why isn't lawn darts (hasbro javelin darts) on this list?? over 6100 emergency room visits and at least one death.. far more injuries reported than battlestar galactica at #1 or just about any of these listed.
And they were still selling them in the 80's! I wanted them, but at the same time knew our family would never play them, as it was ping pong became a form of fighting sometimes.
What ever happened to parents teaching kids to be responsible? Just because you can hurt yourself with something doesn't mean it should be illegal, and placing that responsibility on the seller drastically raises prices on many products and prevents us from being able to buy a lot of cool stuff.
Ever heard of "Loads?" Basically they were small explosive shards you were supposed to slide into mom or pop's cigarette, pipe or cigar. Just think of the possibilities! Once you took that first beating for nearly blowing off your dad's face, causing mom to drop her bottle of Valium in the toilet and deafening the cat, you were off to the races. I actually had a friend who pilfered $50 from his mom's purse to procure several thousand of these death sticks (amazingly, back then, nobody in authority ever asked what a kid with no job was doing with the equivalent of most adults weekly take home pay.) He diligently spent the morning dumping the contents of each Load pack into a steel garbage can. When all was said and done he had filled that can about 1/3 full of a product which was essentially dynamite. He then filed the rest of the can with newspaper for wadding, placed it in the middle of the street in front of our school, lit the newspaper and let the show begin. What he had in fact made was a very effective, very big, concussion bomb. Well, you can imagine everyone's surprise...That can was totally obliterated! And the sound wave that it created was second only to an atomic weapon. Cops, kids, firemen, teachers, parents, literally everyone heard that explosion! My friend now works for NATO. Loads are banned.
you can still buy them www.amazon.com/Cigarette-Exploding-Loads-Prank-1-Pack/dp/B001MKCQH2 www.ebay.com/itm/like/132024119676?lpid=82&chn=ps&ul_noapp=true
Alex Wehrspann Yeah, but it's not as much fun unless you're a kid and the local drugstore will sell you an entire box or two at a time. It also has the added benefit of keeping the kid off terror watch lists since the boozed up owner of the drug store suddenly becomes complicit in the "big boom!" My how times have changed!
Hi Nexus I am new to the channel (Already subscribed) But I have some questions. 1.Are you a group? 2.Do you respond to comments? 3.If you are a group how many people are in the group? Well thank you for reading (If you even did) I hope you have a good day and keep the good work up!
Ian McClorey I miss them, if you put a flag at the goal No one got hurt, if you stood in front of your friend throwing a 4" weighted spike you deserve what you get
I had the Creepy Crawlers and the Fright Factory and Creeple People! Not once was I ever tempted to put my fingers on the hot plate! Must be some not to bright kids around.
I had a Thing Maker and got burned one time when I accidentally grabbed a hot mold. You only do that once. And, yeah, it was a hot plate, you give it respect, even when you're 11 years of age.
Thank you for finally confirming Slip'n'Slide a safety hazard. I remember when I was a kid and saw that commercial I used to think those people were really taking a chance on that little plastic mat.
I feel a bit old seeing all these toys I had as a kid, but some of my most vivid memories are thanks to these products. Examples include knocking out the neighbor kid in a socker bopper fight, learning how to put pressure on a wound after my uncle discovered the hard way that the slip n' slide was laid over a sprinkler head, and of course, learning all about burn care after touching a creepy crawlers tray.
I had a creepy crawler set and I did burn myself once but then I learned not to touch it when it was hot. My parents' attitude was well what did I expect?
I didn't read all of the comments so if someone mentioned clackers, I agree they should have made the list. If you've never heard of them they have some on youtube.... In cold weather the damn things would shatter sending high speed plastic shrapnel all over the place. Not to mention pissed of kids using them as schoolyard weapons. I believe they were on the market about the same time as "Creepy Crawlies"... The good old days..
Clackers were also something you made as a craft kit, My older brother did. They were fun until taken away for no good reason. (my sister got into a fight and threw them through a window, she was such a brat.)
The original clackers were made of GLASS. I had a set of them back in the early 1970's and if you used them properly they wouldn't break but like always, stupid people fucked it up for everybody and they were promptly changed to plastic, then eventually pulled altogether.
To "use them properly" was to make them hit eachother hard. I've seen many, none were made of glass though, unless very tempered those would chip and break even faster then the epoxy resin ones! Nope, in doing with them what they were made for they would chip and break, that was just how they worked.
+*foskeight8*, I also had the original glass model back then and they were great but you're absolutely right. STUPID people were the ones who fucked it up for everybody by hitting them together so hard they cracked and broke, and of course these assholes were the first to sue.
I still remember the smell of Creepy Crawlers. That was 47 years ago. I survived the toxic fumes. And lawn darts, and Water Wiggle, each having a number of victims. Great memories.
for # 9- I should not have been discontinued because what kind of parent buys their BABY little magnetic CANDY LIKE BALLS? It is not the companys fault AT ALL!
Lavamaster, if you knew more about the legal system, it was the companies fault, there was no contract stating that they were not liable for a injury, and since a child died consuming one of their products, it technically is their fault
My child had many of these toys. The water rocket, magnetix. He was always trained how to use the product before we let him play with it. The rocket said to always wear safety goggles. Luckily it never exploded on him. The Gilbert toys were not meant for little kids. They were meant for high schoolers, and a lot were sold only to schools. I had the Fun Flowers Thing Maker. I burned myself many times, but never really hurt myself. I sold it for more than I paid for it because I couldn't find the Plastic Goop any more. It was a really fun toy. I also regularly burnt myself on the first edition Easy Bake oven, especially when making bubble gum. I wasn't allowed to have gum when I was a kid, so I always asked for an easy bake kit when we went to Woolworths, and snuck the bubble gum kit into the cart instead of a cake kit. Toy irons were also very dangerous. I got my first toy iron when I was 4. By the time I was 8, I was ironing my own blouses for school with a real iron. Why not, it was just like play. The most dangerous toy I ever had was a child's desk by Cosco. It was a tubular metal chair, the back of which swung forward to make a desk. When I spilled my milk on it, the paint peeled off and it rusted. This was about 1960, so it most probably was lead paint. The really dangerous thing about it was that it tipped forward easily. A child could get hurt sitting in it and tipping forward, and a child could get hurt sitting in front of it if it tipped forward. I got hurt with that thing many times but not seriously. It was the first thing I ever noticed being recalled. It was recalled about 1962 or 1963. There wasn't much that was dangerous enough to be recalled that early. I played with the thing, and did my homework until 1968 and I was too big to sit at it. I have looked for the Cosco Desk/Chair online, and don't see it at all.
I had the original old school ones with the springs completely visible. Never got hurt, except for the disappointment when I realized I couldn't actually jump like I was on the moon. Lame.
Jarts, E-Z-Bake oven, Clackers, sparklers/fireworks, skateboards, dissection kits - they had a freaking Scalpel in them that made a nice throwing knife!, bikes, chemistry sets at school (Hydrochloric and nitric acid & lighting lines of alcohol on the floor when the teacher wasn't watching), BB guns (neighbor kids played cowboy & Indians and actually shot each other with theirs), darts (stuck one in my buddy's leg), Dad's ax/hatchet,....hell, I grew up playing with all this stuff & we survived. And that was on top of lead paint & no car seat belts until the late 60's.
the sad thing is that majority of these things is not dangerous at all, the accidents that happend was because of insanely stupid brats wining the darwin awards and parents looking for someone to blame other then themself blamed the companies, instead of taking responsibility as a propper parent.
My mate had a 'Sky Rocket Zoom' in the 1970s. It was basically a plastic rocket about 2 foot long, with a steel tip that was fired skywards with a thick elastic band. Two of my friends suffered life threatening injuries.
I remember some of these from when I was a kid! There is actually an updated version of the "Creepy Crawlers" toy called a "Fright Factory", does basically the same thing but now the plastic goo is cured with light (UV, possibly?)
In the early '60's, I had a water pressure rocket shaped like an Atlas rocket. It was over a foot long, and would fly straight up 40 feet or more. Endlessly reusable, it was one of the greatest xmas toys I ever got. I also had a rifle that shot hard plastic bullets, a chemistry lab kit full of toxic stuff, and a set of the original steel-tipped lawn darts. All this and more by the time I was ten. What a great childhood I had!
#2 Creepy Crawlers (otherwise known as Thingmaker). Mattel made several variations of this. One of my friends had the Mini-dragons kit. I had one that had molds of Peanuts characters. Never recall getting hurt (maybe a mild burn) and I don't recall any odors from the plastigoop.
When I was a kid in the 1960s, almost every kid loved Creepy Crawlers, Girls would make butterflies, dragonflies and ladybugs, sometimes making brooches with safety pins inserted into the molten goop and Boys would make spiders, worms and reptiles. Dads would even make fishing lures with their children, putting fishing hooks in the goop filled mold trays while they were still dangerously hot. But you only rarely got burned, because we were smarter than the moronic kids today, and parents didn't sue, parents just said be more careful next time! See what happens when you do something stupid! And you learned!!!
Moon Shoes... God... I remember breaking the bands that came with them and used a vacuum cleaner belt as a substitute. The fresh morning dew on the purple plastic caused a slip that I will not soon forget.
A few of those were truly dangerous, but most just slightly hazardous to the really slow kids. Hell, a bicycle is about the most dangerous toy a kid ever got, but they didn't make your list. There was also a toy that would allow you to melt metal and mold your own toy cars. That makes the glass blower look pretty tame. Also, you have to remember that kids used to have a sense of danger and they had pretty good sense. Kids these days have been coddled so much that they die in an instant when allowed to play with any real toys. Chemistry sets come to mind with that being said, and the bow and arrow sets with the suction cup tipped arrows. The first thing a kid would do is yank that rubber crap off and go outside to hunt. ;)
The Magnetix were pulled for several reasons, one being the injuries and deaths, but another was that a physician engineered a magnetic canon from them. All you needed to do was get a rail, preferably around 6-10ft long, clip the sticks in half, put them at regular intervals along the rails, magnets facing back, put a ball at each of the tubes, facing away from the magnets and then gently tap an additional ball towards the first magnet. The force would push the next ball towards the next magnet with twice the speed of the first one. When this is repeated 10-12 times, you get a ball flying at a very, very high speed, potentially as fast as a bullet. When it was discovered you can basically make a homemade gun, even if it takes about 2 minutes to "reload", the authorities didn't really approve of the toy anymore. I've actually talked to the scientist that built it, when he showed it off at a technology fair in Sweden a few years back. He used a 4ft rail, and the ball flew about 30ft in a straight line before even starting to bend down.
