AG Showdown: Mini-Samantha vs. Mini Samantha

"She's right behind me, isn't she?"

As followers of the American Girl dolls know, their historical character doll line was revamped earlier this year, and rebranded "BeForever".  Part of that revamp involved both a new style of mini-dolls and a re-release of my personal favourite, the 1904-set Samantha, so naturally the new mini-doll was the first thing I picked up.

I'd originally wanted to get some photos of them fighting it out, but sadly they're too cute, and those fight photos all turned out looking friendly instead.  Ah well, it was a funny idea while it lasted!

Coming up after the move...

Moving day is just over a week away, so while I do have a few unboxed items to photograph, I'm going to be spending the next week putting things back into their boxes, so I think I'll wait on opening those up.

Still, before I get into the packing, I thought I'd take a quick photo of the toys that are newly arrived but being packed away immediately:

Coming soon...

It's not a huge backlog: just two Minimates sets (a Dragon Age set of four and a Marvel set of two) and two American Girl mini Dolls (Grace, the 2015 Girl of the Year and the new version of Samantha), but they'll just have to wait! ;)

Out of the Box: Samantha and Cécile (American Girl Mini Dolls)

My American Girl mini dolls are a bit of an accidental collection - I didn't intend to bring them home, and yet here they are!

Mini Samantha came first, a gift from my husband (then boyfriend).  I'd joked to him, as he was heading to NYC on business, that he should visit the AG store and buy me "stuff", thinking that he wouldn't have the time or the desire.  He surprised me by actually going in ("I had to stand in line with hoards of housewives and little girls!") and picking up this doll (he also surprised me by actually recognizing it as the mini version of my larger doll - we weren't living together at the time, so he'd only seen big Samantha once or twice at that point).

Mini Cécile

Mini Cécile arrived just this past month - I picked her up (along with the book series) as a gift for my niece who would be visiting during her school holidays.  However when the niece arrived, I discovered that she had zero interest in either dolls or history and a huge interest in wildlife, so she ended up picking out some zoo souvenirs instead.  Which means that mini Cécile is now here to stay.

As for the dolls themselves, they're very reasonable copies of their 18" counterparts.  They have the
same plush bodies with vinyl limbs and heads, and their outfits are near-identical to the full size ones - fewer details, and with somewhat messier closures on the back due to the small scale, but still decent quality overall.

Mini Samantha

Unlike the larger dolls though, the minis have almost no neck, which makes them seem a bit strangely proportioned over all.  It seems to gives them a broad shouldered appearance that seems a little out of balance with their tiny hands and delicate outfits. 

Unlike the bigger dolls, they have painted eyes (although I understand that the very first versions of the mini dolls from the 1990s had glass eyes) which gives them a somewhat less neutral gaze.  I alternate between thinking they look shocked with thinking that their expressions are just vacant.

As baby dolls for an SD16

Despite the decade's difference in production times, my two seem to be fairly similar in quality overall.  The one exception is the footware on Cécile - while Samantha's plain plastic shoes may be less impressive to look at, the unevenness of the faux-leather of Cécile's boots means that it's near-impossible to get her to stand on her own.  Still, that's a small complaint for a doll that's probably meant more for play than display.

Overall, they're cute little dolls that make a nice accessory for their larger counterparts (and other large dolls), and they're a fun little addition to the doll posse - even if they weren't a planned one!

In storage: American Girl Samantha

My husband likes to insist that I didn't put nearly enough stuff into storage when we moved (even though easily half the furniture and the vast majority of my books - probably close to 85% - did), but of course "stuff" generally just means toys, and that might not be too far from the truth.

But some toys did go into storage, and my AG Samantha was one of them.

Didn't everyone think up AG fanfic about how maybe in 1914 an older Samantha runs off to Canada to join the red cross and ends up as a nurse in Flanders? And then runs into all of the war poets?

No?  Just me then?

  It's a little odd that I even have her - she's from back in the day when there were only three dolls and they were sold through a paper catalogue.  They weren't as widely known, so it was just a fluke that one of my mother's American-resident sisters happened to get a catalogue and, not having daughters, brought it along on a visit instead of just throwing it out.

My parents naturally thought the dolls were absurdly expensive (not to mention the added cost of international shipping), so I didn't actually get this doll until I was a teenager and my younger sister somehow convinced the family that she only needed one gift for every event of the year, and that gift should be the newly released Felicity.

Anyway, now that I've sent this doll to storage I've (of course!) started finding all kinds of interesting sewing projects for the size.  Ah well!