Saturday, November 22, 2014

Yes, there is such a thing as a Sparkle Girlz fakie

Look what I found at Fortress CVS on the edge of downtown today.

For a ballerina, I have lousy posture.



I don't seem to have captured the name in any of my photos, but it's something like Dream Girlz or Dream Dollz. If the resemblance to a Sparkle Girlz cone doll wasn't sufficiently marked, there's the mini tagging along, looking like she could be from the same mold as one of the Sparkle Girlz minis.

My CVS also had pale blondes, where the face-up looks oddly like the arithmetic mean of Sparkle Girlz and Kenya World's Hispanic doll Nicole. My store did not have any darker-skinned versions, and CVS' web site really doesn't cover toys properly, so I don't know how much variety there actually is (until I stop at every CVS I pass, which we all know I will, and I'm already looking for excuses to go to Maryvale or to south Phoenix, the two places where my odds of a darker doll are highest).

Princess dress or nightgown? Can anybody tell?

Speaking of Nicole, both she and Kenya were at the same CVS. (The photo shows Kenya's friend Denise, but there were also Kenya-the-character Kenya dolls.) These are the basic Nicole with articulated knees but no elbow motion, the ones priced $9.99 at TRU... here for $12.99 Eep! Drugstores really do price up everything from cat litter to soup to toys!

If we were $7.99, people would probably buy us.

The duo Sparkle Girlz fakies were priced at a bargain $9.99, though if a cone doll costs $5 and a mini is about $3, it'd be cheaper to buy the real thing. So the target market may be people who don't go to Walmart.

Pricing aside, I'm pleased to see some variety in doll choices at CVS. For a while, it was looking like nothing but wall-to-wall Barbies and Monster High.

4 comments:

  1. I love these huge markets you have in the US, there are no dolls in the supermakets here......too bad.....

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    1. We have this weird thing in the U.S. where grocery stores, drugstores, gas-station convenience stores, dollar stores, and discount department stores all want to compete with one another, so basically they all carry food, and I'm waiting for Monster High to start showing up at gas stations.

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  2. LOL at Monster High showing up at gas stations. Stranger things have happened.

    I guess we shouldn't be surprised that Sparkle got cloned, but actually, I kinda am, lol. I guess success breeds copy cats.

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    1. I'm surprised because we're now well down the garden path of cloning... Sparkle Girlz have been accused of being a clone of Moxie Girlz (though I'm not sure I agree, as they have sweeter expressions than Moxies), which MGA deliberately introduced as a clone of Bratz during the trademark brouhaha... So a Sparkle Girlz clone would be a third-generation descendant of Bratz, with virtually no lingering resemblance to the original. *head explodes*

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