Unsafe Toys People Remember From The Olden Days

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Eric Lund
Mar 27, 2021 6:00 PM EDT

Anyone with a few decades on them can remember a time when toys were heavy, sharp, fast, toxic and scalding. Whether it was a playground slide that would sear the flesh off your palms or a chemistry set that could have made biker crank, people had a different idea of what was considered safe for children. People remember the wildly dangerous activities they participated in as children.

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  • 01
    Font - Wafflestompingpro 10 hours ago My dad told me about how him and his brother would break thermometers and play with the mercury growing up. Whats really funny and ironic about this is that when I was a senior in high school, a kid dropped a thermometer in his science class and they shut down the entire science wing in the school for the rest of the day to decontaminate
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  • 02
    Jaw - BrownEggs93 13 hours ago E Not a toy, but playgrounds were plunked down onto asphalt and concrete.
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  • 03
    Font - SincelastNovember 14 hours ago A chemistry set. My brother and I were totally unsupervised and never followed the instructions. We just mixed chemicals together at random to see what would happen. I remember one combination turned into this really smelly black foam- like substance. My dad and his brothers didn't have a chemistry set. But their father did let them play with mercury in his workshop. They also taught themselves to make...zip guns, I think they were called? Basically, guns cr
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  • 04
    Font - TheMemeSniper 12 hours ago 2 I have a crayon melter that melts crayons and lets you pour it into molds so you could make your own crayons and rings turns out production stopped because of a failure to stop the heater from being turned on if the lid was opened
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  • 05
    Plant - Chum_Gum6838 12 hours ago 2 We had these weird fake cigarettes that actually allowed you to blow smoke that was quite realistic. We freaked out a lot of adults with them.
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  • 06
    Font - Grave-Diffin 14 hours ago I had an incredibly heavy metal square looking robot that spit smoke it produced from burning oil. It smelled noxious and was heavy enough it could have easily been a murder weapon.
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  • 07
    Font - Pure-Rutabaga9743 15 hours ago Lawn darts. 8.8k Reply Share Report Save standing_lamp 13 hours ago When the game was over, we used to throw them in the air and then run for our lives. I have no idea how I survived the 70s.
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  • 08
    Smile - aching-tiffany 15 hours ago 3 I never owned one, but you could buy a radioactive science kit that came with real radioactive material and a geiger counter.
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  • 09
    Smile - HardKor1283 14 hours ago Creepy Crawlers. It was the safer, 90's version, but you could still burn yourself on those metal molds.
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  • 10
    Font - KannaChansPanties 13 hours ago · edited 2 hours ago Idk if anyone has said it yet but the old Beyblades. The ones with the sharp metal on them and would slice up your hands when you tried to pick it up while it was still spinning lol. My cousin once sent one into a wall because it flew off his kitchen table
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  • 11
    Plant - its_moki 13 hours ago S Playground equipment like see-saws, merry go-round, and metal slides. I once burned a layer of skin off my thighs going down a hot metal slide (summer in Georgia) in shorts.
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  • 12
    Vertebrate - DORIMEalbedo 13 hours ago 2 Skydancers were banned iirc. Beyblades were banned from school. Both had the habit of spinning into children's eyes and blinding them.
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  • 13
    Font - MarioneTTe-Doll 13 hours ago On playgrounds, there's always the spinning gate. It was a gate on a pole. You stood on the back of it and kick off like a skateboard and just... spin around on it. Think a merry-go-round, but smaller and crazier.
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  • 14
    Human body - Former_Consideration 12 hours ago I'm surprised trampolines are still around, even with the dumb safety cage netting they must all have now.
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  • 15
    Font - iBody 13 hours ago Super Soakers where getting a little out of control from the mid 90's to the early 2000's. They held a ton of water and felt like someone was spraying you with a pressure washer; hitting someone in the eyes would temporarily blind them and crying wasn't uncommon. Slip and slides whew also pretty rough when a rock poked up through the plastic and caught your stomach after a 30 foot head start. So much blood.
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  • 16
    Font - criscodisco6618 9 hours ago I had a large red plastic toy box that looked like a treasure chest in my bedroom closet growing up. When I was around 7, late at night the toy box would start taking to me from the closet, calling my name, Michael, in a low, creaky voice. For weeks, I was terrified to fall asleep because I knew I'd wake up to the voice again, yet every morning when the sun filled my room I'd open the lid to the box and it would just be toys, like it should be. Finally, I was a
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  • 17
    Font - TheDeadlySquid 13 hours ago 1. Toy gun that looked like a real gun no joke 2. A bug catching kit with hypodermic needle and formaldehyde. 3. A chemistry set with caustic materials 4. Air rifle that I figured out how to use like a shot gun by dropping extra BBs down the barrel and I could use it to shoot homemade darts. 5. Clackers on a string before they made them safe Of course I built all kinds of stick weapons growing up
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  • 18
    Font - glum_hedgehog 12 hours ago · edited 12 hours ago In the late 90s my elementary school had a metal slide about 15ft tall. The ladder to climb up, and the "railing" around the 1ft wide platform at the top were made of skinny metal tubing that got slick af when it was wet. The sides of the slide were about 6 inches tall, super easy to just go over the edge. Several kids fell or were pushed off over the years when I was there. One boy had to be hospitalized not once, not twice, but three time
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  • 19
    Font - auntiepink 13 hours ago Fisher Price people that aren't 3"across. My friend had a tandem bike that weighed more than we did. We would wobble around (our very, very small) town at will. No helmets, no nothing, just an 8 and a 10 year old girl going up to the post office by ourselves on an ancient steel frame to get a carbonated beverage. Lawn darts, BB guns, CO2 cartridges filled with gunpowder (aka crater makers)...I guess that last one isn't a toy per se. We did a lot of stuff like that
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  • 20
    Font - RonSwansonsOldMan 13 hours ago Chemistry set with some fun to play with mercury. A wood burning set to burn your address into a piece of wood or into your hand. A metal casting set to make molten lead to make army soldiers with or to burn blisters into your finger.
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  • 21
    Plant - crackityazz 15 hours ago · edited 15 hours ago I remember these inflatable oversized boxing gloves and the commercial showing kids punching each other
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  • 22
    Font - Roundaboutsix 12 hours ago My dentist used to give me Vials of Mercury to bring to school for show and tell. My parents bought me a rock collection at a natural history museum that included a chunk of asbestos from which you could pull fibrous material. We also had metal trucks with extremely sharp edges and lead based paint jobs.
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  • 23
    Font - Artsy215 13 hours ago My older brother had an original erector set from 1975. It's just toy scrap metal pieces with a thousand tiny screws, nuts, and bolts to possibly choke on or stick in a light socket. Not that we ever tried...
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  • 24
    Human body - Spirit50Lake 13 hours ago Wrist rockets..using bb shot or larger ball bearings. Wicked.
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old wtf old school childhood nostalgia old people ridiculous unsafe safety funny vintage
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