25 Days Of Creepy Christmas, Day 9: The 10 Deadliest Toys Ever Produced

Welcome to our first annual ViralNova Presents: 25 Days Of Creepy Christmas special section! Every day, from December 1st to December 25th, we’re posting a new Christmas-themed article guaranteed to get you in the creepy holiday spirit.

Whether you’re just starting or finishing up your holiday shopping, you’re probably on the lookout for the hottest toys of the holiday season. However, there’s always the risk that you might buy something dangerous for your child or young relatives. Whatever you do, avoid these 10 dangerous toys.

This classic game was only supposed to be marketed towards adults, yet most stores still geared their ads towards kids. The concept behind lawn darts is simple: you throw large, steel-tipped darts at plastic circles about 35 feet away and try to hit them. I think you can see where this is going.

Children and potentially deadly playthings don’t mix. It turns out that if you accidentally got hit with one of these lawn darts, you could end up seriously injured or dead. According to estimates, the force of a thrown lawn dart is equal to 23,000 pounds of pressure per inch. To put that in another way, if someone threw a lawn dart at you, accidental or otherwise, it could pierce your skull.

Despite this, retailers kept selling the game throughout the 70s and 80s. Finally, after hundreds of reported injuries and three deaths, the government finally banned Lawn Darts for good in 1988.

These little water balls, promised to expand to colossal size once they were placed in water. According to the Canadian government, they could potentially expand up to 400 times their size. Sounds kind of cool, right?

Well, they’re only cool if used properly in the sink or bathtub instead of in your small intestine. However, that was the situation many toddlers and children found themselves in thanks to this product. What made things even worse for kids was the fact that these water balls didn’t even show up on x-rays and needed surgery to remove.

This toy, released for the 2007 holiday season, proved that dangerous toys are not a thing of the past. The idea behind this science kit was to allow kids to dust for fingerprints. The problem was that the dust used to find fingerprints happened to be full of asbestos.

According to advocacy groups, the dust was up to 7 percent tremolite, one of the most dangerous forms of asbestos. That 7 percent is more than enough to cause serious health problems later in life.

The worst part is that CBS Consumer Products, the company licensing the toy, knew about the asbestos and still left it on shelves in the run-up to Christmas that year. It took the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization filing a lawsuit to finally stop sales of the kit.

Who wouldn’t love to walk around with trampolines strapped to your feet? This sounds like a good idea to me. However, not everyone saw Moon Shoes that way.

It was easy for a bad jump to land you in the hospital with a broken ankle or worse. Moon Shoes were also made out of lots of tiny and incredibly sharp pieces of metal. It’s a wonder that no one was ever killed while wearing these.

Mattel released the now-infamous Snacktime Cabbage Patch Kid for the 1996 holiday season. What made this particular doll cool was that it “ate” plastic pieces of food. It had a motor on the mouth and a metal roller in the back that spat out the “eaten” food into the doll’s backpack.

However, the dolls would eat pretty much anything you put in their mouth, including the fingers and hair of their human playmates. After disturbing stories of these dolls “eating” their humans, Mattel issued a voluntary recall for them in January 1997.

These malfunctioning mini-boats were every parent’s worst nightmare. They looked safe and sturdy enough to set your baby afloat on. However, these tiny boats had a tendency to easily tear and deflate.

You can imagine this didn’t go over well with parents. Luckily, no children ever drowned because of the defective product. Manufacturer Aqua Leisure eventually had to pay out $650,000 after resisting the courts for six years.

The Easy Bake Oven was a staple toy for many children throughout the years. However, the latest model in 2007 had a potentially deadly design flaw that allowed the oven to trap and burn children’s fingers.

During the year leading up to the recall, over 250 incidents were reported. This included 16 cases of second and third degree burns. One little girl had to undergo a partial finger amputation because of the design flaw. Hasbro eventually recalled one million of the new, plastic Easy Bake Ovens.

More than 30 million Slip ‘N Slides were sold across America since its debut in 1961. For the most part, Slip ‘N Slides provide a great way to beat the summer heat. Yet in 1993, the Consumer Product Safety Commission started issuing warnings about Slip ‘N Slides.

Several teenagers and adults severely injured themselves using the toy, which could not handle their size and weight. Several people were paralyzed and/or received severe neck injuries this way. Not long after, Slip ‘N Slide was taken off the market. It reappeared around 2000, with a new warning on the box indicating it was for ages 5 to 12 only.

This ship was one of the first toys to feature fireable missiles. It is also the reason toys these days with small parts come with warning labels. Everything was well and good with this toy until a 4-year-old tragically shot the toy missile into his mouth and choked to death on it.

Mattel recalled the toy in 1978, and any toy with parts smaller than a baseball from then on was required to have a choking hazard warning on the box.

This children’s science set from the 1950s takes the cake as one of the most dangerous toys ever produced. It was touted as “the most elaborate Atomic Energy educational set ever produced,” and for good reason.

The kit contained four samples of Uranium ore (what nuclear weapons are made from). It also contained an order form for more just in case you wanted to build your own, home-grown atomic bomb.

What a terrible idea. I wonder how many kids got sick from playing with Uranium? I’d love to see how fast this would get pulled off of the shelves in 2014.

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