Oh yes, I remember. I had both these toys and I got burned by both of 'em too. Practically a rite of passage, along with road rash and/or a broken arm from wiping out on your go-kart or minibike, though that was mainly reserved for the boys.
I can’t figure out how you could design a new Easy Bake that would totally remove the possibility of getting burned, which is why I was surprised to see them still around. How would you heat something enough to cook it?
The new “EasyBake Microwave Oven” by Dangerous Toys Inc: Bake those cupcakes in half the time of its predecessor! Guaranteed not to leave external burns on those tender little digits. 
What was that old SNL skit that had a fly-by-night Haloween costume maker brainstorming new costume ideas? Everything was named Johnny-something…
Ferinstance, “Johnny Spaceman” was a plastic dry cleaner bag to put over Johnny’s head, and a rubber band to go arnound his neck.
Then they had one with new toys for xmas, like “bag o’ broken glass.”
Har! Even my imperfect memory of these is making me laugh!
When I received my first boomerang, an Outback “Backfire” I was a kid and sucked at throwing boomerangs, couldn’t get this heavy plastic thing to return let alone catch it. Surprisingly, it was endorsed by the World Champion Boomerang Thrower, Chet Snouffer. Some buddies at school busted it trying to get it to return.
A few years later I got really into boomerangs and started accumulating my 100+ collection. Took a few months to get a catch at first. Only recently I found a Backfire on Ebay and immediately bought it - 14 years later I’m a pretty good boomerang thrower, and it’s fairly safe. The Backfire is a dangerous stick though! It’s a good thing it was a difficult boomerang because when I did get it to return as a grown-up, it still had pretty much all of the momentum it left my hands with. Ouch!
Most boomerang fanatics I know don’t like it when people call boomerangs toys, and weapons is a bad word too.
Bughunter, I think you and I must have lived on the same block.
Recreating Evel Kneivel type stunts using a plank and a good sized cinder block was always fun. Place the ramp at the bottom of the hill, hop on a bike and see how far you can jump. Found out quick that front wheel landings are not good. I would eventually learn just exactly what a broken collarbone felt like.
We lived near some sandstone cliffs, and one day we found a coil spring from a car. We weren’t quite dumb enough to do a Wile E. Coyote stunt, but it was fun to toss the spring off the cliff (about 50 ft). If you tossed it just right, and hit a flat spot, that sucker would take a pretty good bounce.
Also on top of the cliffs were little tinajas (water holes) that would fill with water after a rain. We’d float little boats in them (actually, they were just scraps of wood we’d take from a construction site). That was pretty boring, but wait! How about we add a little coleman fuel and matches to the mix? Sure, now that’s better. Everything was fine until a kid named Ken knocked over the walnut can that we used to carry the gas. Suddenly, the entire can was on fire. Ken picked up the can, held it up to his face, drew in a deep breath, and attempted to blow out the flame. Big mistake. We were all in awe of his fireball impersonation. Now, this was the 70’s, and Ken had a big head of hair. At least he did up until then. Luckily, all he lost was his eyebrows and a few inches of hair. He moved away soon after that.
Another friend had two pairs of ‘youth’ boxing gloves. They must have weighed about 5 or 6 ounces; there was just a bare amount of padding on them. I was always pummeled by him, he had about 4 inches of reach on me, plus he was a lefty. He was always more gung ho to play that than I was.
Old fluorescent lights. Star Wars. Enough said…
I had one of those rockets you fill with water and pump too. They produced an AMAZING amount of force, probably could have killed a kid if fired horizonally at 'em.
I also had these spring-powered guns that shot an arrow-type thing with a suction cup on the end. My sister and I would shoot at each other, and try to make it stick on the other’s forehead. It’s amazing there’s still 4 working eyes between us.
Today, I saw an antique.
It was a little box. Brightly colored, in red, white, and blue. ROLL CAPS FOR HANDGUNS, it said.
Used to be, you could get those for a dime in any dime store in the country.
I examined the box. There wasn’t any clear explanation of exactly why you needed roll caps for a handgun… or, for that matter, any safety warning, despite the fact that the box clearly stated that it was a gunpowder product.
Of course, this particular little box was a relic of another time, back before the Safety Nazis and the Association Of People Who Want To Make The World Safe For Stupid People With Lawyers succeeded in their crusade to have warning labels put on every stinkin’ thing in creation.
Anyone who knew anything about Back Then could have told you what these things were. They were a form of children’s toy.
Roll caps were intended to be rigged inside toy pistols… known to we who dwelt in ancient times as “cap pistols.” You threaded them through the works, and when you pulled the trigger, the hammer would fall on one of the little brown blisters full of gunpowder, making a loud and satisfying BANG.
Well, not a BANG, per se. More of a loud firecrackery snapping sound. Still, it was much louder and more fun than just pulling the trigger and hearing it click.
If you were feeling bored, you could get Dad’s hammer out, and blast a whole roll of caps to hell with one blow. It made a fine BANG sound, as well as discoloring the concrete beneath it, so you wanted to watch where you pulled this particular trick, but oh, my, it was fun… and you didn’t have to wait until the Fourth Of July to buy caps, either.
As I stood there in the antique store, looking at this box of ancient caps… maybe dating back as far as the seventies, or more… I thought about how one would explain this little box to a denizen of the early 21st Century.
“Yeah, they’re little tabs of gunpowder, on a long red paper roll. Yes, gunpowder. And kids play with them. They stick them in toy FIREARMS, to make the shots sound more like real gunshots.”
I could already hear the horrified gasps of imaginary parents.
“Yeah, I had a cap pistol when I was a kid. Y’know, for playin’ cops and robbers, cowboys and indians, and such. Friend of mine had a REAL neat gun, too… a Lone Ranger gunfighter set… gunbelts made of REAL LEATHER, and little cartridge loops in the back with REAL SILVER BULLETS in ‘em, right? (actually chromed plastic, but what did WE know? We were children…) And you could actually open the revolvers’ cylinders and actually LOAD UP those silver bullets, into the chambers! I mean, those guns were almost REAL! They actually did everything REAL Colt Revolvers did, except actually fire real bullets that made real holes in people!”
And I can hear, across the ether, the horrified gabble of angry mothers, gleeful lawyers, and avaricious child psychiatrists.
When I was a boy, they sold a variety of interesting toys. You could buy most forms of popular ordinance in toy form. I remember Lugers, Broomhandle Mausers, Colt .45s, Browning High Power Automatics, Thompson Submachine guns, a whole slew of M-16s (it was the Vietnam era, after all…), and I even remember toy Garand rifles of real wood with actual working gunbolts… I remember, during the height of the James Bond 007 popularity wave, you could buy a variety of shoulder holsters, toy spring-clips, concealed knives, rockets, and weaponry… even a briefcase that could be rigged to dispense throwing knives, and came with a disassembleable rifle that could be rigged to shoot through the closed briefcase it came in!
Nowadays, when I find myself in the toy aisle at Wal-Mart (which is where, according to statistics, MOST American children get their toys these days)… you aren’t likely to find much in the way of toy guns. Water pistols, molded in colored translucent plastic, is about as close as you’re likely to get to any kind of realistic weaponry. Oh, and large expensive water cannons molded in carnival colors, and which can shoot pressurized water jets powerful enough to nail someone’s cat two houses down the street, or peel the paint off your porch at a range of five feet.
I find this interesting.
I first began to see this line of thinking not long after Vietnam… around 1976 or so… when trends were leaning away from war toys. Even with the Reagan Revolution, when GI Joe quit being an adventurer, and went back to being a high-tech soldier, you didn’t see the massive batteries of toy armaments on the shelves that you used to. They just… weren’t… cool any more.
And nowadays, it’s irrelevant. Bringing toy guns to school these days can get your kid expelled, arrested, and psychoanalyzed, and your fitness as a parent loudly and intimidatingly questioned, publicly. There’s a case on record where a kid was expelled for bringing his GI JOE’S toy pistol to school – a tiny .45 automatic, about an inch long – but still in violation of the school’s “zero tolerance” policy. There’s another one, dating from 2000, where four fourth-grade boys were suspended for running around POINTING at each other, and shouting, “Bang! Bang!”
Pointing with their FINGERS, that is. Zero tolerance is zero tolerance. In an age where teeners can blaze their way into legend and oblivion in a hail of gunfire, school officials take no chances.
Admittedly, the kind of tyranny that this sort of thinking brings about is exactly the sort of thing that makes kids WANT to shoot up a school or two… but, hey, better to be dam’d for DOING something than for doing NOTHING, right? If you’re a school administrator, anyway.
But I stood in that antique store, and looked at that tiny, harmless, carnival-colored box that once held paper and gunpowder, and I thought about it. I never shot up a school. Neither did anyone in my entire generation. And we went to school in TEXAS, durnit! We all HAD guns, and knew how to use them! We all of us, durn near, went hunting with our dads every deer season, dove season, quail season! Heck, some of us didn’t even bother waiting for the season, or with hunting licenses, for that matter!
And it is true that a few of us – a very few, comparitively – wound up using these guns on each other. Each generation has its murderers.
But none of us ever shot up a school. It never occurred to ANY of us to do that.
School shooters are a new breed. Different bunch. They were all born well after Viet Nam, well after the beginning of the Reagan Years… in an age where toy guns weren’t made to look realistic… when they didn’t come with toy bullets, or working gunbolts… and you couldn’t buy roll caps for them. These children grew up without ever seeing the violence of those old cowboys-and-indians movies, where innocent settlers caught arrows in their breasts, and died dramatically, and indians got shot off their horses in record numbers.
Nope. The school shooters were born into a different age… an age of political correctness, an age where televised violence was monitored and discussed and criticized and argued… not taken for granted.
Makes y’think, don’t it?
I lost my front two teeth on the unpadded part of a trampoline railing after Robert Callaway shouted in my ear. I lost my balance, my face went forward, and I got to kiss my teeth goodbye.
So it’s a good thing that they’re disappearing.
Robin, who has also sprained her ankles on those things.
That was some of kind of consumer show with Jane Curtin as the reporter and Dan Ackroyd as Irving Mainway, the owner of the company. Great stuff!
Robin
A good point raised earlier in this thread, is nothing that has been banned (even Jarts) is anything like as dangerous as a bike. I am not sure if Children are rally gaining from having these toys unavailable. I know I learnt Chemistry up to A-level standard from my Chemistry set before I was 13.
The best games are the ones that you make up yourself.
My personal favorite is “Wagon Train.” Take four or five wagons and tie them together with jump ropes. Go to the top of the block (which is on a hill), fill the wagons with kids, and make one person pull the whole thing down the hill.
It doesn’t really matter how strong the kid who does the pulling is, because they’re mostly there to steer. The wagons roll pretty well down the hill once they start going, so the real trick is not getting run over.
The only bad thing about Wagon Train is that once the wagons get on level ground (about halfway down the block), either they would be going so fast that they would bang into each other and grind to a halt or hit a bump and dump kids all over the place (including, on one memorable occasion, onto a pile of sticks that ended up causing several puncture wounds).
Did anyone ever play with sparklers? We used to be allowed when we were kids-I mean, as young as three. We’d just stand there waving them around.
Good god, that was fun.
The dangerous 70’s toys were the best! I had a Red Ryder BB gun, jarts, SST cars, a huge chemistry set, a skateboard made from steel wheels on a 2x4, cap guns, bottle rockets, Hot Wheels car launcher, go-cart, Honda 3-wheeler, and many more. I’ve make a tennis ball cannon. The ‘bad kids’ up the street made a battery cannon. They had a length of pipe, capped at one end that a D cell battery would just slide into. Drop in a cherry bomb, drop in a battery, and BOOM! The battery went about 1/4 mile. Do you know that if you fire a bottle rocket into a swimming pool that it will explode under water like a depth charge?
The only injuries that required a visit to the doctor were bike related - one broken arm, and one stitched knee.
You weren’t near any Presidential motorcades at the time, were you?
I mean, it WOULD explain a few things…
Tire Swings – tons of fun for every kid except the ones who happen to be riding it during the last, ill-fated voyage.
Microwave-Victim Barbie – not an official Mattel product.
Broomstick Nunchuks – for the low price of an old broomstick, a short length of chain, and two eye-bolts, you can learn definitively that you are NOT the next Bruce Lee.
I can’t remember the name of it, but I had some kind of wax car factory, which allowed you to melt a hunk of wax and pour it into a car-shaped mold along with 2 little axles w/ wheels. I recall burning my hands several times with that one. I also remember that after using the initial supply of wax that came with the kit, we melted crayons. That worked great unless you didn’t remove all of the wrapper, as a scrap of paper would sometimes catch fire. Of course, “accidentally” including such a scrap paper was a common “mistake”.
My father had a pool table in our basement. My older sister convinced me that a fun game to play was a twisted kind of pool table mercy, in which players took turns whipping pool balls at the other player’s fingers, which were tightly gripping the far cushion and were not allowed to move. Of course, the rules of this game included a very strict Ladies First Rule, so my sister got to go first, and I never got a turn, being too busy howling in pain. Before you condemn my sister for pulling such a cruel trick on me, you should know that I played this game with her no less than 3 times.
Oh, and a note regarding those water-pump rockets (awesome toys, BTW). A schoolmate and I once decided that the range could be increased by using a carbonated liquid, such as Sprite. On our first trial, we filled the rocket with Sprite, shook it up, then pumped it up. The launch got us very sticky, but we achieved no increase in range. Duh! By shaking it up before pumping we didn’t actually increase the pressure – just decreased the amount of times we could pump. So, for the 2nd trial, we filled the rocket, pumped it up, then proceeded to shake it. The plastic rocket cracked on the launcher and sprayed us with Sprite. We were left very sticky and unsatisfied.
Oh my god this is bringing back a flood of memories. I’ve done so many of these things. The lawn darts, tennis ball cannons, fun with Estes rocket engines, fun with black powder, fun with gasoline, etc…
I have vivid memories of those long red rolls of caps with the little blisters of gun powder. Using them in the guns got boring pretty quickly. I would fold them up accordian style so all the little blisters were on top of each other and then wrap them in tape really tight and light it on fire. Got some good bangs when they all went off. Next stage was to thread a pin threw each of the blisters as I accordianed them. Tape it all up nice and tight with the pin still sticking out from each side. Take one of those big square batteries that are about 4x4x4 and hook a wire to each side of the pin, the pin heated up and boom, little bombs. Had great fun laying landmines for my army figures.
We would take new tennis balls and soak them in gasoline light them on fire and play soccer in the street with them. Not really soccer more just kicking the flaming ball at each other. Once that got old we put it into the spokes of a bike and lit it on fire. Not a good idea, we didn’t think of the centrfugal force and the spray of flaming gasoline as we road down the street.
Those are the fun toys, things that burn or go boom!!
Which is precisely what we did. Shooting them at eachother rather than having someone die, that is. We would go off with those red pump plastic rockets (the short fat ones, not the long pointed ones) and pump them up and shoot them at eachother. We also used those flying disc guns that shot the nickel sized plastic disks at the same time. We kept the rocket as a “grenade” to be used as a last resort. We never pumped them as hard as we could but damn those things hurt when they hit you from about 10 feet away. We had plenty of bruises, got knocked off our feet several times, but never any broken bones. The aim on those things were also very bad. They hit hard enough to knock out teeth and eyes, I am sure. I think we just got very lucky not to break a bone with those things.
This is what unsupervised kids do. 
depends, i would be a whole lot fatter if i did not have good ol’ tramp. i think they’re great and hope they’re around for a long time to come.
man talk about some fun. one fun game i still like to play is called launchers (or by it’s perveted name getting off on the tramp). essentially you and a friend try to time your jumps to launch the other person off.
who can forget coming down when the membrane is coming up. your knees fail under the strain so quickly you don’t even feel it. man i can’t wait for spring now.
I’m really surprised that no one has mentioned little green plastic army men.
We used to light them on fire and listen to the little burning blobs of plastic z z z z z i l c h to the ground. It would also give you an apprecitation for what napalm could do to you. I got one of those little molten blobs on my arm. It took months to heal!
The great thing about caps was the poor quality control. You were never quite sure whether you’d get a little “piff” or a deafening “POP”.
Caps were best detonated with a hammer on a concrete surface. If you hit it squarely and had a decent amount of powder in the cap, you could feel the hammer recoil off the tiny explosion.