You need a Zorb!
Take two sweaters and a thick pair of sweatpants and grab your bb gun on the way out the door. There was an understood rule that banned head shots.
Bike helmets? Don’t get me started. We played tag on bikes, tyres only. We did the same thing when we were older with dirt bikes but mom apparently thought that crossed the line.
What’s so dangerous about these? I remember some kind of “Lab” toy that had a hot aluminum plate on which you cooked “Goo” into various shapes. Creeple-People or something like that. You could get the crap burned out of ya.
This thread brings back lots of memories.
Like when we used to jump hills in the old ‘Army Barracks’ (National Guard Training Grounds) down the street from the house where the old Nike sites where located. Without Helmets!!
And Jarts, oh my! We used to pool the neighborhood sets together so we wouldn’t have to walk back and forth so much. There would be several in the air at one time.
Remember when toys actually had pinch points? PINCH POINTS!
Yeesh, our kids won’t know what they’re missing (unless I go pilfer Grandpa’s Basement, he’s probably got some of that stuff still down there).
We used to have Extreme tree climbing where we would compete to see who could climb up the tree the highest and our parents SAW us doing this. Pencil thin branches 50 feet off the ground. :dubious:
Creepy Crawlers?
There was also the edible variety, Incredible Edibles.
They’re taking away teeter-totters now? (Of course, my brother used to wait 'til I was on the high side and then he’d jump off, but still.)
And obviously you haven’t been to Berlin lately.
Genuine Fisher-Price Little People. The junk Fisher-Price makes these days, and the evolution of Little People into hard plastic Cabbage Patch Kids are a crime against kid-hood. If it weren’t so self-indulgent, I’d be scouring eBay for the stuff I remember…Little People Hospital, A-Frame House, Houseboat…
To this day I wonder if a REAL tragedy ever happened due to their smallness, or if someone just got afraid that something would and they’d get sued.
Holy hell, I love the ad writing on that:
Not particularly awesome or unsafe, but the mention of klackety-klacks (which my wife and I were actually discussing less than a week ago!) reminded me of another toy of similar vintage.
Does anyone remember a toy that consisted of a couple of discs threaded on a looped string. You held one end of the string in each hand, twisted up the strings a bit, and then pulled on the ends to make the discs spin. You would alternate between pulling and releasing tension and the discs would keep spinning. The storebought ones had plastic discs with cool psychedelic patterns on them, but I recall making our own versions wioth large buttons and string.
I did a little searching and think they may have been called opee-ops or something similar, but couldn’t find a picture.
There should have been a warning sign:
ACHTUNG! KLACKERSCHRAPNEL!
We had non-motorized go-carts made of scrap wood with casters slapped on. You rode them down a hill and didn’t wear a helmet. It was also fun to ride shopping carts down hills.
Tire swings and rope swings were fun, though you could bash yourself against the tree or the rope could break or you could even strangle yourself if the rope got around your neck.
Someone mentioned “swordfighting” with kitchen knives. We did that too–we got the idea from “Romeo and Juliet.”
Thus proving yet again the importance of banning children from reading Shakespeare.
When I was a kid we kids of the neighborhood once spent two days cutting and decorating cardboard boxes to make “cars” out of our wagons (think Radio Flyer style) in preparation to ride them down a street that had a nice downhill grade to it. Sucks to figure out after you get going that wagons aren’t really known for their handling, steering, braking or shock absorbing qualities. They are known (at least to us) to crash and flip over like all get out.
God that was fun.
I was always a big fan of tear-assing full spead down any steep grade as a kid. We used to have races using bikes, wagons, bigwheels, scooters, whatever people had. They usually ended…badly.
My elementary school had this junglegym thing consisting of a geodesic dome of metal bars about three times the height of a typical fifth grader. It looked like something out of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (the “something” being the Thuderdome.)
There was nothing better than those big steel Tonka trucks with the sharp metal edges.
Except when you left the trucks out in the sandbox all summer, and they developed a nice layer of rust on those edges.
I can’t believe no one has mentioned those Wrist Rocket slingshots!
One summer, my friend and I built fencing swords out of sharpened dowels and her carpenter dad’s assorted wood scraps, and we would fight with them in the backyard. Not quite as bad as real butcher knives, but I’m still amazed nobody had their eye put out or got impaled.
There was a see-saw built out of a giant log in a playground my class used to go to. One day, the kid on the bottom of the see-saw got bored and got off the see-saw, sending the kid on the top crashing down to the ground, with the log smashing his foot and ankle.
By any chance, did you grow up near Steilacoom, Washington?
Oh hell yeah. BB tag. I still have the scar on the inside of my right elbow from the day it got too hot for my “armor” and my friend Tony thought it would be funny to load up a pellet. Although he swears he didn’t, I know he violated the 10-pump rule.
Man, by the time I was growing up they had already gotten rid of most of the dangerous toys so we had to be creative and make up our own ways of nearly killing ourselves.
We had a great sledding hill in our back yard (good enough that people we knew from 30-60 minutes away would come to use it) and we would build thick ice obstacles and jumps all over it which would be nearly invisible against the snow. Imagine going down a steep hill standing up on a sled (and this was before snowboarding became popular, we were cutting edge dammit!) and suddenly having the sled disappear from under you as you go flying 15-20 ft horizontally and smashing face first into the ground (or another ice block). God that was fun.