Doll Post No.1: Barbie Fairytopia Mermaidia Elina

Oh dear, that is one long title.

Sorry to all of you who only care about otome games, this blog is turning into a doll and otome blog! I could've written about dolls before, but I've only just got mine out of storage. They've all been boxed up for a year now... :(

Today, I wanted to talk about a doll of mine that I've had for years, meaning that she is very well played with.

And who is that lucky lady, you ask? Read the title! For those of you who don't want to read that, it's my Fairytopia Mermaidia Elina doll. I do have another Mermadia doll, but I'll save her for another post. I do apologise if the pictures in this "review" are rubbish. I probably took them a bit too quickly, because I was very eager to write this post.

I must admit that I haven't seen the film, which came out in 2006. I may have caught a bit of it on TV years ago, but I don't remember any of it. The only fairy related Barbie film I've seen is Mariposa, a spin-off of Fairytopia. I have a doll from that, too!

I think that I won Elina in a competition somehow. It might've been from the UK Barbie magazine, which I often read, usually on long car journeys up the M5. For some reason I enjoyed making her an older mother figure in all of my games. I don't know why, but her face seemed mature for me when I was younger. I never had any other Elina doll, but I did see the Magic of the Rainbow one once up in Scotland.

Here's a promotional picture of my Elina. in case you wanted to see what a fresh, not worn one looks like. The wings fold down and you're supposed to put the mermaid tail on top of it. Barbie movie dolls often have gimmicks like this. This one simulates when Elina turns into a mermaid at some point in the movie, I believe. I don't recall using this feature that much during play, I think I just used to take the wings off and use her as a normal doll. Most of them don't work very well after a few years, but this one seems to still work fine. I'll talk about that stuff later though.

Here's another close up picture of her. I just want to say that I absolutely love her face. When I was younger I didn't really like it more than any other Barbie face, but looking at it now, I absolutely ADORE it.

Here's a closer look at it. My phone camera couldn't focus on it very well, unfortunately. The rooted eyebrows and the makeup just make the look for me. Elina has green eyes, unlike the typical main  character Barbie portrays in her films, who usually has blue ones. The lips and the eyes are both glittery.

The face has a trademark of 2004, which is the year before the first Fairytopia dolls came out. I thought that they might have made it especially for this line, but I can't seem to confirm it using KattisDolls.net. The Elina face mould is on there, but it only mentions the original doll from the first film, not this one. That mould has a closed mouth too. My Elina might match another face mould from 2004, but I can't find any that look similar.

Her hair is blonde and has tinselly bits in it. There's also a strand of dried glue hair in there too. It used to have a small bit that was tied up, but it got so messy that I had to remove it. Her hair's still messy, but honestly, it's better than what it was.

You can see that Elina has a moulded on top and necklace. The necklace has a button, but it hasn't done anything for years. I think that it used to trigger the wing movement or something. I don't normally like moulded on clothes, but sometimes these gimmick dolls need them to make stuff work properly. It's just a shame that the newer, regular Barbies have moulded stuff on now. I know they're trying to make stuff cheaper, but before they managed to make budget dolls with fabric clothes instead!

Elina has some articulation, but not much. Her arms don't bend, but they move up, down and out. They have cute little armbands moulded onto them. The legs are those soft legs that older Barbie's used to have, but they don't bend like the usual ones do. There are pink decorations moulded onto them too. I think that the decorations on her limbs are painted on top of regular skin coloured plastic.  To summarise things, Elina has about as much articulation as the basic Fashionistas girls you can get cheap nowadays. Her body is the same length as your regular Barbie body, if you were wondering.

There's also Elina's skirt, her one piece of clothing that is fabric, as long as you don't count her wings. It's quite pretty. When the mermaid tail's on, it makes it blend in with the rest of the body by hiding the top of it.

Now, let's focus on her main feature, the ability to transform from a fairy into a mermaid!

PLEASE NOTE: My mermaid tail broke in half whilst taking photos, because it's old and because it's made out of two halves stuck together somehow. This means that the mermaid feature looks awful in the photos.

This is the back of Elina. She has a big hole in the back where her wing pegs are. You attack the wings to them, then pull them down to form a mermaid tail. This thing means that you cannot put a lot of clothes on her without the wing pegs getting in the way. It's a shame, because her pretty face would look great on so many outfits, but then again, this transformation feature wouldn't work without this hole. Maybe she'd look good on a Made to Move body? I would try that, but I've never done that before, and I don't have a spare body lying around.

This is what the tail looked like, before it broke. It's got a very pretty design, and they've actually painted on it instead of leaving it as just one colour! The back of it just has scales, no fancy design. What you do is fold the wings down to her legs, wrap them around, then put this tail on to make it look like Elina's a mermaid. It's quite a good idea, to be honest.

Here's my Elina with the wings. Yeah, they're not in the best shape. The fabric is dangling off the plastic a bit.

Here is the best picture I could find of Elina's movie outfit. It only sort of resembles the doll, but I think that the toy had to combine both elements of her mermaid and fairy outfit to avoid having to make her be re-dressed before each transformation.

Here's me attempting to make Elina a mermaid with a broken tail. It looks pretty bad. It used to actually work quite well though.

Here's the cover art of Mermaidia so you can see some artwork of Elina's mermaid form. Her hair looks a lot longer and thicker than the doll's. The doll also doesn't come with Bibble, either. I actually used to have a big moving, talking Bibble toy, but he has since long gone. The doll looks quite accurate to this. There used to be a game on Barbie.com where you could makeover mermaid Elina, and change the colour of her tail and hair and all that.

In conclusion, I really do love this doll. I don't really use the transformation feature much anymore, but I'll agree that it is a cool concept. I think they could've done it differently though. I think in the original Fairytopia, Elina didn't have wings, so they could make the doll a regular Barbie without moulded on clothes, but have a hole in her back to fit clip on wings, but not the kind that fall off every second. Maybe the wings could even fit round her as a clippy belt thing, a bit like how waist doll stands work? Then the tail could be an extra cover that goes around her legs, like those mermaid tails you can wear in real life. Then she could be either a human, fairy, mermaid or flying fish girl! It would work a lot better, well at least it would in my opinion.

Still, I'm happy with the doll the way she is. I love her face and just her general design. I just want to try some different outfits on her!

That ends my first Barbie post on this blog. I'm going to make a lot of posts like this where I dig through my collection and showcase them all for you. Don't worry, I'm still going to make otome related posts!

I know you should keep your blog to just one theme, but I don't really care. It's not like I'm trying to get traffic so that I can get money for adverts. I'm just doing this for fun. It saves making another blog that'll probably die and get untouched after a few months. Also, this will make it so that my blog isn't just a big row of posts on the same game for weeks at a time.

Hopefully none of you mind this change. Even if you did though, I'm still going to write about dolls.

I suppose I'll see you on the next post then. Goodbye!