The Goodwill Find of the CENTURY

Written by Jonathan Wojcik


I think I've said as much before, and maybe I say it every single time I talk about Goodwill, but I used to dread going into Goodwill. It's probably because I'd have to spend hours at a time there when I was a kid. My mother loved to check out each and every inch of anything resembling a thrift store, so by the time I'd seen everything that could have interested a ten year old, she was still analyzing aisle one of 20 at the molecular level, and it felt like I'd just have to pace back and forth coming up with new depths of autistic inner thoughts to busy myself with for most of the day.

But then I turned into an adult, with the power to spend only exactly as much time as I want to in any given Goodwill, and suddenly Goodwill became kind of exciting! Yet, despite finding some pretty neat things there from time to time, I've definitely never found anything as rare and precious as what I am about to show you, all thanks to the "Halloween" section at our nearest Goodwill in 2024:


For less than $13, by which I mean it was $12, I took home a plastic bag stuffed with no less than three pounds of rubber bugs, and any possible three pounds of rubber bugs would be enough of a must-have, I mean, obviously, but if you don't know you're rubber bugs, you can't imagine what a holy grail of rubber bugdom you're looking at here. These aren't just any cheap dollar store knockoffs: the majority of these are authentic JIGGLERS.

What's a jiggler, you ask?!

Sometime in the 1950's, a whole lot of manufacturers realized they had an excess of soft rubber and rubber molding equipment left over from the industrial rush of the World War II era, or something like that, I'm not really an American History kind of guy, but it wasn't the kind of rubber you could use for tires, cooking implements or anything else that practical in everyday life, so they turned those resources towards children's toys. These products were soft, squishy, wiggly, a little greasy, and even kind of stinky, but they were cheap as heck to make, and the toy industry had a kind of Cambrian Explosion of rubbery, greasy, stinky creatures - not just bugs and monsters, but even superheroes, like Marvel's The Thing here, worth an entire weed joke's worth of dollars.

And those "Creature People" being sold now for $149.95? Look closer; that's not even any Creature People for sale. That's just the piece of cardboard that used to come on a Creature People package.

Once basically the go-to standard for Cool Toys, jigglers would eventually be dethroned altogether by the invention of what we now call "action figures," which had the advantage of not being greasy, or stinky, and also that they could stand up on their own. If kids wanted to play with jiggler superheroes and army guys, sadly, they had to carefully prop up whichever ones they weren't holding at the time.



And sure, we still make floppy, squishy rubber toys here in the 2020's, but for some reason, these almost always tend to also be "stretchy" as their primary selling point, and are made of an even softer, squishier sort of rubber that easily cracks and falls apart over enough time. This is not the case for the REAL DEAL, the jigglers that surged in the 50's, faded by roughly the 70's, and only barely clung to life into the 80's. They can be soft enough to "jiggle," yes, but they're also dense and solid enough that they can last in relatively perfect condition for decades at a time. Even when they've long lost their greasiness and stinkiness, they just don't seem to "dry out" or decay under natural conditions.

We are going to look at nearly each and every beautiful, pristine little creature that was stuffed into the Goodwill Bag, and we're going to begin with these two lizards, because the lower, light grey one was the first thing I actually found; it had been REMOVED from the bag, by someone or other, and dumped off on some other shelf, missing any price sticker. I recognized it immediately as a rarer, older kind of rubber lizard, and I was delighted enough by that alone, by just the one. But I suspected, perhaps, there could be more like it hiding around the store, and found the entire treasure trove just one aisle over.

This included a second, red and green lizard with a fin down its back, and a less realistic but truly lovable face, the same kind of face you find even now on cheap dinosaur toys.

You'll also notice the bit of artificial spider web clinging to the red lizard's tail. Don't use that stuff by the way, it's an environmental hazard! It's just strings of plastic!

There were only two reptiles in the whole bag, the rest consisting entirely of arthropods. However, this grasshopper somehow feels like the oddest one out. Maybe it's because it's the only herbivore, and nobody really thinks of a grasshopper as a "spooky Halloween creature," though perhaps they should? If you owned a farm sometime around the dust bowl, there couldn't have been that many scarier insects besides mealybugs, and can you imagine how hard it would be to make a jiggler toy of a mealybug?! They should, though. I'd buy a million of them.

So when I was talking about Jiggler Lore a moment ago, did you notice both of the rare, expensive ebay listings were "Ben Cooper" brand? Well, these here are Ben Cooper Jiggler Flies. They aren't rare enough to be Ben Cooper Jiggler Marvel's The Thing rare, I've seen them a few times in my life and I even already own a few, but I've definitely never seen any that were cared for this well. Their paint is still as vivid as it must have been when they were brand new, the rubber still shiny and clean, and the bag contained SEVEN of them! I am now positively ROLLING in Ben Cooper flies, and they're as fresh and juicy as the day they were born! There's some more spider webbing, too; it's obvious that this entire bag was part of someone's Halloween Spider Display, so of course they amassed a significant number of large flies, the quintissential Spider Web Captive.

Our spiders have sophisticated and varied tastes, however. Not only were they also eating lizards and grasshoppers, but there's this big, giant worker ant! This is one of the few things in the bag I've never seen before in my life, even in photos. She's made of a slightly harder, stiffer rubber than the rest, her legs locked in an unnatural pose for any real ant, forelegs straight ahead and hind legs swept back. She kind of looks like she's in the middle of swimming. I like her painted eyes, too, bright green with black pupils like no ant in the entire world.

The first of the spiders themselves that we'll look at is a lone specimen made of tough plastic, rather than rubber, with glued-on fur. It also has a built-in suction cup, but the former owners drove a nail through both the head and sucker, disabling its suction powers. It probably wasn't all that good at suctioning anyway; suction cup toys have always been hit or miss. The nail probably helped anchor it some other way as decor. I'm going to leave it there; who knows how many years it's been there.

These two small oddities are made of the squishiest rubber in the whole collection, a fat black spider and a black fly long missing its wings, which were probably some separate, transparent plastic piece. The paint on them is charmingly messy, a few white and red splotches roughly marking the location of eyes and fangs. Considering that the previous spider had some red paint on its suction cup, I wonder if these markings were added post-purchase?

The bag contained TWO of these very big, classic hollow spiders, which in some cases are still made today! The material is more of a durable vinyl than jiggly rubber, as has been the case with every incarnation of this arachnid. It doesn't quite resemble any real creature, either; the fat chunkiness sort of says "tarantula," though the cephalothorax is shiny and hairless, and the beady yellow eyes are spaced more apart than any tarantula. I've also seen this design in multiple sizes, with little miniature versions still quite common, and the fat, tusklike mouthparts are almost always painted white. It may not be realistic in any way, but I do really like these guys.



Another big spider in the bag is also another I've found for sale again in only recent years, making this my second one! I don't know when this model first came into existence, but it's a big more like a long-legged huntsman spider or house spider, and every leg has a small suction cup molded onto its tip. Neither of mine are actually very effective at using said suckers, just like I was saying, though in this case I believe it's because their bodies are simply too heavy!

Particularly exciting is this soft jiggler VINEGAROON. This particular mold is part of a whole set of arthropods from the 50's and 60's, and they're actually all pretty novel, unusual choices. I have two others myself: a pseudoscorpion and a sheep ked! You can learn what a sheep ked is, and see my rubber sheep keds, in one of my old "flyday" posts here. See that you do. As for my pseudoscorpion, here it is meeting its long-lost cousin:





My keds and my pseudo, however, are made of another stiffer, harder kind of material, whereas the vinnie is the REAL DEAL "jiggly" stuff, and most likely up to a decade older or more! If you SOMEHOW don't know either what a pseudoscorpion or a vinegaroon are, well, I've got a post for that too, SUCKER.

Sorry, I don't know why I'm being so aggressive about this, I guess I'm just excited to be writing about all these fake bugs.

Another favorite from the bag is definitely this long, beautiful centipede, with cute little yellow eyes, an almost translucent red-orange body, and a light spritzing of black paint along its legs. This is another SUPER jiggly and wiggly one, but it's also another one I have in a different material!

I actually owned quite a few of the other centipede here, not only in a tougher plastic but more opaque, unpainted except for the eyes, and with shorter, straighter appendages. This is the kind of design degeneration that happens when a new factory mold is made from an existing toy; length and detail are already lost from mold to final product, so if you then use the final product to make your next mold, the sculpt shrinks and smooths out even more.

This is, sadly, inevitable with many of these older toys, because the molds themselves can wear down with use, and the original "master" sculpt has usually been lost forever. I didn't even know there was an older version of these centipedes!

On another note, I say I "owned" quite a few of the newer version. I think I once had a dozen of them, but now I'm down to four or five, partially because I gave some away, but also because a couple of them fell apart for no reason at all. One moment they were in a box or on a shelf, the next they were broken in half as the material subtly broke down. The goodwill jigglepede, on the other hand, is missing only a small piece of one or two legs, otherwise intact after likely 70 years on this earth.

For the last spotlight-worthy bug in the bag, another that I know for certain is a Ben Cooper original: a positively gorgeous, very weird black and green spider bigger than a grown man's hand. Flat bodied with long, dangly, densely spiny legs, it appears to have no trace of any eyes, and its hairy, four-lobed abdomen has two pairs of recessed, red pits. These are details so particular, you'd think it was inspired by a real species somewhere, and the abdomen does at least bring to mind some kind of crab spider. However, this is another one with a couple of close relatives I already owned, and they're also pretty "fantastical" exaggerations of arachnids:

The scorpion is entirely fictionalized. It has the right number of limbs, sure, but it also has a distinct head segment, rather than a cephalothorax, and the head is more like a grumpy beetle or wasp with white mandibles. Then there's the other, very different "spider," which actually resembles an Amblypigid or "tailless whipscorpion," except it's missing a pair of limbs, none of its limbs have the trademark whips, and its palps, if those are meant to be the palps, are a bit stunted for this group. It's also eyeless, like the goodwill spider, and its white fangs end in yellow tips like a couple of candy corns. I love the deep ribbing and segmentation of its red clay colored body, personally, and I surprisingly wound up with two of this species, but I don't even remember when!

This set is known as the Ben Cooper "super bugs," and also includes the flies we looked at earlier. Now the only "super bug" I don't have is apparently a large grasshopper, but I swear I used to have one. Every Ben Cooper Super Grasshopper on google images is so familiar I feel like I even remember what it felt like to chew on. Where did it go?! I can't have chewed on it THAT much.

I'm not sure exactly how much these are really worth altogether, but I've seen less than this go for over a hundred dollars, so twelve of them (dollars I mean) really was a steal. I'm not sure I'd have the heart to part with any of them, though, or separate them from each other when they've obviously been together since I was a baby, or beyond.

Maybe this was a decorative display someone threw together just once from some old, fake bugs they happened to find, then dumped off at our Goodwill...or maybe it was someone's household tradition for years straight? They have so little wear and tear, so little buildup of dust, they had to spend the majority of their existence in carefully controlled storage, maybe brought out for only a brief part of the season before they were delicately taken back down, mostly cleaned of the fake webbing and tucked away, nice and safe, over and over. When a whole collection like this ends up at Goodwill, it often means the original owner has passed on. This could have been someone's granddad or grandma's bag of bugs. Who was this person? What were they like? What memories are attached to their fake squishy spiders? Did they know what the vinegaroon was, or was it just a neat mystery critter in their mind? We can never know.

Now their rubber bugs are my rubber bugs, and maybe someday they will be someone else's rubber bugs. Will my life wrap up in such a way that they will know whose rubber bugs they have inherited, or will they be asking the same unanswerable questions when they stumble upon them in some other goodwill? Will goodwill still exist? Will this next owner blog about their findings? Will blogging still exist?

There's still one more rare, vintage Halloween critter to discuss, and most likely, it came from the same home. It was, however, sold separately from the bug bag, for obvious reasons:

This is a "Paper Magic" brand Halloween decoration, from the 1990's. It's a hard plastic "vampire" or "demon" head, a cartoonishly ghastly visage sort of like a wartier, wrinklier Count Orlok style bloodsucker, with off-kilter light-up plastic eyes, and its black fleshy wings are made of rubber soft enough to, of course, JIGGLE! It's not quite the same kind of rubber as any of our bugs, though. In fact, it's a kind of rubber I know of from only one other context: the legendary Mattel Boglins! I think I know why, too...


Yet again, this is something with a counterpart I already owned, one of my personal favorite Halloween doohickeys since I found it at another thrift store almost 20 years ago. This one is a skull with exposed brains, dripping blood and a squishy green rubber tongue, but instead of wings, it has boglin arms. The same material, the same sculpt, the same warty harder plastic shoulder. It seems that, following the discontinuation of the original 80's Boglins, a bunch of leftover Boglin Flesh and Boglin Molds wound up in the hands of that Paper Magic company. They couldn't recreate the boglins completely, their likenesses still owned by Mattel, but who was going to press charges over just the arms?

Or, maybe they worked out some kind of deal behind the scenes, that they could just use the arms? I don't know. I don't know how these kinds of complicated political proceedings work behind closed doors. I'm going to imagine it was TENSE, though. I bet it was done in a giant office meeting room with a big long table, and the Mattel bosses and the Paper Magic bosses were staring each other down, puffing their cigarettes, bodyguards standing by with their hands already on their guns and/or katanas, like maybe most of them were gun guys but one of them was a samurai guy. Or a samurai girl. And the bosses were making some poor little sweaty office dweeb relay the conditions of the deal from one end of the table to another, panic-stricken as he informs Paper Magic that, well, they can replicate the arms, and they can use the rubber to make bat wings, and oh god, he's just the messenger, honest!! Paper Magic boss narrows his eyes, the gun guys tense up, samurai girl is thumbing the hilt of her sword already...but Paper Magic guy nods, slowly, just once, and slides a black briefcase across the table. It's a really long table so it doesn't go very far and kind of ruins the whole moment. Little office guy pushes it the rest of the way with a broom. Nobody dies though.

Anyway the same Goodwill also has this naked mannequin chest, so I couldn't pass that up either. Then my spouse said I should combine all these things, and when I posted about them on tumblr, tumblr also said I should combine all these things. So I did, at least momentarily because I didn't really have anything to secure them all together long-term. I hope you're all satisfied enough, though.

You can have your "big tiddy goth girlfriend," but you better have the funds to support her entirely jiggler-based fashion sense. Pray she never finds out about the Ben Cooper Marvel's The Thing.

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