The company seems completely out of touch with their customers. It seems the company can only focus on promoting one line at a time and they shifted back to Barbie, which IMHO, doesn’t measure up. The uniqueness, attention to detail and overall idea behind the MH line was spectacular and they didn’t preserve it. They stopped promoting them and the quality and design started suffering years before now. It feels like Mattel killed them long before now. I’m a huge MH collector and would certainly spend money on them if they brought them back in original format. You can also follow PopCult and Rudy Panucci on social media at Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Bookmark the new site, and subscribe to our RSS feed.

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Special note: PopCult may disapper from this location at The Charleston Gazette-Mail soon. To continue reading this story, please visit PopCult at our new location. Apparently the division was shut down last year (or earlier) and the design personnel shifted to other projects. If any new Monster High toys make it into stores in 2018, they’re most likely just the last few items that were in the production pipeline.

The new designs were really out of touch with what fans wanted. Instead of extending the life of the brand, that move seemed to hasten its demise, as collectors rejected the new designs and the already dipping sales never quite recovered. In 2016, Mattel, in dire financial straits following the loss of the Disney Princesses line to Hasbro, rebooted Monster High and tried to aim it at a younger audience.

Monster High had close to an eight-year run, which is pretty impressive for a toy line. It’s been a precipitous fall for Monster High, a brand that, just four years ago, was pulling in almost two billion dollars a year, but it’s also pretty much the norm for the toy business. Unless Mattel had Monster High buried in a corner of their enormous booth that nobody’s bothered to cover on the internet yet, the rumors of the past two years are true. This is no great surprise, as the doll line unwittingly paid tribute to another classic monster movie at retail last year: The Incredible Shrinking Man. So far the only mention I’ve seen of it anywhere was in a press release about Mattel’s partnership with Tynker, an educational program that helps teach kids coding. Mattel’s Monster High seems to be missing in action at Toy Fair this year. UPDATE: For the latest news on Monster High, and signs of a possible revival, click HERE.

Wild heart crew