It’s holiday season once again, and that means that happy children everywhere will get their annual joyous surprise: the new list of Top Ten Most Dangerous Toys. Just 15 more shopping days, kids!
For 31 years, the group World Against Toys Causing Harm (WATCH) has cruised toy store aisles looking for brightly colored deathtraps that unsuspecting adults might accidentally purchase for their hapless offspring.
I check it out every year just to see what’s currently threatening our children with hazardous levels of fun and to see if anything remotely approaches the violently entertaining toys of my youth, back when we could have live ammo and real working bear traps.
There are toys that might put your eye out, and toys that have sharp edges. There are projectile toys such as the “Supremo Slingshot” which is prevented from firing anything besides harmless foam balls by a label, which sternly asks kids not to.
There are countless toys that can be ingested, such as the cups of “Mint Chocolate Chip” and “Marshmallow” ooze produced by the “Nickleodeon Gooze Super Scented Soda Fountain.” There is no nutritional listing for these taste temptations, although the box does add helpful cooking advice such as “DO NOT EAT! KEEP AWAY FROM FACE AND HAIR.”
But none of these playthings of death can compete with my own cherished childhood favorite, the yard dart.
Yard darts — marketed by one company as “Jarts” — were short javelins with heavy metal tips and big plastic fins that combined the skill of horseshoes with the pointiness of darts that weigh about the same as a tire iron. Two mildly dangerous games combined into one potentially lethal activity. What’s not to like?
What you did was, someone tossed a hula hoop about 35 feet away and you used an easy underhand motion to gently hurl your yard dart in the hopes of sticking it into the ground inside the hoop. There were several different official ways to play but we never used any of them. All we saw were nifty red and blue throwing knives capable of pinning a 12-year old to the ground, which was more or less what we tried to do.
We’d put the hoop out. We’d try and hit it. Eventually whichever kid was assigned to retrieve the darts would get fed up and just stand by the hoop to speed things up. The next obvious modification was to use an easy underhand motion to gently hurl your yard dart in the hopes of hitting that kid, who would laugh and try to duck in time. Then we’d change places and continue with our version of The Darwin Awards, Youth Edition.
We didn’t just try and murder each other, mind you. We also had plenty of self-inflicting games, like throwing the dart straight up to see how close you could let it get to you, a game that was lots of fun and guaranteed to push us into the national semi-finals of the annual “Too Stupid to Live” competition. Ultimately we quit, but not because of any injuries. Instead a wild toss took out our living room window and Mom took them away “before we did something dumb.”
Yard darts were finally outlawed for sale or import in the United States and Canada in 1998, after three deaths and 6,700 reported injuries. No word on how many windows suffered.
Of course, these days if I saw my son playing with one of these killers I’d have it away from him before he could blink, even if he was wearing a complete suit of armor. How dare he do something as stupid as what I used to do?
Son, if you’re reading this, play safely. Have a cup of ooze instead.