Tracer (disc) guns
Spark guns
Cap guns
Lawn darts
Dart darts
Frigging bow and arrow sets for kids.
What was the gun that shoots out a plastic projectile with a suction cup on the end? We’d take off the suction cup and eventually the plastic would grind down and couldnt be shot
Also thought of:
Water wiggle
slip n slide
Clik-claks
Creepy crawlies or any goo that you mold and then cook.
Ez Bake ovens
So what others did you all own? There was a carving toy I cant remember the name of. It was a cylinder of soft plastic you carve away to reveal the hard plastic under neath and it makes it look like you carved it.
I may have had some of the guns mentioned but I don’t recognize the one you mention that wore down. We owned the lawn darts and never had anybody in the ER for them.
By clik-claks I think you mean those acrylic balls you whacked together?
I can’t see where a tracer gun or a spark gun could be considered dangerous. Even a cap gun was pretty safe.
I mean - a pencil is more dangerous than any of those…
But, if you want dangerous - how about wood-burning kits?
The discs from tracer guns wernt particularly dangerous I guess. Could smart if it hit an eye. But cap guns were loud as hell and my sister and I would try and burn each other with a spark gun.
But yes wood burning sets or …were there sodering toys …would definitely count.
Super Elastic Bubble Plastic. Basically, liquid plastic in a tube – you would squeeze a little bead of the plastic out of the tube, put it on the end of a straw, and blow up a big, semi-permanent plastic bubble.
My mom once bought us a tube of the stuff after we begged for it; upon getting home, she read the ingredients and the warnings on the tube. She refused to let my sister and I use it ourselves – she blew one bubble for each of us, and then threw the tube away.
you know they still sell 90 percent of those? but ill one up ya the realistic-looking toy guns that you shot plastic bb types of pellets out of funny thing is they were made by one of the gun companies to get around the bb gun laws that popped up in the 80s … i cant remember the name tho … i wanna say viper or something …
How about candy cigarettes? They normalised the idea of smoking being a fun thing to do - that might even have been more dangerous than all the others put together
I seriously doubt candy cigarettes could be blamed for anyone smoking. Candy cigarettes existed because our culture was imbued with cigarette smoking. If you went to the movies, watched TV, read books or magazines it was apparent that everybody smoked cigarettes. If you held a party you were expected to put out cigarettes for your guests on the coffee table along with a huge Aladdin’s Lamp shaped cigarette lighter. Even if you didn’t do that you still put out ashtrays for your guests. Fer cryin’ out loud, Fred Flintstone used to smoke! Do you think some kid, unaffected by all that, was then going to turn into a smoker because of a candy cigarette?
All the best ones are taken in the OP. Maybe Big Wheels - low-to-the-ground riding toys kids rode in the street like bikes, but were harder to see by motorists. Kinda stretching things there, though.
They came out with those new-fangled cap-guns with the round ring of plastic caps, I found out you could carefully lift the chemicals out and pile the contents of 2 or 3 into one cap. I had a little metal souvenir canon that fired these. I ended up with ringing ears a few times after some ill-advised antics. And, of course, there’s the classic act of hitting an entire roll of red paper caps with a rock or brick.
I wanted a chemistry set in the late 70’s, and was disappointed when I couldn’t blow stuff up. I had a creepy crawly maker that got hot as hell, but I was hesitant to use it, because I could never get refills on the liquid you filled the molds with.
As a kid, my brother, father, grandfather and I would divvy up into 2 teams. One child, one adult per each team. We would take archery targets and hold them flat, with the bullseye facing skyward. We would launch the lawn darts into the air by hand (and underhanded throw, trying for maximum height), and the other team would race around, trying to get the lawn darts to land as close to the center of the target as possible. Each player got to be the tosser for a turn, and the person running. So at different points in the game, you would have kids standing underneath lawn darts as they plummeted earthward, trying to get lined up for the best possible scores.
Oh, yeah, I remember that - it smelled toxic as hell. You really have to wonder about what some toymakers were thinking.
Although the 1960’s had nothing on the 19th Century, with things like the incredibly toxic pharaoh’s snake fire work at one point being sold to children.
Some neighbors of ours had lawn darts out at their summer property. They usually invited us out there once a year and we’d play a game of two of them. No one ever got hurt.
In the late 70’s at least, Super Elastic Bubble Plastic smelled really. . .interesting, sweet, as I recall. . . OK, what the hell, this is what the internet is for, right?
<googles ensue>
OK, acetone is one of the main ingredients, and the would be a major component of the volatile gasses, so I guess that’s what I was smelling. I always kind of liked a whiff of acetone. I’m weird, I guess.
We’d try not to smell the fumes, as we were warned they weren’t good for us, but I remember we both liked it. My buddy and I would scrape our change together and buy a few tubes, then come back to my apartment building. I lived in teh suburbs, in a 10-story building on the tallest hill in town. We’d go to the highest floor that had a window we could open (most were screwed shut for safety, but some were removed by residents wanting a breeze in the summer), and we’d let the bubbles fly. We’d get some to travel quite a distance across town. They were pretty light for their surface area, if you didn’t use a lot of goop to pinch it off, so we actually lost sight of some bigger-than-basketball-sized bubbles.
And they sold them to us because they were safer than other fireworks. At least we have all our fingers.
The biggest problem with jarts was the original rules. They said to play it on opposite ends of the course(?). Each player or team puts the plastic circle pretty much at their feet and stands their while the other side throws, then they pick the jarts up and throw them back the other way. Which was absurdly stupid. But most sane people, even kids realized how fuckin stupid that really was, and played from one end at a time, even if it made team play much slower.
