Let’s not forget the Match Box Race-And-Chase set, which was a figure 8 slot car set that featured a see-saw bridge and both a Corvette and Police Car.
The cars could switch direction, but needed some space and momentum to do so. The idea was to avoid getting caught by the guy who was the cop as long as you could. The most common method for doing do was to drive over the see-saw bridge, and make it flip.
Brilliant design. 90% of the time, the Corvette would flip the bridge just as the Police Car was hitting it, flinging it into the air. At best, this meant it would crash down in some other part of the room and break, requiring you to get a replacement police slot car. Usually though, it didn’t get too badly broken because it would hit something soft, like your face, and fall back down to the floor. Of course the Corvette hitting the ramp at full speed also allowed you to use the bridge as a ramp, providing extra momentum to put an eye out with the other slot car.
I don’t know a single kid who had that toy more than 24 hours before they were either hurt, or the thing was completely broken.
The Easy-Bake Oven probably caused me the most pain, but how many of us ended up in the emergency room having Lite Brite pegs removed from the nose or ears?
Okay, maybe that was just me.
… And then there was the time Darth Vader and all his stormtroopers invaded the Barbie Dream house … and set it on fire.
Regular darts can be just as fun as lawn darts. Simply throw them at your friend’s feet. Points scored if they penetrate the shoe, bonus points if they penetrate the skin. Then allow said friend to reciprocate.
My fave was the open-ended Scalextric track. Get all the straights, put them together to get a really good run-up, incline far end out of the window, and shoot the cars at your friend’s sister as she comes home from school. (“Every year five people are hospitalised through Scalextric related injuries.”).
My dad taught us how to make hydrogen gas (to fill balloons etc with) using Red Devil Lye, strips of an aluminum pie plate and water. Yep, there’s nothing like chemical burns to bring a family closer.
Then he made us a go-cart out of an old lawnmower and some metal pipe. I got it up to about 30 miles/hour before I fell off - it didn’t have a seat. Big road rash from knee to hip, but not considered a problem in our house. If it didn’t need stitches, you’ll survive.
Looking back, I think maybe my dad was trying to thin the herd. :eek:
The safety police have certainly made a lot of fun toys disappear. But there will always be a ray of hope in the form of engineers.
A few years back, there was a single summer when SuperSoaker realeased a model called the CPS 2000. Now, I don’t normally think of a squirt gun as anything that even registers on the Dangerous Enough To Be Fun scale. But the packaging had dire warnings about “Do not point at face” – a good sign. An even better sign is that it takes about 50 pumps to get this 3-foot monster up to full pressure. A single squeeze of the trigger expels about half a liter of water at high enough pressure to knock down a 10-year-old child. Eeeexcellent.
When a group of us gathered at a friend’s cabin, all armed with said weapons (the first purchase caused a bit of a domino effect), we proceeded to wade into the lake for easy refilling and then ran amok. Loads of fun ensued. And then, one of our fearless crew took a direct hit to the crotch. It’s the only time in my life I’ve ever seen a grown man felled with a squirt gun.
Yeah, they still sell Easy-Bake Ovens and Thingmakers… but they aren’t the same thing.
The Thingmaker and Easy-Bakes of my youth were the toys of the late sixties through the mid seventies. The Thingmaker I remember had steel trays that were placed inside a doohickey with a heating element not unlike that of a toaster. That steel tray got VERY hot.
The Easy-Bake Oven my sister had used real metal trays and a 100-watt bulb for a heating element. Those metal trays got mighty rosy, too, after hanging over the bulb long enough to cook a cake the size of a hockey puck…
…and this is how my sister and I learned about such technical innovations as “tongs” and “oven mitts.” Especially after she melted a cake-shaped hole in the acrylic shag carpeting in her bedroom…
One summer my friend’s dad moved out of his house, so he was home alone all day while his mom worked. Naturally, we all gathered at his place to enjoy the total lack of adult supervision. He had a BB pistol which was pretty weak as guns go, but still had enough pressure to make the BB go plink! plink! plink! as it bounced off each wall of his bedroom.
At about the same time there was a fad for “throwing stars”. Those will actually stick nicely in a plaster wall.
How 'bout a little love for Cox gas-powered weapons, er Toys!
My brother had the control line plane (that never would fly, but made one hell of a “car-thingy” with some modifications) and I had the dragster. Of course these were suposed to work on some sort of teather or another, but we could never be bothered with that.
The plane needed new wheels to work on the ground, but once you fired it up the kids would scatter like crazy as this thing chased them around. The dragster had a “kill switch” that a bead on a string would activate. Guess what? You don’t use the string, you don’t have a kill switch! Same results as the plane, but without the spinning prop for extra injury potential.
We had Jarts, too. Great stuff.
We also had sleds and lived in the mountains. Roads with hard-pack always yeilded a better ride than the powdery slopes, but you had to watch for those cars!
She told me she loved me like a brother. She was from Arkansas, hence the Joy!
OK, I had BB rifles… SST cars with those little zip cords that you yanked out and set a flywheel to spinning, and the car raced off at high speeds… and even a set of “demolition derby” SSTs, that were designed to be rammed into each other at high speed and disperse small, easily-choked-upon and impossible-to-find-all-of body parts… cap guns with real gunpowder in a red paper strip, god knows I burned myself dozens of times just banging 'em with rocks to set 'em off… bows and arrows… homemade axes and hatchets and spears… rubber band rifles… slingshots…
But my favorite was the tennis ball cannon.
To make a tennis ball cannon, you take four steel soda cans (hard to find nowadays) and remove the tops and bottoms from three. On the fourth, you use a churchkey to make holes in the top, leaving a radial pattern of metal, and use an awl to punch a small hole in the side near the bottom. Tape these tightly in a perfectly straight stack, with the fourth can at the bottom.
To operate the tennis ball cannon, you stuff a tennis ball down the open end, put a short squirt of Ronson lighter fluid (naptha) in the hole in the side, and shake vigorously to vaporize the lighter fluid. Then you aim and set a match to the hole to ignite… >FOOMP< A good tennis ball cannon could shoot a tennis ball a couple hundred yards, easy.
But I think the most dangerous toy I ever had was a bike. I’ve gotten hurt more ways on a bike than anything else… including ramming the bike into a brick wall doing about 30… and my nads into the gooseneck… Took 'em nearly a week to come out of hiding after that.
Heh. Once we were going to use my friend’s slip and slide, only she had lost the stakes to hold it into place.
No matter, we went to her stepmother’s flower bed and grabbed some of the large, decorative rocks to hold it down.
Your’s truly ended up scraping up her foot but good on one of the rocks.
:smack:
My cousins and I used to climb in my grandfather’s wood pile and grab old boards and prop them on top of crates for a makeshift see-saw. We were lucky with got off with nothing more than some nasty splinters!
We didn’t really have any of the dangerous toys listed–my brother had a BB gun and I think my parents had lawn darts (which are probably still somewhere in my mom’s house)–but my mom made up for it by letting us play with fire. Whenever we barbecued or she burned leaves, we kids would light sticks on fire from the coals or fire and run around with flaming torches.
When I was about 12 my brother, with my father’s permission, gave me a rifle. Not just a 22 cal, but a genuine WWII surplus Italian 6.5mm carbine! Perfectly safe since they didn’t give me any ammo. However, it didn’t take long for me to find it! Well a friend and I headed up the hill behind the house one day when nobody was home, and set up an improvised target on a stone wall. Well I let loose with the first, and only shot of the day. We were completely unprepared for the amount of noise the thing made, we were hoping to not attract much attention, but instantly realized that this would not be the case. The rifle was quickly hung bask on the wall where it was, and the ammo returned to the cabinet in the basement. It was 4 or 5 years before I used it again, and then with the full blessings of my father, and at a proper shooting range. I still don’t know how any of us survived to adulthood.
The maniacs in my little neighborhood did something called “DeathMo Wars”. This is where each team would make a “fort” in the woods, about 10 yard away from each other. Once the construction was done, using only native material found on the forest floor, the “War” started.
Anything was allowed, except metal. Pinecones, sticks, ROCKS!!, branches and other misc. trash found out in the woods was game. You would throw it at the other fort and if you scored a “hit”, the target would be “out” and have to vacate the fort. You would hurl shit at one another till one side was “out”.
Absoulute Lunacy! An Emergency Room Doctor’s Nightmare!
One time, I picked up a curved stick and winged it side-armed. It was a thing of beauty! It whipped out over “No-Man’s-Land”, hit the first kid in the head (these were all brothers, by the way), bounced off him and smacked the second in the arm, just ready to chuck a juicy pinecone at us, then glanced off and tagged the oldest dude smack accross the chest!!
A Triple Blow!! It ended the War!!
Nobody ever got “seriously” hurt during the “DeathMo” Wars. Go figure.
Yeah, sure they made those nets around it and put padding on the springs to keep you from landing on them, and sure there is that retarded warning of " One bouncer at a time. Parental supervision required/suggested/hinted at" (which I’ve never seen any parent remotely near the contraption…ever.)
But, the thrill of bouncing netless/padless on one with fifteen other kids, under a huge oak tree with other kids in the branches waiting to jump down into the middle of the chaos to see how many other kids he can bounce out is something that the current generations will never experience, sadly enough.
We also had a friend, until about six years ago, kept their trampoline next to the deep end of the pool. ( the entire pool was a deep end, custom made.) The thrill of bouncing realllllly high and then ricocheting into the water is just too hard to capture with words. Made for incredible cannon ball competitions as well.
On a recent driving trip through southern West Virginia, I saw a trampoline in the yard about every tenth house. Most of them were in use. What’s up with that?
A small, red, fiberglass recurve Bow (and accompanying arrow)
This is perhaps the most idiotic and dangerous, but no less amusing, thing I ever did as a kid. Having watched a film about indians surrounding the stockade and firing their flaming arrows over the wall, lighting up the houses inside, I came up with a not-too-brilliant-if not-slightly-sinister plan.
My friend and I had made a (ground level) club house out of scrap wood in the back of his acreage. It seemed to me that we could re-live the old west right in our own backyards. Together we sprinkled some gasoline on one outside wall of our fort. Wrapping an arrow shaft in tinfoil and then attaching an old rag with a little gasoline on it we stood back ready to assault our ‘stockade’. The gasoline on the arrow ignited much faster than we expected, and so, with some very warm knuckles and the stench of my singed hair in my nostrils I let the arrow fly from about 15 feet away. We stared enraptured as our fort went down in flames. We had waged war against the…erm…clubhouse, and emerged victorious. Gross trouble ensued once found out.
A Plain Old Rope
Lofting some rope over a tree branch I once hoisted myself up to a decent height, only to have the branch break and me plummet to the ground. Remarkable that I never broke a bone.
wince…and confession is good for the soul…
A Pellet gun; the non-CO2 kind with a pump stock you could over charge and turn into, as I discovered, a sniper weapon
Now, I love animals I really do, but growing up we had chickens…I hated them. They made me work and I hated mucking the house out. I was 11. I really didn’t think I would kill it…not with a pellet gun; just give it a good sting, make it balk a little. Which is why I waited until the unsuspecting bird’s downy end was facing me. I was dead wrong. And far more accurate than I had ever intended. :eek:
Then like a fool I lied to mom; I told her I didn’t know why the chicken was dead. After all, there were no obvious clues that I could see. Mom decides to dress out the stiff (actually, it wasn’t stiff yet, it was still warm and as fate would have it, edible) and see if she can determine cause of death. Her coroner skills paid off quickly. She was very angry whilst confronting me about the tell-tale pellet. I was caught and then told her the whole story. I think she knew all along. Even though I lost my pellet gun privileges for a time, I still had an odd sense of satisfaction eating dinner that night.
