Godzilla Weirdie Wiggly Action Figure ("Jiggler," Ben Cooper, 1980)

 

Today, let's knock another vintage Godzilla toy off of the "somehow-neglected" list of empty links on our page of Chronological Vintage American Godzilla items.  You probably know the name of the Ben Cooper company, and it probably makes you think of these:

Vintage Halloween costumes from your youth; the plastic-smock kind that came in what they call "cake boxes."  You know, the ones with the mask held on with the world's weakest rubber band? As it turns out, they made other items too.  Let's start with a rubber dinosaur from 1974:

You had these types of things as a kid, and so did I, and so did nearly every child in the free world at one time.  Hard rubber dinosaur figures, about four inches high.  They became so commonplace to toy and drug stores--and nondescript--that collectors often refer to them today as "Chinasaurs," because 99% of the time, they have no maker listed on them at all.  When Ben Cooper got the Godzilla license, they made a fast change to this figure, which really only consisted of removing its horn, and quickly re-christened him "Godzilla:"

Well, maybe if you squint.

Another thing they did was add an elastic loop to hang the figure from (this I think is what resulted in the nickname of "Jigglers", and not the material they are made from.  If they were that old type of "Wacky Wall Walker" soft rubber, they'd have surely all disintegrated by now!).  This also provided a place to put the tag, which is a sticker doubled over on itself.  There are two variations to this tag, one with red ink and one with black.

There's also a bit of color variation to the figures themselves.  It becomes harder to tell with age; you never know where (or in what conditions) one of these has been stored anyhow, but some figures are more yellowish, even green, and some tend more toward brown.  Here is an example of a mega-rare display box, and you can see that the extant figures inside are all the same shade, if that's anything to go by:

I can't look at this photo without imagining them
peeping like baby chicks!

It also tells us that the official name for the toy is "Godzilla King of the Monsters Weirdie Wiggly Action Figure." It's a terrible name for a toy, but the sweet artwork on the top panel brings the idea more in line with the Hanna-Barbera, and even more so, Marvel Godzilla of the time:

So, as you can see, this toy was very much a "product of its time," but also cool in a wacky kind of way.  They don't come up very often at all, and can be tough to find.  

Unfortunately, Ben Cooper was bought by Rubie's Costume Company in 1992, but the nostalgia for the old-style Halloween costumes will never die.  This year, Super 7 made 3 different Godzilla masks in the vintage style!