This is a category where I culled and refined a lot. Mom had about 100 Kelly and Chelsea dolls in their costumes, and I'd had a bad habit of buying Sparkle Girlz Minis to reward myself for enduring grocery shopping at Walmart in Phoenix. (When I went to Kroger, instead I bought My Little Pony Minis. Since a girl has to eat, these things accumulated. I don't know where the ponies went, probably donated years ago.)
Our leftmost girl, Neveah, is a 2002 Kid Kore Jodi or Jodi-adjacent. She's the doll who touched off renewed interest in this size category, as she has a different face-up than the two traditionally used for Jodi dolls. I've been referring to her as Black, but I'm not sure that was her intent, and for 2024 she may be reclassified as a different ethnicity where straight hair is more usual.
The little blond boy, Lucky, is a Lucky Industries clone of Kelly's friend Tommy, in his original outfit. His rooting photographs badly but looks fine in person, and he has such a cute expression!
Evi Love was a standout pick because she's a Black mini with actual curls! Technically, her hair texture isn't authentic, but she's doing a better job of being a Black doll at this size than most others.
Kelly is my favorite of Mom's Kelly dolls and provides the body comparison for this size range.
Kelly has a vast wardrobe, while Neveah and Evi do better in the fashions for Dollar Tree's little science girls. Poor Evi still needs shoes that aren't hot pink! If Simba sold an Evi Love fashion pack with neutral shoes, I'd be on it.
Notably missing here are Scarlet/Ruby (I keep changing what I call her) and Jania, the two reps of different generations of Sparkle Girlz Minis.
Ruby -- or Scarlet, it's a bad sign when I keep changing the doll's name -- was a sentimental save as one of the few dolls I bought in Connecticut, and one of the last generation of Funville dolls. Jania is a new Zuru Glitzeez, representing how the dolls changed after Zuru bought Funville.
On the one hand, I was really excited about doing a comparison of the two, and I did that thing.
On the other hand, they both look cheap and puffy-headed when compared to my fab four. Jania is very similar to Neveah and obviously inferior, both in quality and in interest: there aren't a lot of 2002 Jodi dolls running loose, and there are tons of Glitzeez. Ruby just... looks so stolid and unengaged. I was always having to do a little extra work to fit her into scenes with the fab four. So these two are going into the donation bin.
Important rule coming out of this: Don't buy just to document a clone line's existence. A $3.75 purchase obviously isn't a big deal, but I feel kind of stupid about it. The upshot is that I will not buy anything from MGA's Dream Ella line, no matter how steeply discounted as it's closed out, as my role in life is not, repeat not, to document every short-lived knock-off-ish line of dolls.
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