Gre-Gory: Mattel's big bad vampire bat, and the borrowed pump in his chest

By Matthew Partsch · Owl and Twig Vintage · September 24, 2026

Gre-Gory, Mattel's rubber vampire bat with the see-through chest, is remembered as a 1978 toy and sold as a 1979 one. Every dated document that survives puts him on the shelf in 1980, and the trick in his chest was one Mattel had already patented for a different figure.

What Gre-Gory is, and what the box promised

Gre-Gory is a bat made of soft, reddish-brown vinyl, with red eyes, bendable fangs, loops at the feet for hanging him upside down, and one feature no dime-store bat ever had: a hollow chest fitted with a clear window. Behind the window sits a little plumbing. A button hidden in his back pushes red fluid through it.

Mattel sold three tricks and printed all three on the box. The box copy, as The Retroist transcribed it, ordered children to “Press his back! See ‘blood’ flow in chest!” and added that shaking him would flap his wings. Elsewhere the box promised that even his teeth would bend, and it closed with a packing note that has become a small collector joke of its own: use your own string and hang him upside down. The string was not included.

The name is a pun on Gregory and on gore, and it took at least one grown collector decades to notice. Brian Heiler of Plaid Stallions, who wanted the toy desperately at eight and finally bought one in 2016, called Gre-Gory the “cadillac version of a dime store bat,” heavier and larger than the rubber bats Imperial and Ben Cooper sold for pocket change, and still, at heart, a rubber bat.

The pump came from Pulsar

Gre-Gory's chest was a second act. Mattel's Pulsar, the Ultimate Man of Adventure, released in 1976 or 1977 depending on the source, was a large action figure with a transparent torso. Press his back and his heart and lungs swelled while red fluid coursed through coiled tubing in his abdomen. Pulsar did not last; the line was over within about two years. The machinery inside him was patented, and the patents survive in full.

On January 21, 1977, Mattel filed two applications side by side. The first, by Ned Strongin of Baldwin, New York, covered a doll with viewable internal organs and issued on May 9, 1978, as U.S. Patent 4,087,933. The second, by Robert F. Schroeder of Long Beach, California, covered the pump alone and issued on September 19, 1978, as U.S. Patent 4,115,042.

Schroeder's pump is a small, clever object. A soft vinyl dome sits in a rigid plastic body slightly less than an inch across. Press the dome and a flexible skirt seals the inlet while a thin tongue swings open to let fluid out; release it and the two reverse, drawing fluid back in. The result moves liquid in one direction only, with no metal parts. Strongin's patent explains what the fluid was: a colored liquid charged with air, so the liquid breaks into separate segments with pockets of air between them. The air gaps are what make the motion visible. A tube full of solid red would look like it was standing still.

No Mattel document found for this guide ties the two toys together. The resemblance is plain all the same, and the people who study Mattel's catalogs noticed it long ago: Plaid Stallions, annotating Mattel's 1980 catalog, observed that the bat was built on nearly the same concept as Pulsar and that the company got real mileage out of it. The patents also state the goal in their own words: two colored loops were proposed in the Pulsar design specifically “to provide fascination to the child using the toy.” Gre-Gory narrowed that fascination to a single red one.

When Gre-Gory came out: the paper says 1980

Ask a collector and the answer is often 1978. A monster-toy blog says so, and so does a steady run of marketplace titles. Ask a seller and the answer is usually 1979, the year that most eBay listings and several video reviews attach to him. Ask the documents, and the earliest dated ones all fall in 1980.

Date	Document	What it shows
Jan. 21, 1977	Two Mattel patent applications, Strongin and Schroeder	The pump and the liquid-and-air loop, filed for Pulsar
May 9 and Sept. 19, 1978	U.S. Patents 4,087,933 and 4,115,042 issued	The mechanism on the public record, assigned to Mattel
1980	Mattel's 1980 catalog	Gre-Gory in the monster-toy pages beside Krusher, Suckerman and Slime
1980	JCPenney catalog	Offered at retail, in the same catalog as Mattel's Shogun Warriors Godzilla and Rodan
1980	Sears Christmas Book, page 567	Catalog number 49 N 50667, $11.79, with a 15-inch wingspan and a shipping weight of 15 ounces
1980	Marvel's Star Wars #38	A full-page comic book ad
1980	Mattel's comic book ad, shown below	Printed “© Mattel, Inc. 1980”; gives the bat as 8 inches tall with a wingspan more than a foot wide

Sears put him on a page of stocking stuffers, between wind-up pocket pets and a giant tic-tac-toe game, and at $11.79 he was the most expensive thing on it. The catalog copy called him the Big Bad Vampire Bat Creature, repeated Mattel's red liquid, promised that his red eyes never close, and suggested hanging him from a pencil or a stick. It also listed him as reddish-brown soft vinyl, for ages 7 and up.

None of that proves Gre-Gory was absent from stores in 1979. A toy can reach the shelf months before the catalog that makes it official, and The Retroist, writing about the bat in 2023, hedged sensibly with late 1979 or early 1980. What the record does show is that no document found for this guide places him on a shelf in 1978.

A molded date on the toy itself, where one exists, will not settle it. Mattel's molded copyright lines record the year of a mold or a copyright, and they stayed on production for years afterward; Barbie bodies marked 1966 were still coming off the line more than a decade later. This blog made the same argument about a Garfield product in the Garfield aquarium guide: a copyright year on an object says who owns the design and nothing about when the object was made. For Gre-Gory, 1980 is the date with paper behind it.

The Mattel monster family around him

Gre-Gory was one of several soft, strange, gimmick-driven monsters Mattel sold at the turn of the decade. The 1980 catalog grouped him with Krusher, a figure that could be smashed flat and reshape itself; Suckerman, a rubber creature that stuck to walls and came in a changing run of colors to keep him on the shelves; and Slime, which Mattel reissued each year with a new additive, from worms to eyeballs.

He also had a competitor in the same aisle. Ideal's Dracula board game from the same era, I Vant to Bite Your Finger, turned a vampire's bite into a mark on the loser's finger, and at least one collector who remembered a Gre-Gory commercial with two red dots on a child's finger later realized he had merged the two toys in memory.

The see-through-blood idea outlived both of them. In 1987, Mattel returned to it with Mosquitor, a late Masters of the Universe villain with a clear chest that filled with red fluid at the press of a button. Pulsar, Gre-Gory and Mosquitor make a tidy decade of one company recycling one very good trick.

How to tell a real one

No one has reproduced the bat itself, as far as this research found. The risks are in the packaging, the condition, and the description. Before buying, check the following.

• The chest. A clear panel set into the torso, with the fluid path visible behind it. A bat with a solid chest is a different toy.
• The back. A press point in the back that gives under the thumb. Press it and watch the window, and ask the seller to do the same on video.
• The feet. Loops at the feet for a string, per the box's upside-down instruction.
• The material. Soft, heavy vinyl in a reddish-brown. Dime-store bats of the period are lighter and have no chest window.
• The size. Measure. Mattel's 1980 ad gives 8 inches tall with a wingspan more than a foot wide, and the 1980 Sears catalog specifies 15 inches. Soft vinyl wings stretch and curl, so a bat that measures an inch or two short across may simply be folded. A tape measure is better evidence than any listing.
• The damage. Look at the ear tips, wing edges and the seam around the chest window. At least one listing reports a missing ear tip, and a cracked window means a leak.

One regional note: Plaid Stallions, writing from Canada, reported that Mattel Canada never carried Gre-Gory. A bat that turns up north of the border most likely crossed it after 1980.

The reproduction box

The arithmetic explains the temptation. A loose bat has sold for about $220; a listing billed as boxed sold for $600. A $26 box closes most of that gap. Ask, in writing, whether the box is original. Compare its wear to the bat's: a crisp, bright, unfaded box around a bat with a missing ear tip and a stalled chest has had two separate lives. Old boxes tend to show store stickers, soft corners, and the same toning inside and out.

Will the blood still flow?

Usually not well, and sometimes not at all. Listing after listing reports dried or stalled fluid, and one seller could see the red in the chest but could not make it circulate. Heiler's example still moved, slowly and thickly, which he compared to a lava lamp. The comparison fits: like an old lava lamp, the fluid has had more than forty years to change.

Pulsar suffers the same fate. One collector's history of the figure notes that its fluid has almost always congealed. The loop in these toys is closed by design, so a loop that loses liquid, or whose liquid thickens, offers nothing a buyer can easily top up. Resist opening it. A pierced or pried window turns a stalled bat into a leaking one.

Store a working bat out of heat and direct sun. None of this restores a stalled one, and no reliable restoration method turned up for this guide.

What they sell for

Sold records are scarce and asking prices wander. These are the figures found, labeled for what they are.

Item	Price	Type
New, 1980 Sears Christmas catalog	$11.79	Retail, 1980
Loose Gre-Gory, listed as 1979	$220	Sold, best offer accepted, September 2025
Listing billed as a boxed 1979 Gre-Gory	$600	Sold, May 2025; contents not verified
Gre-Gory with an original comic ad page	$320	Asking
Reproduction box, new	$26 to $27	Retail and asking
Original 1980 comic ad page, trimmed	$8 to $12	Asking

Condition sets the rest. A bat whose blood moves when pressed is the one collectors want; a stalled bat trades as a display piece. Original packaging can nearly triple the price, on the evidence of the two sales above, and that gap is what gives the reproduction box its appeal. Modern tin signs and T-shirts printed with the 1980 ad art sell for about $20 to $25 and are new merchandise, whatever year the sign says.

Where the records disagree

The year. Memory says 1978, listings say 1979, and the documents say 1980, as set out above. An early shipment could account for late 1979; nothing found here accounts for 1978.

The size. Settled by the period paper. Mattel's 1980 advertisement gives 8 inches tall with a wingspan more than a foot wide, and the 1980 Sears Christmas catalog puts the wingspan at 15 inches, the same figure a collector's blog and at least one seller report. Nostalgia Central's 12-inch wingspan and Heiler's estimate of about 12 inches long run short; curled vinyl wings would explain it.

Pulsar's own date. Sources split between 1976 and 1977 for Pulsar's release, and one claims the figure was patented in 1976. Both patents were filed in January 1977, so the patenting, at least, belongs to 1977 and 1978.

The pump inside Gre-Gory. The mechanism described here is Pulsar's, on the record. Gre-Gory's box speaks of a blood pump system in his back, and the family resemblance is strong, but no document found for this guide shows his exact parts. Read the schematic as the idea he inherited. It is not a teardown of the bat.

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