19 Of The Most Dangerous Kids Toys Ever Sold

7. Jarts

Perhaps you remember these things as Lawn Darts or simply Jarts, but most remember them as tiny javelins of doom and the reason your uncle still has that funny limp when he walks. Lawn Darts were banned in 1988 for obvious reasons. While the game could be fun—you’d stand away from a target placed on your lawn and lob the darts at it from a distance—it was incredibly dangerous.

People who had these things jabbed into their skulls and other parts of their bodies probably would have preferred not to be impaled. In eight years, 6,100 people playing these were rushed to the emergency room, and most were kids. There were even three deaths attributed to this deadly amalgam of horseshoes and darts.

8. CSI Fingerprint Analysis Kit

CSI has certainly been a popular series on television, so it’s no wonder they created games to promote the series. That alone wouldn’t be a problem, but the issue here isn’t that these kits help children imagine one day becoming the person who samples bodily fluids off of corpses, it’s that they included something deadly in the kits themselves. You know those commercials that come up on television all the time asking if you suffer from something called mesothelioma? That’s the disease you get when you inhale asbestos fibers, which is exactly what they included in these sets.

The fingerprint set contained asbestos in the powder used to dust for prints. It took 20 months for CBS to agree to a settlement in the class action lawsuit and finally issue a recall of the toy. It was never made clear why asbestos was included in the fingerprint powder, which could easily be inhaled, but many consumers blamed China since the game was manufactured there. Maybe CBS can come up with a game to test children to see if they were poisoned with asbestos—it’s practical and would probably sell well given this fingerprint fiasco.

9. Clackers, Knockers, and Click Clacks

Whether people called them knockers, click-clacks, crackers, or any other similar name, this toy was nothing more than two acrylic balls attached to a long piece of string. A person would take the string in the middle and jerk their hand in an up-and-down motion to get the balls to swing into each other, which delivered a rather satisfying banging sound that drove your parents absolutely insane. Swinging small acrylic balls about at high speed may seem like a safe activity to most people, but the problem with these arises when those balls reach their inevitable breaking point.

After a while, these things would wear down. They’d to slam into each other hard enough to shatter. When you expect a satisfying “bang” and instead are given splintered ball bits in your eyes, you might not be playing with the safest toy in the world. These little guys were made in the 1970s and didn’t make it very far into the following decade due to most parents’ desire to keep shrapnel out of their kid’s faces.

10. Belt Buckle Derringer

Toy guns can be dangerous for a variety of reasons, but most often these days, it’s when a police officer confuses them for the real thing. That’s one of the reasons toy companies started making them out of different colored plastics or placed bright orange pieces at the ends of their muzzles. Back in the day, toy guns looked just like real guns, and the Belt Buckle Derringer by Mattel was one such plaything. This gun was the same size as a real derringer and was fashioned into a belt buckle. It fired a spring-loaded plastic bullet, which was loaded into a brass shell. The bullet could fire about 12–15 feet from the gun and be about the same size and shape as a .22-caliber rifle slug.

Now, it isn’t necessarily a dangerous toy because it looks and acts like a gun. It’s dangerous because it’s a gun you fire from your junk and can lodge a small bullet into a person’s eye or down their throat. The eye was most often the unfortunate recipient of this plastic, crotch-shot round of fun, which made it particularly dangerous. Also, you needed to load an explosive cap into the gun so it would make the appropriate “bang” sound. It’s up to you how close you want to put an explosive to your junk, but for many people, this was something of a deal-breaker.

11. Battlestar Galactica Colonial Viper

Remember back in the day when you could fire a cool little missile out of a G.I. Joe or Star Wars toy without worrying about popping out your kid brother’s eye? Sadly, those days are long behind us, and their disappearance has a lot to do with toys like the Battlestar Galactica Colonial Viper. The ship would fire off a plastic missile, and like any spring-loaded weapon of destruction could, it would lodge in children’s throats or hit them in the eyes. Unfortunately, a four-year-old toddler named Robert Jeffrey Warren died in 1978 after placing the nose of the toy into his mouth and accidentally firing the missile down his throat. After this incident (and a few others reported to the Consumer Product Safety Commission), Mattel put warning stickers on all their products capable of firing deadly missiles.

The product safety stickers even had an effect on the worst, most deadly assassin known to exist in any universe: Boba Fett. The original Boba Fett toy was supposed to have a missile that could be fired from a pack on his back, but due to the problems arising from the Battlestar Galactica line of toys, it was decided to remove this functionality. The only versions of that toy capable of firing a spring-loaded missile were prototypes, making them extremely rare and valuable collectibles.

12. Cabbage Patch Snacktime Doll

Have you ever seen one of those Child’s Play films that feature the horrific doll Chuckie and his love of murder? Ole’ Chuckie has got nothing on the Cabbage Patch Snacktime Doll because while Chuckie is a cool character, he isn’t real and he doesn’t chew the fingers and hair of young children. It’s a pretty cool doll on the surface—you feed it veggies and French fries while it constantly chews the items down into its belly. Hey, it’s better than those dolls that wet and poo themselves.

Unlike those incontinent little bastards, these Cabbage Patch dolls are insatiable, so they never stop chomping. That’s where this goes from adorable to horrible because numerous incidents came out where the doll would get a hold of a young girl’s hair and chomp away until it pulled it right out of her scalp. Little girls love their hair, so that’s traumatic enough, but those unfortunate children who got their fingers stuck in those insatiable jaws may never be able to feed a real baby after undergoing that horror.

One more page of Fairly Dangerous Kid’s Toys!