A pedantic reader might well make the assertion that the subjects of this particular blogpost are at some remove from Godzilla, and they may well be right. There is much of the silently screaming chinasaur here in both. However, when we turn to the ‘Kong Hong’ finger puppet here, it is clear that it was an attempt to re-Godzilla-ise (now that’s a horrible new word to coin) the Ben Cooper toy, using common Chinese bootlegs, and these are the earliest crossovers between the Godzilla brand and the jigglers. I am also firmly of the opinion that if you don’t love the oily-smelling quivering awfulness of jigglers, then there must be something deeply wrong with you, so the subject matter here is accepted into our canon.

As is well known, Jigglers were made famous by the company Ben Cooper, a Brooklyn-based firm whose main success was in the production of inexpensive Halloween costumes and plastic masks, and who mass-produced their products in Hong Kong and imported them to the US for sale. After some success in the late 1960s in producing a line of flying super heroes (as the toy line ‘Flying Fun Things’) in oily textured rubber that had a certain jiggle to it, they moved into the booming monster market in 1973, producing stock-in-trade monsters such as a witch, a devil, Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, King Kong holding a plane (that adapted from an Imperial toy or one of its many spin offs) and so on, as well as half-human, half-insect creatures under the ‘Creature People’ line. These were marketed alongside a few others, without the Ben Cooper marks, and apparently made by other now-anonymous companies (including a mummy, a hunchback, a smaller Frankenstein’s monster and a Bela Lugosi-like Dracula. Copies and adaptations of the popular figures, such as King Kong, boomed (see this group posted by Dich Vin on Facebook), and Ben Cooper also re-issued several of its rubber toys in the early 1980s in bags with header cards.

⁂

In the later stages of this wave of production, Ben Cooper also produced a Godzilla bootleg, datable by the year ‘1980’ being given as a copyright date on some surviving labels (for now, ignore the ‘1974’ on the chest of the beast). Ben Cooper had made a Godzilla costume with plastic mask in 1978 under license from Toho, and most probably used the same license to produce the ‘Godzilla’ jigglers two years later.

They stand about 100mm./4 inches high, and are in quite ‘jiggley’ rubber, and were suspended from an elastic loop (this often broken during play, and then cut away).

However, this was a chinasaur-like creature identifiable as Godzilla only by its presence in the movie monster line and the word “GODZILLA” on its label and counter-top sale boxes:

(Image to show label: this from an Etsy listing)

A typically thorough Sphinx blogpost has images of the counter-top display box these toys were sold from, which names these toys as the wonderfully exuberant and wordy: “Godzilla, King of the Monsters, Weirdie Wiggly Action Figure”.

It is obvious that the Ben Cooper Godzilla bootleg is some distance from any representation of Godzilla. This is due to the fact that, as the Sphinx blogpost notes, it is a very minimal adaptation of an earlier hard-rubber chinasaur – so minimal that the copyright date of the chinasaur (1974) was apparently carried over onto the chest of the jiggler, and the only apparent difference is that its nose-horn was removed.

(Above: the original 1974 chinasaur: image here from the Sphinx’s blog – from which I also take the date of this rare chinasaur, having not seen one of these with my own eyes)

A Mercari listing of October 2025 shows another version of this horned chinasaur, with the inscription “MIDE IN / HONG KONG” on its stomach, in the same place that the Ben Cooper marks were placed:

This might be taken to suggest that the Hong Kong manufacturers used by Ben Cooper, were already producing this bootleg chinasaur on their own before working with Ben Cooper – and that they supplied the model for the jiggler, changing the text and removing the horn to differentiate that produced in Ben Cooper’s name from their own bootleg.

The general form of this horned chinasaur may be more familiar to readers in the taller and anatomically-challenged ‘bandy-legged horned dinosaur’ produced in Hong Kong by Dor Mei, whom we know of as one of the principal Godzilla bootleggers in that region. I do not know which came first here, the chinasaur or the Dor Mei dinosaur, but it is clear that Hong Kong in the 1980s was a hotbed for the production of these Godzilla bootlegs and their numerous offspring.

(This image of a Dor Mei dinosaur from an eBay listing)

⁂

The second bootleg here perhaps has even greater appeal. These ‘Kong Hong’ bootlegs of the Godzilla jiggler represent an apparent attempt to clean up and improve on the Ben Cooper model, elongating the body into a more bipedal Godzilla-like form, and bringing elements most probably from the ‘company X’ and Imperial Godzilla bootlegs into the design. The spine-fins in shape and number of rows (albeit with one more outer row added on each side) nod at the ‘Sharkzilla’ bootlegs produced in China by ‘company X’ (see previous post on Chinese bootlegs), the arms and hands follow common Imperial, Dor Mei and ‘company x’ Godzilla bootleg models (quite unlike those of the Ben Cooper jiggler and Dor Mei dinosaur), and the feet show a great similarity to those of the Imperial Godzillas (and are quite unlike the Ben Cooper jiggler’s or the Dor Mei dinosaur’s three-toed feet).

These stand about 110mm. tall, and weigh about 25g. Unlike the Ben Cooper model, they were made in hard black rubber and sadly do not ‘jiggle’. They were highlighted in yellow and red, or completely painted in green, and have a circle of red on their stomachs. Their eyes and teeth are picked out in white and red, and a tongue is marked with a single stroke of red paint. Their arms are fixed in the raised ‘don’t shoot’ position, and they do not articulate at all.

Their most notable feature is the large oval hole (17mm. diameter at widest part) that was left in their ‘under carriage’ so they could be mounted on a finger for fighting with others, and close inspection reveals that their only maker’s marks are the very slightly garbled words “KONG / HONG” under the base of their tail.

⁂⁂⁂

I do not think that these two were the only bootleg Godzillas produced in the frenetic hotbed of industrial production in Hong Kong in the 1980s, within the atmosphere there of continual copying and adaptation, with bootlegs produced of bootlegs and so on ad infinitum. One has only to consider the vast array of closely related King Kong toys produced there at the same time to suspect there must be many more Hong Kong mini ‘Godzillas’ not known to me. I should love to hear from any reader with other Hong Kong-made similar figures in their collections, in the hope that in time we might create something of a catalogue of them here, and flesh out more fully this branch of the evolutionary tree of Godzilla bootlegs.