Monster High Vol. 1

For your reference, here's the webisode Index. Study up!

The first episode is about five monster girls who want to see a boy band.

You don't get to hear the full theme song in the webisodes for awhile.

In a bit of weird canon, this takes place after the first special, New Ghoul At School, which does nothing but bring the main character to the titular school, have her meet her two best ghoulfriends, and establish the 'bad girl' character, who is really not so bad.

But who are these girls? It's best you learn quickly, because there are another, oh, forty five characters to learn about;

They had a bit of a samey body style. It was even more apparent with the dolls, as Draculaura was scaled up to be the size of everyone else when she's quite clearly shorter, even in her boots. The dolls also never made Ghoulia (Far right) slump like that.

The Jaundice Brothers are hosting a competition to play at a High School, and guess what, it's a 'Youth make a video' plot.

Yeah, there are a lot of sly pop-culture references in the earlier webisodes. It's even stronger in the books by Lisi Harrison.

Also, the stills are going to be in low quality for a few episodes, as the official MH Youtube didn't upload in 480+ until episode six.

One of these characters will be important later.

But not very.

Our main character is Frankie Stein, the black and white and green Daughter of Frankenstein. She's sixteen days old, and is the new girl. Being the straight disembodied reanimated corpse girl, she doesn't get a hell of a lot of personality besides 'positive' and 'eagar'. 

Clawdeen Wolf is one of the more popular and spirited characters, and is the Daughter of the Werewolf. Though I believe it changes in later iterations, as the daughter of a werewolf, as there are different packs out there. You'll see more of her and her family later.

Draculaura is the adopted daughter of Dracula after her mother, his loyal housekeeper, died during a sickness in ancient Rome, if I remember right. Talk about your mood whiplash. She's 1599 years old.

I'm actually going to hold off on introducing the other three people who showed up, as they have better introductions a bit further down the line.

The second episode, Talon Show, is about the rivalry between.....well, everybody else but today it's Clawdeen, and Cleo DeNile, who is my favorite character.

She's not the only 'Haughty princess with a heart of gold' character in this franchise, but that's lightyears away. 

The diary canon says that the reason the two have bad blood is because Cleo broke up with Clawdeen's brother Clawd, but in reality it was a mutual split and they agreed to say that Cleo dumped him to save face. But Clawdeen doesn't know that, and, well, they get better.

Oh, and the girl on the far right is Ghoulia Yelps, daughter of the zombies. She doesn't speak any known language, but everyone else can understand her, so good enough for me!

It's a talent show episode. Hey, they got more creative as the show went on, but it is interesting to see how stilted and cheap the animation looked in the beginning. Ever After High's sole benefit was having come out three years later where more people were comfortable with flash-puppets with lots of hair moving around.

Fear Squad has Frankie accidentally joining, well, The Fear Squad (Because Fear sounds like Cheer, get it?), run by Cleo, who says she doesn't want any dead weight on her squad, prompting Ghoulia to leave.

This might be the only weird shot like this we see in the series.

It stands out in retrospect because diary canon has Cleo and Ghoulia being best friends, and Cleo makes sure that people don't mistreat Ghoulia. You remember my griping about EAH never sticking to book or diary canon, but I never realized how bad it was in the early days of Monster High. I understand why Mattel wanted to reboot it to bring all four continuities into something that made sense.

The next webisode, Substitute Creature, is interesting.

• It's the first acknowledgement of Headless Headmistress Bloodgood.
• It's the first visual of Heath Burns.
• The substitute teacher is a "Normie", just an ordinary human.
• On a tangent, that's another bit of this franchise that was weird as hell. One of the specials, Fright On!, suggest that monsters and humans coexist, but live separately, as the humans are dicks, unsurprisingly. 
• But then, from Scaris: City of Frights onward, it's hinted that monsters have taken over the entire world. Seriously, let me list the names of cities and countries that show up;
• Scaris
• Fanghai
• Boo York
• Shibooya
• Rotland
• Monster Picchu

So I guess all the humans just got murdered. Ok!

Anyway, here's Deuce Gorgon, Son of Medusa of Greek (Shrieek?) Mythology. 

He turned the normie sub into stone.

There's another webisode that says he accidentally stoned his pet dragon as a child and it still hasn't returned to normal, so that teacher is just dead.

He's also Cleo's boyfriend. Plays Casketball. Likes to cook. Had a really nice Boo York doll.

I would wear both of these.

Next up, introducing the Token Sport Girl (Although Clawdeen is no slouch there either, and Fearleading IS a sport), Lagoona Blue, Daughter of a Sea Monster and an Ocean Nymph.

She is probably my least favorite in the main sextet, and that's mainly because of her stupid love plot, but she has my favorite outfit.

Lagoona has a crush on Gil Webber, and they are in a constant state of Will they or Won't They, as he is a freshwater monster whose parents are, let's call it what it is, racist, against Lagoona's mixed heritage and salty blood. Even with her movie, Great Scarrier Reef, being the last film of Gen 1, you're not gonna see a ton of development for either of them.

The Hot Boy is about Draculaura crushing on the newcomer, Heath Burns, Son of a Fire Elemental.

They were running through the monster concepts rather quickly already, huh.

There are good lines in these webisodes, despite their....pedantry in the stories. "You're pretty pumped for someone without a pulse. Spill to Cleo." The odd thing is Draculaura talking with Cleo as if they're friends already - They aren't. And Photo Finish again has Cleo involved in the adventures of the main trio. I'm glad they pushed to have her be involved, but it doesn't make sense. 

If it seems like all the boys have powers, don't worry, we're going to be introduced to maybe another three in this franchise and they're all relatively normal.

Wow another episode about a girl and a crush. I'm not even going to recap it, but I will show you this weirdly off model Draculaura.

Totally Busted shows us the two-hundred and twenty two year old Headmistress. She can remove her head and rides around on her giant blue horse, Nightmare.

Back to a legitimate webisode review with Freakout Friday. Because it's weird.

It's both Friday the 13th and October 31st because fuck you, and this school of monsters is being super superstitious. 

Deuce freaks out as a black cat passes by him. Which is weird because there are werecats in this universe and one of the newcomers will be a black cat. Draculaura is holding an open umbrella indoors. Isn't that bad luck too? That doesn't help matters.

The girls call jinx, and a random....guillotine blade swipes down in front of them.The bad luck ends when Ghoulia turns the clock in the school to 3 PM. I wish that was a full 30 minute special.

Shock And Awesome really dates this show, as Clawdeen, Draculaura, Lagoona, and Cleo are talking about a Twilight parody, TwiHard.

 The writers didn't know what to do with Cleo at this point. They didn't know which canon to follow. So she's their friend now.

Fur Will Fly is everyone going "Uh, you don't fuck with Clawdeen on the best of days, but not today,"

 Heath was set up to be a fiery bad boy but instead is just a hot headed kid with extreme energy.  They also cool it on the Moon Ex Machina stuff.

Also; Enter Clawd Wolf, Clawdeen's older brother, captain of the Casketball Team;

They also stopped having Cleo whip out random Fauxgyptian Artifacts that backfired on her.

That's kind of all there is to Volume one. A lot of repeated story elements. But luckily, we kick things off in proper fashion in Volume 2 with a long storyline about fearleading.