14 Toys Pennsylvania Kids Played With That Would Never Be Sold Today

A toy oven once burned a child’s finger so badly that doctors had to remove part of it.

It sat on Pennsylvania kitchen tables for decades before anyone recalled it.

Half the backyard and basement favorites from those years carried a recall, a lawsuit, or a banned ingredient.

These are the toys Pennsylvania kids grew up with that no store would stock today.

1. Lawn Darts

Lawn darts turned a Pennsylvania backyard into a hazard the whole neighborhood shared.

Each dart was a foot-long metal spike with enough weight to split a skull, tossed underhand toward a plastic ring in the grass.

Kids ran to fetch them while other kids were still throwing.

You can guess how that went.

After the weighted darts killed three children, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) banned them in 1988 and told families to break the darts they still owned.

Not recall them. Destroy them.

2. Clackers

Clackers handed a kid two hard acrylic spheres on a string and asked them to smash the two together as fast as possible.

The faster you swung, the louder the crack.

Then they shattered mid-swing.

Cheap acrylic under that much force did more than crack. It threw shards at whoever held the string.

Federal regulators pulled the versions that fractured and flung pieces, and the rules still list them as a mechanical hazard.

Schools banned them first.

3. The Atomic Energy Lab

The Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab put actual radioactive material in a box built for kids.

A.C. Gilbert, the company behind Erector sets, sold it around 1950 with samples of uranium ore, a working Geiger counter, and a cheerful guide to splitting the atom.

None of it was pretend.

The set cost about fifty dollars, a small fortune then, so few Pennsylvania kids ever found it under the tree.

Collectors now trade it as a museum piece, and more than a few call it the most dangerous toy ever sold.

4. Creepy Crawlers

Creepy Crawlers ran on an open hot plate that Mattel handed to grade-schoolers.

You squeezed liquid plastic into metal molds, set them on the burner, and waited for rubbery bugs to harden.

That plate reached 390 degrees.

The molds stayed painfully hot long after the bugs peeled out, and burned fingertips were the cost of a rubber spider.

The burns were routine.

Mattel dropped the original in 1973, once tougher safety rules arrived.

5. Missile-Firing Space Toys

Mattel’s Battlestar Galactica toys fired little plastic missiles across a Pennsylvania living room, and kids loved the range on them.

The Colonial Viper launched a red missile small enough to swallow.

In 1979, a four-year-old put a missile in his mouth, inhaled it, and died.

Mattel ran a replacement program and glued the missiles down on every ship it had already sold.

The whole industry followed.

Spring-loaded missiles that small never came back.

6. The Easy-Bake Oven

The Easy-Bake Oven baked cupcakes under a hot light bulb, a fixture on Pennsylvania kitchen tables for generations.

The 2006 front-loading model was the problem.

Small hands slid into the front opening and jammed against the heating element.

It burned.

The CPSC tallied 249 trapped hands and one partial amputation, a five-year-old who lost part of a finger, before Hasbro recalled around a million ovens in 2007.

7. Aqua Dots

A tray of tiny beads, a spritz of water, and Aqua Dots fused them into a flat picture.

The coating did the sticking.

Swallowed, that coating turned into the same compound as a date-rape drug inside the body.

Two children ate the beads and slipped into comas.

Both pulled through.

Spin Master recalled 4.2 million kits in 2007, and the beads never returned in that form.

8. Sky Dancers

Sky Dancers looked harmless, a foam-winged fairy doll a kid launched into the air from a pull-string base.

Then physics took over.

The dolls shot up fast and flew off in an unpredictable direction, often straight at a face.

Galoob logged scratched corneas, broken teeth, and a mild concussion or two.

After about 150 injury reports, the company recalled 8.9 million of them in 2000.

Aim was never part of the deal.

9. Magnetix

Magnetix was a building set for kids, snapping together with small magnets tucked inside plastic rods and squares.

The magnets worked loose and fell out.

A child who swallowed two of them faced an emergency because the magnets snapped together across the intestinal wall and pinched the tissue shut.

A 20-month-old boy died that way.

The child's death prompted a Magnetix replacement program in 2006, covering 3.8 million sets.

Three more kids needed surgery.

10. The CSI Fingerprint Kit

Every kid who watched the CBS crime show CSI: Crime Scene Investigation wanted to dust a doorknob for prints, and this fingerprint kit let them.

The danger sat in the dusting powder.

Labs tested that powder in the late 2000s and turned up asbestos, the fiber that scars lungs decades down the line.

A licensed TV tie-in shouldn't carry a carcinogen.

CBS and the stores that sold it settled and offered refunds.

11. Snacktime Cabbage Patch Kids

The Snacktime Cabbage Patch Kids doll chewed plastic fries and beans through motorized jaws.

There was no off switch.

The jaws kept pulling in whatever reached the mouth, and that came to include kids' hair and fingers.

Parents pried children loose from a doll that wouldn't stop chewing.

Mattel pulled the dolls and offered a refund in January 1997.

12. Buckyballs

Buckyballs were an adult desk toy, sets of tiny, high-powered magnet balls sold for stacking into sculptures.

Teens swallowed them anyway, often while mimicking a tongue or lip piercing.

Two magnets that meet inside the gut clamp together and tear a hole where they pinch.

Emergency rooms filled with cases.

After a long fight, the CPSC recalled the sets by 2014.

13. Asbestos in the Crayon Box

Crayola crayons came out of Binney & Smith in Easton, the one toy on this list made in Pennsylvania.

In 2000, testing found trace asbestos in some crayons, traced to the talc used to firm up the wax.

The amounts were small, and the risk was low.

Low isn't zero.

The crayon makers agreed to drop talc and reformulate within months.

Every crayon in a Pennsylvania pencil box today follows a different recipe because of it.

14. The Water Wiggle

The Water Wiggle screwed onto a garden hose and thrashed around the yard, soaking anyone brave enough to grab it.

A soft bell-shaped cap covered the metal nozzle underneath.

That cap came off.

With the nozzle bare, it could lodge in a child's mouth and hold fast.

Two children drowned that way, one child in 1975 and another in 1978.

Wham-O recalled roughly 2.5 million of them in the spring of 1978.