Stuff You Should KnowIt's every kid's dream - a job playing with toys that pays in toys. It's a real thing and has been around for a long time. Then there's the other side of the testing process, companies who ensure that toys are safe. It takes both of these testing techniques to successfully bring a toy to market these days. Dive into the ball pit with us today and learn all about toy testing in this classic episode.
Hey everyone, it's your friend Josh. And for this week's select, I've chosen the November twenty seventeen episode on toy testing. It's a kid's dream job, definitely supposing they can circumnavigate the confusing world of child labor laws. But it's a nightmare to that kid's parents, as I stress multiple times in this episode. So I hope I really got that across. Enjoy it in good health.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles w Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry Rowling in there, and this is stuff you should know for all the kiddies out there. For the cats, the kiddies, there is a d d Oh, gotcha, two d's and an ie.
Not kitties.
No, not kitties.
Not the Miamio.
Nice callback man.
Yeah, oh that was a good one.
Basalts probably should have mentioned that on the one for the kiddies. Chuck, Yes, have you ever tested a toy?
No?
Did you ever want to?
Well? Yeah, I mean I've done some product testing before because I have a friend or had a friend that worked in market research and She would occasionally hit me up for a burger taste or a beer drink nice, or a tool test, but never toys.
Wow, I'll bet the beer drink was fun.
It's great, drink a little beer and you get paid like a hundred bucks?
Was she like? No, No, you can't swallow. You have to swish it around in your mouth and spit it out.
Actually, most of the beer ones, the only one I did, I think there was only one that was a taste. A lot of times it's just like, what do you think of this logo type of thing?
Oh?
Really? Yeah?
So like the beer wasn't even in the room with you. No Ah, what a tease?
Yeah? They just throw things up and I just go so boring?
Yeah, were you like you probably could have explained this better when you asked me to test the beer.
Well you get that little envelope on a hundred bucks though, so who cares? Oh? Nice?
Is that how much that pays?
Sometimes more?
Wow?
Sometimes fifty. I did a frozen yogurt win for fifty bucks one time, but it ranged between fifty and a couple one hundred.
Very cool.
Yeah, cash money, yeah, why not?
You know you can go buy a lot of beer with that totally. Well. I remember hearing about the idea of toy testing as a kid and just being like, how how do I do this? And my parents were like, I don't know, we both work were busy. Go be a latch key kid.
Yeah, especially after the movie Big.
Oh yeah, there was like a lot of toy testing in that.
Right, yeah, I mean that was his job.
I forgot about that. Totally forgot about that. I just remember the piano scene and then the scene at the end.
Well, they'll spoil it, Okay.
I didn't. I said the scene at the end, Hopefully it didn't spoil it for anybody that Big ends eventually.
Yeah, don't spoil it. But it has something to do with a dirty bomb, right, that's the next stepisode, the big surprise ending.
So anyway, I remember wanting to be a toy tester and it never panned out for me. And now that I have grown up a little bit and I've read this article, especially during a little research, toy testing still sounds awesome if you're a kid, oh yeah, But if you're a parent, it does not sound all that great.
Uh what do you mean, like if your kid does that?
Yeah, it sounds like a lot of work, man, what.
Like getting the toy and having your kid play with it.
Yeah, I mean it's not like that's the end of it. Like, there's a lot of a lot of extra stuff you have to do. You have to pay attention to your kid while they're playing with it. You have to You've got to write reports and stuff. But there's like if there's work to it if you're the parent, for sure, So.
In other words, you have to take them out of their their small, plain brick room and actually let them play.
Yeah, take off their Hannibal Lecter face mask and their straight jacket.
I never thought about it that way.
It don't get to work and then put them back in after they're done with their toy.
That's right.
No, this again, if you're the kid, great job. If you're a parent, it seems tough. Plus also, one of the things that's tough about it is that this is not something that is easily come by. I think. Although it's a lot easier today to get a job for your kid as a toy tester than it was, say like in nineteen ninety, yeah, I.
Think back then you had to literally depend on someone getting in touch with you.
Right or you had to like go show up at headquarters and be like, hey, what do you think you kid?
Huh right?
You know, all right, well, let's let's go a little further, a little further back, Chuck, because there's a lot of different testing that goes on with toys. There's the kind I was just talking about research market research, right, like you and your beer logos.
Yeah, Like, play with this toy, kid, what do you think does it stink?
There's also the kind that has to do with like actually making sure it's safe, which is another kind of toy testing, and we're going to cover both. But the idea of testing toys to make sure that they didn't you know, disembowel the kid that was playing with them with some weird sharp edge or a missile that was actually you know, would stick in your gut and catch fire or something like that, that's actually a relatively new concept, like surprisingly new.
Actually yeah, I mean toys have been around for thousands of years. Like they found toys that are potentially four thousand years old. I saw a rattle that was from Turkey that maybe like four thousand years old. Yeah, And by all accounts, this Italian find was a sort of like an early easy bake oven kit.
Yeah, it was like a toy kitchen basically kitchen said.
Yeah, so, like little kids have always wanted to play with stuff. It's just part of being a child, whether it's tuk took junior or you know. Although up to my times and in the eighteenth century, it became a thing to where the Enlightenment philosopher said, you know what, learning through play is a really valuable thing. So like legit toy started being developed for the first time.
Yeah, I think this is about the time, maybe a little before, but this is probably the seeds of where childhood came from. And we need to do an episode just on childhood. I think man like when it was allowed. Yeah, like this is not it's not like a natural It may be natural, but observing it is not a long standing thing among humans.
Well, it was like, well, you're five years old. Time for you to get to work exactly.
Like here you get a little more cold dust on your face. You look jobless.
Yeah, you know.
So the idea of kids playing, especially to kind of learn and grow into adults, that that, yeah, that's like finds its roots in the Enlightenment, and so you've got that one branch or that one sapling coming up up and it starts to integrate and merge with another one that comes up later on in the nineteenth century industrialization. Yeah, so now you have the idea that kids should play with toys because prior to industrialization, families may have made them themselves. Like the kid may have been just playing with a kitchen utensil, forced to use its imagination.
Yeah, and I.
Just realized I keep referring to the kid, is it? Yea his or her imagination, Like a broom becomes a horse pretty easy?
Yeah, or you know, I mean, look at stickball. Sure is there anything simpler than cutting a broom into a broomstick and playing baseball? Right?
Or a nice ladle can become an electric guitar. Sure, that's always my thing. I always played air guitar whenever I could. I would give entire God Man, when I'm like, now that I am older, how torture must just have been. I would give entire concerts of like bon Jovi's Slippery When Wet No Boy, but like it would be an either air guitar or a drum set made of like country crock lids for symbols, And then the tubs for the drum themselves, or like a Quicker Roads box or something like that. But I have like a whole like Tommy Lee drum kit made up.
All right, I got some questions here, Okay.
I wasn't I wasn't done. I was on. Yeah, I would give this whole concert and like everybody would come into my room and sit there and listen to like the first song and be like, okay, well more, and I'd try to go through at least one whole side of the tape. Okay, I don't think I ever made it through a whole side, but my aim was to do the whole album.
All right. Well, that that answered all my questions. Actually, Okay, I want to know how long were these performances? Who you subjected them to?
My family? And they were long? They must have been excruciatingly long.
Okay. Yeah, that pretty much sums it up, right, So.
I'm not even sure how I got on that.
What my point was, Well, because of your imagination of turning household items into fantastical toys.
That's right, So thanks to industrialization and mass production, toys could be made and sold and distributed, and all of a sudden, now you have something like the beginning of a consumer culture, especially in America.
Yeah, and we're talking nineteen fifties. It became a real thing. Except back then the toys were highly likely to injure or kill your child, right, not highly like you, but a lot of them were pretty dangerous.
There. I found this one stat from nineteen sixty eight, and like I've seen it, like question, no one was keeping track. Apparently, no one really started keeping track to toy injuries and deaths until like the twenty first century.
Until the great lawn dart incident of fourth of July.
Isn't that jaw dropping? Man first century is when they started releasing reports with injury and death statistics from toys. So I saw this one. It was a guestimate, but I saw seven hundred thousand injuries from toys in nineteen sixty eight. And that's not including jungle gyms and swing sets.
Bikes, trampolines, probably scooters.
Nothing like that. These are just straight up toys. By twenty twelve, I saw that there were eleven children who died in the US. Five of them were from tricycles, two of them were from scooters, two or from balloons. So really, technically only two children died from what you would consider like just a straight up toy like a dollar or stuff toy or something like a crane or plato. I think both of them were asphyxiation. So the idea that there was this huge change from very very very dangerous toys into actually a pretty safe industry that has to do largely with toy testers.
Yeah, And it was nineteen sixty nine that they finally passed what's known as well the first federal safety Standards for toys into law, and then the National Commission on Product Safety that same year said all right, we've got eight recommendations for banning toys. And I look these up in picture because they're kind of fun to look at. Sure, the Empire Lady Empire Little Lady stove, which is basically an easy bake oven mixed with a pottery kiln six hundred degrees fahrenheit. This thing would get.
It's three hundred and sixteen degrees celsius.
Like your home oven doesn't get up to six hundred degrees Probably.
It genuinely does not. I think mine goes to five point fifty. Maybe in cleaning self cleaning mode it gets up that high but this is not something a little toddler needs to play with.
Right in self cleaning mode, it locks it self shuts he can't open the door even right. What else the Bird of Paradise slingshot, which looked innocuous enough, but it the deal with that one was that had these sharp missiles that could make you bleed. Yeah.
I think slingshot it just begins and ends at that as far as the safety's concerned.
I looked up slingshots today because I had remember the wrist rockets, Yeah, I do.
Those things were so dangerous.
Did you have one?
No? I was never allowed to have one.
So I had a wrist rocket and I looked up today after this article. I was like, I wonder what's going on in the world of slingshots? And dude, you should see some of the slingshots on the market today.
Are they even more dangerous than the wrist rocket? Oh?
Yeah? Wow? And like there are YouTube videos with people with these things that they look like little musket balls that you can fire. Sure, And I mean this guy was shooting these balls with a slingshot through like half inch plywood.
It's like a that is a dangerous toy. Wow.
Yeah, it's really just look up extreme sling shots at some point and go get one.
Yeah, maybe if you're eighteen year older and don't have like some you know, grudge against anybody.
This last one, the Zulu blowgun, was that period in America where you could have some a kid's toy that was highly racist and very dangerous, all in one one convenient box. Yeah.
I can't imagine what the packaging looked like on that onine.
It looks like what you think it looks like.
So kids were choking on the darts, I'm sure, like putting the dart in then taking a deep breath exactly. They were like, I should have thought this through first.
Pretty much, I regret nothing.
And that was that, right. So that was nineteen sixty nine.
Yep.
That was the first time they started taking toy safety seriously. And prior to that, the last time they had looked out for little kids was I think in the fifties, because in the forties there was a lot of like flash fire deaths among children wearing like pajamas because pajamas were made of ray on, this new material at the time, and I guess no one had ever tested it around a flame, and it turns out that it could burn up real quick, and not only could it burn the kid badly, possibly to death, it could also kill them from smoke inhalation from their pajamas.
Right, Yeah, And even if.
They survived, they were again very badly burned. So Congress passed the Flammable not flammable, Flammable Fabric Act. I think is what it's called, not flamable? And can I go off here for a second. Sure, can we all come together and just agree to drop the word inflammable altogether?
Oh? That again, there's no reason for it.
It's just a dangerous word.
Yeah, it's weird.
Well I'm still I'm still beating the drama on that one.
Wasn't that a Simpsons thing too? Yeah?
Doctor Nick, He's like, right, flammable means flammable.
Yeah, okay.
So the so Congress passed this act to basically say all kids where needs to be flame retardant. Now, the problem is is the chemicals they used to make the closed flame retardant was were flammable. They were not. They were the opposite of flammable in their credit, but they supposedly were linked to kids an increase in hyperactivity and a decrease in IQ Oh wow. And still today it's very, very tough to get kids pajamas that aren't flame retardant with those same chemicals in them. But apparently in the mid nineties, Congress allowed a loophole to keep going where if the pajamas were of a snug fit, they could be not flame resistant. Right, they didn't have to have the flame retardant chemicals because to burn, fire needs oxygen, and if there's no oxygen really between the kid's skin and the pajamas because they're snugly, snug fitting pajamas, then the fire is probably not going to happen, so they don't have to have flame retardant chemicals. That's the one loophole. Isn't that fascinating?
Well, yeah, and now we can get back to the long standing tradition of leaving a lit candle in your baby's crib for the first month.
Well, there was one other thing I saw, chuck too. There is a long standing rumor that it was actually the tobacco industry that got the Flammable Fabrics Act pushed through because they were trying to deflect the blame for death by fire accidental fire from cigarettes to the actual fabric manufacturers, gotcha. Even though a lot of people died in their beds from their mattress going up because they fell asleep with a cigarette in their mouth.
Smoking a bed seems like such a such a thing that nobody would do anymore. But I know people still do it, Yes, but it's still shocking when you see it in a in a movie or TV show, which it used to us to see that all the time in movies, But now when you see it, you think people really smoke in bed. I don't know.
Yeah, I don't know either. I don't I don't smoke.
All right, Well, let's take a break and we will come back and talk a little bit more about different kinds of toy testing right after this. All right, So there are mechanisms in place and regulatory bodies in place now that are in charge of making sure toys are safe, and these are constantly It's not like they wrote the book on it and said, all right, we're good. As toys expand and are developed, the safety standards need to be changing all the time, and they do, which is great.
So one thing I saw, ironically enough, is that somebody actually did write the book on this.
Well, yeah, but it's not a finalized version, right.
Oh, oh, I see you too, mean like they updated as new science comes in. Yeah, yeah, agreed, agreed. But even that, you know, just the idea of creating standards again is pretty new, because I think until like the nineties, they didn't really update the toy safety requirements for a while, and it started to finally pick up, I think in the nineties, and then in the two thousands there is a group, an organization called ASTM. Could not, for the life of me find what that stands for, but they created the Standard Consumer Safety Specification for Toy Safety, which apparently is the universal guidelines for toy.
Safety American standards for toy manufacturers. Oh maybe that's not bad, chuck, all right, that was my first stab at it.
That's pretty good.
You also have companies like in our article here at how Stuff Works called intertech, not in a tech.
What's in a tech?
I think that was office space, wouldn't it? Oh? Was it? I think so inner tech, which basically they they're professional toy testers. They have laboratories where they have technicians that say, here, let me, let me see if I can bite the eyes off of this doll into my mouth and let me see if it's so small that I can swallow that eye. Let me rip it apart, let me light it on fire. In England they have I think actually not even just England and all of Britain. They they have a rule that a toy burn rate can be no more than one inch per second, with the idea that if a toy does catch on fire, at least your kid has enough time to throw it away, throw it towards the gas can and run, right.
And then the EU has their own set of standards too, So with that burn thing, I should say at least, yeah, if a toy burns faster than thirty millimeters a second, which is a little over an inch, then it can't be sold in the EU.
Right.
And then if it burns between ten millimeters a second and thirty millimeters a second, it still has to have a warning that says warning, keep away from fire.
Yeah, can get Bernie right, right, And.
Yeah, the whole idea is like, if that kid sees the thing on fire, they're gonna throw it and run and the house will catch on fire. But the kid's not gonna burn up, right unless the kid goes and tells a grown up. I think that should be in the in the warning too.
Throw doll, run, tell grown up.
Right, don't go make like a ham sandwich. I saw this really great video from Innertech and it's called Teddy Bear Testing. Did you see it?
I did.
It is great. It's that they clearly are aware of what that what they're doing is bizarre and morbid if you just are standing there watching it as an observer, but you know, the point to the whole thing is actually quite quite noble and heroic. But one of the things that they did was there's this like three pronged It was almost like you know those things that a jeweler uses to pick up diamonds with tweezers kind of, but they have one that's like a three prong thing where you push down on the end and the prongs extend and open a little bit, and you pick something up and then release the end and it draws it up and tightens it and holds it stung trysers, tryesers. That's going to be in the OED one day, I think. But with this there was a little bigger and much sturdier, and they hooked the dolls the Teddy Bear's eye up to this thing and then pull the teddy bear back to see how many pounds of pressure it could be stand before it came off. And that's the other thing too. They're not just like pulling this and like having fun, Like they're making measurements and they're using like standardized force that they're applying to this, right, Like the seams. The sewing has to be able to with stand like one kilogram of weight for ten seconds without opening up. Just things like that, right, And it's thanks to these groups like the EU or the ASTM and who have gone through and said this is like if your toy makes a sound, it should be no louder than this, or if you are manufacturing a toy gun, it should be marked like this, so it's obviously a toy and not a real gun. Like just comprehensive standards that everyone could adhere to to keep little kiddies two d's safe. Yes, I just think it's great that there's people out there doing that because it's a kind of a new thing.
Well sure, and they ostensibly have done the research on like they really cover all their bases, like what what could we imagine a child doing with this thing? You know?
I suspect that even as much time as they spend doing that. Oh sure, kids still come up with some whack stuff to do with toys.
Yeah. I mean I told the story during the evil Canevil thing, we used to make a coat hanger hoops and dip them in gasoline.
I wish I would have known you back then so I could stand there and watch that.
Man. Well you would have been putting on your we would have been running the pyrotechnic for your Bonjobi concert. Oh wow, thank Scott, and I would have been all over that.
You know, it's not too late.
That's true, all right. So that's toy making sure toys are safe. Once a toy is safe, then there's this whole second thing that we were kind of talking about from the movie Big, Like the great scene when Tom Hanks is first and grown up Josh Baskin is in the office.
Did you look up his name or do you just walk around knowing it?
No? No? Another movie Big Inside and Out?
Wow, is that one of your favorites?
Oh?
Sure, You've been running around asking people on movie Crush with their favorite movie? Is what's yours?
Oh?
Is Big It?
No?
No?
No, but it's up there I love the movie Big, I've seen it a dozen times or more. Gotcha easily? Josh Baskin, Yeah, so a little Josh Baskin's all grown up in the office. And what's his name? Was it? John Hurd that he recently passed away. He's the evil corporate executive that has his idea and as I.
Remember his famous line, stop having fun.
Yeah, and he makes his big presentation. I think it was like a building that turns into a robot and Tom Hanks very sweetly just raised his hands. I don't get it. He's like, what do you mean? I don't get it? And that's basically what they want to ask kids, like do you want to play with this? Is it fun? Like adults to design these things? And they might. I would assume that if you're a toy designer, you have a mind of a child to a certain degree, but you're still not a kid. Yeah, it's got to pass that test, right exactly.
That's the whole point of having toy testers. It's kids like that's they're not adult toy testers. Maybe their parents are there or something like that, but the whole point of actual market development toy testing is by just giving kids some toys and seeing what they do with it. That's right, and there's a lot of a lot of places that do this right, Like apparently Mattel has something called the Mattel Imagination Center in El Segundo. And if you live around El Segundo or willing to travel to El Segundo, and you have a child that's zero to thirteen, there's a pretty high likelihood that you will be able to get into the door and your kid will be able to play with some toys and be watched by scientists behind two way mirrors. But that's pretty I mean, that's a little I think that's pretty close to reality. I think the places where you go to actually test on site with toys are a little more fun than like a like a room with a two way mirror, but it's still the same principle. Generally you're being observed while you're playing with toys as a kid.
Yeah, and there's to get these gigs the dream job for a kid or I guess you think the job from hell for a parent. Pay attention, Like sometimes they might get in touch with you. Sometimes you might can follow the social media page of like the Mattel Imagination Imagination Center they. I mean, if you just google toy testing jobs, there are pages and pages on places where you can submit your name and it's you know, from there. It's probably a bit of a lottery like experience, depending on what exactly they're looking for. Like you might fit your kid might fit a demographic, but there's still a lot of kids in that demo that they have sip through. So it's not like you can say, you know, don't promise your kid you can get them a job as a toy tester.
Right, well, oh yeah, you may want to not in.
I don't even tell them that that's a job right until you've secured it.
Just don't even say the word toy around your kid.
Yeah, exactly.
So there's that's there's the old school way is like going directly to the company, like to go to Mattel or Fisher Price maintain something called it's play Lab, and you can email these companies directly basically send your kids resume, maybe a video of your kid playing with a toy. What they would be looking for, Like you said, they might be looking for a certain demographic, but they more often than not if they're just looking for like a go to toy tester to where your kid actually has the job of being a toy tester, where somebody, some company or companies are mailing your kid toys to test you. You basically need to audition for that, and you would want to include a video and that your kid in the video would want to be using like coherent words that express how he or she's feeling about that toy at that moment. Yeah, and you may get picked up. That's the old school way of doing it. Although if you want to do super old school like use a video camera and send in like a VHS tape of your kid playing with the toy, that's the old school way of doing it. Now, you can go onto social media, like you were saying, Chuck, and there's a lot it's a lot easier for companies to reach out in a targeted way to basically tap kids to become toy testers.
Yeah, if you are a mom, mommy blogs are huge. They are huge on the Internet and they get sent everything from you know, baby products that they can use to mommy products to toys. So tell your mom start a blog, become a top blogger, and she'll thank you because then she'll be rich.
Yeah, say, mom, start a viral blog to day.
Who is it? Ellen DeGeneres has a show feature where she has these kids that come out and test toys on TV. You're not gonna get that job because these two kids already have it.
Well, that one of the kids. I'm not sure what Trey Hart's background was, but Noah Ritter, he was the apparently kid on Alan Remember him?
Nope?
He came off ride and was asked by a local newsperson like what he thought of the ride? And he's like, well, apparently I thought it was great. It had me scared half to death. You've ever seen the video of that kid?
No?
Oh, it's beyond adorable. Yeah, he's one of the two toy testers. Now, oh so that's how he got that gig. Yes, good for him.
What else? You can start a YouTube channel? There are actual kids out there with their own YouTube channels where they test toys. And beyond that, I want to recommend have you ever seen our buddy Joe Randazzo's Lego Dude reviews? Yeah? Have I don't know if you have to be a friend to Joe or not, but go out there and look at Lego Dude reviews, Lego City Logging, truck and our friend Joe formerly of The Onion and formally of at Midnight Fame, our comedian writer friend. It's just the funniest thing I've ever seen. And it doesn't translate to everyone because there are comments like is this guy for real? Right?
Yeah, because he's doing it straight.
Yeah, but it's like all those reviews, like they start off with the box that it comes in, and so Joe starts off with the box and how well taped up it is. It's just really funny.
Yeah, he's a nice, nice spoof Lego.
Dude reviews and there are all kinds of those, but specifically Lego City Logging Truck, and you'll just see that sweet face of Joe's and you'll know it's him. But there is a boy called well, I don't know what his full name is. Was Evan Tube HD is a YouTube channel. Yeah.
He and his sister do reviews.
Yeah, and he is. He has four and a half million subscribers.
Is that as of today?
Yeah? Yeah, four point six.
I noticed that they did like a pizza challenge where they just put weird stuff on pizza and it has like sixty five million views.
Unbelievable.
It is unbelievable. It's crazy, Chuck. You if you ask somebody like back in nineteen eighty to conceive of like what TV's like in the future, and they said, it's people just opening up toys on on TV and that's it, you'd be like, that's a pretty good, pretty good description. I would buy that. Well the futures.
Now, well there's the other one, the Disney collector br.
Right, this is who I'm talking about.
Nine and a half million subscribers, and like you said, there it is literally nothing but the hands of some woman, some anonymous uh robot ai creature.
Right.
No, it's a real person's opening up toys and playing with them and talking a little bit in a very creepy voice. If you ask me, I think it's great. You think the voice is great, dude, Yeah, Pepa pig. It creeped me out.
Oh I liked it. Her Okay. So her name probably is Vera Creditio.
Uh a woman, vera money bags.
Yeah, a woman. Yeah, get this, she's even more wealthy than you realize. She's a woman in winter Park, Florida. If that's her, then that's so that's that's supposedly her and her husband Messius Creddio.
Okay, he has.
Something called Blue Toys Club Surprise, which is the boys version basically uh huh of Disney Collector br and together, they seriously are probably clearing twenty plus million dollars a year, making a video every day and uploading it. And she will say pepai or something like that and say what it is the product that she's holding or opening or playing with or whatever, and that like that's it.
Man.
It's like you were saying, like all you see are her hands, she's opening the packaging. She's actually really good at opening packaging. She never gets frustrated. I didn't see her, Like I didn't see them have to cut and like there was no jump cut or anything like that. She's really good at opening packaging. And then she kind of says what it is out loud and then just like sets it down to the side, and I was watching it like, this is ridiculous. This is the first ten seconds. This is ridiculous. People actually watch this. I can't believe this. And then the next thing I knew, the next four minutes were me sitting there with my mouth kind of open a little bit. Yeah, just zoned out watching this.
I think that's the whole point. It's kids love it. Toddler's love watching stuff.
I can see why. Yeah, her husband though, or I should say Blue Toys Club, surprise, he didn't talk at all. And then I find a little creepy.
He just breathes heavily.
He did. He just like plays with them. He plays with them more than she does. She just opens them. He opens them and plays with them. But he doesn't talk. But again, you just see the hands. Yeah, twenty million dollars a year.
Yeah, what a world.
It is quite a world. It's the future, all right.
Should we take another break? Yes, all right, let's do that, and we're going to come back and finish up with a little fun with some of the most dangerous toys of all time right after this.
Okay, we're back, man, Are you ready?
I'm ready?
So this, this list could go on for years.
Yeah, there are lots of list like this out there.
So this and it's not meant to be comprehensive. This is just a selection of some of our favorites. Doujour huh sure? So one that I saw was the snack Time Kid cabbage patch doll, yes, which you could feed real stuff to that in the ad they feed, like the cabbage patch kid a French fry or two, or maybe I think it came with food, That's what it was. It came with food and you could feed it and it would just keep chewing and swallow and then bam, the plastic French fry was gone. Your cabbage patch kid just ate a French fry, can you believe it? And that was the whole thing, right, Yeah. But they would chew no matter what was placed in their mouth. Yeah, like fingers or hair, right, and they wouldn't stop either. Yeah, So your little kid could end up with like a crushed finger or lose a big tuft of hair, and the cabbage patch kid would just be all fitts and elbows, say more and more, give me more.
Yeah, that's a that's something for your nightmares. There's a cabbage patch kid just chewing their way towards.
You, exactly connected by your hair to you.
So that was recalled by Mattel in nineteen ninety seven. Yep, So they did the right thing there.
Yeah, they did. Probably The most famous one of all time is lawn darts.
Yeah, lawn darts. I played it when I was a kid. If you haven't seen lawn darts just you're of a newer generation, just google it, and they were you. You would have two big kind of hula hoop rings, kind of like a horseshoe game, and you would launch these large, plastic, sharpish darts.
Plastic on one end.
Yeah, the fins were plastic. Yeah, the stick part or the what would you call that, the dead end, the pizzer, sure, yeah, was metal and it was sharpish. It wasn't like a you know, like a razor or anything, but it was sharp enough to where if you launch this thing from across the yard and you look up and go, I can't see it. It's in the sun, all of a sudden, it's in your eyeball. Yeah, and you're blind.
Yeah, that happened to some people. Like people were getting injured by these things. Apparently there were seven thousand reported injuries from lawn darts. What'd you call them jarts?
Mmm? No, I never said that.
I thought you call them jarts earlier.
No, okay, that is a thing. Though I've heard of jarts. What are those?
I thought that was the same thing.
It may be the same, So maybe that was the brand name.
Maybe I'm not sure, but they were banned. Actually, they didn't even have a chance to be recalled. They were banned in nineteen eighty eight. So it is illegal to manufacture, sell, possess, and certainly play with lawn darts in the US by punishment of death by lawn darts.
Yes, I just looked up quickly. By the way, Jarts was the brand name. Oh, okay for at least one of them. I'm sure there was more than one kind.
There definitely was, because the one I saw was Franklin yard Darts. Franklin, they made the shuttlecocks that my family used to play badminton with. Did you know I was like a world class badminton player. I'm just learning so much today now that I think about it. World class is probably misleading.
Neighborhood class.
Neighborhood class for sure, Yet right, I could destroy the neighborhood at least.
Yeah, I will still play a game of badminton. My brother set one up a couple of years ago.
Of course, how'd you do?
It? Was okay?
Good enough?
Yeah?
So have you ever watched it? Like Olympic badminton?
Oh, it's it's awesome.
It's so crazy, it is amazing.
But I can't even follow it. I'm just they might as they could be out there faking like there is no shuttle cock and I would never know.
Yeah. The only way it could get better is if Disney collector b R commented on it but didn't even talk about what was going on. She just said extra squeeze, all right.
So this next one is actually these next two are legit scary. The Atomic Energy Laboratory. In nineteen fifty one, A. C. Gilbert and vented the Erector set and he released this energy lab like a it was sort of like a little chemistry lab set thing, but it actually had uranium. It had real radioactive materials. Yeah, so you could see like you could create mistrails and things. Yeah.
It was like a chemistry set for kids, but with radioactivity. That was the point of it. This is at a time when the government was like, no, no, it's all fun. Radioactivity is fine. It's good for you. It gives you a healthy glow.
Yeah. And the next one the CSI Fingerprint Examination Kit. This was on Ion nine's list was the number two most dangerous toy of all time.
Yes, I think also thanks for saying that the last three were from the band toy museum online.
Yeah, like we said all these and I looked at a bunch of these lists and it's mostly the same stuff. Sure is good to know that it's not you know, like there's really one hundred things and we're just picking our.
Favorite, right exactly.
So the CSI Fingerprint Examination Kit, you could play CSI you could dust for fingerprints with trimolite, which is one of the deadliest kinds of asbestos. The powder that you used to dust had about seven percent trimolite, and this was really scary and it's amazing that it got through because this was not the nineteen fifties.
Yeah, No, it was just like the early two thousands, I believe, because it was a CSI brand fingerprinting kit. And I guess so I saw that that what is it tremolite? Yeah, is a it's an actual like I think they used actual fingerprint dust and that's like part of something that fingerprint technicians have to work with, is this asbestos. But they packaged it up and sold it for kids, and the company went bankrupt pretty quickly.
Yeah, I would imagine.
So what about Bucky Balls. It's kind of a legendary one.
You remember those, Yeah, I didn't know that these had a bad ending, because I remember my nephew and niece got Bucky balls for Christmas whenever, I mean not too long ago, and they were awesome and cool and I played with them like crazy at their house.
Yeah, they're fun. Were great. They're like ball bearings that are super strong magnet.
Right. Yeah, it's really neat.
So far, so good. You can build stuff out of them, you can hold stuff to a refrigerator with them, whatever you want to do. It's just a great round magnet. But the problem is is that if you swallowed more than one, you could be in big trouble because these things were very strong magnets, and if you had one in your intestine and another one and a part of a different part of your intestine, they would come together and your intestine would be pinched off right there.
Yeah, and this actually happened to the extent where about a thousand or so kids required surgery to get these out. And they were a big hit. It was kind of one of those, uh, just one of those Christmas toys that really captured Yeah, I must have Christmas toy. And I guess the inventor did not want to acknowledge this, so he basically said, I'm not recalling these. These are a hot item. The federal government sued him. He dissolved his company instead of funding a recall, and so they went after him personally to try and get fifty seven million bucks out of them.
Yeah, supposedly settled for about one percent of that. Yeah, I know, fifty seven million down to.
What five hundred and seventy thousand, right, Yeah, that's.
That was my calculation too, But I was like, that's so small. I'm not very confident about saying it out loud. Thank you for swooping in.
Well, I think that's right. I didn't calculate it, and I'm terrible at math.
We'll find out I am too, buddy. And look look how far we've gotten in life. Yeah, it's five seven, So thank you for using the coca sure. And then lastly, Chuck, we've mentioned it before. We mentioned the prototype four it that was banned, the Easy Bake oven itself, the famous one that was in the National Toy Hall of Fame in two thousand and six, was itself banned?
Yeah, this one did not. So was that the deal with the other one that was a prototype?
No? No, it was like a predecessor too, Okay, I guess that is what I mean.
Yeah, because the easy Bake oven never got up to six hundred degrees No, but.
It got up to two hundred degrees cel c s four hundred degrees paraheight. That's you don't bake anything that like that much like that hot? That is hot.
Yeah, like you could cook a pizza in that thing.
Yes, not well, but you could, yes, if.
You had time. Sure, But they had some problems with them over the years. I mean, this is a is a like you said, a Hall of Fame toy that's been around forever and beloved by boys and girls for generations. And two hundred and fifty incidents reported sixteen cases of second or third degree burns.
Yeah, and there was specifically a design flaw that got little kid's fingers trapped in the oven when it was hot. Yeah, and one little girl apparently had to undergo a partial finger amputation, says I Owe nine.
Very sad.
It is sad, But we wouldn't know about this stuff if it weren't for consumer protection. And I guess that's the moral of the story. That's becoming the moral of the story lately. Our Restaurant Inspector's episode. Oh yeah, now toy testing.
Yeah, there you go. Good point.
If you want to know more about toy testing, you can type those two words into the search bar at House of Forks dot common and it'll bring up an article. And since I said that it's time for listener mail.
I'm gonna call this something we missed in the Foyer episode. Hey guys, long time stener, first time writer, just listen to the Freedom of Information Act episode acknowledge this. He's a little behind and I wanted to bring something to your attention. Many states have laws modeled after the FOYA, and there's a disturbing trend the last few years. There are many special interest groups and activists out there that have begun using Foyer requests to stall legitimate research.
This sounds familiar, Yeah, exactly.
With facilities having hundreds of terabytes of data to potentially sift through, complying with a request or say every inter departmental email from twenty to twenty seventeen, they can completely shut down an operation with only a handful of researchers. Another tactic is to cherry pick from tons upon tons of data to attempt to piece together an argument to discredit unfavorable study results. The group's making the request know this, so it's a win win for them. They get tons of private emails to look through to spend into something nefarious, and even if and when they find nothing, they still throw a wrench into legitimate research. And how about that man? He said he was a little disappointed we didn't mention it. But first of all, Brandon, I didn't know about this, So yeah, same here, Brandon Ley. That's why. But he said, you guys, I realize you focus more on the federal version, so that's not much of an issue there, So let us off the hope. Yeah, he Since you guys are awesome, keep up the great work. Sincerely, guy you should Know, Brandon Benzac.
Thanks a lot, Brandon. That was pretty smart. Thanks for letting us know so we could, in turn let everybody else know terrible stuff. Yep, I gotta look into that now. If you want to alert us to something that we walked right past, please do we always want to know that kind of thing. You could send us an email to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my Heart Radio visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
