So Bad It's Horrible/Toys

While everyone has their different ideas of what's fun, sometimes a toy is just a bad idea waiting to happen. The mere lack of articulation doesn't make a toy horrible, as that's just too common. It takes some real ingenuity to make you truly regret a purchase.

As a general note, Jeepers Media and Ashens specialize in showing the worst toys the world had to offer. In fact, most of the toys listed here have been featured by them.

Important Note: Merely being offensive in its subject matter is not enough to justify a work as So Bad It's Horrible. Hard as it is to imagine at times, there is a market for all types of deviancy (no matter how small a niche it is). It has to fail to appeal even to that niche to qualify as this.

Examples of So Bad It's Horrible/Toys include:

• The DigiDraw promised to make tracing, an already simple act, even easier by placing the thing to be traced between a light and a suspended glass pane, projecting its image onto a blank piece of paper. Its ridiculously poor design meant that even if you could assemble it, the resulting projection was faint at best, and it would screw with your focus to the point where you couldn't do a perfect trace, assuming you hadn't already ruined it by nudging the paper even slightly. And trust us, we are not alone in this belief.
• Marvin's Magic Drawing Board. Let's forget the marketing's Blatant Lies regarding its reusability;^[1] scratching off the outer layer to reveal the multicolor beneath it took the will of a thousand men. Simply removing the layer, let alone drawing an image, was an impossible task in and of itself. Much like the later DigiDraw, it was advertised to do one thing and couldn't even do it well.
• Gold Plastic Syndrome. A number of Transformers toys made in the late 1980s and early 1990s were, in part or in whole, constructed with a kind of swirly plastic that crumbled quite quickly, especially on moving parts. Certain toys (like the reissue of Slingshot, various Pretenders and the Japanese exclusive Black Zarak) are known to shatter before they are taken out of the box. There are pictures of the effects of GPS in the article linked above. Thankfully, this has been fixed and that plastic is not used...mostly.
  • Unposeable "brick" Transformers. The Generation 1 toys can get away with it, but in later series, like most Armada and some Energon toys (especially the Powerlinked modes), they are atrocious — Wing Saber is literally a Flying Brick, and not in the good way. With today's toy technology, there just isn't an excuse for something with all the poseability of a cinderblock and whose transformation basically consists of lying the figure down, especially the larger and more expensive ones.
  • And the many Asian and German bootlegs/knockoffs. Such as Woodblockformers, anyone?
• The tacky Sonic the Hedgehog holiday plush line, many of which are extremely Off-Model.
• Cracked.com has an article called "The 5 Least Surprising Toy Recalls of All Time", listing variously dangerous toys. Amongst them...
  • Sky Dancers. The wicked offspring of a spinning top, a helicopter, and a Barbie doll. It came out looking like a beautiful fairy with propeller wings — and a launcher. When those little dolls went spinning, their foam wings became blades of doom that could seriously mess up a kid's face with cuts and slashes. There's no way to control those beauties once they are launched, and it's hard to predict where they will go...which is why they're "Dancers"!
    • There was also a manly version called Dragon Flyz. There are also imitators. They could be quite enjoyable — it's just that they were also surprisingly dangerous.
    • That's why most flying rotor toys are circled.
  • Lawn Darts. Feathered Javelins! Surprisingly, they came out in the early 1960s and were only recalled when the first injuries were reported...in 1988.
    • • Injuries? The things killed people.
      • Charlie Murphy (yes, the same guy who wrote for Chappelle's Show and is Eddie Murphy's brother) appeared on an episode of 1000 Ways to Die that had the story of a coked-up guy from the 1970s having a barbecue with his other drugged-out buddies (with the coked-up guy getting impaled in the head with a lawn dart after getting sidelined by a woman who just went topless) to comment on how the 1970s was a decade full of wall-to-wall health hazards, from people eating fatty foods to abusing drugs to playing with lawn darts (which most people did while under the influence).
    • "Impaled by a stray lawn dart" is also one of the "Terrible Misfortunes" that can befall your bunnies in Killer Bunnies and the Quest for the Magic Carrot.
  • Snacktime Cabbage Patch Dolls, a 1996 Cabbage Patch doll sold with the gimmick that its mouth moved as it appeared to "eat" the plastic carrots and cookies sold with it. The problem was, once it started chewing, it didn't stop until the plastic food was sucked in...and little fingers and hair set it off just as well as plastic food. The only way to turn it off was to remove the toy's backpack...something buried in the instructions so deep, nobody saw it until it was announced publicly.
    • An episode of The X-Files took the idea and ran with it. There was also a Dexter's Laboratory episode parodying this with a teddy bear named "Mr. Chewey Bitems", who incidentally is found in a garbage dump.
  • The New Easy-Bake Oven. Easy-Bake ovens have been around since the 1950s and are, as the name claims, easy to use...but a recent redesign made the opening small enough to put a tiny hand in, but not take it out. Next to a newly designed heating element. Ouch.
• Aqua Dots (Bindeez in its native Australia) is (or was) a fun little collection of interlocking beads designed for the creation of multidimensional shapes, as seen on TV. You had to get them wet before they would stick together. But the coating released one ingredient it shouldn't have when exposed to water — a form of the date-rape drug GHB. Should someone put that in their mouths...
  • This wasn't the fault of the company that made them, but rather the Chinese plant that manufactured the toys. Essentially, they found out that some chemical was much less expensive than the one they were supposed to be using, but still worked. They didn't do the research that said chemical metabolizes into GHB, or else they didn't care. (They also didn't tell the company that they made the swap.) And yet, for all the Chinese toy manufacturer chaos that was going on in the media at the time, the blame fell squarely on the toy company for this.
  • They still exist, though hopefully with the non-GHB formulation. They are now called Pixos (Beados in Australia) and marketed as "safety tested". In fact, they are marketed the same way Aqua Dots were, with the same announcer and background music.
• Chilly Bang! Bang! was a chilled juice-drink toy released in 1989 by Mackie International consisting of a gun-shaped packet of juice. To drink it, you had to stick the barrel in your mouth and pull the trigger. And if you thought Persona 3 was controversial...
  • My Name Is Earl had a minor character have a similar gun. Given that he also had a real gun... And take two guesses how said character wound up dead in a later episode.

Chubby Jr: "Well, Dad did say never to trust a Doctor. But then again, Dad now has a bullet hole where vodka should be."

• • There was also a PEZ dispenser in a similar design back in the 1960s.
• Flubber, a Silly Putty-like mixture of synthetic rubber and mineral oil released by Hasbro in 1963 to promote the film Son of Flubber. A poor mixing of the combination was extremely toxic, though, as was the first batch released to the public, and many who played with it came down with serious fevers and rashes. Hasbro immediately recalled the Flubber and prepared to dispose of it. However, when the company tried burying the stuff at sea it floated to the top, and when they tried burning the goop it wouldn't ignite (plenty of noxious black smoke, though). Eventually, Hasbro buried what remained near their Rhode Island factory, and paved a parking lot over it. An Urban Legend claims that if you look closely at the cracks in that parking lot on hot days, you can see the Flubber oozing up... Sweet dreams!
• Many toys that contain magnets. Seriously, there's been so many recalls on these kinds of toys that you'd expect toy manufacturers to either stop making toys with magnets altogether or find some way of incorporating the magnets in such a way that they won't escape the toys they're put in. If a child swallows two magnets, the magnetic force could perforate their intestines. Nightmare Fuel, indeed. Add in the usual risk of choking from overly small toys, and you have a problem.
  • Kids with guts made of iron foil? Or loosely-fixed pieces of something like Sm-Co (it's not like you'll get such a great force from steel ones) in toys? In both cases — Holy Headcrab, and yes, Nightmare Fuel.
  • Take a piece of paper or cloth, place a magnet under it, then place another magnet above it on the other side of the paper/cloth. Lift the paper/cloth and note that, if the magnets are working properly, they're stuck together. Now imagine the paper/cloth to be the walls of one's intestines.
    • No need to imagine; it happened in an episode of Grey's Anatomy. A kid did it in order to encourage his parents to split up.
• Any parent worth their salt is aware that Original Flavor LEGO is a potential choking hazard for their children, and that those hard plastic bricks can cause massive damage to the digestive tracts of unaware tots. So what do companies do? They release hard and gummi candies, shaped like LEGO bricks. Bravo. And it doesn't help that one of those companies is Kelloggs.
  • Speaking of edible LEGO products, they now produce ice cube trays to make LEGO-shaped ice cubes with (which is kinda cool), a minifigure-shaped cake mold, and a cookie-cutter for making LEGO-shaped cookies. That last one doesn't subliminally encourage kids to eat plastic, but rather makes them cry because it doesn't work.
    • Sadly, the chocolate LEGO bricks are not LEGO-compatible and cannot be used for building. Aww.
• Earlier, there existed a series of candy and bubble gum that were decked out to look like joints and cigarettes, respectively. The "cigarette" gum even let loose a puff of bubble gum dust "smoke" each time the child blew into one end. They're still making them, though lord knows the kind of PTA could've been conceived for them...
  • Candy cigars have also been around for years. They are easier to find than real cigars, though only just.
• The 2003 Powerpuff Girls Girl's Makeup Kit, which contained pink lotion that was contaminated with Pseudomonas aeruginosa, not something you're going to want your little girl to be slathering on her face, as it can be deadly for children with damaged immune systems, and even in a healthy child can lead to eye abscesses and ear infections...and, in rare cases, meningitis.
• What about the Dark Knight "hidden blade" katana toy? Y'know, the one with the hard plastic spring-loaded blade in the handle? The one that shot out with such force that it can cause blunt force trauma if the kids weren't expecting it? The one that can be activated by an easily-hit trigger in the handle? Yeah, that one. How could this be safe for kids?
  • Wanna know how the neighbor's kid got those scars?
• Rollerblade Barbie, which had a gimmick that made the skates spark. Slightly risky if used on lacquered vanities with hairspray in the air.
  • Bill Engvall discussed seeing this on the news once:

"What if Barbie rollerskated through a pool of gasoline?"
"What if Barbie had a handgrenade? Is that a common household problem now?"

• • For exactly this reason, there will never again be a Transformers toy with sparking action.
  • Razor of all companies marketed, for a month or so in 2009, a scooter that came with its own spark generator.
• In a similar case to the Transformers GPS above, LEGO also fumbled up their own plastic around '07, which resulted in nearly all of the lime-green colored pieces becoming ridiculously fragile. This affected the Bionicle sets of that era greatly, which were already prone to breaking due to the faulty sculpting of the ball-socket joints. Since that line of sets had more lime-colored pieces than usual, it is needless to say that fans were not amused with the ordeal, as it meant that they couldn't take apart and rebuild their LEGO sets. Reportedly, some of these lime pieces broke right at the figures' first assembly.
  • The problem has only gotten worse. Pretty much any socket joint from '08-'10 has a high risk of breakage, due to the rectangular sockets that were originally meant to remedy this problem. Thankfully, Lego seems to have learned its lesson; the Hero Factory sets have pieces with small ball joints and stronger socket joints.
  • Bionicle rubber bands suffered from this too. There were two kinds: the older, less durable variants with a rectangular cross-section, and the lot more durable and higher-quality rounded rubber bands. Early sets came with the older bands, and these tended to rot away within years of the figures' assembly, rendering the action functions of the sets entirely useless. But this can be sort of forgiven, as the better rubber band hadn't been introduced yet (which only happened in 2002). For some strange reason, though, the 2005 set-line (the Visorak) got divided into two sub-lines: the regular, which had colored canisters and the better kind of rubber band, and another line, which came in black containers and had the older band. Yes, they reached back to the bad bands, which, as you may have suspected, broke or melted off with time, thereby taking away the sets' only gimmick, the Visorak's snapping pincers.
• 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.
• The first line of Resident Evil action figures from the early 2000's were, to put it charitably, very lazily made. For background, each pack came with 2 figures (except the Tyrant figure, but more on him in a bit), usually a larger character or monster, and a smaller mini-monster. This troper had the Chris Redfield/Zombie Dog, Forest Speyer/Maggot Zombie and Tyrant figures. The Chris figure's arms would fall off if you so much as looked at them funny, because the socket in the shoulders was larger than the ball joint in the torso, the molds for the dog zombie's skin (a feature of the dog was that if you pushed his head down, he'd "explode") were not cut properly, so the pieces fit awkwardly. The Tyrant figure boasted a "deadly claw swipe" action, which amounted to a rubber band in his torso that would frequently come undone while in the package, as well as a beating heart action which amounted to nothing more than a button which would pump red liquid into a transparent plastic heart. Also, I don't know if this was a widespread problem, but my Tyrant had two left feet..literally. Thankfully, the company got their act together with the next line (based on Resident Evil 2), which was far and away the superior toy line. IN FAIRNESS, however, it must be pointed out that the detail work on the monsters was top notch throughout the entire line, even the disastrous series 1.
  • It should be noted that, among the older Resident Evil toys, these are the most common ones to find and are often the cheapest (Only the NECA line, which is the most recent, is more common and cheaper...and it's newer as well). Make of that what you will.
  • Here's A few reviews of the figures on Amazon.com. Even the positive reviews point out that the toys have major flaws.
• "Sader", the legendary Chinese bootleg of a figurine of Saber from Fate Stay Night. Horribly molded and ineptly painted, the thing become famous almost instantly, inspiring tons of fanart and even a doujinshi.
• At least Sader was a bootleg. This horrible figure of KOS-MOS from Xenosaga was a legitimate official product bundled with the limited edition boxset for Xenosaga Episode II. The only consolation of the unfortunate people who obtained this was that the bike who come with it was rather better done.

1. ↑ specifically, you can't actually reuse it