Recall This, You Bastards

FOCUS: What toys of your childhood was later deemed to be "too unsafe" by a bunch of overly-paranoid soccer moms and pulled off the market?

ALT-FOCUS: What toys of your childhood just aren't available any more that you miss, or think should be brought back?

I had Tonka Trucks equipment, like a big dump truck and a back hoe, that were made out of metal. Now they're just plastic.

Also, playgrounds were just dirt, so when you fell off the monkey bars or jumped sideways from a swing, you got the breath knocked out of you like God intended. None of this rubberized mulch nonsense

 

Can it be a game that was decided unsafe and banned? Dodgeball was the shit. I have fond memories of hucking that ball at heads as hard as my 8 year old self possibly could. Now my kid's school won't even allow it with a foam nerf ball.

 

Dangerous toys from the 20th century. Toys used to teach as well as entertain. The working steam engine is rather awesome.

 

I ruled at these! Loved them:



Bruised the shit out of my forearm, but it was a price worth paying.

Actually, that looks like my parents' deck and house. Not my arm. Though I may have owned at one time a brown, velour, short-sleeved shirt. But I'm admitting nothing.

Now THESE are one of their replacements:



Or ones with a ring to hold onto instead of...a not ring. I don't know what to call the flat short stick-like thing it used to have.

That's just not right.

 

Wait, they banned water rockets? Why?

 

We would stand at opposite ends inside the rings. Everybody had a dangerous way of playing the greatest backyard game ever.


The breaker of ankles and shredder of tendons:

 

Oh god, another pants wetting hysteria from histrionic mothers. Slap bracelets will cut your wrist and you will BLEED TO DEATH! Third grade, no more slap bracelets. Really, I see it as wasting a good tetanus shot.

On that same token, as a child of the 80s, the big one I remember is water guns made to look exactly like real firearms. "You'll get shot if I buy you that!" Mothers had this fantasy of their 8 year old in a dark alley at night confronted by cops. Nevermind the logistics of how your 8 year old is mistaken for a midnight hoodlum, let alone being in that dark alley in the first place. Or they're in their own yard, and will get gunned down by over zealous cops in broad daylight thinking a real gunfight is in progress between opposing yuppie, suburban gangs. What's more disturbing is the number of fantasies moms have come up with where you tragically, gorily, unnecessarily DIE.

Ironically, a kid getting blown away in his own yard by cops is a reality now. Sooooo... checkmate, kids? We showed you!

 

I remember playing with a bag o' glass when I was a kid. I don't know what the big deal is, we were playing with it in the parking lots anyway, they were just giving us what we want.

 

I liked "Doggie Dentist", personally.

 

My brother and I would buy model rocket engines at the local craft store and use them for all sorts of fun shit, such as:

-Sending small reptiles into the lower stratosphere.
-Making toy cars/boats go so fast they become airborne.
-Homemade bazooka ammo for playing Army with our friends.
-Smoking/chasing out gophers.
-Rollerblades.


I also remember breaking bones being a sort of rite of passage. There were kids who had broken bones and kids who were going to have broken bones.

The playground where I went to elementary school had a big steel slide that was about 10-12 feet tall and had a big hump in the middle, kind of like this:

Spoiler

In the winter, the kids who lived closest to school would dump water down it at night to get it good and icy. When we showed up in the morning we would have contests on who got the most air off the hump and who slid the furthest on the snow after they came off the slide. When you went up the ladder, a "spotter" would follow you up so he could push you and get more speed. It got to the point to where we were flying off the hump and almost clearing the bottom of the slide. It was awesome and terrifying at the same time. It's a miracle there were no broken tailbones. They have since taken it down and replaced it with a lame-ass little 8 foot plastic slide with high sides so you can't even fall off.

 

It's funny because for all those supposed "dangerous" toys - some of which I had (lawn darts, chemistry set) - the one that gave me the most injuries was this one right here:



I had this exact bike and it was my most cherished childhood possession. The amount of scraped knees and elbows I got as a result of doing stupid shit on this bike is more than I can count.

 

Where we lived while I was in high school was a small town called Yambuk which had one attraction.

This.



This is the sanitized version. It used to be another half longer and no steps to get to the top or anything fancy. We ripped a wheelie bin lid off one day to use instead of cardboard and were coming off so fast that we were sliding out into the car park.

 

Here comes the boom.

You can still find them, just not by that company. As they aged (especially left out in the sun), they were more likely to get tiny cracks . . . leading to plastic shrapnel.

We had some of those L'eggs plastic eggs that were clear. We would tape those to things like Evel Knievel's canyon rocket, and put lizards and frogs and stuff in there. We would tape M-80's to the back, and hope the fuse burned just the right amount of time before it blew up.* We even filmed some of that with a Super 8 camera.

We used to take the steel plate door that was the crawl space cover at my friend's house, stack it on bricks, and jump our bikes across the creek. I went back to that spot later as an adult, and I don't know how we didn't get hurt more.


*Shut up, PETA. The animals were just fine, all safe inside the egg.