My Little Panzer

Perfectly safe and perfectly real, honest..

Yogurt: Merchandising, merchandising! Where the real money from the movie is made! Spaceballs the T-shirt, Spaceballs the coloring book, Spaceballs the lunch box, Spaceballs the breakfast cereal, Spaceballs da flamethrowah!
[turns on flamethrower]
Dink, Dink, Dink, Dink, Dink, Dink: Ooooh!

Yogurt: The kids love this one.
—Spaceballs

Who says Evil Is Not a Toy? Some fictional children's toys are so dangerous, they have no business being children's toys!

Values Dissonance often comes into play, due to cultural perceptions both of what is and is not dangerous for kids and how long it takes for kids to "grow up." (Theodore Roosevelt reportedly could fire a gun at age 10, whereas most kids that age nowadays might still be playing with Play-Doh.)

Olympus Mons could be considered the organic equivalent; just replace "toys" with "pets."

The trope name is a pun on My Little Pony. Not to be confused with mein little tank. Compare other failures to regulate safety in TV Land: No OSHA Compliance, Social Services Does Not Exist, There Are No Therapists. Not to be confused with wonderful toys (although those are often effectively the same thing).

Examples of My Little Panzer include:

Anime

  • Bakugan should get a warning sticker of their own as of New Vestroia's second season. Good thing their real world equivalents cannot transform into their true forms.
  • Battle B-daman launchers cause some pretty painful (if minor) injuries in the anime. Real life versions can put an eye out under certain circumstances.
  • Beyblade: With some of the things Beyblades do to each other in the anime, they wouldn't be approved for kids in most real countries. The real ones are much less dangerous, but you should always make sure the parts are on tight.
  • Crush Gear Turbo: Crush Gear vehicles have a tendency to fly apart.
  • Taken to the extreme with Danball Senki. LBX literally have a military application and have been used in assassinations before. However, due to the creation of the Fortified Cardboard, it has become the most popular children's toy the world has ever seen!
  • Girls und Panzer is Exactly What It Says on the Tin: high-school girls (and in the spinoff Little Army, middle-school girls) who fight battles with WWII tanks as a sport. Live ammo. No helmets or seatbelts. Inexplicably, there's never any serious injuries shown, even when tanks get shot or flipped over -- the worst is some scrapes, smudges, and cracked glasses, but there's always a chorus of "We're okay!".
  • Medabots carry weapons that can damage the surrounding landscape, concrete and steel included. They're quite popular with the kids. Fortunately the live weapons have only appeared in video games. However this doesn't change the fact that the Medabots have self-healing capabilities and are VERY durable. If it weren't for the fact that their medals can be ejected with enough damage (or manually) these thing could take over the world.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh: Duel Monsters really should come with the following disclaimer: "WARNING -- May cause getting kidnapped by evil organizations, Freak Outs, Mind Rape, the emergence of a Super-Powered Evil Side, summoning of Eldritch Abominations, soul-stealing, and various physical hazards up to and including death. Not for loners or anyone with Parental Issues." (Not to mention skipping school and going broke.) Note to Pegasus: never design a children's card game based on ancient Egyptian mythology. Especially if you have an ancient Egyptian Artifact of Doom implanted in your eye socket!
    • Even worse near the start, where just about every game or toy was turned into a game that resulted in someone breaking psychologically.

Comic Books

  • The Beano had a long-running strip featuring "General Jumbo", a schoolboy who had a fully functional remote-control set of toy soldiers and military vehicles created for him by a friendly neighbourhood Mad Scientist. He used them to fight crime. A number of British comic creators have gone on to create Expies, most notably Robin "Toybox" Slinger and her father "Colonel Lilliput" in Top Ten and "General Tubbs" in Jack Staff.
  • There was/is an european (most likely franco-belgian) comic called Charly that features a young boy and his Captain Lightning starship toy. It floats. It has lasers. It can blow a hole in a wall large enough to walk through (and kill an unfortunate sheep on the other side). The goverment finds out about it, things escalate and the toy demonstrates that it is quite capable of annihilating a squad of special forces. At some point there was a background story about a different boy with a tank toy.


Fan Works

  • Tiny Robo and Lesser Mazinger from Undocumented Features' Symphony of the Sword stories definitely count, although their owners had no idea of the full range of their abilities. When 6-inch Tiny Robo finally unlimbered his Atomic Buster Cannon and vaporized a steel door with it, Utena resolved to have a Serious Talk with the not-a-toy's creator.

Film

  • Spaceballs had The Flamethrower. Da Flamethrowah!
  • Small Soldiers: This is the premise of the movie. The reason the toys are so dangerous is that they used military-grade artificial intelligence so the toys could "play back". A.I. Is a Crapshoot. They might've been safe had they bothered to program in The Laws and Customs of War. As it was, the soldiers came out as the single-minded psychopaths they designed (see the lawn darts below for another such brainfart). Ironically, though, the monstrous, presumably intended to be "villainous" Gorgonite toys are rather personable.
    • The Gorgonites are personable because their original designer conceived them as a subversion of Beauty Equals Goodness. **Although that really doesn't explain how that bled into their actual programming, since the programmer was a guy totally onboard with casting them as the villains.
      • They were programmed to be antagonists. They are good because the other guys are evil.
  • In the film Jumanji, games of Jumanji could qualify, being a cursed artifact disguised as a game. Especially unfinished and abandoned games. Zathura, too. Well, they do warn you. Junmanji warns you and then pulls you into the game if you even glance at the pieces.
  • Toy Story: Never outright addressed, but some of the toys seem a bit too dangerous for little kids to play with. The Buzz Lightyear figure alone is rather dangerous when you think about it. His wings have the capability to pop out with enough force to tear through duct tape like it was wet tissue, and the helmet flips back and forth rather swiftly too, it was enough to make Woody cry out in pain anyway. Also, while his laser certainly isn't a gun, the singular point it makes suggests it is an actual laser pointer, which can easily blind a child for life. In the sequel, Stinky Pete's pickaxe is apparently sharp enough to cut through fabric easy enough and function as a screwdriver.
    • The "laser" on an actual Buzz Lightyear toy is a red LED. This probably applies in-universe as well. A scrapped plot point for the third film involved Andy actually getting hurt by a malfunctioning Buzz. Though, this is somewhat beside the point, since a fully functional Buzz is still pretty dangerous on its own.
      • The Toy Story Toon "Small Fry" parodied the subject of recalled toys. One kids meal toy in the support group was recalled because one of its parts fly off it. The toy doesn't explain about it, but after the recalled toy says "I was recalled because...", the part mentioned earlier flies off of the toy.
  • The sci-fi movie Evolver features a robotic AI toy that just happens to have been installed with a state-of-the-art weapons-grade military AI chip; The robot is meant to be a harmless children's game, but it soon begins learning how to arm itself with more lethal weapons. The Evolver unit was originally a military battle robot prototype that was re-purposed after killing people in a field test. It got made into the grand prize for the top scorer of the Evolver VR Game so that they could play it in real life. The problem starts when its military programming that was left in gets reactivated by the protagonist's sister dramatically "dying" after it scores a "kill" on her and she gets back up. It realizes that its "weapons" aren't lethal, as they're "supposed" to be, to it the Evolver game is a live fire War Game and refits itself to compensate.
  • Toys: This Robin Williams vehicle focused on the new owner of a toy factory switching production to toy tanks and helicopters armed with real weapons he meant to sell to the military. He also starts a videogame division to get kids into violence in order to have future soldiers. The videogame was actually a simulation/prototype. The new owner's plan was to have kids remote-control operate actual war machines without knowing it.
  • The Santa Clause: Tim Allen's character speaks out against his company's design for a Santa in a tank as a toy for the kids.

Scott Calvin: Well, isn't that a pretty picture, Santa rolling down the block in a PANZER! Well kids, I... I certainly hope you have been good this year, cause it looks like Santa just took out the Pearson home. Incoming!

  • The Nightmare Before Christmas has the main artist of Halloween Town taking over Christmas. The people of Halloween Town misinterpret Christmas rather badly, resulting in this trope.

Literature

  • In Robert A. Heinlein's Have Space Suit—Will Travel, Kip accidentally sets fire to the barn where he has his lab. His mother worries but his father merely comments that one should be careful about making explosives in a frame building.
    • Note however that Kip is in his mid to late teens, old enough that entrusting him with flammable or corrosive substances wouldn't be considered out and out negligence even in this day and age.
  • The Alcatraz Series has teddy bears that double as hand grenades. They are explicitly designed to be used by kids for self defense.
  • In the Philip K. Dick short story "War Games", Earth has a safety board inspecting toys from Titan, with whom they are having a political Cold War, but whose goods are still popular. We see at least one dangerous toy—a VR costume-suit which causes the wearer to lose contact with reality. The safety board is afraid everything could be like this, so they have a paranoid eye on everything-- excepting a board game that looks like a Monopoly variation, but isn't. (No, the board game doesn't count unless you consider undermining capitalism dangerous.)
  • The short story Bobo's Star has kids in the future being given their own miniature star-creation kits at home. The titular character's star turns into a black hole and devours the Earth because nobody would listen to him.
  • The Stephen King story "Battleground", part of the "Night Shift" collection, has a hitman who killed a toy designer attacked by an army of toy soldiers, complete with air support. They eventually kill him by breaking out a tiny nuclear weapon.
  • Discworld:
    • Something similar happens when Death substitutes for the local Santa equivalent in Hogfather. A little girl asks for a sword (as well as a few other gender-abnormal toys). He gives her one. Only some persuasion from his 'helper' convinces him that giving a small child a few feet of sharp steel might be a bad idea.
    • Thud: Lampshaded where Sam Vimes suspects there are intruders in his house and is looking for a weapon. Sadly, he's in his son's bedroom, and he notes he and his wife completely overlooked the range of toys with sharp steel parts. He settles for the leg of a rocking horse.
  • Harry Potter
    • Playing cards that explode, albeit without much force.
    • Marbles that squirt nasty-smelling liquid in your face when you lose a point.
    • Dudley owns a small, working tank that he once ran over the neighbor's dog with.
    • Chess pieces that beat each other to death probably deserve a mention.
    • Bludgers in the Quidditch games. They can give somebody a pretty nasty concussion if they hit you in the head, and knocking you off your broomstick at certain heights is also dangerous in and of itself.
    • How about the actual broomsticks? They can travel over 100 mph, they fly more than high enough to cause fatal falls, and kids ride them without any licenses, seat belts, safety equipment, lights, or air traffic rules. Even in blinding rain and thunderstorms. Neville, Harry, and a few other characters actually sustain broken bones and concussions from falling off brooms, but nobody in the wizard world seems to think broomsticks are dangerous.
      • Well, this is a world where broken bones can be fixed with a flick of a wand, provided the person actually knows the spell. Even missing bones can be regrown with a magic potion. And first years aren't allowed to have their own brooms. There are toy brooms that only hover a few feet off the ground.
  • How To Be A Superhero warns the would-be superhero about putting his name to merchendise without checking its safety, citing such previous PR disasters as Captain Feline and Blackie the Wonder-Cat's "Kitty-Fun" playsets (a variety of ways for a child to torture a cat) and the Mr Inferno dressing-up kit (one costume, one bottle of kerosene, one box of matches)
  • Georgia Nicolson worries about her little sister's "Pantalitzer" doll, described as having a terrifying face, steel forks for hands, and easily detachable parts that hurt when thrown at Georgia.

Live-Action TV

  • In the 70's, Saturday Night Live had toy maker Irwin Mainway (played Dan Aykroyd) appear on a consumer watchdog show called "Consumer Probe", and hopelessly defend his company's extremely dodgy and dangerous products, and drawing comparisons with the dangers of actual commonplace products. Of note was an episode where he attempted to defend a series of Halloween costumes, including "Johnny Space Commander Mask" (simply a plastic bag and a rubber band), "The Invisible Pedestrian" ("NOT FOR BLIND KIDS!"), "Johnny Combat" (which comes with an actual working rifle, ammo not included. Allegedly popular in Detroit), and "Johnny Human Torch" (oil-soaked rags and an oversized torch. "It lights up the night!")
    • Then you got "Bag O' Glass", along with its spin-offs Bag O' Nails, Bag O' Bugs, Bag O' Vipers, and last but not least, Bag O' Sulfuric Acid.
    • One of those pathetic attempts to defend his products involved a harmless toy phone; Mainway argued kids could choke themselves with the long stretchy cord. These days, what with the CPSC wiping out long cords of all sorts on kids' toys, the dangerous phone is a funny aneurysm (much like most things on SNL).
    • SNL also had "Happy Fun Ball". It was a kid's toy with an increasingly bizarre disclaimer, containing warnings such as "May suddenly accelerate to unsafe speeds" and "If Happy Fun Ball begins to smoke, seek shelter and cover head," culminating with the famous quote, "Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball". Link to sketch Fun+ Ball%22&total=42&start=0&num=20&so=0&type=search&plindex=0 here.
    • Lots of the SNL's fake toy commercials are for toys that would no way in Hell be sold in real life (whether it's because they're physically dangerous, will cause complaints from Moral Guardians who think that kids are impressionable enough to be screwed up by what they play with, or are just plain useless and/or lame). Some examples include: Gangsta Bitch Barbie (comes with Jolly Ranchers, a pack of Newport cigarettes, and a restraining order against her boyfriend Tupac Ken), Nerf Crotch Bats, Big Red (A viking who sprays massive gushers of blood-red liquid), Litter Critters (using cat crap to make clay figurines), and the recent dangerous toy commercial, Li'l Poundcake (a doll that administers vaccinations against the HP virus for girls under 10).
  • Merrick And Rosso had a sketch involving two modified remote controlled toys from hell; One being a Thomas the Tank Engine with a buzzsaw on the front, the other being a Barbie-style van with a flamethrower, both tearing up mundane toys. (Except the official Merrick and Rosso inaction figures)
  • Mad TV had "Spishak's 'Hey, It's Ovens for Kids!'", a children's gas oven.
    • Spishak's products in general, actually. Besides the above, there's Yule Blazers (plutonium-powered Christmas lights), the Bris-O-Tine (a mini-guillotine designed for circumcision), the Snoorfpk (a spoon/fork/knife combo), etc.
  • A number of the Mad's contributions to the Invention Exchange on Mystery Science Theater 3000 fit this trope: a flame-throwing Godzilla figure and the Unhappy Meal are just two examples, and Joel and the 'Bots would call Dr. F out for his depravity.
  • In the Get Smart episode "Our Man in Toyland", Max and 99 take on defeat a bunch of KAOS agents in the toy department of a department store using only the (highly-destructive) normal toys on sale there.

Agent 99: Max... you were wonderful!
Maxwell Smart, Agent 86: No 99, the real credit belongs to these toys. After all, we had at our disposal every fiendish and destructive plaything ever devised for the pleasure of little children. Those poor devils, all they had were real guns and bullets.

Music

  • Musician Doctor Steel has this as his gimmick, too. That and megalomania.
    • In "Lament for a Toy Factory", he mentions "babies with buzzsaws, dollies with knives, gasoline-filled super soakers" as the too-drastic toy designs that got him fired... and were later used for revenge against the factory.
  • Insane Clown Posse's "Toy Box" (from their Riddle Box album) has a bullied schoolboy making these toys on purpose in order to kill his tormentors in revenge. He then brings them to class for "Show and Tell," which results practically the entire class getting strangled by Slinkies, decapitated by sword-wielding robot figurines, and - most horrifyingly of all - shot to death by cute rubber duckies that go "Squeeku....squeeku....BANG!" Evilly Affable to the max, especially with a Howdy Doody-like voice cheerily announcing: "Nothin' beats a good hardy-har-har, right, boys 'n' girls?!"

Newspaper Comics

  • In Bloom County, Oliver Wendell Jones's father gives him a chemistry set as a gift. Said chemistry set is promptly used to genetically engineer what is supposed to be a long-tailed hamster, but ends up making a number of freakish mutants. Given that Oliver already uses his computer to hack into the Pentagon and once created a working nuclear bomb with the luminous paint from a vast number of glow-in-the-dark watches, it's hard to say if the chemistry set itself was dangerous, of if Oliver was unique in his abilities to abuse it.

Video Games

  • In Super Mario RPG, Gaz has a Geno doll. Even before it becomes possessed, it still manages to knock Mario out. Although, that might have been Gaz being overly enthusiastic.
  • One of the early missions in Grand Theft Auto Vice City involves using a toy helicopter to carry timed explosives into an uncompleted building to blow it up. Security guards and construction workers come after it once they catch on to your charade, but you can kill them by running the chopper into them.
  • Subsequently in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, after you buy Zero's shop, all of the three missions you must do for Zero involve My Little Panzers. The first involves defending from a swarm of RC planes dropping bombs with a minigun, and the second has you using a prototype RC biplane armed with an infinite-ammo cannon to kill employees of Berkley RC, Zero's arch-rival in the business of RC toys. Serious business indeed.

Zero: They're not 'toys'! They're just smaller!

    • Oh, and the third? Seems like the actual use for these things: a car tries to drive a road into a base. Bentley's helicopter drops obstacles that your helicopter has to remove. Bentley also has actual tanks shooting at his car, albeit with low-powered ammo for their size. You have access to antitank bombs.
  • Gotcha Force is a game about an invasion by toy-sized robots and the other toy-sized robots who resist them. They get bigger.
  • The Wario Land 4 Wario car action figure-like enemies. Oh the irony of a toy based on Wario driving his car being something that's dangerous enough to kill him in the toy themed levels. It also had a metal spike on the front (hence how it was so dangerous), could drive through more spikes, and was apparently a pretty good throwing weapon.
  • While not toys by any means, the Scoobies from Phantom Crash are often piloted by children. In fact, the shop owner who sells you upgrades gets called out by one of the top pilots for essentially selling weapons to children. Of course, the shop owner brushes it off and it's never brought up again.
  • The foot-tall Robos of Custom Robo are actually pretty harmless themselves, despite being able to shoot lasers, bombs, or swords. They can only work within specialized arenas called Holosseums. Except illegal parts can do rather horrible things to whoever uses them, and the local Cthulhu happens to have accidentally possessed one. These behaviors might be excusable, since they're not well known. The part where losing in a Holosseum knocks you head first into the ground and quite often knocks you unconscious might not pass the CSPA muster.
    • That last bit happens only when the "safety switch" is off, which allows the robos to use their abilities to the fullest extent. Regular, day-to-day Holosseum battles are basically massive Nerfs of the robos so that no one is hurt. Illegal parts are actually capable of killing someone if the switch is off (though this is rare, even with the ridiculously powerful illegal parts)... this is why they're illegal.
  • The weapons Alice uses in American McGee's Alice are referred to as Toys, but only a few resemble playthings. The Flamingo Croquet Mallet, Playing Cards, Jacks, and Demon's Dice qualify, but the Ice Wand and Jabberwok Eye Staff are more like fantasy RPG items, while the Vorpal Blade and Blunderbluss are real weapons.

Web Animation

  • It's implied that practically everything sold at Bubs' concession stand is highly unsafe and quite possibly illegal. The most overt example would be Hollerin' Jimmy's Hobby Kit, whose slogan is "We have no idea what's inside this box!"
    • The Stab Yourself! Try not to stab yourself!
    • Not everything Bubs sells is dangerous. The stuff he sells out back on the black market is quality goods. In fact, in his capacity as a black marketeer, he's so devoted to customer satisfaction (as opposed to his capacity as an official businessman, in which he relies on not having any competition) that if you specifically want something that will cause an allergic reaction, he'll totally sell you the allergenic stuff.
      • Though he sold Strong Bad a pinata that was filled with...

Homester: Bwoken glass, Bwoken glass, Bwoken glass, Bwoken glass.

Web Comics

Tarvek: It explains... so much...

Western Animation

Number 4: They sell these things?
Number 5: Well, they ain't cheap.

    • Made even worse as the helmet can actually fuse to the victim's head, guaranteeing permanent mind control.
    • There may also be a bizarre Double Standard involved, as the device is not only marketed but designed only to be used by girls on boys, until a male villain modifies one, of course.
  • In The Simpsons, Homer buys Maggie an Army Base playset with actually working, explosive missiles. When Marge points out how dangerous it is, Homer claims it's perfectly safe, but is stabbed, maimed and shot by the toy.
    • Another example from The Simpsons was a cereal with jagged steel letter O's in it.
      • Only one, and it was supposed to be a prize, not eaten.
        • Not that the regular cereal is much better.

Reporter: What about that little boy who got appendicitis from eating your cereal?
Krusty: To prove that this metal O is harmless, I will personally eat one. (eats the O) See? There's nothing-- (starts screaming and writhing) Oh, boy! This thing is shredding my insides!
Sideshow Mel: Er, Krusty, that wasn't the metal one, that was a regular Krusty O.
Krusty: It's poison!

      • At the end of the episode, Bart reveals to Lisa the new and improved Krusty cereal; "Flesh-eating bacteria in every box!"
    • The Krusty doll in a "Treehouse of Horror" episode had a switch that let you flip it between good and evil.
    • Most of Krusty's toys were dangerous in some sense or other. This is because Krusty is such a corporate whore that he'll put his name and approval on anything that he's paid to, no matter how dangerous, and his die-hard fans will buy anything with his name on it, regardless of quality or safety.
  • On Squidbillies, Dan Halen Industries sold a baby crib that was so dangerous, critics called it a "Baby Deathtrap". The company sued for trademark infringement, as it sold actual Baby Deathtraps: teddy bears bristling with electric spikes.
  • An episode of Yin Yang Yo had a villain who manufactured these because he loved money and hated children. The most memorable and blatant were probably "Eyebiters", which were exactly what they say on the tin.
  • The South Park episode "Good Times with Weapons" has the boys trick a county fair vendor into selling them several dangerous ninja weapons. It ends in an Anvilicious note when their parents are more concerned with nudity (Cartman appeared naked under the delusion that he was invisible) than the fact they seriously damaged Butters' eye.
    • Other dangerous toys on South Park include: Chinpokomon (the toys themselves weren't dangerous, but they were pawns in a plot to brainwash kids into bombing Pearl Harbor), Wild Wacky Action Bike (the kid who tried to ride it in the commercial crashed into the underside of a truck), Alabama Man and Wife (teaches boys to be drunken, wife-beating trailer trash), and Stupid Spoiled Whore Video Playset (teaches girls to be like Paris Hilton), and a make-your-own Mr. Hankey play set, whose commercial was filmed in live action.
  • The Reptar wagon in the first Rugrats movie. Who would give their babies a toy that can spew real fire? In fact, just about everything Stu Pickles devised in Rugrats fits this trope.
    • There's a store full of these played for laughs in an episode called Toy Palace.
      • Including Avogadro the Alligator, which is powered by cold fusion.
  • In Superman the Animated Series, any toy created by Toyman fits the trope. Most notably, the Dopey Dough he throws on the unsuspecting Superman:

Toyman: "Uhhh, maybe you should read the warning?? Dopey Dough is a lethal biogenic organism. Contact with the skin can prove fatal. It won't stop growing until it asphyxiates its host. NOT for children under 3."

  • As a homage to superheroes, something similar shows up in Darkwing Duck, with Quackerjack's toys. 'Don't play with Quackerjack toys, they're dangerous!' was once said before the child in question threw the toy. She had to pull the pin first.
  • Ed, Edd n Eddy has some of Ed's toys, including an action figure of a small monster that literally acted as a flamethrower when a certain button was pressed. To the surprise of Edd when Ed was in a bad mood and they were using it in a puppet show.

Eddy: Your stupid toy ate my breakfast!

  • Cow and Chicken had an episode where they accidentally create perpetual energy using a child's chemistry set. The Red Guy kidnaps them to recreate it.
  • Subverted in Big Guy and Rusty The Boy Robot, where the consumer models of Rusty are perfectly harmless. Unless, the Legion Ex Machina hijacks their AI to do robot conquest bidding. Then proceed to retrofit them with the same nuclear power source as the original Rusty. At that point it is like the equivalent (yield) of several thousand tactical nukes or one strategic nuke.
  • In Ben 10 Alien Force, a little alien loses her toy. The toy in question can shapeshift, regenerate, and mimic other peoples and aliens special abilities. Not only that but it's actually more technologically advanced then the Omnitrix.
  • On Johnny Test, everything made by Wacko Toys is intentionally dangerous to children, because the CEO hates children, and his employees have no problem with it beyond greed. Examples include a board game that punches you if you land on a certain square, another board game where if you mess up you get electrocuted, a bag of tacks, a robot that traps kids within their own houses until they're 18, an exploding frisbee, a mechanical alligator, helium-based gum, and exploding gum.
    • Who wouldn't want to play such wholesome games as "Left Hook", "Don't Get Shocked", and "Bag O' Tacks"?
  • On Jimmy Two-Shoes, Since Misery Inc. seeks to torture everyone, it's no surprise that several of their products are aimed at kids.
  • In the Fanboy and Chum Chum episode "Total Recall", the titular duo has a toy octopus that spits corrosive ink, electrocutes them, has tentacles with the sucking force of a real octopus, and explodes randomly. Among Oz's collection of recalled toys, there's "baby's first nail gun", a fire truck that functions as a flamethrower, dolls that spit acid, a doll who's arms fly off at 100 mph, a sock full of nickels, and a model warship with real weaponry (which was recalled because it was a choking hazard).
  • In the Family Guy pilot, Peter is fired after unsafe toys are released on his watch.
  • Robotomy has Tickle Me Psycho, a My Pet Monster-meets-Tickle Me Elmo-style doll with the screechy, nasal voice of Gilbert Gottfried who acts like a complete Jerkass to robot kids (in the commercial, he stole a kid's drink, drank it, and tossed the cup in the child's face, ripped another kid's fingers off and ate them, and tore a third kid's "I Love You" card and kicked him. It ends with Tickle Me Psycho yelling, "I can't stand kids!") and is plotting a war against them.
  • One episode of My Life as a Teenage Robot has the Cluster deceiving Jenny into letting her image be used in the creation of action figures that would later attempt to destroy her. They were turned off at the end by a power switch; this leads to a serious CMOF as Brad refuses to believe Krackus would be stupid enough to control them through a power switch, leading Tuck to prove how stupid he actually is in order to break Brad's Willing Suspension of Disbelief. Vexus scolds him for his design plan after they're defeated.
  • An episode of Robotboy had a store clerk copying Robotboy's image to create "Roboboys" (note the omission of the 'T') that predictably went berserk. To differentiate them from Robotboy the horns, lower legs, and hands came in a multitude of colors.
  • Averted Trope in just the setting you might expect to find this in, what with all the talk/creation of dangerous summer activities in Phineas and Ferb. The toys we've been shown seem to go the opposite direction, including such gems as Shimmy Jimmy, Little Mary MacGuffin, Perry the Platypus: Inaction Figure and Brick [1]
  • In Rick and Morty, Beth had a lot of these as a child that her father made via her request; in the present, he uses them to convince her of what a terror she was:

Rick: Look at some of the **** you were asking me to make you as a kid. Ray guns, a whip that forces people to like you, invisibility cuffs, a parent trap, a lightning gun, a teddy bear with anatomically correct innards, night-vision googly-eyed goggles, sound erasing sneakers, false fingerprints, fall-asleep darts, a lie detecting doll, and indestructible baseball bat, a taser shaped like a ladybug, a fake police badge, location tracking stickers, rainbow-colored duct tape, mind-control hair clips, poisoned gum, a pink, sentient switchblade...
(Clicks open switchblade)
Switchblade: Hi, Beth! You've gotten taller! Shall we resume stabbing?

Truth In Television

  • The most infamous: Lawn Darts. Which are large, heavy, metal tipped darts that kids are given to throw at targets placed on their lawn. Needless to say, throwing spearlike "toys" is not a good idea.
    • Considering lawn darts are pretty much the modern equivalent of the plumbatae of the Late Roman Empire...
    • It gets worse - the placement of the targets? They were laid at the kids' feet. Seriously, how on earth did any of them live to adulthood?
  • The Atomic Energy Lab pictured above was a real toy. In 1951, A.C. Gilbert introduced his U-238 Atomic Energy Lab, a radioactive learning set we can only assume was fun for the whole math club. For a mere $49.50,[2] the kit came complete with three "very low-level" radioactive sources[3], a Geiger-Mueller radiation counter, a Wilson cloud chamber (to see paths of alpha particles), a spinthariscope (to see "live" radioactive disintegration), four samples of uranium-bearing ores, and an electroscope to measure radioactivity.
    • These guys can hook you up, but it's not in one convenient set. And will run you a bit more than half a c-note.
  • Home chemistry sets used to be quite popular for young science nerds. However, fears of poisoning, acid burns, and explosions soon brought the combination of lawsuits and Moral Guardians to stop sales. "Chemistry" sets can still be purchased, however they contain practically nothing of any use. Buying a box of baking soda is pretty much the same thing.
    • Some U.S. states have actually made it illegal to own chemistry glassware, on the grounds that they could be used to make methamphetamine.
    • Some prominent scientists have bemoaned the fact that kids can no longer experiment with chemicals, explosives, and rockets, as a number of famous and Nobel Prize winning scientists began their interest in science by experimenting with them. Attempting to do so today is quite likely to lead to the child being arrested as a "terrorist".
      • And, as stated, experimenting with pretty much anything else will bring the SWAT team to your house to bust up your meth lab.
    • You can still buy those kits in Mexico and other Latin American countries, since those countries have lax regulations about what kind of toys can be sold (with the exception of weapon-shaped toys and other dangerous toys.)
    • These sets are also available in Russia, but they are no match for the fabled Soviet "Kid Chemist" set that included, among other things, strips of magnesium for kids to burn and (not dangerous, but awesome!) a real retort.
    • Of course, there's still a lot of potential for fun experiments, even in the U.S. -- in the current economic climate, parents should note that an arc welder costs about half as much as a Nintendo DS.
  • BB Guns, by definition. In the wrong neighborhood, any sufficiently real-looking gun is dangerous.
    • For this reason there are actual laws in the U.S. and U.K. that demand that toy guns be made in bright, unrealistic colors. You can not buy realistic looking toy guns. Although it is rather annoying for the children, it does make parents feel a lot safer knowing it is less likely their child will be shot by police by mistake.
      • Plus there's the danger that you'll shoot your eye out, kid.
      • This adds Fridge Horror Adult Fear. Think about what would happen if you owned a gun and your child found it (even without bullets) and decided to play "Cowboys" with it. Now imagine what would happen if a police officer was driving by as your child was playing.
    • An arcade shooting game had its gun replaced with a bright colored model because of this. Apparently when police entered arcades they were not amused to have realistically looking toy guns pointed at them.
    • Similarly, the original version of the Transformers character Megatron transformed from a robot into a Walther P-38 pistol. More recent incarnations have transformed from a robot into a dinosaur, a jet, or a tank (for example) so that his action figures don't (legally) need to be bright orange.
    • The Walther P-38 version of Megatron was yet again redesigned as "Masterpiece" Megatron, now with a far more detailed and intricate transformation scheme. He still turned into a Walther P-38, but now one nearly twice the size of the actual weapon. It was not allowed to enter the US without a neon orange safety plug in the barrel, even though it ships in robot mode.
    • The newest Walther P-38 Megatron toy, a Legends-class (read: really small) figure released in the 2011 "Reveal the Shield" line, still has an orange tip on its barrel, despite measuring about three inches from front to back.
    • The policy of having fake guns painted artificial colours has, of course, now resulted in a large amount of black spray paint being used to cover up these features and police concerns about real guns with unusual colours or a spray-painted tip.
  • "We have removed this (shuriken) from our list due to it being made of metal."
  • The Cabbage Patch Kids Snacktime Kid. Note to manufacturers: when building a toy that chews anything put between its teeth, including fingers and hair, install an OFF switch!
    • There was one—remove the backpack and the doll shuts off—but this was only documented in the instruction book, and who reads the instructions on a doll?
  • From Cracked.com, we have The 5 Least Surprising Toy Recalls of All Time.
    • The list exaggerates with the Kinder Surprise case, they are still sold in Canada, Mexico, Peru, much of Europe, and Argentina (among other places) and no one was stupid enough to swallow the toys, it just requires common sense.
  • Bindeez (the precursor of Aqua Dots) were recalled due to the factory substituting a cheaper chemical that becomes GHB in the stomach if you swallowed them. Since they are so small, swallowing them is not a problem. They were re-released as Beados "Featuring the new bead formula."
  • The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments, which was in one well-known case to inspire a boy scout to build a model nuclear device, although the device did not achieve fission but only transmutation, it did contaminate the neighborhood with a substantial amount of radiation and provoke the attention of the authorities.
  • Similar to the Beyblade example at the top, Pogs could be painful but not especially harmful if one of the striker discs ricocheted... until some enterprising manufacturers decided to make small metal throwing stars to fit the role. How they got away with those boggles the mind.
    • Likely because its edges were blunted. Yes, it's fine because, while it may have points, the heavy chunk of metal's edges are blunt.
      • Which doesn't change the fact that it's a heavy chunk of metal with points that you can presumably still throw like a ninja star. (Which is the first thing that anybody did when they got one of those)
  • Entertech Water Pistols were one of the reasons that toy guns are molded in garish colors now to keep police from misinterpreting a child's toy, and keeping criminals from using them in holdups. The commercial even clearly stated:

"The look! The feel! The sound - so real! ENTERTECH!"

  • Another Transformers example; there used to be a line of toys with the ability to "spark", they would produce light, sound, and exhaust similar to real engines and weapons. They work via an internal steel wheel rubbing a flint, much like a cigarette lighter. Skating Barbie dolls had similar roller blades to spark up the ground. Needless to say, Hasbro refuses to produce these anymore.
  • Most knock-off toys (the kind of things you find at car boot sales, market stalls etc. they're normally based on a popular kid's film or cartoon, for example Spider-Man or Cars) are made with lead paint or will fall apart VERY easily. This is generally done because they're cheap to make and they're generally bought by parents who don't realize the dangers and just see a cheap toy.
  • Tie 'N Tangle, a game based on wrapping other players in a web of nylon string, would otherwise be So Bad It's Good based on its unintentional reference to bondage had it not been for its significant safety hazards: people can fall and hit their head, be strangled by the cord; etc. Even worse, the cord is too strong to be broken by hand, in case an emergency does happen. Jeepers Media suggests destroying this game, as its vintage worth is far outweighed by the hazards it possesses.
  1. ↑ It's fun.
  2. ↑ According to this site, the price would come out to somewhere in the range of $700 to $800 in 2013. Even the latest-generation video game consoles on the day of release aren't worth that much!
  3. ↑ Which wouldn't be at all dangerous to handle, but are extremely toxic if ingested.
This article is issued from Allthetropes. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.