25 Toys From The 90s That Kids Aren t Allowed To Play With Anymore
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25 Toys From The 90s That Kids Aren t Allowed To Play With Anymore
There were many great toys in the 90s, but there were definitely some that probably should never have been made. Here are some of them. The '90s were certainly a decade full to the brim with exciting innovations in nearly every aspect of day to day life. Computers found their way into nearly every home. The internet as we know it grew from a toddler into an awkward, coming-of-age teenager. Robotic butlers tended to our mundane daily chores, we rode jet-powered skateboards to work, built our first dinosaur zoo, and The Phantom Menace kicked off a trilogy of the best Star Wars films to ever grace the screen. Man, what a time to be alive. And to be a child of the '90s? Forget it. It's not even a competition. The toys of this magical decade were the stuff of dreams and legends. Seriously though, I'm actually not lying about that bit. '90s toys were the pinnacle of toy making, period. Didn't we stop making toys altogether after that? I'm pretty sure we just issue kids copies of Minecraft and Fortnite at birth and call it a childhood, now. I honestly have no idea. Of course, you can't manufacture perfection without encountering a few hiccups along the road. To be a '90s kid was also to brave a merciless frontier of poor product quality testing and sometimes outright terrible ideas manifested as children's fare. Unfortunately, one cannot simply Bop It, Twist It, nor Pull It without risking life, limb, and delicate developing psyches. Here are twenty-five such toys that kids would never be allowed to play with today. THEGAMER VIDEO OF THE DAY Tamagotchi
via: asdagoodliving.co.uk If you didn't have a Tamagotchi, I'm pretty sure you didn't have a soul, much less a childhood. Regardless, these seemingly harmless virtual pets could inflict some real trauma, outside of endlessly distracting you from your grade school homework. The Tamagotchi's reliance on you and the potential for emotional attachment resulted in what was termed the "," with the prospect of the pet passing on due to neglect having the real capability to cause distress in owners. Later versions introduced a pause feature to cut back on the guilt factor, but by then plenty of kids had been emotionally scarred after forgetting about their Tamagotchi for half a day. Kinder Eggs
via: standard.co.uk Most toys branded a "hazard" come with a clear, visible warning that young children shouldn't be left alone with the toy, much less allowed to put it into their mouths. So can you imagine what happens when you cover a hazard with delicious chocolate? Yep, you guessed it. It's a pretty terrible idea. And that does a pretty good job of describing what the Kinder Egg is—it's a toy hidden within a chocolate shell, or "egg." The issue here is so glaringly obvious that the practice is actually illegal, and yet here we are. The CPSC for these chocolate enshrined gimmick toys in 1997, though that hasn't seemed to stop them from popping up. Lawn Darts
via: imgur.com (thump661699) Being absolutely fair, Lawn Darts were around much further back than the '90s. However, they continued being available and relatively popular until the late '80s and early '90s, even after repeated and well-publicized controversies. How exactly anyone thought it was a good idea to chuck these miniaturized javelins around in the presence of children is mind boggling, but the impressively lengthy list of Jart-related problems spanning from the '60s and into the '90s, including one particularly bad one resulting in a nationwide ban, probably still has Darwin seizing in his coffin. Super Soaker CPS2000
via: youtube.com (Water Warfare Network) Surprisingly, Super Soakers are , with several documented incidents concerning water gunfights escalating into heated, life-threatening exchanges. However, the CPS2000 was such a ludicrous implement of water warfare that it included a warning label directing kids to avoid aiming for the face. While the story about the kid that had a bad run-in with a CPS2000 is pretty well relegated to urban legend, the problems that have been reported and the presence of the warning label speak volumes. And if you've ever been on the receiving end of one of these high pressure water blasts, you'd be inclined to believe there's something to it. Pogo Ball
via: youtube.com (ido ben david) Known under a variety of different nicknames and brandings, the Pogo Ball consists of two primary components. It's a bouncy rubber ball, with a plastic platform secured around it for you to stand on. Then you just utilize it to bounce around. It's a simple concept, but unfortunately simplicity doesn't quite preclude the sheer amount of issues involved. Achieving peak fad status in the '80s and continuing well into the '90s, the Pogo Ball is just one of those painfully obviously flawed concepts that cause you to feel pretty safe questioning the abilities of any parent that would actually buy one. Teletubbies Talking Po
via: worthpoint.com The Teletubbies are pretty wholesome, right? In their own slightly disturbing sort of way, anyway. So what could possibly go wrong when it comes to a line of speaking toys based on the popular children's show? The problem is in the "speaking" part, if you needed a hint. The "Talking Po" toy recites several prerecorded lines of easily misunderstood gibberish, and we do mean . Rather than translate for you, we'll just link you to a recording of the toy's dialogue and let you draw your own conclusions. Obviously the outrageously offensive interpretations were unintentional, and are largely due to the thick accent of the woman that recorded the spoken lines. Creepy Crawlers Oven
via: triviahappy.com Operating on the same premise as the Easy Bake Oven, the Creepy Crawlers Oven unfortunately presents the same complications as its feminine counterpart. If we really need to point out the obvious here, you're not going to win any parenting awards by furnishing your kids with an oven hot enough to melt and mold plastic critters. But hey, a childhood spent baking potentially toxic "Plasti-Goop" while risking life long burn scarring is a childhood that builds character, am I right? Dick Tracy Steve The Tramp Figure
via: collectors.com While this pick isn't really bad by any means, it definitely manages to cross the line by a mile or two in terms of being completely insensitive concerning the social issue of homelessness. Released in 1990, the packaging features such gems as, "You'll smell him before you see him," then calling him "ignorant" and saying that he was "stinking up the city sewers," more or less cementing the concerns raised and ensuring it was after a remarkably short run. Skip-It
via: romper.com The Skip-It has a longer history than most '90s kids are privy to, being based on a toy from the 1960's called "Lemon Twist," which operated around the same familiar concept—you attach one end to your leg, spinning the weighted ball around to skip over it. The Skip-It we're familiar with hit shelves in the late '80s and peaked during the '90s. Naturally, the sheer velocity the weighted end could achieve could be bad for kids, pets, household items and pretty much everything within range, and then we get into the overt tripping hazard involved. In short, you could be forgiven for skipping the Skip-It. Nickelodeon Gak
via: reddit.com While it's pretty unfortunate that Nickelodeon chose a term that was already taken as a name for certain substances, this weird, oozy and sort-of gross "toy" was otherwise pretty harmless. Being honest, the case with Gak isn't really so much that '90s kids can't play with it anymore. It has more to do with the fact that these sticky amorphous blobs are all probably so encrusted with hair, lint, and dubious, unidentified substances that no one should want to play with it. Crocodile Dentist
via: pinterest.com This '90s game originally by Milton Bradley is a fairly fun and innocent concept, so long as your kid was smart enough to not go around the local zoo attempting to play dentist with live crocodiles. You tap the harmless plastic tooth, do it wrong, the croc clamps down on your hand. Easy, simple, silly fun. The problem we're seeing with this one actually has to do with the despair-inducing torrent of internet challenge fads, one of which has , nails, and other fun objects. This, people, is why we cannot have nice things. Ride-On Powered Vehicles
via: fisher-price.com You were probably one of the coolest kids on the block if you had one of these awesome, functional miniaturized motorcycles, cars or trucks. I mean come on, they're actually still pretty cool, if we're being honest. It's unfortunate that the massive battery powering them is also insanely problematic. The problem is that they had a tendency to, well, explode and catch fire while kids were riding them. The usual culprit is Fisher-Price, but apparently it's been a challenging issue to work out for several models and manufacturers, as en masse for the same reasons nearly every single time. Realistic Toy Guns
via: youtube.com (KIDS & TOYS SHOW) Toy versions of firearms have long been a point of contention, but this debate when a terrible incidents involving police and children playing with such a toy caused many retailers, including then-iconic Toys 'R Us to pull any remotely realistic toy gun from its shelves. Of course, toys along these lines are still pretty easy to find, and the issues they present persist to this day, regardless of the controversy or measures taken to ensure they aren't mistaken for the real thing in the hands of a youngster. Puppy Surprise
via: flickr.com If you're looking to prompt an incredibly awkward and uncomfortable battery of questions from your children the next time you sit down at dinner, I can think of no better way than to purchase them a toy that simulates the puppy process. And that's pretty much the story with Puppy Surprise! Hitting the market with near rabid popularity, this one is sure to have resulted in no shortage of complete misconceptions concerning how babies are made. Snap Bracelets
via: amazon.com There is absolutely no way that you avoided contact with this accursed fad between the late '80s and early '90s if you were school aged. It didn't take long for these this odd hybridization between fashion accessories and toys to be banned from school districts all over the United States. Amazingly, the annoyance and distraction factors were secondary issues concerning the bans. Once the plastic casing wore off, the edges and "snappy" nature of the underlying metal , making it capable of some pretty bad cuts. Pocket Rockers
via: youtube.com (Keith Yates) Occupying the same bizarre and unnecessary niche that HitClips would be known to occupy later on, the Pocket Rocker was a terrible miniaturized stereo that played proprietary two-song cassettes with totally abysmal sound quality. It had a short, if somewhat lively run, releasing in the late '80s and being discontinued in 1991 after sales completely plummeted. There were only roughly sixty songs that had been transferred to its cassette's format during its lifespan, which sort of begs the question of why you'd want one in the first place. Spanish Barbie Doll
via: flickr.com If you were just itching to get your hands on a toy that straddles the delicate line between "culturally insensitive" and "advocating cruelty," then maybe the Spanish Barbie is the toy of your dreams. She strikes a perfect balance between the two by donning a matador's outfit, and she wasn't on the shelves long before she managed to that quickly resulted in her being pulled and ultimately discontinued by Mattel. Bandito Bashin Mike Action Figure
via: collectors.com While we're on the topic of culturally insensitive action figures, why don't we feast our eyes on this Teenage Mutant Misstep? Can you imagine actually being the dude that thought this was a fantastic marketing angle? Needless to say, the clear cut caricature meant that this one often got passed over in favor of less stereotyped turtles by conscientious parents. And one can hardly blame them for doing so. Needless to say, Bandito Mike here wouldn't stand a chance of hitting the shelves today. Cabbage Patch Kids Snacktime Doll
via: entertainment.howstuffworks.com Another '90s hallmark was the increasing prevalence of dolls that imitated real life, with each wave of them attempting to one-up the functions and "realism" of those preceding it. One such entry was Mattel's Snacktime Kid from the Cabbage Patch line in 1996. It's initially concerning that you would feed anything to your weird little cyborg doll, but it gets worse. Especially considering that the doll didn't really differentiate between its play food and things like human hair and fingers. Coupled with the fact that the thing was designed to continue "eating" until its mouth was clear of debris and you've got a recipe for a real horror story. Slip N Slide
via: department.monm.edu Now this one's sure to stir distant memories of summer days in the back yard, running and diving onto what was essentially just a tarp slicked with water from the hose. Or maybe it'll kindle slightly less fond memories of times being hurt, depending on your luck. Funnily enough, this was less of a problem for kids and more of one for teens and adults, The exhaustive list of documented problems is more than a little concerning, to say the very least. That's one way to end a nostalgia buzz, I guess. And it's an even better way to make modern parents think twice before letting their children take the dive. Er, slide. You know what I mean.