Oily jigglers: the grease on your hands is the toy leaking itself

By Matthew Partsch · Owl and Twig Vintage · September 20, 2026

An eight-inch ape with GIGANTOR and HONG KONG pressed into the sole of one foot answers three questions at once: what the grease on your fingers is, why the name is not King Kong, and how a Missouri kaleidoscope company ended up in the story.

What an oily jiggler actually is

A jiggler is a hollow figure molded in one piece from soft vinyl, open underneath, wobbly enough to shiver when you shake it, and cheap enough that nobody expected it to last. They came out of dime stores, carnival prize counters and the glass globes of vending machines through the 1960s and 1970s, usually in one solid color with little or no paint, usually for a few cents. Monsters, sea creatures, dinosaurs, skeletons, insects and apes were the standing repertoire.

The vocabulary around them belongs to collectors rather than to any factory. Jigglers, uglies, slurfies and oilies all circulate as category names in listings today; none of them turns up as a registered trademark attached to this kind of figure. Sellers use whichever word they learned first, and a search for one misses the other three.

The American commercial context is easier to document than the Hong Kong manufacturing one. Russ Berrie rented a garage in Palisades Park, New Jersey in 1963 and booked $60,000 in sales in his first year; by 1971 the company was past $7 million. His early catalog ran to Fuzzy Wuzzies in 1964 and the Bupkis Family, a line of soft rubbery dolls, in 1965. Collector accounts date his oily rubber figures from 1965 to 1971. That range comes from a collector writing about his own shelf rather than from a company record, and it should be carried that way.

Why they feel oily, and what it costs

Nobody dipped these in oil. Soft vinyl gets its softness from plasticizer blended into the polymer, and in a very flexible formulation that additive can run as high as 40 percent of the object's mass. Plasticizer is not chemically bonded to the vinyl around it. Over decades it works its way to the surface, sits there as a film, and eventually leaves altogether.

The Canadian Conservation Institute describes the result in the language of a collections problem rather than a toy problem: exudation and deposition of additives on plastic surfaces, sticky degrading surfaces that trap particles and dust, and staining of anything the object touches. Its guidance calls for non-stick shields and interleaves between sticky surfaces and other objects for that reason. The research literature adds the endgame. As plasticizer leaves, an object suffers embrittlement and dimensional change, and becomes more fragile and vulnerable to damage from handling, exhibition, or when supporting its own weight.

That sequence is the whole collecting problem in one sentence. The greasy feel that identifies an oily jiggler is the same process that will eventually shrink it, stiffen it and split it at the fingers, ears, tail and the rim of the open base, where the wall is thinnest.

It also separates vinyl from the natural rubber that sellers usually name in their titles. The two materials fail in opposite directions.

What you see	Plasticized vinyl	Natural or vulcanized rubber
Surface	Greasy film that returns after wiping	Dry, often chalky or powdery
Feel over time	Soft for decades, then abruptly stiff	Hardens steadily from early on
Failure	Shrinkage, then splits at thin points	Surface crazing, cracking, crumbling
Driver	Plasticizer migration	Oxidation, accelerated by stress
Effect on neighbors	Stains by contact and transfer	Emits degradation products that attack other objects

Conservation practice puts both on the same watch list. CCI names PVC and rubber among the malignant plastics, the ones that produce noxious degradation products capable of damaging other objects in a collection. A jiggler is a hazard to the shelf it sits on, whichever of the two it turns out to be.

The Gigantor name, and who owned it

Turn the ape over. One foot carries GIGANTOR above HONG KONG in raised capitals. Neither word names the animal, and one of them has a paper trail.

A documented set of smaller jigglers, around three and a half to four inches tall and hollow underneath like oversized finger puppets, is stamped Gigantor and 1975 Steven Mfg. That set runs to three designs: an ape-like creature, a crocodile-centipede hybrid and a pterodactyl, in translucent orange and red as well as brown and green.

Steven Manufacturing Company is a real and long-lived American toy firm, and its surviving federal paperwork has nothing to do with monsters. It registered DESIGNOSCOPE for toy kaleidoscopes, filed November 24, 1943 with a claimed first use of October 13, 1943, registered June 18, 1946, and expired December 18, 1986. The registration disclaims the words MILLIONS OF DESIGNS, the same slogan that still runs along Steven kaleidoscope tubes decades later. The Strong National Museum of Play holds one of those tubes, a 1975 Steven Kaleidoscope Wonder Wheel made in Hermann, Missouri. The company filed once more in the period that matters here, for SMOKEE CB on toy banks, first used January 19, 1977 and cancelled in 1985.

It never filed for GIGANTOR. A search of the federal register turns up no GIGANTOR mark owned by Steven Manufacturing at all. The earliest GIGANTOR filing covering toys belongs to Entercolor Technologies Corporation, which filed on June 14, 1993 for dolls and toy vehicles, eighteen years after the date molded into those little figures. Whatever Steven was doing with the word in 1975, it was not protecting it.

Two names it is not, and both are easy to establish. Gigantor, the cartoon, is the American dub of Tetsujin 28-go, drawn by Mitsuteru Yokoyama from 1956 and adapted for English by Fred Ladd and Al Singer, entering US syndication in January 1966. Gigantor is a flying steel robot flown by remote control by a twelve-year-old boy. It is not an ape, it has no connection to this toy, and its licensor waited until 1993 to claim the word on merchandise.

King Kong is the other name, and in 1975 it was radioactive. Universal sued RKO, Merian C. Cooper's estate and Dino De Laurentiis that year, seeking a declaration that the King Kong story had fallen into the public domain, after losing the rights auction to De Laurentiis, who paid RKO-General $200,000 plus a percentage on May 6, 1975. Both sides withdrew in January 1976 and the De Laurentiis picture opened on December 17 that year. When the Second Circuit finally looked at Universal's King Kong trademark claims in the Donkey Kong case a decade later, it declined to decide whether those rights were valid at all, assuming them only for argument's sake before throwing the case out on other grounds.

The record does not say why an importer put an invented name on an ape in the middle of that fight, and this guide will not pretend otherwise. What the record does establish is that the word on the foot was a product name with no registration behind it, chosen for a figure that resembles a character nobody could safely license. Hong Kong factories of the period produced a great many monsters that resemble something famous without naming it; the Mechanical Martin is the same idea from a different country, misspelled name and all.

Why Hong Kong made nearly all of them

By 1970 Hong Kong held roughly 1,100 toy factories employing about 40,000 people. In 1972 it passed Japan to become the largest toy exporter on earth, and by 1980 the count had grown past 2,000 factories and 56,000 workers. Soft-vinyl novelties were exactly the product that economy was built to make: low tooling cost, no electronics, no licensing, and a shipping weight close to nothing.

The words in the mold are a legal requirement rather than a flourish. Section 304 of the Tariff Act of 1930 obliges imported articles to be marked conspicuously with the English name of the country of origin. Country names sit on the undersides of so much mid-century merchandise because of it. The same statute is the reason the marking on a piece can date it, a point this blog has made before about Nippon, Occupied Japan and U.S. Zone marks.

The Hong Kong mark, though, is a looser instrument than collectors tend to assume. When sovereignty transferred on July 1, 1997, US Customs decided that goods produced in Hong Kong entered on or after that date should continue to be marked to indicate that their origin is Hong Kong. The marking stayed legal for another twenty-three years. It ended on August 11, 2020, when Customs and Border Protection published a Federal Register notice implementing Executive Order 13936 and required goods from Hong Kong entering on or after September 25, 2020 to be marked China, with a ten percent ad valorem duty for failures. HONG KONG in the vinyl therefore sets a ceiling of late 2020 on a figure's age, and nothing tighter. Everything that narrows the date from there comes from the style, the material and the company names around it.

How to tell a real one

Five checks, in the order they are quickest to run. None requires tools.

• The surface. Pick it up bare-handed. A period oily jiggler leaves a faint slick on the fingers and holds dust in its recesses. A figure that is bone dry and matte is either much younger or a different material altogether.
• The parting line. Run a thumb up each side. The seam should be present and soft, a slight ridge that the vinyl has rounded off. A sharp, hard, perfectly even ridge is the signature of a later cast in resin or silicone rather than a molded production piece.
• The mold number. Look into the open base with a light. Raised alphanumeric codes are common inside the body; one documented eight-inch ape carries R 918541. No published concordance exists that turns these numbers into a factory or a date, so treat a number as evidence of production tooling and nothing more.
• The open base. The underside should be fully open, and the wall should read as one continuous skin a few millimeters thick, with no glued halves, no seam across the bottom and no armature inside.
• The foot stamp. GIGANTOR above HONG KONG, both on the same foot, in raised capitals that stand cleanly off the sole. Letters that are shallow, rounded off or partly filled point to a copy taken from an original rather than from the factory's own mold.

Weight matters as a cross-check. An eight-inch hollow vinyl figure is startlingly light, and anything in the hand that feels dense is not what the listing says it is.

The look-alikes

Cast copies. A silicone mold taken off an original and poured in resin reproduces the shape and loses everything else: the flex, the lightness, the softened seam and the crispness of the foot stamp. Resin also fails the surface check, since it never feels oily and never will.

Modern retro jigglers. Soft-vinyl novelties are still made, and some are deliberately styled after the 1960s originals. Current production for the American market has to meet phthalate limits that did not exist in 1975, so the modern equivalent is formulated differently and behaves differently in the hand.

Japanese sofubi. Contemporary Japanese soft-vinyl collectibles share the material and nothing else. They are painted, boxed, numbered, made in small runs, and priced in a bracket that has no overlap with a dime-store ape.

Licensed King Kong toys. Actual licensed Kong merchandise from the 1976 film exists and is a separate collecting category with its own packaging and its own prices. A jiggler is not a cheaper version of one; it is a different object that happens to resemble a gorilla.

The costliest look-alike problem is not a fake at all. It is the listing title. The same eight-inch ape appears as King Kong, as Gigantor, as an Ugly, as a Slurfie, as a rubber monster and as a vintage gorilla toy, at prices that differ by a factor of three because buyers searching one word never see the other five.

What one sells for now

No realized public auction price for a jiggler of this kind turned up from a source that actually discloses the number. WorthPoint indexes a run of sold Gigantor ape listings, and the sold figure behind each one sits behind its membership paywall. Every number below is a visible asking price, labeled as such.

What was offered	Asking price
Single eight-inch Gigantor Hong Kong ape	$69.99
Lot of four Hong Kong soft rubber dragons, circa 1970	$40.00
Lot of six small ugly-monster jigglers, Hong Kong	$24.99
Larger vending-machine lot: sharks, whales, turtles	$250.00

Two things move a figure inside that spread. The first is color. A seller offering a non-black eight-inch ape described it as very rare in this color and black as the version usually found, which is the ordinary pattern for a category molded in whatever compound was loaded that shift. Color premiums on mass-produced toys behave much as they do across eighties toy variants, where a small production difference carries a large share of the price.

The second is the split. A tear at a finger, an ear or the base rim is the failure this material is heading toward anyway, and it takes a figure out of the top band permanently. Listings that mention a repaired tear circulate at visibly lower asks than clean examples of the same mold.

How to store one so it survives

The conservation guidance for highly plasticized plastics is specific, and most of it runs against how a collector would naturally display a toy.

• Keep it cool and dark. CCI recommends cool or cold storage for highly plasticized plastics such as flexible PVC, and storage in the dark. A sunny shelf accelerates everything described above.
• Do not seal it in a bag. Sealed, unventilated containers are advised against for malignant plastics, because the degradation products concentrate rather than disperse.
• Interleave it. Put a non-stick barrier between the figure and whatever it rests on. CCI names non-fibrous, non-foam sheets such as PTFE, PET or silicone release material, precisely to prevent staining by contact with a surface carrying plasticizer bloom.
• Keep it away from the rest of the collection. Both vinyl and rubber sit on the malignant list. A jiggler stored in a box of paper ephemera or pressed against a painted figure will damage its neighbors before it damages itself.
• Do not try to clean the oil off. CCI's guidance rules out solvents, bleaches, detergents, wax, and vinyl or rubber erasers on plastics. Solvent removes plasticizer from the surface layer faster than the object was losing it, and hastens the stiffening.

A dry dust with a soft brush, a barrier sheet underneath, and a cool dark cupboard is the whole regime. The oil will come back after every wipe, and that is the object working as designed.

Before you list one for sale

A 1970s soft-vinyl figure predates every American phthalate rule now on the books. The Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 permanently prohibited children's toys and child care articles containing more than 0.1 percent of DEHP, DBP or BBP; a 2017 final rule added DINP, DPENP, DHEXP, DCHP and DIBP at the same threshold, taking effect 180 days after publication. Nothing in that framework existed when this ape was molded, and no vintage jiggler has been tested against it.

The CPSC's own Resellers Guide to Selling Safer Products addresses this directly, and it covers thrift stores, consignment stores, charities, yard sales, flea markets and online sellers alike. Two lines from it matter to anyone listing a jiggler. First, CPSC does not require resellers to test their products for safety. Second, resellers cannot knowingly sell any children's toy that does not comply with the prohibition on specified phthalates.

The same guide draws the line that resolves the tension: vintage collectibles not considered primarily intended for children are acceptable to sell. An eight-inch jiggler listed and photographed as an adult collectible, described as not intended as a children's toy and not marketed to children, sits on the collectible side of that distinction. One listed as a kids' toy does not. This is a summary of a federal agency's published guidance rather than legal advice, and a seller with real exposure should read the guide itself.

The broader point holds across the category. Objects made for children before the modern rules arrived carry obligations for the person reselling them, a theme this blog has followed through clacker balls and the rest of the Hazard Files.

Where the records disagree

Size. The Gigantor figures with a documented Steven Manufacturing credit are three and a half to four inches tall. The ape most often listed under the same name is eight. Whether one company put the name on both scales, whether a Hong Kong factory reused it, or whether two unrelated product lines converged on the same word, no source consulted here resolves.

The internal number. R 918541 appears inside a documented eight-inch example. It is not a US patent number, and no published index connects it to a factory, a mold shop or a date.

The Berrie dates. The 1965 to 1971 range for Russ Berrie's oily rubber figures comes from a collector's blog, not from company documentation. The company's own recorded early lines are Fuzzy Wuzzies in 1964 and the Bupkis Family in 1965.

The category names. Uglies and Slurfies function as collector vocabulary. No federal trademark registration for either term as a line of rubber figures turned up.

The material. Sellers say rubber. The aging behavior says plasticized vinyl. Both cannot be true of the same figure, and only testing would settle it for any particular one.