The 8 Most Wildly Irresponsible Vintage Toys

That Lil' Nuclear Reactor does seem a bit much. That said, I can truthfully say that I spent many summer days playing lawn darts, melting and casting lead, and performing dubious experiments with my chemistry set. I even performed a memorable series of experiments using electricity to bring frogs back to life. I never succeeded, but I'm still here to tell the tale.

My uncle had that Kaster Kit, he once told me that the best part of the kit was that you could flatten their heads with your teeth after you were done.

I'm truely surprised there isn't something seriously wrong with him, but he seems fine. Scary stuff.

Let's be clear about something: the toys are not dangerous; the retarded parents who let their kids play with them unsupervised are dangerous.
Speaking as someone who has been around long before today's 'computer-as-a-babysitter' parents, we all played with wood burning kits, and lawn darts and what-not.
The difference is, out parents were there with us making sure we didn't kill each other or ourselves.
Parents now just set the kid down to play and then go do whatever. Kids are more like accessories now. Just use them as needed and leave them alone the rest of the time.

How about parents go back to being parents and let their kids have fun again. Supervised fun.

I had the Powermite tools as a child. They were only capable of cutting through thin balsa wood sheets. The blades and bits were dulled and the motors were low speed. The worst you could get from them was a bad scrape on your skin.

the games are NOT irresponsible.... only the parents who don't teach their children safety etc. Todays childrens are wimpy and thus will be more in danger than kids from the era of these games.

I came here to say what many others have said already.

Irresponsible? In which world? Not teaching your children to actually handle things that give them real world skills and fosters their creativity, problem solving skills and intelligence, now that's "wildly irresponsible".

I remember an elementary school science class in which mercury was poured into our hands and we played with the ball of mercury by rolling it around our hands. We also put it on nickels. Shined them right up.
And there was no health consequence...
What was I talking about?

Lead casting kits don't kill people; People with lead casting kits kill people.

When I was 11 or so, my friend's mom send us out into the yard to play with a BB gun. We were horsing around and he pinged me in the leg. I thought, "What the hell are we doing playing with a gun?" We stopped.

Lead casting kits, we used to make sinkers to catch fish and later forged coins for pinball machines. However, the stupidest thing we did was break thermometers to play with the mercury and then, sadly, the next step was to see what it felt like in your mouth. I believe in the Irish version of God where he looks after fools and drunks because mercury is poorly absorbed through the digestive tract.

...sorry where was I? Is the fluctuating IQ article?

Toys exist in part to teach kids about the real world in ways that are more accessible to them. To blunt all the edges means to lower the effectiveness of that teaching. They do need to be age appropriate, but if you don't learn about the dangers of the world in the protected environment of the home, you WILL learn about them elsewhere and probably with worse consequences.

I did the sinkers, and the mercury from thermometers. And lead free-form casting by pouring lead in water. We did not think or even know about the dangers.

At times I wonder how our generation has been able to survive at all. We did not wear helmets when riding bicycles, had not heard anything about car belts. I was fishing on a river bank completely on my own when I was 5.

Too much concern about safety takes away freedom to experiment and makes the life boring. I wonder at times if that's not where addictions, drug abuse and things root from.

Yes, Sharrydan, because we never had those things when you were five years old.

The thing about safety is that your whole generation wasn't going to die out because you didn't wear helmets or fall in the river. But some kids did. the thing about safety is trying to protect that small percentage of kids who did die doing the stuff that didn't harm YOU when you were a kid. The kids who got their heads crushed in or who were murdered or poisoned or fell in rivers aren't around to say, "I used to do that, and I didn't get hurt". Why? they're dead. But hey, you're okay, and that's all that matters, right?