Original subtitles

Do you remember a time

when kids' toys went for the jugular?

It actually wraps around the girl's throat twice.

Did you ever see the movie "Alien"

where the thing goes around your throat?

It was that!

Do you remember there was once a fun craft project

that could slip you a roofie?

They're coated with a chemical that is utterly insane

to be on a child's toy,

especially one that looks like candy.

Or when a gas-powered pogo stick

could send you sky high?

You're basically jumping out of your second-story window

onto a thing about the size of a quarter;

that is taking life in your own hands.

Does it sound dangerous?

Yes, that's the point,

that's what makes it awesome.

These are the things we used to do

for fun, for money, or maybe out of boredom

that we'll never see again.

Were they dangerous?

Certainly.

Deadly? Occasionally.

But, boy, wasn't it exciting?

One of the must-have toys of the 1980s

was an innovative new doll you very well might know.

But what you might not know

is that one time this cuddly, soft doll

suddenly developed an appetite.

If you were a kid in the '80s,

everybody knew what a Cabbage Patch Doll was.

This is one of the first examples of a toy going viral,

and they truly can't make enough to keep up with the demand.

It's anarchy.

Hold it!

People are climbing over one another

for this doll in its giant cardboard box.

I got my doll! I got my doll!

It's America's bestselling toy in 1983, 1984, and 1985

with half a billion dollars in sales.

But crazes cool off, they always do.

Interactive dolls like Teddy Ruxpin are coming out

and they're electronic

and they're grabbing massive market share.

Hi, my name is Teddy Ruxpin.

Can you and I be friends?

So just being a cute little doll in a Cabbage Patch

isn't gonna cut it.

Your new thing better shake, it better wiggle,

it better dance, it better talk,

it's gotta do something.

To reignite their Cabbage Patch Kid craze,

they give their dolls something to do,

and it takes interaction to the next level.

What they come up with

is the Cabbage Patch Snacktime Kid.

She's my Cabbage Patch Snacktime Kid.

She really loves to snack.

Wow, she really chews!

The Cabbage Patch Snacktime Kid

has a mouth that opens and closes like a child,

so you feed it.

This doll really looks to be eating.

It's really exciting to see this tiny doll chew food.

The way the Snacktime Doll works

is very similar to the old laundry roller mechanism,

that you put your clothes in there and it pulls it through.

Inside the head of the doll is a motor

that controls these rollers,

and there's a little sensor in there

that when you put one of the pieces of toy food

into its mouth, the lips start to move,

and those rollers grab hold of that food,

pop it into the doll's belly area,

and then pops it right out into the backpack.

It really is bringing the Cabbage Patch doll

to life, which is what their whole ethos was,

and they are a huge hit.

Within the first six months,

they'd sold 500,000 of these dolls.

By the end of 1996,

the Snacktime Kid is devouring its competition;

but that's not all it's consuming.

The Snacktime Kid loves to eat,

and it's supposed to just eat the plastic treats

that you feed it.

But it can't tell the difference

between the food that it came with

and anything else you put in its mouth.

So kids, they're feeding it all sorts of things,

paper towels, real food, hair ribbons.

But if the wrong thing gets in there, like your finger,

there is no obvious way to make it stop.

There's no on/off switch;

anything you put in there, it's gonna keep trying to chew

until it spits it out in its backpack,

which is a major problem.

It's the mid '90s,

children and adults have long layered hair, it's beautiful.

But as it turns out, long hair is not that great

when you've got a perpetually hungry doll.

And the mechanism is strong enough

to pull the hair right out of the scalp.

Imagine this doll just keeps getting closer

and closer to your head.

It's like it's eating spaghetti

except it's your kid's hair.

The doll will not stop, it just chews and chews.

It's like something out of a horror movie.

We're talking like Chucky, Megan action here.

Parents are freaking out, they're calling 911,

they're trying to pull out the battery,

they're searching for that non-existent on/off switch,

they're doing whatever they can,

and then they realize there's one way to make it stop.

And that is take the backpack off,

because if the backpack is off,

the Cabbage Patch doll is no longer hungry.

It makes sense?

No.

When the backpack is off,

there's no place for the plastic food to go,

so the eating mechanism is disabled.

Who would think backpack when a doll is eating

your child?

You're thinking off button, battery compartment,

not backpack.

There are more than 90 reports

of kids getting their hair or fingers

stuck in the doll's mouth.

So the toy-maker decides the right thing to do

is recall all 500,000 of the Cabbage Patch Snacktime dolls

and issue a full refund.

Which costs millions of dollars.

It's so costly that they really don't see a way

forward, and they discontinue the Cabbage Patch Snacktime Kid

entirely.

Not only do they discontinue the line,

it is such a blow to the manufacturer,

no other toy maker has ever tried to make a chewing doll.

What a sweet little face.

You wouldn't think this is gonna rip my kids' hair out

and make them have long-term PTSD for sure.

Finger-eating dolls were only one way

toys could turn on us.

In the 1960s, there was a new toy

kids couldn't wait to take for a spin,

a very painful spin.

In 1958, the hula hoop comes out,

and it is an instant success.

It's hard to overstate

how crazy the hula hoop phenomenon was.

A hundred million hula hoops are sold in two years.

By the 1960s, if you're a child in America,

chances are you or somebody very close to you

owns a hula hoop.

This thing takes off and everybody wants in it.

So people are trying to think,

"What could we make

that would be like the next great hula hoop?"

Well, it turns out there's an opening

in the hula hoop market.

People like to do tricks and get a little fancy;

hula hoop with an ankle or a wrist.

One particular trick that is tough for a lot of people

is hula hooping on the head.

Spinning a hula hoop is always a fight with gravity.

You run the risk of it constantly falling to the ground

if you're not spinning fast enough.

But a toy company called Transogram

lets the hula hooping phenomenon go to your head.

♪ It's a new thing, it's a fun thing ♪

In 1965, something called the Swing Wing is born.

It's a cap, it's got a tether on it

with these weighted streamers.

And the idea is that,

if you use your head to swing it around,

the weighted streamers will counterbalance,

and you can get them to spin really quickly.

The more you swing your head around, the faster it

goes, and it looks like fun.

Because it's a hat,

it won't keep dropping to your waist like a hula hoop.

Now you can generate a lot more centrifugal force

by flinging these weights and really build up momentum.

Kids are really into the Swing Wing,

but it starts to hurt after a while.

You're basically headbanging

trying to get this thing to spin around.

I don't think you could do this

for more than 30 or 45 seconds.

It hurts just thinking about it.

Kids' necks are built to go side to side

or up and down slowly,

but the Swing Wing forces them

to whip their heads around violently.

It's not just the violent headbanging that hurts,

there's also a counterweight

pulling in the opposite direction

of the way that your neck is straining against.

The Swing Wing is just asking for a neck problem.

And depending on how you're whipping your head around,

you could actually damage your spinal cord.

There's a word for this type of violent movement:

whiplash.

It's what you see in these crash test dummy films

where their heads just swing all the way around.

Today, there's an entire legal industry

dedicated to this kind of damage.

My question is, did anyone at the company test it,

because it really is crazy.

You think that the Consumer Product Safety

Commission would yank the Swing Wing off the market,

and maybe they would have,

but two years before the commission's creation,

the company declares bankruptcy.

It's safe to say

that it was probably because of the Swing Wing,

but there's something to be said for a time

when you could just strap something to your head like this

and just go for it.

Okay, so it didn't become the next hula hoop,

but this pain in the neck did go down in history

for all the wrong reasons.

Remember as a kid when it felt like your entire

universe revolved around one toy you just had to have.

Well, in the '60s,

one inventor thought he had just that

by taking an iconic play thing to a terrifying new height.

In the 1960s, America is in love with hot rod culture.

People are taking boring family cars and pickup trucks

and souping them up with giant engines

and really loud exhausts.

There are hot rod magazines, movies,

there's this kind of outlaw, bad boy vibe

to this whole trend that really captivates America.

And a gearhead named Gordon Spitzmesser

thinks he can tap into that.

He wants to give the same badass, outlaw vibe

to a pogo stick.

Pogo sticks in the '50s

were only rated for about 80 pounds.

Because they were built

with these soft kid-friendly springs,

you outgrew it pretty fast, and the thrill was gone.

So Spitzmesser has this brilliant idea to up the ante,

and the way he's gonna do this

is by attaching an internal combustion engine.

Does it sound dangerous?

Yes, that's the point, that's what makes it awesome.

Spitzmesser's version isn't gonna raise the bar,

it's gonna launch right over it.

The engineering behind this is actually pretty

impressive, Spitzmesser creates a single-cylinder engine,

and the spring action of the pogo stick

drives that piston up and down.

When the piston reaches the top of the cylinder,

the spark plug fires, the fuel explodes,

that pushes the piston down hard;

that's gonna send you flying back in the air.

In 1971, Spitzmesser's vision is ready for market;

and it's goodbye boring pogo stick,

hello, Hop Rod!

Hey, what's that kid doing?

He's hopping on a Hop Rod.

Can we just take a second to appreciate the name:

the Hop Rod.

I mean that's perfect.

It's promising a pogo stick

that may or may not be street legal.

My 10-year-old head would explode.

The big stick is here.

It's the Hop Rod, the world's first powerized pogo stick.

People are looking at the commercials,

and it looks effortless;

you're just holding on for the ride.

You could hop for 30 minutes on just four ounces of

gas without expending any energy or using your leg muscles.

The Hop Rod can hold 280-pounds,

so now the pogo stick's not just for small kids,

it's for anybody.

The Hop Rod is so ruggedly built,

even mom and pop can hop, grandpa too.

My grandfather got one of these things,

he's gonna bust a hip.

I shouldn't be anywhere near these devices, okay?

Adults don't fall to the ground

and then pop up laughing with like springy bones.

You think about the original pogo stick,

and most kids were getting a few inches off the ground.

Well, then with this Hop Rod,

people are getting like three-feet off the ground,

that's table height.

It's pretty insane.

Sure, three-feet sounds fun,

but it's not long before amateur daredevils

are supercharging their Hop Rods.

The Hop Rod is designed for gasoline,

but nothing keeps you from putting something else in there.

Some people mix oxygen and acetylene,

which produces a flame that's over 5,000 degrees.

When you produce energy like that,

you're flying 12 feet in the air.

Jumping 12 feet in the air,

you're basically jumping out

of your second story bedroom window

onto a thing about the size of a quarter;

that is taking life into your own hands.

And if you did get in trouble,

the only exit strategy for this thing

was to just jump and pray to God

that you land somewhere safe and roll with it.

Any child toy that needs fuel

probably shouldn't be given to a child.

That being said, I feel like kids today

are losing out on a pride of survival.

Despite delivering on daredevil thrills,

Hop Rod sales fall flat,

not from concussions or broken bones,

but from busted wallets.

It costs about $70, which is about $500 today.

The Hop Rod is not the big seller

Spitzmesser thought it would be.

So by 1975, Hop Rod was out of the market,

but they didn't disappear

before they made an appearance

at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

It's a publicity event.

This TV personality gets on a Hop Rod

and starts jumping, but falls off and breaks his shoulder.

There's no footage that we can see unfortunately,

but the Indianapolis Motor Speedway banned pogo sticks,

still to this day, mind you.

It must have been bad.

With certain toys, the hazards were pretty obvious,

but sometimes the most dangerous toys

were like hiding a concealed weapon;

and in some cases, they actually were.

In the 1950s, Cowboys are all over television,

"Gunsmoke" is the most popular show, comes out in 1955.

Cowboy toys are the thing to have.

So every backyard is gunfight at the O.K. Corral.

In the current era,

realism and gunplay sounds kind of dicey,

but at the time, realism is the number one component.

Looks like real,

sounds like real.

At the core of every imaginary gun fight,

there is a critical element

and that is getting the drop on any varmint

before they can get the drop on you.

In 1959,

a new toy promises to give any 6-year-old gun slinger

the element of surprise.

So you're in a gunfight,

your opponent might be watching your hands,

might be watching your eyes,

but you know what he's not watching?

Your pelvis.

In a tight spot,

the tricky buckle gun holster set

shoots a safe shooting shell when you push out your stomach.

The Derringer is a metal toy belt buckle that

hides a gun.

It's kind of a combination of your regular cowboy quick draw

with something that feels a little bit more James Bond.

This is a time in history when cowboy culture

is really sort of colliding with Cold War spy culture.

So anything that's sort of sneaky

is gonna be really big in toy weapons.

It is a pretty awesome idea.

The belt would pop open,

and it would fire a little plastic bullet

where the pop and smoke came out.

So if you got this thing in your belt, locked and

loaded, all it's waiting for is a little bit of pressure

on these two little points right here,

and all of a sudden, boom, it shoots.

You don't even have to pull the trigger.

With the Remington Derringer,

you might get the drop on your friends,

but perhaps hands-free shooting

wasn't fully thought through.

Firing projectiles

at waist-level, what could go wrong?

And these plastic bullets that they're using,

these are not little light plastic nothing bullets.

Plastic bullets are what riot police

use to quiet unruly crowds.

Now you got this belt buckle,

and you're trying to aim with your little 6-year-old hips,

you're taking out the table lamp, mama's glass of wine,

your brother's eyeball,

anything waist-height, better watch out.

There weren't warnings,

it didn't say like don't point this at anyone.

Toys in this era were definitely in the mind state

of if you're gonna be dumb, you gotta be tough.

Mom's best china

isn't the only delicate collection at risk.

These "shells"

have a habit of just sort of exploding on their own.

The little caps

were actually a tiny little gunpowder explosive,

and could cause actual burns.

One should be advised not to have explosive

or incendiary devices near the family jewels.

Despite all the broken glass

and the random explosions coming from your kids' pelvis,

parents buy a lot of these things, it's a big hit.

I think there may not have been a lot of rules

for toys and regulations at that time,

because I think parents just thought,

"Oh, well, if it's for sale, it must be fine."

By the late '60s, westerns were fading,

and the Derringer Belt Buckle rode off into the sunset.

What parent doesn't love a toy that inspires creativity,

something you can leave a kid alone with for hours?

Well, it turns out for one popular arts and crafts toy,

that was a very bad idea.

Fuse beads or perler beads are this really big trend

in the '80s,

and you basically set up these little beads on this pegboard

and then you essentially melt them together with a hot iron.

Really fun,

you can make all sorts of cool designs and decorations.

But five-year-olds can't handle a hot iron,

so you have to wait for your mom or dad to come around

and fuse your whole creation together,

that just sucks.

So an Australian company thinks to itself,

"Well, what if there's a way to create a toy

where kids could do this on their own?"

You're gonna have to make some sort of chemical

reaction for the beads to bond

and essentially glue themselves together.

They get some engineers to help design a toy

that can do just this,

and it's called Aqua Dots.

Here's the trick:

spray with water to make them stick!

Kids have a little spray bottle,

they're going to spray their little Aqua Dots,

and in just a few seconds,

it's gonna fuse together

and their new creation will be ready.

It kind of feels like magic, no iron, no adults,

and kids, especially girls, are super into it.

Now, as a parent today,

you might look at these beads and think,

"Oh, these are a choking hazard,"

but that's actually not the real hazard of the Aqua Dots.

They're so small, kids are just swallowing them,

and then parents start reporting really strange symptoms.

Parents are reporting children getting

dizzy, nauseous.

passing out, and in some cases even falling into comas.

There are enough reports of sick kids

that the Consumer Product Safety Commission

opens an investigation.

Researchers find out that they're coated

with a chemical called butanediol.

That's a chemical that is utterly insane

to be on a child's toy,

especially one that looks like candy

and can be easily swallowed.

Butanediol is essentially an industrial

solvent, it's found in spandex, it's found in nail polish,

In fact, it's so toxic that if you are to ingest some of it,

you have to call poison control.

You're supposed to wear goggles and gloves

to handle this stuff,

and you definitely don't want to inhale it,

it's not the kind of thing

you wanna lick off of your art project.

But it gets worse;

when this chemical is ingested,

it turns into a compound called gamma-hydroxybutyrate,

or GHB.

GHB was developed as an anesthetic,

it knocks you out cold

by suppressing your central nervous system.

Today, it's classified as a Schedule I substance,

extremely powerful.

GHB, also known as the "date rape drug,"

and that's what they're using to coat a children's toy.

What's wild about this toy is that nobody thought,

what happens if like maybe a child

thinks to put a small colorful object in their mouth?

Of course, that's gonna happen,

and then beyond that,

they never looked at the way in which it was toxic.

No one says, "Okay, so this thing

that used to take heat to bond,

we're just gonna spray water on there,

and that's all it's gonna be?"

"Yeah."

No one raised their hand and said,

"So what are we putting on there that makes it do that?

And is that safe for children?"

Nope, that didn't happen.

The US government hits Aqua Dots

with a $1.3 million judgment,

and, of course, millions of packs are recalled.

But how insane is it

a children's toy made with this chemical

made it to market in the first place?

Wow, talk about hard to swallow.

And when one toy icon from the 1960s got an upgrade,

the dangers were more of a burning sensation.

In 1963, a toy company in Ohio

comes up with one of the greatest ideas of all time:

the Easy-Bake Oven.

You make your batter, you put it in the tin

receptacle, and you slide it through a narrow slot

in the Easy-Bake Oven.

The idea is genius:

use a box with 200-watt incandescent light bulbs

to bake cakes on demand,

and then you're suddenly everybody's favorite friend.

Over the next four decades,

Americans buy more than 20 million Easy-Bake Ovens.

But in the early 2000s,

the heart and soul of the oven comes under fire.

The government starts to ban incandescent light

bulbs in order to move to energy-efficient LEDs

that produce the light without the heat.

The manufacturers of the Easy-Bake Oven

suddenly have a giant problem on their hands.

The Easy-Bake Oven was engineered

around all the wasted energy that came off as heat

from those incandescent bulbs.

So when you put LEDs in the oven,

you don't have any heat, and you're not baking anything.

Rather than scrap a toy icon,

designers go back to the drawing board.

They decide that the best approach

is to add a heating element,

the same basic thing as you have on your oven,

those coils, it's that.

They even redo the whole design,

such that it looks like a real oven;

there's fake burners on top,

and the baking slots aren't on the side,

the baking slot's in the front,

much like you would put a cake in

and take a cake out of a real oven.

To get out the hot pan,

you have the Magic Cool Pan Grabber.

You reach in with the grabber to slide it out.

It's basically your parents' oven, but more fun.

Kid bakers across America rejoice.

The Easy-Bake is more powerful than ever,

and can crank out cakes faster than they ever had before.

Every kid in the country wants to get their hand on one.

But the trouble starts

when kids get their hands in one.

With the new redesign of the Easy-Bake,

with the opening in the front of the oven,

it's gotta be wide enough for the pan grabber to get inside,

which means there's a lot of room for little fingers

to get stuck,

and for little fingers to get burnt.

This is about as big as a VHS tape.

I could see how a little kid could get their hand

under this metal slot, and not get it out.

Now imagine this is on,

at a temperature hot enough to bake a cake.

We're talking like 375 degrees.

Kids are touching that heating element

and getting third-degree burns.

It's nuts that they would put this real heating

element in a toy oven.

I mean, it's a perfect recipe for disaster.

But even if it's not hot,

some kids get their hands stuck inside the metal door

for hours.

Parents have to call 911, there's emergency room

visits, and kids are literally showing up

with an oven attached to their hands.

Within months, there are more than 200 reports

of kids getting their hands stuck in the Easy-Bake oven.

Almost 1 million Easy-Bake Ovens

with this design have to be recalled.

The company ultimately reverts

to the old slide in, slide out design.

Now the slots are even narrower,

and the heating element is further away,

so that limits your capacity to actually burn yourself.

It's wild to think that the original design

was safer than the remake in the 21st century.

When it comes to safety and fun,

sometimes you cannot have your cake and eat it too.

In the late 70s,

kids were obsessed with galaxies far, far away,

so space toys came out fast and furious;

in one case, maybe a little too fast.

In 1977, "Star Wars" mania hit the country,

it's the biggest thing around,

it's the highest grossing film to date.

Every single company on Earth is out there

with their clones trying to harness

that "Star Wars" magic.

"Battlestar Galactica" premieres on ABC in 1978.

And much like "Star Wars," with the series come the toys.

The line is so popular it sells 2 million toy

spacecraft in the 1978 Christmas season.

Turns out "Battlestar Galactica"

has a secret weapon to thank for their huge Christmas sales.

Cylon Raider, missile base open.

Cylon Raider, launch!

Four of the ships from the Battlestar Galactic range

can launch projectiles at each other.

No other space story, not from "Buck Rogers,"

not from "Star Wars," can do that.

When you're a kid playing at interstellar warfare,

there's nothing more frustrating

than firing a missile at your friend ship

saying, "Oh, I got you,"

and he's saying, "No, you didn't."

But with real projectiles, instead of just flashing lights,

there's no questioning, you fire, you hit, you know.

But these fake space battles

turn out to be real-life dangerous.

Compared to back then,

today's modern projectile toys are neutered,

either the darts are soft, or they don't go too far,

or the firing mechanisms are weak,

or, more than likely, all three.

But the "Battlestar Galactica" line

shoots these hard plastic missiles

with the force of a low-powered BB gun.

It shoots them far and fast and straight,

which sounds awesome 'cause it was,

but the force with the small size of the missiles,

that's a big problem.

They're really small, they're only about an inch,

an inch and a half.

It's a choking hazard.

But at the time, choking hazards,

we're not really thinking about it,

we're just buying toys for our kids that are fun.

And to make matters worse,

where you load the missile and where you fire it

are actually very close together,

especially on the Colonial Viper.

So it was very easy to slip

and accidentally fire that missile

right down your own throat,

lodge there, and it was very hard to get it out.

There are so many stories

of parents running to the emergency room,

one kid had a half hour surgery to get this out.

Despite these incidents,

the Consumer Product Safety Commission

doesn't order the toys recalled.

That is what irresponsible looks like in the 1970s.

However, the company knows they have a problem,

so they voluntarily put labels on the toys

saying don't fire at your face or mouth.

But they don't put the labels on the ones in the stores,

they just put 'em on the ones in the factories

that are about to be shipped.

Sales are still going strong through the holiday

season, and then a couple days after Christmas,

a kid actually chokes on a missile from a Cylon Raider,

and that's kind of it.

The fun is over,

they recall existing Battlestar Galactica spaceships

and redesign new ones with non-firing missiles.

It's such a big deal,

they actually highlight it in the commercials.

Re-designed toys do not launch missiles.

Sales drop like crazy.

Their biggest selling point

has become their greatest liability.

They've become more safe,

but as far as kids are concerned,

they are a lot less cool.

It is the Battlestar Galactic toy line

that is responsible for toys

that come with small plastic pieces

bearing the warning of choking hazards.

Unsurprisingly, those dangerous,

OG Battlestar Galactica missile firing ships,

they are now considered rare and valuable collectibles.

Today, there's a standard warning on toys

that say "Not for children under 3."

But back in the '90s,

there was an attractive new toy marketed just for girls

that delivered high-speed action,

whether it meant to or not.

In the early '90s,

a toy designer notices his daughter

playing with a fluttering seedling

and gets an idea for a toy.

He imagines something that flies,

it's like a fairy or a ballerina or a little sprite

that can move through the air with the same grace

as those seedlings he saw his daughter playing with.

So he and his partners develop these dolls

with these beautiful wings,

they work at a deal with a toy company,

and they land on the name Sky Dancer.

Through the years, flying toys are mostly aimed at

boys, they're rockets or airplanes

that are meant to be used outside.

These ones are aimed at girls,

and meant to be used inside too, like dolls.

These fill a big gap in the market.

Wow, they really fly!

By the end of 1995, they hit $70 million in sales.

This is the number one doll on the market.

Turns out, Sky Dancers do a lot more

than just fly off the shelves.

If you watch the commercial,

these fairies spin up very gently

and come down very delicately;

this is not how they're being used.

The doll stands on a base,

and when a kid yanks the drawstring,

the doll starts spinning around and the wings open up,

but the wings are really more like helicopter blades.

The harder you pull that string,

the faster and higher they're gonna go.

And if you launch it straight up,

like you're supposed to do,

they can go up to 10 to 12-feet off the ground.

But girls soon discover

that if you point it at another angle,

say at a whiny brother or sister,

or anyone who's annoying you,

you can shoot it right at them.

This fairy becomes a projectile with

hard spinning blades.

It's basically a flying blender.

These are like kamikaze fairies,

and this thing is hitting you at 40 miles per hour,

it's like getting drilled in the face by a baseball.

Kids are getting scratched corneas, broken teeth,

broken ribs from a toy

that's supposed to be this beautiful fairy

flying through the air.

The toy manufacturer actually figures out

there's a problem,

but they don't tell anybody.

This is before social media,

so they're like, "Let's just not say anything.

Maybe if we don't tell anyone, it'll just go away."

Soon, there are more than 150 recorded injuries

from Sky Dancer dolls.

So the Consumer Product Safety Commission steps

in and says, "Look, you can't give your little girl

attack drones to play with."

And in 2000,

the US government fines the toy company $400,000,

and they demand a full recall of all 9 million Sky Dancers

which have been sold.

Sky Dancers were later reintroduced with a new design,

they would only launch

when you pointed them up toward the sky,

and not at your little brother.

Remember that old catchphrase,

"Up your nose with a rubber hose?"

Well, a hot toy back in the '60s asked,

"What if that rubber hose

whacked you across the head instead?"

If you're an American kid in suburbia in the 1960s,

there's probably like a 95% chance

that you do not have a pool.

Your parents aren't gonna buy one,

and you're probably ticked off about it.

If you wanna get cool in the dead heat of summer,

you don't have many options.

You have a hose and you can attach it to a sprinkler,

and there's nothing more boring and predictable

than a sprinkler.

There might be a sprinkler that moves like this,

maybe it's a kind that moves like this,

those are kind of your options.

Toy companies soon realize

that whoever makes the everyday garden hose more exciting

is gonna cash in.

1962, toy makers decide

that the secret ingredient to backyard fun is chaos,

and they introduce the Water Wiggle.

It's practically alive,

you never know what the Water Wiggle will do next.

It's wild, cool, splashing fun!

This thing is next level.

I mean, it is just bringing the party to everybody.

Essentially, it's this seven-foot long hose

that then has this head on the top,

it looks like a giant half of a potato,

and it will fling itself around

just on the water pressure alone.

Inside the head is where the magic happens.

There's a hook on the end that narrows the stream,

turns it into a jet,

and so, now, this head can move around

in unpredictable ways,

utilizing the force from the jet of water.

The Water Wiggle

is like what kids have been waiting for, right?

It's unpredictable, it chases you, it runs around.

You can't compare this to a boring sprinkler,

it's not even a fair fight.

Through the '60s and '70s,

this is an absolute backyard staple.

They sold 200,000 of these a year.

Kids may love it,

but behind its smile and googly eyes,

the Water Wiggle hides a dark side.

It doesn't take long for problems to

reveal themselves.

This thing has such high water pressure

that it's less a toy and more like a mechanical serpent

with a mind of its own.

If you watch that commercial,

the Water Wiggle

actually wraps around the girl's throat twice.

Did you ever see the movie "Alien"

where the facehugger comes on

and the thing goes around your throat?

It was that!

Today, if you put that ad on social media,

within 30 minutes, that sucker's going viral,

they're gonna call senators.

But in the '60s and '70s,

parents watched this and were like,

"We gotta get one."

It's soon revealed that strangulation

isn't the biggest danger hiding inside the Water Wiggle.

The plastic head on this thing is not secure,

it can come off,

and now you've got this exposed, hard spout

just flailing around, waiting to take someone out.

Now there's nothing protecting you

from getting smacked in the face by the spout itself,

or getting blasted by the jet of water

that's coming out at 45-miles per hour.

That's faster than some roller coasters.

If your mouth is open,

pressurize water can actually fill your airways,

it can drown you very quickly,

or, you know, if it's lodged deep enough,

it could also just sort of block the airway itself.

In 1975, the spout gets lodged in a boy's throat,

cuts off his airway,

but the Consumer Product Safety Commission,

which has only existed for three years at this point,

says, "Seems like a freak accident,

you know, let them keep playing."

In 1978, it happens again,

and this time there's a full recall,

and it gets pulled from the market.

But very few of these things were returned.

Was it because they were broken and thrown away,

or was it because people just ignored the warning?

Maybe, I mean, it was the '70s.

I think the Water Wiggle really shows you

how much tired parents are willing to risk

just to have their children be entertained.

Today, you might find an old Water Wiggle

at a garage sale or on eBay, but proceed with caution.

There used to be a famous slogan

that promised us better living through chemistry.

And in the 1950s and '60s,

toy makers thought chemicals could also make toys better.

What could go wrong?

It was science.

In 1961, Disney comes out with a movie

called "The Absent-Minded Professor,"

and it's this huge hit.

The movie itself has this miraculous substance

that the lead character invents.

We dump the Flubbers!

You can put it on your shoes,

and suddenly you can jump 20-feet.

You can throw it in your gas tank,

it'll do things for your car.

If I'm a kid watching that, I want Flubber.

In 1962,

a toy version of Flubber hit store shelves.

Coming out with the Flubber toy was a no-brainer.

It was this mix between like slime and silly putty.

You can stretch it, you can bend it, you can bounce it.

You can press it down on a newspaper

and lift up the image.

There's a lot you can do with this toy version of Flubber.

We don't really know what this substance is made of,

but who cares, right, kids are having such a great time.

Within the first several months,

4 million balls of Flubber are sold.

It is gangbusters.

But Flubber's success is short-lived.

The "LA Times" starts reporting

that local and state health officials

are investigating a breakout of strange rashes

among school children.

This thing could be anything,

a fungus or a bacterial epidemic,

and the government is like oddly unconcerned

about this at the time.

One government official actually says,

the rash is so faint that you can hardly see it.

But when people begin to look more closely,

they notice a trend.

These affected kids were all playing with this Flubber toy.

And the rashes that were supposed to be so faint,

you could barely see them,

oh, you can see them.

These are full body rashes;

plus, a lot of these kids have extremely sore throats.

Kids are out of school for days

with intense itching and swelling,

and we're not talking about just a few kids,

we're talking about thousands of children.

There's outbreaks in Kansas City, New York, Phoenix,

it's going across the country.

So on the packaging of Flubber

that says "Non-toxic, harmless, parent-approved,"

well, as it turns out, not so safe.

Although an official ingredient list

for the Flubber toy was never released,

we do know that there was probably

synthetic rubber, mineral oil, and

borax.

Borax is a hardcore cleaner that you use to remove

rust stains and deodorize toilets.

It's good for killing ants and cockroaches,

you don't play with it.

Some countries have actually banned the

use of borax.

In America, it's not banned outright,

but it is banned from being included in food products.

When kids were playing with Flubber,

they were getting it all over their hands,

they're touching their faces,

and inevitably, it made its way into their mouth.

So kids were basically eating this stuff.

But at the time, there is no regulatory structure

around regulating the safety of toys.

However, the US Food and Drug Administration

finds that there is evidence to suggest that Flubber

is actually making people sick.

So the company orders a recall,

But there's something about Flubber

that makes it not so easy to get rid of.

Today, we have a ton of regulation, state and

federal, about waste disposal,

but we really didn't have that back then.

There are stories of at first,

them trying to just basically take it all to the dump.

But there are kids that are trying to break into the dump

because they want access to Flubber.

Next, they tried to burn it,

but burning rubber isn't great,

it releases all kinds of toxic chemicals into the air.

Next up is dumping it in the ocean,

and then they make a startling new discovery for Flubber,

it floats.

Ultimately, the rumor goes

that they buried the rest of the Flubber

and paved over it to make a parking lot.

It sounds like the plot of a horror movie,

like, it's just waiting underground

for some disaster to reanimate it.

Maybe at the end of the world,

all that will be left is cockroaches and Flubber.

Thinking back about the toys

that made us tempt fate,

whether they fired speeding projectiles,

or sent us soaring too high,

or even tried to eat us alive,

it was all fun in games, and someone was bound to get hurt.

But looking back now,

that's why our hazardous history was child's play.