The 10 Most Dangerous Toys Of All Time

Monday, July 16, 2007

a.k.a My Childhood Treasures!

This blogger has thoughtfully put together a list of toys he called the "most dangerous of all time." Of course, most of them come from the 1960s and 1970s when disfigurement, mutilation and risk of death were all just part of an afternoon's fun. And we LOVED it! Who cared if little Jimmy lost an eye, or if the kid we all knew as "Lefty" had to spend six months in the hospital!

Of the toys this guy has listed, I don't think we actually owned any of them ourselves, but my brothers and I definitely played with some of them. My grandparents owned a set of lawn darts for years, and we used to love to go out into their front yard and throw them as high up into the air as we could and watch them auger into the ground. We must have known someone with the Creepy Crawlers set, too; I can vaguely remember making them or something similar. If you were old enough to play with a toy like that, you were old enough to know not to eat them, but i suppose that didn't stop younger siblings. I also had a chemistry set, even though it did not contain anything radioactive. We sure used to mix up some pretty nasty stuff in the little test tubes, though.

Given that our entire society lives in a total state of panic about anything the slightest bit dangerous, you'd think that toys today would have had all the ~~fun~~...I mean risk...engineered right out of them. Nevertheless, this list of recent toy recalls from the Consumer Product Safety Commission shows that there are still plenty of ways for kids to jeopardize life and limb. Hooray!