a pointy witch hat, a sleek cape, a sharp costume, and square earrings.

Arlecchina has a big fluff of curls, a bowler hat, round earrings, puff sleeves, and a floaty train. I'm almost surprised she doesn't have spots on her body too!

Pulcinella would need to be outright spiky for me to call her "Kiki" and Arlecchina "Bouba", but the shape language is deliberately contrasted.

Pulcinella has a wig formerly tied in ponytails, split between blonde and purple. This is a misstep to me. Straight black and white would be much better, and the hairstyle utterly does not suit her. The wig caps are pretty obvious at the hairlines of both wigs, but these just fit snug around the scalp with no pegs to plug into the head.

I think Arlecchina's wig is successfully clownish and fantastical and wearable by all, but the curly texture might take on unwanted associations when paired with the unwanted associations of Pulcinella's lipstick. I don't think this wig must exclusively be a Black style, nor that it being read or applied that way would be negative. It's a joyful hairdo regardless of interpretation, but the red-lipped black half of Pulcinella's face would make it look uncomfortable.

With the Pulcinella wig untied and recombed, you can turn the cap and flip which colors are on which side, and Arlecchina's wig can be flipped too. MGA warns the owner not to subject the hair to high heat in the instructions, but I'm not sure if that means Pulcinella's wig definitely can't be safely boiled into a straight center-part shape, or if MGA are just warning the casual buyer in to cover their asses in case anything does go wrong. I don't like the wig enough to mourn it if it gets destroyed, so boiled it shall be!

I'm totally fine with Pulcinella being bald. She looks great this way. Such an artsy doll needs to have a sense of command, and no hair puts emphasis on the body patterning.

It also helps that the wigs go on with no pegs and the doll heads have minimal molding artifacts on the scalp. The typical ring is present, and divots are present within the circle on both dolls (not in the same spot!), but the Switch-a-Witches look better bald than most unrooted dolls, who typically have more unsightly artifacting. Next to Create-a-Monsters inset scalp discs for the wig pegs, the Bratzillaz are particularly flattered sans hair, and it's possible this is another attempt to improve on CAM's precedent.

Arlecchina's wig is big bouncy curls split between pink and blue, which is a color elsewhere only on one of her costume pieces. Both dolls' wigs have colors that match optional pieces of their outfits, so they can be bald and comprised of two colors, or they can add a third with a wig and an outfit extra. 

The hats are both miniature statement accents which were attached to elastic bands at one point. To make these functional again, I had to take elastic cord, knot it at the ends, and shove the knots into the holes the elastics were threaded through. 

Pulcinella's hat is a vertically-divided tiny vinyl witch's cone that stands straight up and can be aligned or contrasted with her face colors. It looks best centered with the split over the divide of her body colors. Arlecchina has a pink bowler with a green band that matches her costume, and it can rest anywhere on her head and look good. Negotiating the elastic band and tidying Arlecchina's curls around it is a fiddly job.

Pulcinella may look good bald, but she's even better without the cape, too. It has no drape and the purple is not an asset. If it were silkier and black-and-white, I'd use it because the cut and style goes, but it's not flattering in its execution. MGA couldn't even color-match the purples of the cape and hair, so that knocks it down even further.

Both dolls have pleather two-pieces, but Arlecchina's pleather has held up almost pristinely while Pulcinella's was shot right out of the box. 

Arlecchina's pleather seems to be a thicker style associated with lunchboxes or tablecloths, while Pulcinella's was evidently thin. It's a shame because I'd choose Arlecchina to be my dud if I could. Pulcinella's mod fashion is great, but evidently much less durable.

Pulcinella's top matches her arms on each side while contrasting her torso and creating another row of alternating color blocks, with the skirt matching the blocking of the top while contrasting the legs and midriff. Her pieces have a high collar and a belt buckle accent, but no separated belt segment like in the prototype. The top is too tight for her, though, and showed some holes from stress after I peeled off the pleather. 

I wish MGA was better about sewing clothes that fit tidily rather than squeezing on. It happens a lot. The skirt has sewn-in panties while it opens all the way down the back. This keeps the skirt from riding up, but it's a little awkward getting it fit and slid into place properly.

Pulcinella's shoes are ambiguous and can go on either leg, but you know she likes her contrasted colors, so the white shoe on the black leg and the black shoe on the checkered leg looks best to me. I'm glad the worst paint flaw on the right leg is totally hidden by the shoe strap.

Arlecchina's top and skirt match with a checkerboard pink and green design. It's interesting that Pulcinella's pieces are vertically divided and Arlecchina's are checked, as if encouraging the clothes to swap and match the patterning of the other doll's body. Smart move.

The top here has two big tulle puff sleeves in green and pink on the corresponding sides of the body, and no collar accent. The pleather has some small white nicks, but otherwise looks good and the piece fits well. 

Around her waist, Arlecchina has a velcro belt with a blue bow sash  and a train of pink and green tulle layers. The belt matches the hair to pull the look together.

It's officially suggested that this can be used as a cape too. There's kind of a lot going on near Arlecchina's neck with her curls, earrings, and sleeves all doing the most, so getting the piece on as a cape is a tad fiddly...but darn if I don't love the result. 

The band surprisingly doesn't feel like an overly loose awkward fit around the neck, and the doll reads far better as a witch this way. With the bow offset diagonally against the hat, it's even better. I never hated Arlecchina, but never really looked twice at her compared to Pulcinella, who was the doll I really wanted all these years. Using Arlecchina's bonus piece as a cape, though, totally boosts her appeal to me.

Of course, now I had to see if the inverse was true--does Pulcinella's cape work as a skirt?

...no. I mean, it physically fits. But it doesn't work. The piece being two dark colors breaks the whole design scheme. White and purple like the wig would at least be a bit better if it couldn't be black and white.

Still, this inventive "can be worn different ways" approach to doll clothing is something I've observed fairly often in MGA, and I love to see it. I was first impressed by multi-functional MGA costuming when I reviewed O.M.G.'s Spirit Queen.

Arlecchina's bottoms have a frilled hem with no outward flare. 

Arlecchina's shoes can go on either leg, but this girl likes to match up, so I put them on the matching leg colors.

Her shoes are a different mold from Pulcinella's. Both shoe sets are pretty basic, but it suits the neutral-chaotic customization aesthetic. Monster High Create-a-Monster pieces were so overwhelmingly themed that transferring pieces between dolls, body or shoes, usually didn't make sense. Only the CAM fabric clothes were decently basic and transferrable in several cases.

Pulcinella has one costume element for which there is no equivalent on Arlecchina--a pair of black and white square bracelets.

These have openings, but don't actually clip on, being tight around the wrists. They get slid on with the hands popped out. I'm no sure why there wasn't another pair of bracelets in this set, or why this pair wasn't instead a single square bracelet in Pulcinella's colors and a single round one in Arlecchina's. Neither bracelet goes with Arlecchina's colors or round theming. A purple square and a blue circle could have made for a more balanced assortment in this set, though I'm not complaining that Pulcinella gets a little extra in her black and white colors. For a rival to CAM that makes a competitive point of achieving parity in its doll two-packs, the bracelets for only one doll feel like a crack in the mission. It's still by far a more acceptable disparity than a pair of shoes, a wig, or a torso core being missing from one doll.

I like Arlecchina fully done-up, but she also looks good pared down to remove the blue pieces. This gives her a more midcentury retro look, but in a different sense from Pulcinella.

To address Pulcinella, I did my best to repaint her lips. I went over with a subtly metallic gunmetal color first, and did my best. 

Stage 1: hat restrung, lips repainted in one color, costume peeled.

It's hard to fully cover a prior lip paint at the edges, and the open-mouth toothy look is especially delicate. I then went over the black side's half of the lips with a brighter silver paint pen to match the makeup and re-add the split contrast. I think limiting her face colors more this way actually improves the look of her disparate eye colors. They're more striking and feel more purposeful with the lips being silver. I tried painting some black paint around her face to reduce the glossy discrepancies with a new paint finish, but they still show up under there somehow. Maybe less jarringly.

When cleaning up my repaint with acetone on the white side, I damaged the faded edge of her blush and decided to remove that element. There's no equivalent on the black side, anyway.

I also worked on refinishing the costume with glossy fabric pant, since the peeled pieces looked ragged and not as chic as the doll demanded. I'd have been fine leaving the white side matte for a texture split, but a dark spot got onto the skirt and I figured I'd cover it by getting white fabric paint and restoring the whole thing as best I could.

Here's the doll basically finished. The repainted costume doesn't look nearly as good as it would have brand-new, but it's better than it looked peeled.

And here's Pulcinella's wig straightened. It didn't boil out completely straight, and it tends to look wet even though it's completely dry. The texture is very waxy/greasy.  

I do like it better as a loose center-part. It definitely brings out the Bratz in her, but the colors are still wrong, the hair could feel better, and the style could be better suited to her vibe. This doll kind of asks for a bob and/or blocky bangs.

Well, she could get the latter!

I had to get this doll for the ultimate black-and-white build. This set includes a wig in the right colors for the black-and-white witch, plus an awesome cape that matches her. Meanwhile, the purple elements seemed like a good tradeover to suit this doll build's white and yellow palette.

I'll refer to the character this set builds by another commedia dell'arte name: Columbina. 

Columbina's parts are a bit more assembled, with her full arms pieced together. The photos of this doll show at least two prototype differences--like the others, the prototype's eyes are gazing forward, and she's wearing earrings that do not appear in the released product.

Columbina comes with a brush that's useless in this pack's context, plus a full costume and body, which is still impressive to me. MGA rightfully could say "Create-a-Monster solo packs could never", because they did never.

Her instructions are smaller and match her rather than reprinting the deluxe set's.

Here's the doll assembled. Columbina is vertically divided into two body colors with no alternations (not even in the makeup scheme), and is yellow on her right and white on her left. The base casting color of her head and torso is the white shade, with the yellow painted on.

Columbina's white is very slightly greyer than Pulcinella's, and because Pulcinella is built with a checkerboard alternation color map, there wouldn't be a way to fully swap Columbina's white pieces for Pulcinella's checked pieces and simplify her look. You could give Pulcinella an unpatterned white arm, but she's always going to have a checkered right leg.

Not that the leg swap would be great, anyway, since Columbina is indeed delivering a third body type to Switch-a-Witch. Her legs are just a tad longer (it's barely noticeable in practice) and her torso is a different shape with a smaller bust.

I was immediately disappointed with Columbina's body because it's outright floppy. The waist ball joint is not tight at all and the tipping motion has no friction, and the hips are about as loose as the others'. The waist only stays firm if the if the waist is rotated out of a forward alignment. Given that the waist ball joint is not intended to be separated, I don't know if I have any prospects of improving the connection. I didn't really get Columbina for Columbina, anyhow, so that's okay.

Here's the doll dressed up. This is definitely the least cohesive of the Wave 1 "default" looks, but it's working anyway.

Columbina has no central motif to her clothing; no pattern or shape style that's all hers. Instead, half of her pieces look intended chiefly for Pulcinella, and none look especially suited for Arlecchina. She has pink and stripe and yellow and black ideas going on, but no core to the idea. The outfit also doesn't have the concept of the wig and extra fabric piece adding a color that the bald dressed doll doesn't have. If her design were more like Pulcinella and Arlecchina's, her base doll would be white and yellow with striped clothing in those shades, while her wig and cape would add pink or black (but not both) to her palette. She also doesn't have bracelets, and I think a solo pack could afford to include those. As it stands, only Pulcinella was assigned any.

I don't dislike this ensemble, though, and I can see some 1990s artsy aesthetics in her exploration of chaotic visuals.

Columbina's witch hat is pink with a black band. The elastic was still intact and functional, but being worn on the doll overnight met me with a broken band in the morning, and I eventually replaced it with elastic cord.

The wig is pretty awesome, though the hair is very poor quality. The hair is very sixties and artsy with the split Cruella colors and the bangs and updo. It's very chic, but the bangs are terribly thin and the fiber looks shot. Some of the hair isn't as tight as it should be, and it's distracting.

The styling is gelled solidly, and pretty complex. Twists on either half of the head are wrapped into an oblong bun that looks plastered and sewn and banded every way to Sunday, while the wig displays excellent consideration with separate rooted twists intended solely to wrap around and disguise the edges of the wig cap.

I wish this was nicer hair fiber and rooting, but the shaping is pretty incredible. 

Columbina's face has leftward-glancing eyes like Pulcinella's, but her eyes and makeup are 100% symmetrical and don't interact with her body colors. 

Columbina's irises are super glittery silver, and honestly, might have been best in Pulcinella's head. It's possible the eyes could be swapped, but that's a bit nerve-wracking to consider. I'd only try it on spare copies of both witches' heads and then re-execute the lip repaint on the black and white head if successful. Her makeup is metallic purple eyeshadow and black lipstick. The face has some blemishes and errors and one is on the painted half of the chin.

Columbina's earrings are the third mold that Switch-a-Witch would use, which are like two chained dangling narrow pyramids. 

While Columbina is yellow and white and her pants are black and white her earrings and shoes are instead black and yellow. On Arlecchina, the green of her costume was quite different from the green half of her skintone, but Columbina's yellow costuming is quite close to her yellow skintone, so I chose to invoke some contrast and put the yellow earring and shoe on her white side.

Columbina has a big cape with a rounded sorcerer's collar that's half white and half checked, seemingly tailor-made for Pulcinella. The cape itself is white with a black dot and squiggle pattern that clashes with Pulcinella's overall shape language, and has a tattered-shaped hem, so I'm not sure if it'll work great with her or if those elements will detract. The cape ties with a ribbon strap and the collar needs ironing.

The satin material isn't the drapiest, but it's better than the purple/black cape.

Columbina's top is pleather again, but it seems closer to Arlecchina's and looks fine right now. It's cut to sit off-the shoulder and has a horizontal pink, yellow, and black stripe pattern and a cropped waist. The pants are long and split black-and-white. 

The pants are made of satin, not pleather. I wish all of Pulcinella's clothes were too so this would match better (and so her costume would have aged well!) The pants are diagonal to the color-blocking of Pulcinella's top, but align with her waist colors. Pulcinella wearing these pants under her own top would lose one color alternation in her checkerboard body map.

Columbina's shoes are a strapped beaded sandal design.

Before I took the wig down, I had to try it on Pulcinella, and it's stunning. It's absolutely ideal for her colors and mod aesthetic. 

The wig adds one color alternation to the doll, so the hat is best flipped from when she wears it bald. Problem is, the shape of the wig is not intended for the hat to be worn centered, which is where it looks best. The bun pushes the hat forward.

Finding the hat and wig could not share space the way I wanted was what finally drove me to take the hair down and see if there was something else I could do with it.

There...kinda isn't.

The wig cap is very sparsely and specifically rooted for this particular style, so my recommendation has to be to accept either mod fantasy with the hair and no hat, or bald with the hat, because the wig isn't set up for any other shape. I kind of saved it with a Barbie-style high ponytail tie, but the horrible fiber and multiple lengths of the hair don't flatter it, and the wig cap isn't disguised this way either. I might invest in a second copy of the wig, but I can update on that as this series progresses.

I tried out some more things on Pulcinella. Other MGA pieces since this doll released came in handy, like a checked O.M.G. jacket and sock and Spirit Queen's broom.

The jacket seamlessly transitions into the checkered forearm, though the fit on the torso isn't excellent.

Without the cape, the look is less dizzying.

I'd be more willing to use the jacket if it fit better and wasn't pleather undergoing signs of stress, because this is awesome.

I also tried O.M.G. Tough Dude's color-blocked shirt out. The Columbina pants are pretty see-through on Pulcinella, though, and they don't flip well to switch the orientation because of the velcro closure on the back.

Spirit Queen's white skirt kind of pairs with the shirt, but the sleeves look too long here, and all of this with the ponytail feels more a fifties look, a decade prior to Pulcinella's target aesthetic. The shirt also doesn't fit her well enough.

Here's Pulcinella fully dizzying in patterns.

And a bit simplified.

Here are some artsier compositions based on the blocking of her patterns.

I still have the modern-art backdrop I made for Neon Frights Frankie! They were a Mattel doll I saw a lot of MGA aesthetics in, so it's only fitting that I finally use if for one of those MGA dolls!

Here are some portraits with Arlecchina. I gave her a dotted pink sock.

I honestly wasn't sure I wanted to bother building out Columbina, and didn't know if her pieces were a starter to anything cohesive. 

Here she is testing the castoffs from Pulcinella.

Eh.

I had to go more off-book to really find her. I used the Fierce Neonlicious skirt under the black/purple cape, a G3 Nefera necklace, a striped sock, G3 Ghoulia glasses, the purple/white wig, and some silver bracelets.

To bring some pink further down, I trimmed a Monster High Inner Monster leg wrap.

Here are some portraits.

To shoot the cover image, I took the dolls all apart.

I then mixed the parts all together thoroughly for my first and only time to depict two witches building a third.

This is how I like them best, though.

So what do I think of Switch-a-Witch? Well, it's fun if you buy into the arsty abstract design scheme, which I certainly do. It's my favorite flavor of MGA. For a product line and brand intended to fight Monster High, though, the two brands share some flaws--optically and quality-wise, and MGA didn't correct or outdo some of the things MH did badly at the time. Im not satisfied with the BZ body quality, as there are a few free-swinging joints in these dolls and I prefer the way Monster High uses hard plastic for most of the body parts, save the heads and forearms and hands. MH G1 in the same period was guilty of similar joint flaws. The wigs are mixed. Arlecchina's curly wig is fine, if hard to wrangle into her hat band. Pulcinella's feels very waxy, and Columbina's had a great factory shaping but poor fiber quality, and did not accommodate all logical placements of a hat. MH wigs were not much better. I resent the reliance on pleather for this line's aesthetic, and it ruined Pulcinella's clothes before I could ever see them pristine. Her clothing fit is a bit off, too--too tight. This was perhaps a lower point for MGA where their clothing production was not blatantly kicking Mattel's ass in the way it does today. I do appreciate the way the Switch-a-Witches left no body parts behind and designed for more visual modularity with the dolls's aesthetic, even though, as with CAM, I still found satisfaction only with the "intended" designs as bases. The different body types, while interesting, are not the best for modular mix-and-match compatibility, and the bracelets do betray some asymmetry in the design of the two-packs, though it's less significant than in Monster High's equivalent sets. Even the highest parity in CAM two-packs felt unfair thanks to one monster going barefoot, but one witch not having bracelets is fine. Switch-a-Witch does also display one facet of MGA's diversity ignorance with the really poor color choice of Pulcinella's lips, and mainline Bratzillaz can be accused of colorism/Eurocentric visual bias and cultural stereotyping in ways MH can too. Neither brand was invested in textured hair or broad Black representation, though Bratzillaz having less diversity than its origin brand hurts it. Then again, Ever After High might be accused of similar as counterpart to MH. MGA and Mattel will never admit to being two sides of a coin, but they are.

Of the Switch-a-Witch dolls as designed, Arlecchina is the winner. She feels cohesive on her own and has not degraded badly with time. Pulcinella looks okay on her own, but her "complete" look with wig and cape actually detracts from her aesthetic, and her costume was ruined by time. Her black face paint also had some shiny surface errors that distracted me, and her lipstick color was again, a big mistake. Pulcinella outshines the other two dolls when supplemented by Columbina and other MGA pieces released since, and becomes my easy favorite, but her base look is weaker. Columbina carries herself well in her base look, but is the least cohesive, and ended up the most externally restyled to look her best. She also had the weakest joints.

I might not be done working with these dolls--I could see myself getting another Columbina wig and head and another Pulcinella head to see if I can do an eye swap or get a Pulcinella face with no shiny spots. Those updates can come another time, and probably won't even need an interlude. I needed this review done before Moonspell Magic dropped! That's where Witchy Wonders will continue in July!

Switch-a-Witch is quite flawed, but I'm glad to have finally experienced it. It really is Create-a-Monster gone Bratz, and I can definitely enjoy that mix.