Doll Hunting on the Internet

~ Shara

It started innocently enough. I was browsing through Entertainment Weekly’s site and came upon an article about the new dolls for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. It caught my interest because I pretty well liked the doll Mattel came up with for Katniss for The Hunger Games (a doll I wish I’d picked up), and I wanted to see what they did for the second movie (an aside: I love that Mattel has, thus far, resisted putting Katniss in her Capitol Dresses and focused instead on what she actually wears for realz, you know?), and I wanted to see how the Catching Fire doll would compare.

Which led me directly to Mattel’s BarbieCollector.com site, which got me browsing through their collectable dolls catalog. I’ve always been somewhat in awe of their actual collector dolls. You know, the stuff that’s not actually meant to be taken out of the box, but if you do, you better damn well display it somewhere? So I was, of course, in awe, by the various dolls for sale and came upon one that knocked my socks off. It’s called The Queen of Constellations and it’s Amidala-Awesome.

While reading the description, I learned this doll was the third and final in a series of three “futuristic space goddess series,” so of course, I had to Google the other two dolls. Those were cool too, but no where near as fabulous as “The Queen of Constellations.”

All of this drooling reminded me of one of my first doll-collecting sprees, that of Disney’s The Little Mermaid. See, I was about eight when the movie originally premiered in theaters, and I. Fracking. Loved. That. Movie. I wanted everything Little Mermaid I could get my hands on, but one thing I never got was an actual Ariel doll. Some of my friends had them, and I was wildly jealous. But I never had my own. Until college, when I discovered that Disney still made Disney Princess dolls and sometimes, they’d release an awesome Ariel doll that was meant for me, the COLLECTOR, and not for little girls to take out and play with.

I don’t remember how many dolls I ended up with. A handful, maybe, and now that my memory’s all shoddy I need to go to my grandmother’s and do some digging. But I remembered seeing, last year, a Disney Holiday Princess Cinderella, and after doing research last year, I learned that they released one Disney Princess per year in this collection. So I filed that knowledge away so I could look for Ariel one day. I Googled it, and wouldn’t you know, 2013’s edition just so happens to be Ariel!

It’s a little disappointing to me. She looks too bright-eyed and girly, and that’s saying something, because bright-eyed and girly is what Ariel does you know?

You know where this is leading, right? I started Googling for other collectable Ariel dolls, stuff I’ve missed since college.

I found this beauty, and given the fact it was just re-released earlier this month means I might actually be able to find the beauty. I see a trip to the Disney store in my future!).

I found this designer rendition, which came out in 2011 and is part of the designer princess collection and pre-dates the fascinating designer villains collection last year, which included this unfortunately (see what I did there?) skinny Ursula Doll, which looks fabulous in person and I really wish I’d gotten it last year when I saw it in the store, but alas… money.

This set comes out later this month, and I have to admit, I’m really curious to see it in person: It’s Eric and Ariel both!

And lastly, on The Little Mermaid front, these are two dolls that I think I may have gotten ONE of while I was in college, but I’m not sure. I really need to sort through my stuff at my grandmother’s. Aqua Fantasy Ariel and Summer Seas Ariel.

By time I got through these, and poked around the online Disney Store for other goodies (Ariel coffee mugs!), I decided to take one more peek at the truly outrageous new Jem and the Holograms dolls: Original gallery here at The Mary Sue.com and even MORE dolls featured at The Mary Sue.

In conclusion, I need more money. And some epic display cases/devoted rooms to the fandoms of my childhood.

24 thoughts on “Doll Hunting on the Internet”

  1. Ooh, so many cool dolls! The Eric and Ariel doll set will probably sell out fast once it’s released, since I know the other couples in the Disney Fairytale Designer Collection did…

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  2. the only dolls i’ve ever, TRULY wanted were the Amidala dolls. and i only ended up with a few of them, making me sad [and people kept getting me the SAME ONE, i have THREE of the one that was made for you to play with her hair, which … sigh]

    but i can see it. not Ariel per se, but the urge behind it.
    also, the dress Ariel wears in the Eric/Ariel set? i want THAT!

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    1. Oh, the Amidala dolls! I need to put up a post to talk about the doll craze I went through in college, and the dolls I got out of it. Because the Amidala dolls featured quite heavily in that. 🙂

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  4. Whooaa, the Queen of the Constellations is badass, and I covet the Jem dolls. My inner 80’s kid is very giddy over the Jem dolls. I think it would be very easy to get into dolls.

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    1. TOTALLY badass, right?

      You should poke around their site. The various “from around the world” dolls and outfits have always awed me.

      I love the new Jem dolls. I want to buy them all. 🙂

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  5. “I love that Mattel has, thus far, resisted putting Katniss in her Capitol Dresses and focused instead on what she actually wears for realz, you know”

    Unlike Cover Girl, which has released a series of Capitol inspired makeup. Because we want to celebrate the fake extravagance of the Capitol that made Katniss so uncomfortable?

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    1. I’m rather torn on the Cover Girl campaign, because I totally get what you’re saying, but…. I kind of love it. Maybe it’s the brand loyalty to Cover Girl, so I’m cool they’re geeking out over a fandom. But yeah, it’s ironic. 🙂

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  6. Oh my god, dolls. This is such a huge subject for me, I don’t know where to start.

    I had…a bajillion dolls of all types when I was a kid. Technically, I STILL have a bajillion dolls of all types, but they’re all in boxes somewhere in the basement. I was especially big into Barbies–a few of mine fell apart because I played with them so much–but I only have two collector’s edition Barbies. Because they were so expensive, and probably because they were meant to be put on a shelf, not played with, my parents wouldn’t buy me collector’s edition Barbies, so the first one I had to save up my money and pay for half of, the other was (I think) a Christmas present.

    I’m kind of “over” Barbies at this point in my life. However, there are other types of dolls I feel like I could still get really into. I had (still have–like I said, in a box somewhere) two American Girl dolls, and I was OBSESSED with those things, and the clothes, and the furniture, and the other stuff you could get for them. I wanted EVERYTHING I ever saw out of the magazine. I ended up with an Addy doll (which I carried everywhere for YEARS) and one of the “Girl of Today” dolls, several outfits for each, and Addy’s bed.

    Those dolls I could still get into. Not only have they added more dolls to the collection since I got “too old for dolls,” but they try to make them not just fun, but historically informative, which I can appreciate. I think I learned most of what I knew as a kid about slavery in America and the Civil War from reading Addy’s books.

    The other type of doll I can still admit to being interested in would be porcelain dolls, of which I have a small collection that I wouldn’t mind adding to, once I have the space (and money) to do so.

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    1. The American Girls collection I never actually got into, but I saw all the literature for them and fantasized about having them. I think my favorite was Samantha?

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      1. I liked all of them, but Addy was my favorite, as you can probably tell. 🙂 I also really liked Molly, because I thought she looked like me (long brown hair and glasses).

        To go off on a tangent, sort of, this is something I always mention whenever that discussion about dolls and race comes up–which I think can be simplified as, “Girls prefer dolls that are the same race they are.” That is not a universal fact, and I think my preference for Addy, who in her story escaped slavery in the South and started a new life in Philadelphia during the Civil War, can attest to that.

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        1. “Girls prefer dolls that are the same race they are.”

          I think there’s is some truth to that, but it’s not absolute. Transcending that beyond dolls to favorite characters, I realized not so long ago that some of my favorite female characters are all redheads. I am not a natural redhead, but I’ll be damned if I can think of a blonde character I adored as I was growing up, you know? Not that I’m blonde anymore, but still, I was back then!

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          1. Oddly, I gravitated towards blondes when I was a kid, even though I’ve always been a fairly dark brunette. My mom is a blonde, and we’ve always been very close, so maybe that had something to do with it?

            I love red hair on women, I find it really beautiful. My hair is still brown, although at the moment it has a purple stripe in it–I also like crazy colors for hair, as you might deduce :).

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            1. I’m probably going to go red in a few weeks myself. Right now, the last red I got back in the spring has kind of faded into this straw-colored blonde look. I’m not sure what I’d call my natural color. It’s on the brown side, but not a warm brown, if that makes sense?

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              1. I’d like to get my stripe recolored–it was really dark purple at first, but now a few months on it’s gone kind of grayish-pink, which I’m not a fan of. 😛

                I’m thinking turquoise, or just leave it bleach blonde (they had to bleach it before applying the purple dye, because my natural hair color is so dark it wouldn’t have shown up if they hadn’t).

                I love red hair of just about any shade. I like my natural hair color, but if I was going to switch colors entirely, I’d totally go with red.

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  7. Oooooh! I did not even know there were collector Barbie dolls (which is probably a Very Good Thing).

    The pirate Barbie is pretty bad-ass, too – http://www.barbiecollector.com/shop/doll/pirate-barbie-doll-k7972

    And so are these two: http://www.barbiecollector.com/shop/doll/la-reine-de-la-nuit-barbie-doll-x8286 and http://www.barbiecollector.com/shop/doll/barbie-and-rockers-reunion-tour-barbie-doll-0

    But the Lounge Kitty TM collection makes me wonder about the person who came up with that idea – http://www.barbiecollector.com/showcase/category/fantasy#pLoungeKittiesCollectionp 🙂

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