Hat Plays Dolls

So, I do believe I finally own and have reviewed the entire Monster Family sub-line of Monster High-- I've got single-packed Pawla Wolf, Fangelica Van Bat, Sandy de Nile with high chair, the Vampire Kitchen with Dracula and Draculaura, Pharrah de Nile and the de Nile Family game Night set with Cleo, Lux, and Sandy #2, the Blue beach picnic two-pack with Lagoona and Kelpie, Alivia Stein andb Gigawatt, the Wolf bedtime three-pack with Clawdeen, Barker, and Weredith, the Wolf Family bunkbeds with Pawla, Weredith, and Packlyn, Howleen Wolf and allegedly Cushion, the Stein family cookout two-pack with Frankie and Alivia, and as of May 2021 (yes I am super backlogged, why do you ask?), the doll I hesitated on in stores because I could never find one with both her eyes on the same plane of existence...



Little Ebbie Blue!

It took a damn ass hell long time to find her on eBay, too-- I paid about $20 shipped for her, and that was my ceiling because she's such a small doll.

( Thirty-one more pics this way! )

... Okay so maybe I missed 'tomorrow' a little for this review, but late is better than forgotten! (Tuesday is Errands Day and Wednesday is Both Kids Wednesday, when Mom and I have to watch my extremely strong, active, and dexterous four-foot-tall four-year-old nephew and my incredibly independent, busy, and cat-loving two-year-old niece without the help of anyone who can move particularly quickly. Fun times.)

So, third and final of the replacements Mattel's fantastic customer service sent me, going above and beyond the price point of the Lunchtime Ghouls two-pack is Tween Howleen! Which is very exciting, honestly, she counts as one of the characters I don't have (alongside Zomby Gaga, Treesa Thornwillow, and Ebbie Blue).



Instead of her canonical 14, Monster Family Howleen appears closer to the eleven-to-thirteen range, like Alivia and Kelpie.

( Let's go take a closer look at her! )

But how, you ask, does Monster Family Howleen compare to Classic Howleen?

( I'm glad you asked! )

But hey, now I've got all three Monster Family Tweens, do I have any learnings on what shoes fit them?

( I'm glad you asked that, too! )

With Pawla, Weredith, and Packlyn!

This one was my birthday present to myself this year (I wanted to get IHF Cleo, but she's not, you know, at Toys R Us right now).



My nephew also wanted this one like a lot. He enjoyed stacking the boxes, and after I finished doing my review pics, he stole the frickin bunk bed out of my danged office and wandered off with it.

Ahem.

( 28 more pics behind the cut! )

I've made a couple trips back to Toys R Us as it sinks, grabbing what I can before it's gone. Alivia here I still paid full price for, but considering my local options for reliable doll shopping are Toys R Us and Target, and my Target has about five MH dolls in stock anymore... well, $13 wasn't too bad.



Alivia here is a very budget doll, and in fact I really think she should have an MSRP of... $10 or $11, instead of $13, especially considering she's only got five points of articulation.

And yeah, I pulled down my little blue photo box, which is only like eleven inches tall, because I didn't want to deal with The Big White Tri-Fold.

( Thirty-two more pics inside the cut! )

Yeah, I know I just posted the Vampire Kitchen, I do things all at once or not at all, I'm terrible that way. I was actually going to review Pharrah MONTHS ago-- but the thing is, I got her in September somewhere. I live in California in the Bay Area, and right around October... seventh or eighth, the North Bay kind of... caught fire. A lot. We're all fine, we were fine, the fire was ten, fifteen miles away, but it burned so much so that wasn't, you know, that comforting. Anyway, Pharrah got shoved in a suitcase with the rest of my Monster High stuff in case we had to evacuate. ... Because if we'd had to evacuate, we had enough warning to pack up anything we'd be distraught living without (which shouldn't be dolls, but one, I have brain chemistry issues and dolls do help with that, some, and two, it's not like I wasn't prioritizing the actually-vital stuff, like the cats and important paperwork and clothes and heirlooms from my grandmothers and backups of files. If I'd failed at Car Tetris, I would've left the dolls first). Eventually I had the spoons to unpack, so Pharrah was freed, and then there was a 'spend $100 on toys, get $25 off' deal at Target when we were out Christmas shopping for my niece and nephew, so I got the rest of the de Nile kids (the same day Cartwheel had a 20% off deal for DC Superhero girls, so I got the Bumblebee to put on a Clawdia body to be the Andromeda to my BYBY Deuce's Perseus I'm a nerd and they're not ready for prime time yet) and after I got all my Insurance Nonsense straightened out, I rewarded myself with Monster Family deboxing and a big ol' photoshoot.



So here we go. ( Fifty-one more pics beyond this point, mind your connection. )

I do plan to get all the Monster Family kids, with the possible exception of the littlest Blue sister. The last time I was in Target, they'd finally started stocking the de Nile clan-- they had Pharrah (well, they had two, and both had wonk-eye), they had the three-pack, and they had...



Sandy, solo. And I'll be honest, I'd planned to get the three-pack, for Lux and for Cleo's comfy dress, and I will 100% freely admit that Sandy de Nile is a tiny little hot mess... but this high chair, oh my god I could not pass up the high chair. (Plus I was in a nine-dollar kind of place, budget-wise, not a twenty-dollar place. I'm saving up $5 Target gift cards for the Vampire Kitchen, I can wait a little longer on the three-packs.)

Okay, I know I'm not gonna sell anyone on Sandy, but let's review the little cuss, anyway. ( Follow the cut for more pics! )

So yesterday I ran my usual errands, dropped eBay stuff off at the post office, did a quick Target run (my nephew broke a plunger and... look, it's really important that the number of toilet plungers equal or exceed the number of toilets in your home, especially if you have a toddler around), checked out the toy aisle (still resetting-- but I saw First Day of School Clawdeen and Fangelica! I held off), and went to Toys R Us because I had a $5 reward. I was about to use it on Lagoona and the least-wonky Kelpie when I said to myself "Wait, let me check this endcap," and lo and behold there was the $9 doll I really wanted to use that $5 coupon on.



Check it out, I got me a Pawla!

Okay, first things first, I frickin' love the Monster Family dolls, I plan to get all of them except maybe Ebbie and she could still grow on me (if I ever find one who doesn't have her pigtails covering her face). Weredith is cuter in person, Dracula is cuter in person, at this point I'm even assuming Sandy is cuter in person, they're all cuter in person. I love the concept of the Monster Family line and while I agree the execution could be a little better, the execution is still really good.

But I have like fifteen more pics, so ( click the cut to see if I can't sell you on Dead Tired Pawla. )