The Skultimate Collection

A brief deviation from Ever After High to the franchise that started it all.  As the Monster High Create-A-Monster Skultimate Set is only available in Australia so far, here’s a review so the rest of the world can know exactly what it is or isn’t missing.  There’s nothing new in the set per se, but it has been drawn from a vast net of CAM parts.  The logical way to break them up is as follows:

1.  A complete gorgon girl figure including her dress, shoes and a stand.
2.  A complete ice girl figure including shoes and a stand.  There’s a blob girl dress for her.
3.  A complete Beeanna figure except for her wig, but including her glasses, wings, shoes and a stand.  There’s a blob girl wig for her.
4.  A full vampire girl body, cat girl ears, wig and tail, witch girl dress, unpainted ghost girl shoes and a stand.

Beeanna's black and yellow wig, snake staff and Masters High figures not included.

This last concoction is what the spirit of Create-A-Monster is all about - adding a creative ‘building’ aspect to the Monster High line.  Being able to create four fully-dressed, standing figures is a nice touch - one of the main drawbacks of the CAM line is the general lack of completeness to the sets.  If you wanted all these specific pieces, you’d need to buy four starter sets, two add-on packs, one mail-order torso set and some paint stripper.  At $58 Australian, I feel the 84-part set is worth the price.  If you don’t already collect CAMs you get four dolls at less than $15 each.  If you do have a CAM collection there’s a good chance you’re short on torsos, thighs, upper arms and stands, and this set has a bundle of them to help complete, mix and match your bags of spare monster limbs.

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In Ever After High news for the day, the first wave of toys should start to appear in the next few months and its line-up is: Royal Apple White, Royal Briar Beauty, Rebel Madeline Hatter, Rebel Raven Queen, Legacy Day Apple White, Legacy Day Briar Beauty, Legacy Day Raven Queen and an Ashlynn Ella and Hunter Huntsman two-pack.

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Mad thought: the preantepenult is the fourth-last syllable of a word.

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Madeline Hatter, A Rebel Wrapped In An Enigma.

If you fed your first and middle name into Google Translate, turned it into Latin, fiddled with the result then translated it back to English and switched the words around, you might get an idea of how Charles Lutwidge Dodgson came up with his pen name of Lewis Caroll.  In less clever wordplay, Ever After High’s Madeline Hatter is the daughter of Caroll’s creation the Hatter (from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.)  He’s not named ‘Mad’ or explicitly called a “mad hatter” in the novel, although he quite clearly is ‘mad’.  The saying “as mad as a hatter” actually predated Caroll’s story.  In the 1800s, hatters tended to breathe mercury fumes as they turned fur into felt, and it led to symptoms that included trembling, uncoordination, slurring, losing teeth, memory loss, irritability and an unfortunate smorgasbord of mental conditions.  (Many Chinese emperors took mercury as an elixir of immortality.  Ironically it precipitated their deaths.)  The Hatter once sung for the Royals of Wonderland, but his rhythm may have been flawed since The Queen Of Hearts charged him with “murdering the time!”  Ever since then, time has abandoned the Hatter and for him it’s always six o’clock - “always tea-time”.  The Hatter’s companions include the narcoleptic Dormouse and the March Hare.  (“Mad as a March hare” is another saying that existed before Wonderland.)  The Hatter and Hare return in Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There as Hatta and Haigha (say the words out loud), two of the White King’s pawns.  In Wonderland, the Hatter asks Alice the riddle “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?”  148 years later, his daughter’s best friend’s name is Raven.  Coincidence?  Well... in the lead-up to the full launch of the Ever After High, this Wonderlandish key:

...led to this silhouette and question:

Like her father, Madeline Hatter is certainly not a Royal, but at this point she’s not a Raven-style Rebel.  Madeline is happy “to follow the destiny of dear old Dad”: she has a broken watch that inaccurately tells her it’s teatime, loves tea, and hangs with a dormouse named Earl Grey.  According to Madeline’s bio, “everyone thinks I’m mad. So nobody believes me when I tell them I can see into the future.”  Maddie has a Cassandra Complex.  In Aeschylus’s play Agamemnon, Cassandra correctly foresaw the fall of Troy, the murder of Agamemnon and her own death, but was doomed by Apollo to be unable to change her destiny or convince anyone else of her predictions.  In a Maddie-style forecast, here's an early preview teaser of her doll and Raven’s:

Mad thought: Maddie is the only one who can hear and converse with the narrators.  Is she the only one who’s sane?

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Raven Queen, First Among Rebels.

This year, Mattel launched Ever After High, its fairytale spinoff from Monster High.  Monster High was about accepting your “freaky flaw”s, that nobody cares if you’re the offspring of Dracula, Medusa, The Phantom of the Opera, Mr Hyde or The Boogey Man because you can still be a great ‘person.’  Ever After High is more discordant.  The children of fairytale characters are broken up into Royals and Rebels, and the division isn’t as clear as it might seem from their titles.

Raven Queen is the daughter of the Queen from Little Snow-White (Snow White’s stepmother).  However, Raven is not a ‘Royal’ but the instigator of rebellion at Ever After High when she chooses to forge her own legacy.  Rather than be destined to poison her roommate (Apple White, who’ll then sleep until she gets kissed by a prince, becomes a queen and has her ‘happily ever after’), Raven wants to write her own destiny.  Raven has good reason not to follow in her mother’s footsteps - the Queen was a narcissistic assassin-hiring woman who cannibalised what she thought were her own stepdaughter’s organs and danced herself to death.  (At least, in some versions of the tale.)  However, if Raven Queen doesn’t pledge her evil destiny by the end of the school year, the headmaster (Milton Grimm) claims that both Raven’s ‘story’ and Raven herself will cease to exist.  So Ever After High is in itself going to be an extended parable about conformity versus nonconformity, and if Raven doesn’t want to be evil then some of her peers and the faculty might well to do their best to drive her evil.

You can watch Raven’s first two adventures below:

Raven's Tale: The Story of a Rebel

Stark Raven Mad

Using Ever After High as a structural device, this EAHigh blog will look at the history and mechanics of fairytales, toys and wherever else the franchise might lead.  ‘The End’ is just the beginning.

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Mad thought: Raven is her roommate’s aunt.

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