I started this blog with reviews of Creeproduction Frankie Stein and the Skullector interpretations of the monsters who inspired her, so there was never a question that the second, female licensed version of the iconic Monster would be joining my collection and my unofficial Universal Frankenstein doll family.
While this is the second Monster High doll of the famous Monster, it's technically the first based on Frankenstein (1931). The Skullector set is billed as a Bride of Frankenstein tie-in despite its Monster doll looking more like the first film's visual.
The doll's box is primarily black and green with laboratory theming.
The Mummy and Monster are fairly monochromatic dolls, so Dracula's skintone being neither reddish nor colorless feels like a lapse in cohesion. She's very pretty, but her palette feels less restricted. I like the Mummy and Monster's take on limited palettes more than the "greyscale with not enough pops of color" that Reel Drama used. It gets the old-movie effect across more appealingly, but maybe Dracula indicates such an aesthetic was never actually the goal.
Here's the back.
Like the Mummy's box, the monster is not gendered in the text, going for a "gasping in horror" use of "it" pronouns.
Here's the backdrop out.
And here's the two Monsters together.
It does look like a pre/post transition comparison here, or else like the new doll is the Monster's daughter with no Bride involved in the inheritance, unike Frankie. The Monster and Bride never got together in the Universal films, which introduced the Bride and killed her forever (and the Monster, temporarily) within minutes of the Bride's debut. Frankie Stein represents a canon-noncompliant union of the Universal monsters.
The changes between the two Monsters are more drastic than a human transition could achieve, but a Frankenmonster could be rebuilt beyond the limits of human surgery and hormone therapy. I'm definitely playing the girl Monster as her own separate character, though. She needs disambiguating with a nickname of my own. I think I'll call her Karlotta after Boris Karloff. Karloff himself used a Slavic stage name to separate himself and his career from his family's reputation, but Karloff himself was English.
Karlotta's skintone is a different, slightly more saturated and yellowish shade from the first Monster's.
When I heard they were doing a girl version of the Monster, I was curious if she would resemble G1 Frankie--or rather, I wondered how she would avoid looking like Frankie. I think she offers no confusion.
Her face and skintone are clearly different and since Karlotta takes nothing from the Bride, her hair is all black, though a few Frankies have shared this long loose haircut with the flat bangs evoking the squared hairline of the Monster. The dolls have similar face shapes, but Karlotta has stronger features and looks more mature.
It was immediately obvious this new doll is on the standard mid-teen body sculpt, and I think that badly mishandles the character. This should be the big-sister body to make her a tall woman. I wanted her to be a big sister or aunt to G1 Frankie. Her face looks like an older character! Has the big-sister frame vanished again? I'm worried Michael Myers is on the mid-teen body too. The grown-up sculpt is great and Mattel is missing too many opportunities to use it.
Karlotta's hair is frustrating. I think it looks good and suits her, but it also actively hides details put into the doll.
On the left side of her head, she has two barrettes shaped like metal staples, which is cute.
The hair is center-parted and medium-length saran, with bangs across the forehead which are not gelled solid. The hair is all black.
It's not a bad look for her, but isn't there a better one?
One that doesn't cover her scars?
Just like the first Monster, Karlotta has the forehead cut on the right and the stitched scar on the left, and both are hidden by the shape of her hair.
Karlotta's scars are mildly more gruesome with their red paint. The stitched scar is very low-relief but is molded, not only painted. Both cuts are dimensional.
These are the Skullector equivalent details.
It's absolutely baffling to me that Karlotta has these features and they're fully hidden. Alivia Stein in G2 did this as well. What a waste of detail. Isn't Monster High all about owning your freaky flaws? Why cover them up? Is Mattel succumbing to femininity standards and letting the adult man wear these features while having to hide them on the teen girl? Cowardice.
Unfortunately, there's not much to do to make these visible that doesn't involve cutting and a potential bad result. The bangs are pretty short already, above the brow, so the forehead cut can't really be shown off. The side scar can be if you tie the sides of her hair behind her head. Maybe I could use her hair clips to expose the details, but the bangs don't promise to be moved at all.
Part of why I still begrudgingly like the factory hair for Karlotta is that it reminds me of one of my favorite cinematic Frankenmonster depictions: Elizabeth Shelley from Frankenhooker, a film that is 100% as trashy, and arguably, 0% as sexist, as it sounds. Frankenhooker is a campy, absurd low-budget exploitation film by Frank Henenlotter which tells the story of Jeffrey Franken, a scientist who rebuilds his dead girlfriend from the pieces of sex workers he kills to harvest their parts. The resulting "Frankenhooker" is a jerky, multicolored woman who doesn't act human and can only parrot the street-calling lines of the women used to crete her, devoid of context. It's a genuinely haunting performance despite its comedic tones.
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| Elizabeth/Frankenhooker, as portrayed by Patty Mullen. |
Eventually, Elizabeth's head gets bolted back on, her consciousness returns, and she gets targeted revenge on Jeffrey. He so thoroughly violated her autonomy, and so many other women's, in viewing them solely as bodies, and then by reviving Elizabeth and editorializing in reconstructing her, so he gets an experience along those lines. Frankenhooker is not remotely anti-sex work and the director himself went on record saying he loved when women embraced his film and saw his point that Jeffrey's biggest sin was trying to "fix" his girlfriend in remaking her. It's a stupid movie with some strikingly good horror ideas and a message well ahead of the curve. It takes the "playing God is evil" tone of the Frankenstein myth to frame a narrative of how monstrous it is for a man to reign over women's bodies.
Mattel would never ever do a Skullector doll of rebuilt Elizabeth; Henenlotter films are way out of their zone and the film's title would be radioactive to Mattel...though I wish they would do it anyway. I can content myself with Karlotta having Elizabeth's hair.
LDD Presents should have gone for Elizabeth's rebuilt character.
Karlotta's face has huge eyes and dark lips.
Her makeup uses black and yellow and lime to pop against her green skin. Her irises are gradient green and yellow with stitch-mark radials, while her upper lids are shaded with ombre dark green. Her lips are full and painted black while her cheeks have yellow shading.
Her face mold is far more femme than the male Monster's, of course.
Putting the two together creates a stark demonstration of how masculinity and femininity are sometimes unevenly stylized.
It would make some sense for Karlotta and the Mummy alongside her to share a head mold because both are femme intepretations of characters played by the same actor, Boris Karloff, but the two heads are visibly different sculpts. They're not hugely distant, though. Karlotta has a taller nose bridge from the front, sharper cheeks, and a more cleft-looking chin.
Only the male Monster's head can reasonably be called a likeness of Karloff in any form, but you can technically say the Mummy and Karlotta are his second and third portraits in Monster High.
Karlotta has G1 Frankie's neck bolts in pearl silver, and a necklace of the same color depicting dangling chains with one visible safety pin.
The costume is a black Frankenstein jacket and long pants and boots, with a black cropped pleather tank under the jacket. The jacket has deliberately contrasted white stitching and very sharp pointed shoulders. Foil lightning runs down the jacket arms, while stylistic zigzag stitching runs down one lapel and one shin.
The jacket and pants are a synthetic material Mattel seems to be adopting pretty widely at the moment. It has a visible weave and a semi-reflective look and feels waterproof. Willow Thorne's pants and Michael Myers' coveralls are also this fabric. It's better than pleather, but not as appealing as natural fiber.
The pleather tank is disappointing, but it can always be dyed black after peeling to its matte layer. I don't think the cropped cut was necessary.
The shoes are basically the exact same design as the Skullector doll's, given a new silhouette. They're graciously bereft of gimmicky heels and are stompy platform heels with stitch texture. They're just tall enough to tuck into the pant legs.
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| Skullector boots. |
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| They even transed her shoes! |
If the body couldn't be correct, at least the shoes could be a bit taller.
The purse is even better than the Mummy's, depicting the windmill setting that ends the first Frankenstein and begins its sequel. At the climax of the first film, the Monster, pursued by a mob, seemingly dies in the windmill when it burns down, while Bride of Frankenstein begins in its ruins and reveals the Monster survived. The Monster is actually the first horror villain in American cinema to be defeated in film one and be revived/revealed to have lived in a sequel, with Bride of Frankenstein being credited as the first English-language horror sequel movie as well. This formula of the enemy always coming back in horror sequels became the norm for franchises to follow.
The windmill bag is green with silver for the sails, and one sail looks held together like the Monster herself.
The purse does the one thing it needed to.
Inside, the texture makes the bag look like a teeny-tiny playset.
Karlotta has black fingernail polish and more hidden details under her clothes, though, nail polish aside, these are all shared by, and equally hidden on, the Skullector Monster and aren't as frustrating as the elements covered by Karlotta's hair. She has stitches on her limbs, including one metal plate on the left forearm.
Here's the four Universal-style Frankenmonsters together. G1 Frankie is not licensed, but is clearly based on the Universal Monsters in ways G3 Frankie isn't--G3 Frankie seems to deliberately avoid Universal traits with their design, likely for copyright concerns. The Skullector duo aren't G1 Frankie's canon monster parents, but are the closest we have and work well as such because her look is based on both film characters.
The designs appropriately communicate their backgrounds, namely that Frankie is derived from both Universal monsters while Karlotta is only based on Karloff's character. Gosh, I wish Karlotta was taller.
I never considered the Off-White Frankenmonster Harmonie Ghoul to fit into this unofficial family, but maybe she could. Cousin, maybe?
She doesn't have the Universal aesthetic in the same way, despite using Frankie's head sculpt, and her bright reds stand apart from my group. I've said it before, but the nail through Harmonie's neck not being real was the nail in her coffin for me. It's mounted on an invisible clip-on choker that was either edited out of the stock photos or changed to the fake-impaled choker design past the protoype stage. If the nail really was put into the doll's neck, I'd have gotten her.
I kept Karlotta's photoshoot very brief. There wasn't any ground I felt I really left untreaded in this monster sphere, and what was achievable for me was about the same as the last time I shot Frankenmonster photos. The one thing I did try, a photo edit with her in a digital outdoor backdrop and her purse edited to the scale of the real windmill, wasn't working, so I stopped that. I just set her up in a lab scene and got some basic portraits.
The most special photo for me was the restaged and expanded Universal Frankenmonster family portrait.
I'd be happy to redo this again if Karlotta's series adds a second Bride. That could be Auntie.
This review feels a bit perfunctory, but at this point in the brand, it doesn't feel like there's a whole lot to say about or do with the new Universal Monster doll. She's a very pretty femme take on the Monster, but I think Frankie and the Skullector set are better character designs. Karlotta's hairstyle looks good on her but also hides some details in a way it has no right to, and I think I'd have engaged significantly better with this doll on the big-sister body mold. Mid-teen size isn't exciting for this character and it leaves her less worthwhile as a doll than she could have been. It's a fun experiment, and I like the licensed doll collection more with her than without, but there was a better version of Karlotta that we didn't get.
We'll see about Dracula sometime. I don't want to kick myself for not getting her if more Universal Monsters roll in.
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