Wednesday, August 12, 2009

"It Sells Very Well, as a Matter of Fact, You Know? It's Just Broken Glass, You Know?"

The Daily News lists the top 10 dangerous toys, a collection that brings to mind the old Saturday Night Live sketches featuring Dan Aykroyd as slimy toy salesman Irwin Mainway, who went on talk shows to promote such wonderful toys as Johnny Switchblade: Adventure Punk and Bag O' Glass.

My brother and I were too young for lawn darts and too old for that Chucky-like Cabbage Patch doll on the list, but we had some toys that by today's standards would be considered questionable.

Man, I loved Micronauts. These dolls action figures had a crazy ancient Egypt theme, and those little white hands, reminiscent of the white gloves worn by Bugs Bunny or Mickey Mouse, were easy to remove and not too difficult to choke on.

Plus, looking back, I think they were responsible for my wanting to be buried in a pyramid.

I never owned a Riviton, but my cousin-with-all-the-cool-toys did. This primitive thing allowed you to fuse pieces of plastic together using smelly plastic rivets (those little rabbit-poo-looking things in the lower right of the photo).

Apparently there was a recall due to the very obvious choking hazard (and I know that when I played with this toy it was much later than 1978), but I had a different, potentially dangerous interaction with them. While everyone else was downstairs, I was in my cousin's room and noticed that if you squeezed the rivet, which was like a hollowed-out bullet, you could stick it to your skin via the wonders of suction. Multiply that by about 50 times, and I was starting to look like Darth Maul. When I removed them about 20 minutes later, red blistery dots remained on my face, much to my parents' horror. Fortunately, they faded after about an hour.



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