Toys Surprisingly high-quality, and a standout in girl-targeted media and toys.
Honest confession: I am male. I had never shown any interest in girls' things, due to the oversaturation of pink and other feminine stereotypes and cliches which I found tiresome and uninteresting. When I first heard of Monster High, I thought it was another ugly Bratz follower, and quickly dismissed it. A few years later, though, I found out more about it and quickly fell in love, due to my own love of monsters.
The show/movies are written well enough, but their greatest strength is in making every character likable (if they're supposed to be). Despite the horror lens, all of the conflicts in the stories come from real problems people face, with the fantastical elements being interchangeable with real-life substitutes. The message of the brand is admirable and important, too. It uses the variety of monsters to promote equality and diversity, as well as self-acceptance.
The character designs and concepts are very detailed and well thought-out, and the dolls themselves are pretty high quality for their price. They also get pretty weird, which I love. Two characters have multiple pairs of arms, there's a cyclops doll, and one of the dolls is conjoined twins with the bonus of being daughters of the Hydra!
Overall, MH is an accessible and fun love letter to classic monsters, and the most interesting and inventive girl-targeted brand on the market.
Toys An innovative and exciting toy brand with a good message and aesthetic.
Monster High was unique for having high-detail and genuinely freaky monster characters as pretty fashion dolls, successfully marketing a darker and weirder tone to a market known for pink pretty triteness.
Quality was high. The dolls had a then-exceptional standard of articulation for a play doll, and the dolls had bespoke faces for almost every character and bespoke bodies with intricate, super creative monster details on many, many characters.
Theming-wise, MH wasn't playing around. It genuinely had a passion for horror and executed it with design panache. My favorite touches include a robot character with the doll's factory stamp moved to a leg panel to make it part of the character, and a swamp monster with crocodile spines and swirling vines all over her body. Some of these dolls were genuinely gnarly, too, including a doll with blank white eyes, a doll with six arms, and customizable dolls with clear body plates that can be removed to customize their inner organs with emotion charms. These dolls were edgy, pretty, spooky, and downright cool. I was a teen boy and they grabbed me.
I had my gripes. The faces always felt unrealistically gorgeous for many of the monsters and weren't often as detailed as the bodies were, and the oversized heads never quite worked out for me. The storytelling feels directed at a younger age than the first dolls were, and representation was flawed. Foreign characters had reductive theming that dipped into stereotypes and made each primarily defined by their country, the bodies were minimally varied and all very skinny, and male characters, while more plentiful than expected, were inevitably there as the girls' love interests. The brand was also prohibited from showcasing queerness in any way, which jars with the fabulous aesthetic of the dolls and the diversity metaphor.
G2 of the brand was blah. The dolls had a doe-eyed makeover that stripped them of personality and their costuming became more grounded, colorful, and modest for a younger audience. Not a lot of good.
G3 has promise. A lot is being reimagined, but mostly with respectable new takes. The look is school-friendly, but more mature and detailed than G2, and the dolls themselves are back to form for the time being. G3 has a bit of queer rep, which is nice, and body diversity has increased, which works. Clothing compatibility doesn't matter for such distinct characters. I'm excited to see where G3 goes.
This brand changed the girl's toy market and in its G1 peak, delivered some of the most imaginative and creepy dolls on the market. The brand may be different now, but it looks like it's in a good place.