November 28, 2017 • 46 mins
It's every kid's dream - a job playing with toys that pays in toys. It's a real thing and has been around for a long time. Then there's the other side of the testing process, companies who ensure that toys are safe. It takes both of these testing techniques to successfully bring a toy to market these days. Dive into the ball pit with us today and learn all about toy testing.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles w Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry rolling in there,
and this is stuff you should know for all the
kiddies out there. For the cats, the kiddies, there was
(00:24):
a D d oh, two d s and an I E.
Not no, not the nice call back man. Yeah, that
was a good one, Bass Salts. Probably shouldn't mention that
on the one for the kiddies. Uh, Chuck, Yes, have
(00:44):
you ever tested a toy? Um? No? Did you ever
want to? Well? Yeah, I mean I've done some product
testing before because I have a friend or had friend
that worked in market research and she would occasionally hit
me up for a burger taste or a beer drink
(01:05):
or a tool test, but never toys. Wow, I'll bet
the beer drink was fun. That's great, drink a little
beer and you get paid like a hundred bucks. But
she's like, no, no, you can't swallow. You have to
switch it around in your mouth and spit it out. Actually,
most of the beer one is the only one I did.
I think there was only one that was a taste
a lot of times it's just like, what do you
think of this logo type of thing? Oh? Really? So,
(01:26):
like the beer wasn't even in the room with you?
What a tease? Yeah? They just throw things up and
I just go boring. Yeah where you like, you probably
could have explained this better when you asked me to
test the beer. Well you get that little envelope with
a hundred bucks? Also, who cares? Oh nice? Is that
how much that pays? Sometimes more sometimes fift. I did
(01:46):
a frozen yogurt one for fifty bucks one time, but
it ranged between fifty and a couple of hundred. Very cool.
Yeah cash money? Yeah, why not? You know you can
go buy a lot of beer with that. Totally well.
I remember hearing about the idea of toy testing as
a kid and just being like, how how do I
do this? My parents are like, I don't know, we
(02:08):
both work, we're busy to go be a latch key kid.
Especially after the movie Big Oh. Yeah, there was like
a lot of toy testing in that right, Yeah, I
mean that was his job, and I forgot about that,
totally forgot about that. I just remember the piano scene
and then the scene at the end, Well, don't spoil it. Okay,
I didn't. I said the scene at the end hopefully
(02:30):
didn't spoil it for anybody that big ends eventually. Yeah,
don't spoil it. But it has something to do with
it a dirty bomb, right, that's the next st episode,
the big surprise ending. So anyway, I remember wanting to
be a toy tester and it never panned out for me.
And now that I have grown up a little bit
and I've read this article, especially doing a little research,
(02:50):
toy testing still sounds awesome if you're a kid, but
if you're a parent, it does not sound all that great.
What do you mean, like if your kid does that, Yeah,
it sounds like a lot of work, man, Like getting
the toy and having your kid play with it. Yeah,
I mean, it's not like that's the end of it.
Like there's a lot of a lot of extra stuff
you have to do. You have to pay attention to
(03:11):
your kid while they're playing with it. You have to uh,
you've got to write reports and stuff. There's like if
there's work to it if you're the parent, for sure.
So in other words, you have to take them out
of there. Uh, they're small plane brick room and actually
let them play, Yeah, take off their hannibal lector face
mask and their straight jacket. I never thought about it
that way to work, and then put them back in
(03:33):
after they were done with their toy. Um. No this again.
If you're the kid, great job. If you're a parent,
it seems tough. Plus also, one of the things that's
tough about it is that this is not something that
UM is easily come by. I think, although it's a
lot easier today to get a job for your kid
(03:54):
as a toy tester than it was, say like in yeah,
I think back then you had to literally depend on
someone getting in touch with you, right, or you had
to like go show up at headquarters and be like, hey,
what do you think you kid? Huh? You know? All right, well,
let's let's go a little further, a little further back,
because there's a lot of different testing that goes on
(04:14):
with toys. There's the kind I was just talking about
research market research, right, like you and your beer logos? Yeah,
like playing with this toy, kid, what do you think stink?
There's also the kind that UM that has to do
with like actually making sure it's safe, which is another
kind of toy testing. And we're going to cover both. Um.
(04:36):
But the idea of testing toys to make sure that
they didn't you know, disembowel the kid that was playing
with them with some weird sharp edge or missile that
was actually you know, could would would stick in your
gut and catch fire or something like that. That's actually
a relatively new concept, like surprisingly new. Actually yeah, I
(04:57):
mean toys have been around for thousands of years. Like
they found toys that are potentially four thousand years old.
I saw a rattle that was from Turkey that maybe
like four thousand years old. And by all accounts, this
Italian find was a sort of like an early easy
bake oven kit. Yeah, it was like a toy kitchen
(05:21):
basically kitchen stead. Yeah. So, like little kids have always
wanted to play with stuff. It's just part of being
a child. Whether it's took Took Jr. Or uh, you know,
all the way up to modern times. Uh. And in
the eighteenth century it became a thing to where the
Enlightenment philosopher said, you know what, learning through play is
a really valuable thing. So, like legit toys started being
(05:45):
developed for the first time. Yeah, I think this is
about the time maybe a little before. But this is
probably the seeds of where childhood came from, and we
need to do an episode just on childhood. I think,
man like when it was allowed. Yeah, like, this is
not it's not like a a natural. It may be natural,
but observing it is not a longstanding thing among humans.
(06:09):
It was like, well, you're five years old, time for
you to get to work. Exactly Like here you get
a little more cold dust on your face. You look jobless,
you know. So, Um, the idea of kids playing, especially
to kind of learn and grow into adults. That that, yeah,
that's like finds its roots in the Enlightenment. And so
you've got that that that one branch or that one
(06:31):
sapling coming up and it starts to integrate and merge
with another one that comes up later on in the
nineteenth century industrialization. Yeah, so now you have the idea
that kids should play with toys because prior to industrialization,
families may have made them themselves. It may like the
kid may have been just playing with a kitchen utensil,
(06:51):
forced to use its imagination. Um. And I just realized
it keep referring to the kid as it yeah, his
or her imagination. Um, like a broom becomes a horse
pretty easy. Yeah, or you know, I mean, look at stickball.
Is there anything simpler than cutting a broom into a
(07:12):
broomstick and and playing baseball? Right? Or um, A a
nice ladle can become an electric guitar. Sure, that was
always my thing. I always played air guitar or whenever
I could, I would give entire God Man, when I'm like,
now that I am older, how torturous must this have been?
(07:33):
I would give entire concerts of like bon Jovi's Slippery
when Wet, but like it would be an either air
guitar or a drum set made of like country croc
lids for symbols and then the tubs for the drum themselves,
or like a quicker Roads box or something like that.
But I have like a whole like Tommy Lee drum
(07:54):
kit made up. All right, I got some questions here,
I wasn't I wasn't done. I was on us there more. Yeah,
we give this whole concert, and like everybody would come
into my room and sit there and listen to like
the first song and be like, okay, one more, and
I try to go through at least one whole side
of the tape. Okay, I don't think I ever made
it through a whole side, but my aim was to
do the whole album. All right, Well, that that answered
(08:15):
all my questions. Actually, Okay, I want to know how
long were these performances? Who you subjected them to? My family?
And they were long, and they must have been excruciatingly long. Okay, Yeah,
that pretty much sums it up, right, So I'm not
even sure how I got on that. What my point was, Well,
because of your imagination of turning household items into fantastical toys,
(08:39):
that's right. So thanks to industrialization and mass production, toys
could be made and sold and distributed, and all of
a sudden, now you have something like the beginning of
a consumer culture, especially in America. Yeah, and we're talking
nineteen fifties. It became a real thing. Except back then
the toys were highlyly to injure or kill your child. Right,
(09:03):
I'm not highly like it, but but a lot of
them were pretty dangerous. But there, I found this one
stat from nineteen sixty eight, and like I've seen it,
like question, no one was keeping track. Apparently no one
really started keeping track two toy injuries and deaths until
like the twenty one century, isn't that jaw dropping? Man?
(09:27):
UH century is when they started releasing reports with injury
and death statistics from toys. So I saw this one.
It was a guestimate, but I saw seven hundred thousand
injuries from toys in nineteen sixty eight. And that's not
including jungle gyms and swing sets, bikes, trampolines, probably scooters,
(09:48):
nothing like that. These are just straight up toys. By
two thousand twelve, I saw that there were eleven children
who died in the US. Um five of them were
from tricycles, two of them were from scooters, two or
from balloons. So really technically only two children died from
(10:09):
what you would consider like just a straight up toy,
like a dollar stuffed toy or something like a crane
or plato. I think both of them were asphyxiation. So
the idea that there was this huge change from very
very very dangerous toys into actually a pretty safe industry
that has to do largely with toy testers. Yeah, And
(10:32):
it was that they finally passed what's known as uh while,
the first Federal Safety Standards for toys into law, and
then the National Commission on Product Safety that same year, said,
all right, we've got eight recommendations for banning toys. And
I look these up in picture because they're they're kind
of fun to look at. The Empire Lady Empire Little
(10:56):
Lady stove, which is basically an easy bake oven, uh
mixed with a pottery kiln six hundred degrees fahrenheit. This
thing would kit's sixteen degrees celsius like your home of
and doesn't get up to six hundred degrees. Probably it
genuinely does not. I think mine goes to five fifty.
(11:17):
Maybe in cleaning self cleaning mode it gets up that high.
But this is not something a little a little toddler
needs to play with, right and self cleaning mode it
locks itself, shuts he can't open the door even uh
what else? The Bird of Paradise sling shot, which looked
um innocuous enough, but it uh. The deal with that
(11:37):
one was that had these sharp missiles that could make
you bleed. But yeah, I think sling shot it just
begins and ends at that as far as the safety
is concerned. I looked up sling shots today because I
had remember the wrist rockets, Yeah, I do. Those things
were so dangerous did you have one? No, I was
never allowed to have one, So I had a wrist
(11:58):
rocket And I looked up today after this article. I
was like, I wonder, what what's going on in the
world of sling shots? And dude, you should see some
of the sling shots on the market today. Are they
even more dangerous than the wrist rocket? Oh? Yeah? And
like there are YouTube videos with people with these things that,
uh they look like little musket balls that you can fire.
(12:22):
And I mean this guy was shooting these balls with
a sling shot through like half inch plywood. It's like
a gun that is a dangerous toy. Wow. Yeah, it's
it's really just look up extreme sling shots at some
point and uh and go get one. Yeah, if you're
(12:45):
eighteen year older and don't have like some you know,
grudge against anybody. This last one, the Zulu blowgun. Um,
was was that period in America where you could have
some kid's toy that was highly raised, just in very dangerous,
all in one one convenient box. Yeah. I can't imagine
what the packaging looked like on that one. It looks
(13:06):
like what do you think it looks like? So um
kids were choking on the darts, I'm sure, like putting
the dart in then taking a deep breath exactly. They
were like, I should have thought this through first, pretty
much no thing, and that was that, right, So that
that was That was the first time they started taking
(13:29):
toy safety seriously. And prior to that, the last time
they had looked out for little kids was I think
in the fifties, because in the forties there was a
lot of um like flash fire deaths among children wearing
like pajamas because pajamas were made of ray on, this
new material at the time, and I guess no one
(13:50):
had ever tested it around a flame. And it turns
out that it could burn up real quick, and not
only could it burn the kid badly, possibly to death,
it could also of them from smoke inhalation from their pajamas, right,
And even if they survived, they were again very badly burned.
So Congress passed the flammable um not flammable. Flammable um
(14:13):
fabric act, I think is what it's called, not flammable.
And can we can I go off here for a second,
can we all come together and just agree to drop
the word inflammable together. There's no reason for it. It's
just a dangerous word. Uh yeah, I'm still I'm still
(14:34):
beating the druma on that one too. Yeah, it's dr Nick.
He's like, flammable means flammable. Uh okay. So they so
Congress passed this Act to basically say all kids wear
UM needs to be flame retarded. Now, the problem is
is the chemicals they used to make the close flame
(14:55):
retardant was um. They were not. They were the opposite
of flammable in their credit, but they supposedly were linked
to kids um an increase in hyperactivity and a decrease
in i Q. And still today it's very, very tough
to get kids pajamas that aren't flame retardant with those
(15:17):
same chemicals in them. But apparently in the mid nineties
Congress allowed a loophole they keep going where if the
pajamas were of a snug fit, they could be not
flame resistant, right, they didn't have to have the flame
retardant chemicals because um, to to burn fire needs oxygen
(15:38):
and if there's no oxygen really between the kid's skin
and the pajamas because they're snugly, snug fitting pajamas, then um,
the fire is probably not gonna happen. So they don't
have to have flame retardant chemicals. That's the one loophole.
Isn't that fascinating? Well, yeah, and now we can get
back to the long standing tradition of leaving a lit
(15:59):
candle in your baby's for the first month. Well, there
was one other thing I saw, chuck too. There is
a long standing rumor that it was actually the tobacco
industry that got the Flammable Fabrics Act pushed through because
they were trying to deflect the blame for um death
by fire accidental fire from cigarettes to the actual fabric manufacturers,
(16:22):
even though a lot of people die in their beds
from their mattress going up because they fell asleep with
a cigarette in their mouth. Smoking in bed it seems
like such a such a thing that nobody would do anymore.
But I know people still do it, yes, but it's
still shocking when you see it in a in a
movie or TV show, which I used to us see
(16:43):
that all the time in movies, But now when you
see it, you think people really smoke in bed. I
don't know. Yeah, I don't know either. I don't I
don't smoke. All right, Well, let's take a break, um
and we will come back and talk a little bit
more about different kinds of toy testing right after this. Alright, so, um,
(17:22):
there are mechanisms in place and regulatory bodies in place
now that are in charge of making sure toys are safe,
and these are constantly It's not like they wrote the
book on it and said all right, we're good. Um,
as toys expand and are developed, the safety standards need
(17:42):
to be changing all the time, and they do, which
is great. So um. One thing I saw, ironically enough,
is that somebody actually did write the book on this.
Well yeah, but it's not a finalized version, right Oh yeah.
See do you mean like they updated as new science
comes in? Yeah, yeah, agreed, agreed. Um. But even that,
you know, just the idea of creating standards again is
(18:05):
pretty new because I think until like the nineties, Um,
they they didn't really update the toy safety requirements for
a while. It started to finally pick up, I think
in the nineties, and then in the two thousands there
is a group, um, an organization called a st M.
Could not for the life of me find what that
stands for, but they created the Standard Consumer Safety Specification
(18:28):
for Toy Safety, which apparently is the universal guidelines for
toy safety, American standards for toy manufacturers. Maybe that's not bad, Chuck,
all right, that was my first stab at it. That's
pretty good. Uh. You also have companies like in our
article here at how Stuff Works called Intertech, not in
(18:51):
a tech? What's in a tech? I think that was
office space, wasn't it? Oh? I think so um Interchech,
which basically they they're professional toy testers. They have laboratories
where they have technicians that say, here, let me um,
let me see if I can bite the eyes off
of this doll into my mouth, and let me see
(19:13):
if it's so small that I can swallow that I
let me rip it apart, let me light it on fire. Uh.
In England they have I think actually not even just
England and all of Britain. They they have a rule
that a toy burn rate can be no more than
one inch per second, with the idea that if a
toy does catch on fire, at least your kid has
(19:33):
enough time to throw it away, throw it towards the
gas can and run. And then the EU has their
own set of standards too. So with that burn thing,
I should say, at least if if a toy burns
faster than thirty millimeters a second, which is a little
over an inch, um, then it can't be sold in
(19:55):
the EU. Right. And then if it burns between ten
millimeters second in thirty millimeters a second, it still has
to have a warning that says warning, keep away from fire,
right right? Um? And yeah, the whole idea is like,
if the kid sees the thing on fire, they're gonna
throw it and run and the household kitch on fire.
(20:16):
But the kid's not gonna burn up, right unless the
kid goes and tells the grown up. I think that
should be in the in the warning too, Throw doll, run,
tell grown up, right, don't go make like a ham sandwich.
I saw this really great video from inter Tech and uh,
it's called Teddy Bear testing. Did you see it? It
(20:37):
is great. It's that they clearly are aware of what
that what they're doing is bizarre and morbid if you
just start standing there watching it as an observer. But
you know, the point to the whole thing is actually
quite quite noble and heroic. But one of the things
that they did was there's this like three pronged It
(20:59):
was almost like you know those things that a jeweler
uses to pick up diamonds with tweezers kind of. But
they have one that's like a three pronged thing where
you push down on the end and the prongs extend
and open a little bit, and you pick something up
and then release the end and it it draws it
up and tightens it and holds it. Snuck's that's gonna
(21:20):
be in the O E. D one day, I think.
But with this that was a little bigger and much sturdier.
And they hooked the dolls, the teddy bears I to
this thing and then pull the teddy bear back to
see how many pounds of pressure it could be saying
before it came off. And that's the other thing too.
They're not just like pulling this and like having fun
like they're they're making measurements and they're using like standardized
(21:42):
um like force that they're applying to this, right, Like
the the seems the sewing has to um be able
to withstand like one kilogram of wait for ten seconds
without opening up. Just things like that, right, And it's
thanks to these groups like the EU or the A S. T.
M and who who have gone through and said this
(22:04):
is like if your toy makes a sound, it should
be no louder than this. Or if you are manufacturing
a toy gun, it should be marked like this, so
it's obviously a toy and not a real gun. Like,
just comprehensive standards that everyone could adhere to to keep
little kiddies two d's safe. I just think it's great
(22:25):
that there's people out there doing that because it's a
kind of a new thing. Well sure, and they ostensibly
have done the research on, like they really cover all
their bases, like what what could we imagine a child
doing with this thing? You know, I suspect that even
as much time as they spend doing that, kids still
(22:47):
come up with some black stuff to do with toys. Yeah,
I mean, I told the story during the Evil Kneedl thing,
we used to make uh coat hanger hoops and dip
them in gasoline to jump. I wish I would have
known you back then so I could stand there and
watch that. Man. Well you would have been putting on
your we would have been running the pyrotechnic for your
(23:08):
bon Jovi concert. Oh wow, good thinking, Gott and I
would have been all over that. You know, it's not
too late, that's true. Um, all right, so that's toy
making sure toys are safe. Um. Once the toy is safe,
then there's this whole second thing that we were kind
of talking about from the movie Big. Um, like the
(23:28):
great scene when Tom Hanks is first and uh, growing
up Josh Baskin is in the office. What did you
look up his name? Or do you just walk around
knowing it? No? No, I know the movie Big Inside. Now, Wow,
is that one of your favorites? I you you've been
running around asking people on movie Crush with their favorite movie?
(23:50):
Is what's yours? It's Big It No, no, no, but
it's up there. I love the movie Big I've seen
it a dozen times or more easily. Josh bat Yes,
a little Josh Baskins all grown up in the office,
and um, what's his name? Was it? John? Heard that
he recently passed away. He's the the evil corporate executive
that has his idea and remember his famous line stop
(24:13):
having fun? Yeah? And he he makes his big presentation.
I think it was like a building that turns into
a robot. And Tom Hanks very sweetly just raised his handset.
I don't get it. He's like, what do you mean?
I don't get it. Uh, And that's basically what they
want to ask kids, like, do you want to play
with this? Is it fun? Like? Adults design these things,
and they might. I would assume that if you're a
(24:35):
toy designer, you have a mind of a child to
a certain degree, but you're still not a kid. Yeah,
it's got to pass that test, right exactly. That's the
whole point of having toy testers. It's it's kids like
that's they're not adult toy testers. Maybe their parents are
there or something like that. But the whole point of
actual market development toy testing is by just giving did
(25:00):
some toys and seeing what they do with it. That's right.
And there's a lot of a lot of places that
do this right, Like um, apparently Mattel has something called
the Mattel Imagination Center in El Segundo. And if you
live around Al Sagundo or willing to travel to Al Sagundo,
and you have a child at zero to thirteen, there's
(25:20):
a pretty high likelihood that you will be able to
get into the door and your kid will be able
to play with some toys and and be watched by
scientists behind two way mirrors. But that's pretty I mean
that's a little I think that's pretty close to reality.
I think that the places where you go to actually
test on site with toys are a little more fun
(25:40):
than like a like a room with a two way mirror,
But it's still the same principle. Generally, you're being observed
while you're playing with toys as a kid. Yeah, and
there's um to get these gigs, the dream job for
a kid or I guess you think the job from
hell for a parent. Um attention, Like sometimes they might
(26:01):
get in touch with you. Sometimes you might can follow
the social media page of like the Mattel Imagination Imagination Center.
Uh they I mean if you just google toy testing jobs,
there are pages and pages on places where you can
submit your name and uh it's you know, from there.
It's probably a bit of a lottery like experience, depending
(26:24):
on what exactly they're looking for. Like you might fit
your kid might fit a demographic, but there's still a
lot of kids in that demo that they have to
sip through. So it's not like you can say, you know,
don't promise your kid you can get them a job
as a toy tester. Right, Well, yeah, you may want to.
I don't even tell them that that's a job until
you've secured it. Just don't even say the word toy
(26:46):
around your kid. Yeah, that exactly. Um, So there's that's
there's The old school way is like going directly to
the company, like to go to Mattel or um Fisher
Price maintains something called its play Lab, and you can
email these companies directly and basically send your kids resume,
maybe a video of your kid playing with a toy. Um.
What they would be looking for, Like you said, they
(27:08):
might be looking for a certain demographic um, but they
more often than not if they're just looking for like
a go to toy tester to where your kid actually
has the job of being a toy tester, where somebody,
some company or companies are mailing your kid toys to
test you. You basically need to audition for that, and
you would want to include a video and that your
(27:29):
kid in the video would want to be using like
coherent words that express how he or she's feeling about
that toy at that moment um, and you may get
picked up. That's the old school way of doing it,
although if you want to do super old school, like
use a video camera and sending like a VHS tape
of your kid playing with the toy. That's the old
(27:50):
school way to do it. Now you can go onto
onto social media, like you were saying, Chuck, and um,
they there's a lot it's a lot easier for companies
to reach out in a targeted way, um to to
basically tap kids to become toy testers. Yeah, if you
are a mom, mommy blogs are huge. They are huge
(28:14):
on the Internet and they get sent everything from you know,
um baby products that they can use to mommy products
to toys. So tell your mom start a blog, become
a top blogger, and she'll thank you because then she'll
be rich. Yeah, say, mom, start a viral blog today?
(28:34):
Who is it? Ellen degenerous as a as a show
feature where she has these kids that come out and
test toys on TV. Um, you're not gonna get that
job because these two kids already have it. Well that
one of the kids. I'm not sure what trade Hearts
background was, but Noah Ritter, he was the apparently kid
on Allen Remember him, m No. He he came off
(28:56):
ride and was asked by a local newsperson like what
he thought of the ride? He's like, well, apparently Um,
I thought it was great. Had me scared half to death.
You've never seen the video of that kid. It's beyond adorable.
He's one of the two toy testers now, so that's
how I got that gig. Yes, good for him. What else?
(29:17):
You can start a YouTube channel? There are actual kids
out there with their own YouTube channels where they test toys. Uh.
And beyond that, I want to recommend have you ever
seen our buddy Joe Randazzo's Lego Dude reviews? Yeah? I have.
I don't know if you have to be a friend
of Joie or not, but go out there and look
at Lego Dude reviews, Lego City Logging Truck and our
(29:40):
friend Joe formally of Onion, informally of at Midnight Fame,
our comedian writer friend. It's just the funniest thing I've
ever seen. And it doesn't translate everyone because there are
comments like is this guy for real? Right? Yeah? Because
it straight But it's like all those reviews like they
(30:02):
start off with the box that it comes in and
said Joe starts off of the box and how well
taped up it is. It's just it's just really funny.
He's a nice, nice spoof leg reviews, Lego Dude reviews,
and there are all kinds of those, but specifically Lego
City Logging Truck. Uh. And you'll you'll just see that
sweet face of Joe's and you'll know it's him. But
there's a boy called well, I don't know what his
(30:24):
full name in was. Evan tube HD is a YouTube channel.
Yeah he didn't his sister do reviews. Yeah, and he is.
He has four and a half a million subscribers. Is
that as of today? Yeah, yeah, four point six. I
noticed that they did like a pizza challenge where they
just put weird stuff on pizza and it has like
(30:44):
sixty five million views. Unbelievable. It is unbelievable. It's crazy, Chuck.
If you if you ask somebody like back in to
conceive of like what TVs like in the future, and
they said, Um, it's people just opening up toys on
on TV and that's it. And you'd be like, that's
(31:07):
a pretty good, pretty good description. I would buy that.
Well the futures. Now, well there's the other one, the
um Disney Collector. Br Right, this is who I'm talking about.
Nine and a half million subscribers, and like you said,
there It is literally nothing but the hands of some woman,
some anonymous uh robot ai creature. Right now, it's a
(31:31):
real person's hands opening up toys and playing with them
and talking a little bit in a very creepy voice.
If you ask me, I think it's great. You think
the voice is great? Dude? Yeah, Pepper Pig. It creeped
me out. Oh I liked it. Her Okay, So her
name probably is Vera crid didiou woman, vera money bags. Yeah,
(31:53):
a woman. Yeah, get this, she's she's even more wealthy
than you realize. She's a woman in winter Park, Florida.
If her, then that's so. That's that's that's supposedly her
and her husband, messiest critdio um. He has something called
Blue Toys Club Surprise, which is the boys version basically
(32:15):
of Disney Collector b R. And together they seriously are
probably clearing twenty plus million dollars a year, making a
video every day and uploading it. And she will say
Peppa Pig or something like that and say what it
is the product that she's holding or opening or playing
(32:39):
with or whatever, and that like that's it. Man, It's
like you were saying, like all you see her her hands.
She's opening the packaging. She's actually really good at opening packaging.
She never gets frustrated. I didn't see her like, um,
I didn't see them have to cut and like there
was no jump cut or anything like that. She's really
good at opening packaging. Um. And then she kind of
(33:00):
says what it is out loud and then just like
sets it down to the side. And I was watching
it like, this is ridiculous. This is the first ten seconds.
This is ridiculous. People actually watch this. I can't believe this.
And then the next thing I knew. The next four
minutes were me sitting there with my mouth kind of
open a little bit, just zoned out watching this. I
(33:20):
think that's the whole point. It's um, kids love it.
Toddler's love watching. I can see why her husband though,
or I should say Blue Toys Club Surprise, he didn't
talk at all. And then I find a little creepy.
He he just like plays with them. He plays with
them more than she does. She just opens them. He
(33:42):
opens him and plays with them, but he doesn't talk.
But again, you just see the hands. Twenty million dollars
a year. What a world. It is quite a world.
It's the future. All right, should we take another break? Yes,
all right, let's do that, and we're gonna come back
and finish up with a little fun with some of
the most dangerous toys of all time right after this. Okay,
(34:24):
we're back, man, Are you ready? I'm ready. So this,
this list could go on for years. Yeah, there are
lots of lists like this out there, so in this
and it's not meant to be comprehensive. This is just
a selection of some of our favorites. Huh so um.
One that I saw was the snack Time Kid cabbage
(34:45):
Patch doll, yes, which you could feed real stuff to
her that in the ad they feed like the cabbage
Patch kid a French fry or two or maybe I
think it came with food, That's what it was. It
came with food and you could feed it and it
would just keep chewing and swallow and then bam, the
plastic French fry was gone. Your cabbage Patch kids just
(35:06):
ate a French fry, can you believe it? And that
was the whole thing, right, But they they would chew
no matter what was placed in their mouth, yeah, like
fingers or hair, right, and they wouldn't stop either. Yeah.
So you're a little kid could end up with like
a crushed finger, lose a big tuft of hair, and
(35:28):
the cabbage patch kid would just be all fists and
elbow saying more and more and more, give me more. Yeah,
that's a here's that's something for your nightmares. Is a
cabbage patch kid just chewing their way towards your exactly
connected by your hair to you. Uh so that was
recalled by Mattel So they did the right thing there, Yeah,
(35:49):
they did. Um. Probably the most famous one of all
time is lawn darts. Yeah, lawn darts. Uh, I played
it when I was a kid. If you haven't seen
lawn darts, just you're of a newer generation, just google it.
And they were you. You would have two big kind
of hula hoop rings, uh, kind of like a horseshoe game,
and you would launch these large plastic, sharpish darts plastic
(36:14):
on one end. Yeah, the fins were plastic. Yeah, that
the stick part or the what would you call that
the dead end? The pizzer sure, yeah, was metal and
it was sharpish. It wasn't like a you know, like
a a razor or anything, but it was sharp enough
to where if you launch this thing from across the
yard and you look up and go, I can't see it.
(36:37):
It's in the sun. All of a sudden, it's in
your eyeball and you're blind. Yeah, that happened to some people.
Like people were getting injured by these things. Apparently there
were seven thousand reported injuries from lawn darts. Would you
call them jarts? M M no, I never said that.
I thought you'd call them charts earlier. Okay, Um, that
(36:58):
is the thing, though, I've heard of yarts. What are they?
I thought that was the same thing. So maybe that
was the brand name. Maybe I'm not sure, but they
they were banned. Actually, they didn't even have a chance
to be recalled. They were banned in so it is
illegal to manufacture, sell, possess, and certainly play with lawn
(37:19):
darts in the US by punishment of death by lawn darts. Yes,
I just looked it up quickly. By the way, darts
was the brand name for at least one of them.
I'm sure there was more than one kind. There definitely was,
because the one I saw was Franklin yard Darts. Franklin.
They made the shuttle cocks that my family used to
play badminton with Did you know I was like a
(37:41):
world class badminton player. I'm just learning so much today
now that I think about it. World class is probably misleading.
Neighborhood class. Neighborhood class for sure. Yet I could destroy
the neighborhood at least. Yeah, I will still play a
game of badminton. My brother set one up a couple
of years ago. Of course, how did you do? It
was okay? Good enough? Yeah? Have you ever watched like
(38:05):
Olympic Babin. Oh, it's it's awesome. It's so it is amazing,
But I can't even follow it. I'm just they might
as they could be out there faking like there is
no shovel cock and I would never know. Yeah. The
only way it could get better is if Disney collector
b R commented on it but didn't even talk about
(38:26):
what was going on. She just said extra squeezy. Alright,
So this next one is um Actually, these next two
are legit scary. The atomic energy Laboratory in a. C.
Gilbert invent of the Erector set, and he released this
energy lab like a it's sort of like a little
chemistry lab set thing, but it actually had uranium. It
(38:51):
had real radioactive materials, so you could see, like you
could create mistrails and things. Yeah, it was like a
chemistry set for kids, but with radioactivity. That was the
point of it. This is at a time when the
government was like, no, no, it's all fun radio activities. Fine,
it's good for you. It gives you a healthy glow. Yeah.
And the next one the c s I Fingerprint Examination Kit. Uh,
(39:14):
this was on I O nine's list, was the number
two most dangerous toy of all time. Yes, I think
also thanks for saying that. The last three were from
the Band Toy Museum online. Yeah, And like we said,
all these and I've looked at a bunch of these
lists and it's mostly the same stuff, which is good
to know that it's not you know, like, there's really
(39:35):
a hundred things and we're just picking our favorite. Uh.
So the c s I Fingerprint Examination Kit, you could
play c s I get dust for fingerprints, uh with
trim a light, which is one of the deadliest kinds
of asbestos. The powder that you used to dust had
about seven percent trim a light. And this was really
(39:57):
scary and it's amazing that it got through because this
was not the nineteen fifties. Yeah, No, it was just
like the early two thousands, I believe because it was
a C s I brand fingerprinting kit and I guess
so I saw that that that, um what is it
trema light? Yeah? Is it's an actual like I think
(40:19):
they used actual fingerprint dust and that's like part of
something that fingerprint technicians have to work with. Is this asbestos? Um?
But they packaged it up and sold it for kids,
and the company went bankrupt pretty quickly. Yeah, I would imagine.
So what about Buckie Balls. It's kind of a legendary one.
Do you remember those? Yeah. I didn't know that these
had a had a a bad ending because I remember
(40:43):
my nephew and niece got Bucky balls for Christmas, um whenever,
I mean not too long ago, and they were awesome
and cool and I played played with them like crazy
at their house. Yeah, they're fun. There, There were great.
They're like ball bearings that are super strong magnet. Right. Yeah,
it's really neat, so far, so good. You can build
stuff out of them, you can hold stuff to a
(41:05):
refrigerator with him, whatever you want to do. It's just
a great round magnet. But um, the problem is is
that if you swallowed more than one, you could be
in big trouble because these things were very strong magnets,
and if you had one in your intestine and another
one and a part of a different part of your intestine,
they would come together and your intestine would be pinched
off right there. Yeah, and this actually happened to the
(41:28):
extent where um about a thousand or so kids required
surgery to get these out. And they were a big hit.
It was kind of one of those, uh, just one
of those Christmas toys that really captured. Yeah, must have
Christmas toy. And the I guess the inventor did not
want to acknowledge this, so he basically said, I'm not
(41:52):
recalling these. These are a hot item. The federal government
sued him. He dissolved his company instead of funding a recall,
and so they went after him personally to try and
get fifty seven million bucks out of him. Yeah, supposedly
settled for about one percent of that. I know, fifty
seven million down to what Yeah, that's that was my
(42:15):
calculation too, But I was like, that's so small. I'm
not very confident about saying it out loud. Thank you
for swooping in. Well, I think that's right, And I
didn't calculate it, and I'm terrible at math. We'll find
out I am too, buddy. Um, and look look how
far we've gotten in life. Yeah, uh so, thank you
for using the UM. And then lastly, Chuck, we've mentioned
(42:38):
it before. We mentioned the prototype four that was banned,
the Easy Bake Oven itself, the famous one that was
in the National Hall Toy Hall of Fame in two
thousand and six. Um, was itself banned? Yeah, this one
did not. So was that to deal with the other
one that was a prototype? No? No, I mean it
was like a predecessor to is what I mean? Yeah,
(43:01):
because Easy Bake Oven never got up to six hundred
degrees No, but it got up to two hundred degrees
celsius four hundred degrees fahrenheit. That's it's that's you don't
bake anything that like that much like that hot? That
is hot? Yeah, like you could go campizza in that thing. Yes,
not well but you could, yes if you had time. Sure,
(43:22):
But they had some problems with him over the years.
I mean, this is a is a like you said,
a Hall of Fame toy. It's been around forever and
beloved by boys and girls for generations and two hundred
and fifty incidents reported, uh, sixteen cases of second or
third degree burns. Yeah, and it was specifically a design
(43:44):
flaw that that got little kids fingers trapped in the
oven when it was hot. Um, and one one little
girl apparently had to undergo a partial finger amputation, says I.
Oh nine, very sad. It is sad, But we know
about this stuff if it weren't for consumer protection. And
(44:04):
I guess that that's the moral of the story. That's
becoming the moral of the story lately our Restaurant Inspector's episode.
Now it's toy testing. Yeah, there you go. Good point. Uh.
If you want to know more about toy testing, you
can type those two words into the search bar houseolforks
dot common and will bring up an article. And since
I say that it's time for listener mail, I'm gonna
(44:27):
call this, uh something we missed in the FOIA episode.
Hey guys, a long time listener, first time writer, just
listen to the Freedom of Information Act episode acknowledges he's
a little behind and I wanted to bring something to
your attention. Many states have laws modeled after the FOIA
and there's a disturbing trend the last few years. There
are many special interest groups and activists out there that
(44:49):
have begun using FOI request to stall legitimate research. This
sounds familiar, Yeah, exactly. With facilities having hundreds of terabytes
of data to potentially sift through complying with the request
or say every interdepartmental email from two thousand to sev
they can completely shut down an operation with only a
(45:09):
handful of researchers. Another tactic is to cherry pick from
tons upon tons of data to attempt to piece together
an argument to discredit unfavorable study results. The group's making
the request know this, so it's a win win for them.
They get tons of private emails to look through to
spend into something nefarious, and even if and when they
find nothing, they still throw a wrench into legitimate research
(45:32):
and endeavors. How about that man, He said he was
a little disappointed we didn't mention it. But um, first
of all, Brandon I didn't know about this sore, that's why. Uh.
But he said, you guys, I realized you focus more
on the federal version, so that's not much of an
issue there. So yeah, he says, you guys are awesome.
Keep up the great work. Uh, sincerely, Guy you should Know,
(45:55):
Brandon ben Zack. Thanks a lot, Brandon, it was pretty smart. Um.
Thanks for letting us know so we could, in turn
let everybody else know terrible stuff. I gotta look into
that now. UM. If you want to alert us to
something that we walked right past, please do. We always
want to know that kind of thing. You can tweet
to us at s y ESK podcast or joshuam Clark.
(46:17):
You can hang out on Facebook at Charles W. Chuck
Bryant or Stuff you Should Know. You can send us
an email the Stuff podcast at how stuff Works dot
com and has always joined us at our home on
the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com. For more
on this and thousands of other topics, is that how
stuff Works dot com
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from how Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles w Chuck Bryant, there's Jerry rolling in there,
and this is stuff you should know for all the
kiddies out there. For the cats, the kiddies, there was
(00:24):
a D d oh, two d s and an I E.
Not no, not the nice call back man. Yeah, that
was a good one, Bass Salts. Probably shouldn't mention that
on the one for the kiddies. Uh, Chuck, Yes, have
(00:44):
you ever tested a toy? Um? No? Did you ever
want to? Well? Yeah, I mean I've done some product
testing before because I have a friend or had friend
that worked in market research and she would occasionally hit
me up for a burger taste or a beer drink
(01:05):
or a tool test, but never toys. Wow, I'll bet
the beer drink was fun. That's great, drink a little
beer and you get paid like a hundred bucks. But
she's like, no, no, you can't swallow. You have to
switch it around in your mouth and spit it out. Actually,
most of the beer one is the only one I did.
I think there was only one that was a taste
a lot of times it's just like, what do you
think of this logo type of thing? Oh? Really? So,
(01:26):
like the beer wasn't even in the room with you?
What a tease? Yeah? They just throw things up and
I just go boring. Yeah where you like, you probably
could have explained this better when you asked me to
test the beer. Well you get that little envelope with
a hundred bucks? Also, who cares? Oh nice? Is that
how much that pays? Sometimes more sometimes fift. I did
(01:46):
a frozen yogurt one for fifty bucks one time, but
it ranged between fifty and a couple of hundred. Very cool.
Yeah cash money? Yeah, why not? You know you can
go buy a lot of beer with that. Totally well.
I remember hearing about the idea of toy testing as
a kid and just being like, how how do I
do this? My parents are like, I don't know, we
(02:08):
both work, we're busy to go be a latch key kid.
Especially after the movie Big Oh. Yeah, there was like
a lot of toy testing in that right, Yeah, I
mean that was his job, and I forgot about that,
totally forgot about that. I just remember the piano scene
and then the scene at the end, Well, don't spoil it. Okay,
I didn't. I said the scene at the end hopefully
(02:30):
didn't spoil it for anybody that big ends eventually. Yeah,
don't spoil it. But it has something to do with
it a dirty bomb, right, that's the next st episode,
the big surprise ending. So anyway, I remember wanting to
be a toy tester and it never panned out for me.
And now that I have grown up a little bit
and I've read this article, especially doing a little research,
(02:50):
toy testing still sounds awesome if you're a kid, but
if you're a parent, it does not sound all that great.
What do you mean, like if your kid does that, Yeah,
it sounds like a lot of work, man, Like getting
the toy and having your kid play with it. Yeah,
I mean, it's not like that's the end of it.
Like there's a lot of a lot of extra stuff
you have to do. You have to pay attention to
(03:11):
your kid while they're playing with it. You have to uh,
you've got to write reports and stuff. There's like if
there's work to it if you're the parent, for sure.
So in other words, you have to take them out
of there. Uh, they're small plane brick room and actually
let them play, Yeah, take off their hannibal lector face
mask and their straight jacket. I never thought about it
that way to work, and then put them back in
(03:33):
after they were done with their toy. Um. No this again.
If you're the kid, great job. If you're a parent,
it seems tough. Plus also, one of the things that's
tough about it is that this is not something that
UM is easily come by. I think, although it's a
lot easier today to get a job for your kid
(03:54):
as a toy tester than it was, say like in yeah,
I think back then you had to literally depend on
someone getting in touch with you, right, or you had
to like go show up at headquarters and be like, hey,
what do you think you kid? Huh? You know? All right, well,
let's let's go a little further, a little further back,
because there's a lot of different testing that goes on
(04:14):
with toys. There's the kind I was just talking about
research market research, right, like you and your beer logos? Yeah,
like playing with this toy, kid, what do you think stink?
There's also the kind that UM that has to do
with like actually making sure it's safe, which is another
kind of toy testing. And we're going to cover both. Um.
(04:36):
But the idea of testing toys to make sure that
they didn't you know, disembowel the kid that was playing
with them with some weird sharp edge or missile that
was actually you know, could would would stick in your
gut and catch fire or something like that. That's actually
a relatively new concept, like surprisingly new. Actually yeah, I
(04:57):
mean toys have been around for thousands of years. Like
they found toys that are potentially four thousand years old.
I saw a rattle that was from Turkey that maybe
like four thousand years old. And by all accounts, this
Italian find was a sort of like an early easy
bake oven kit. Yeah, it was like a toy kitchen
(05:21):
basically kitchen stead. Yeah. So, like little kids have always
wanted to play with stuff. It's just part of being
a child. Whether it's took Took Jr. Or uh, you know,
all the way up to modern times. Uh. And in
the eighteenth century it became a thing to where the
Enlightenment philosopher said, you know what, learning through play is
a really valuable thing. So, like legit toys started being
(05:45):
developed for the first time. Yeah, I think this is
about the time maybe a little before. But this is
probably the seeds of where childhood came from, and we
need to do an episode just on childhood. I think,
man like when it was allowed. Yeah, like, this is
not it's not like a a natural. It may be natural,
but observing it is not a longstanding thing among humans.
(06:09):
It was like, well, you're five years old, time for
you to get to work. Exactly Like here you get
a little more cold dust on your face. You look jobless,
you know. So, Um, the idea of kids playing, especially
to kind of learn and grow into adults. That that, yeah,
that's like finds its roots in the Enlightenment. And so
you've got that that that one branch or that one
(06:31):
sapling coming up and it starts to integrate and merge
with another one that comes up later on in the
nineteenth century industrialization. Yeah, so now you have the idea
that kids should play with toys because prior to industrialization,
families may have made them themselves. It may like the
kid may have been just playing with a kitchen utensil,
(06:51):
forced to use its imagination. Um. And I just realized
it keep referring to the kid as it yeah, his
or her imagination. Um, like a broom becomes a horse
pretty easy. Yeah, or you know, I mean, look at stickball.
Is there anything simpler than cutting a broom into a
(07:12):
broomstick and and playing baseball? Right? Or um, A a
nice ladle can become an electric guitar. Sure, that was
always my thing. I always played air guitar or whenever
I could, I would give entire God Man, when I'm like,
now that I am older, how torturous must this have been?
(07:33):
I would give entire concerts of like bon Jovi's Slippery
when Wet, but like it would be an either air
guitar or a drum set made of like country croc
lids for symbols and then the tubs for the drum themselves,
or like a quicker Roads box or something like that.
But I have like a whole like Tommy Lee drum
(07:54):
kit made up. All right, I got some questions here,
I wasn't I wasn't done. I was on us there more. Yeah,
we give this whole concert, and like everybody would come
into my room and sit there and listen to like
the first song and be like, okay, one more, and
I try to go through at least one whole side
of the tape. Okay, I don't think I ever made
it through a whole side, but my aim was to
do the whole album. All right, Well, that that answered
(08:15):
all my questions. Actually, Okay, I want to know how
long were these performances? Who you subjected them to? My family?
And they were long, and they must have been excruciatingly long. Okay, Yeah,
that pretty much sums it up, right, So I'm not
even sure how I got on that. What my point was, Well,
because of your imagination of turning household items into fantastical toys,
(08:39):
that's right. So thanks to industrialization and mass production, toys
could be made and sold and distributed, and all of
a sudden, now you have something like the beginning of
a consumer culture, especially in America. Yeah, and we're talking
nineteen fifties. It became a real thing. Except back then
the toys were highlyly to injure or kill your child. Right,
(09:03):
I'm not highly like it, but but a lot of
them were pretty dangerous. But there, I found this one
stat from nineteen sixty eight, and like I've seen it,
like question, no one was keeping track. Apparently no one
really started keeping track two toy injuries and deaths until
like the twenty one century, isn't that jaw dropping? Man?
(09:27):
UH century is when they started releasing reports with injury
and death statistics from toys. So I saw this one.
It was a guestimate, but I saw seven hundred thousand
injuries from toys in nineteen sixty eight. And that's not
including jungle gyms and swing sets, bikes, trampolines, probably scooters,
(09:48):
nothing like that. These are just straight up toys. By
two thousand twelve, I saw that there were eleven children
who died in the US. Um five of them were
from tricycles, two of them were from scooters, two or
from balloons. So really technically only two children died from
(10:09):
what you would consider like just a straight up toy,
like a dollar stuffed toy or something like a crane
or plato. I think both of them were asphyxiation. So
the idea that there was this huge change from very
very very dangerous toys into actually a pretty safe industry
that has to do largely with toy testers. Yeah, And
(10:32):
it was that they finally passed what's known as uh while,
the first Federal Safety Standards for toys into law, and
then the National Commission on Product Safety that same year, said,
all right, we've got eight recommendations for banning toys. And
I look these up in picture because they're they're kind
of fun to look at. The Empire Lady Empire Little
(10:56):
Lady stove, which is basically an easy bake oven, uh
mixed with a pottery kiln six hundred degrees fahrenheit. This
thing would kit's sixteen degrees celsius like your home of
and doesn't get up to six hundred degrees. Probably it
genuinely does not. I think mine goes to five fifty.
(11:17):
Maybe in cleaning self cleaning mode it gets up that high.
But this is not something a little a little toddler
needs to play with, right and self cleaning mode it
locks itself, shuts he can't open the door even uh
what else? The Bird of Paradise sling shot, which looked
um innocuous enough, but it uh. The deal with that
(11:37):
one was that had these sharp missiles that could make
you bleed. But yeah, I think sling shot it just
begins and ends at that as far as the safety
is concerned. I looked up sling shots today because I
had remember the wrist rockets, Yeah, I do. Those things
were so dangerous did you have one? No, I was
never allowed to have one, So I had a wrist
(11:58):
rocket And I looked up today after this article. I
was like, I wonder, what what's going on in the
world of sling shots? And dude, you should see some
of the sling shots on the market today. Are they
even more dangerous than the wrist rocket? Oh? Yeah? And
like there are YouTube videos with people with these things that,
uh they look like little musket balls that you can fire.
(12:22):
And I mean this guy was shooting these balls with
a sling shot through like half inch plywood. It's like
a gun that is a dangerous toy. Wow. Yeah, it's
it's really just look up extreme sling shots at some
point and uh and go get one. Yeah, if you're
(12:45):
eighteen year older and don't have like some you know,
grudge against anybody. This last one, the Zulu blowgun. Um,
was was that period in America where you could have
some kid's toy that was highly raised, just in very dangerous,
all in one one convenient box. Yeah. I can't imagine
what the packaging looked like on that one. It looks
(13:06):
like what do you think it looks like? So um
kids were choking on the darts, I'm sure, like putting
the dart in then taking a deep breath exactly. They
were like, I should have thought this through first, pretty
much no thing, and that was that, right, So that
that was That was the first time they started taking
(13:29):
toy safety seriously. And prior to that, the last time
they had looked out for little kids was I think
in the fifties, because in the forties there was a
lot of um like flash fire deaths among children wearing
like pajamas because pajamas were made of ray on, this
new material at the time, and I guess no one
(13:50):
had ever tested it around a flame. And it turns
out that it could burn up real quick, and not
only could it burn the kid badly, possibly to death,
it could also of them from smoke inhalation from their pajamas, right,
And even if they survived, they were again very badly burned.
So Congress passed the flammable um not flammable. Flammable um
(14:13):
fabric act, I think is what it's called, not flammable.
And can we can I go off here for a second,
can we all come together and just agree to drop
the word inflammable together. There's no reason for it. It's
just a dangerous word. Uh yeah, I'm still I'm still
(14:34):
beating the druma on that one too. Yeah, it's dr Nick.
He's like, flammable means flammable. Uh okay. So they so
Congress passed this Act to basically say all kids wear
UM needs to be flame retarded. Now, the problem is
is the chemicals they used to make the close flame
(14:55):
retardant was um. They were not. They were the opposite
of flammable in their credit, but they supposedly were linked
to kids um an increase in hyperactivity and a decrease
in i Q. And still today it's very, very tough
to get kids pajamas that aren't flame retardant with those
(15:17):
same chemicals in them. But apparently in the mid nineties
Congress allowed a loophole they keep going where if the
pajamas were of a snug fit, they could be not
flame resistant, right, they didn't have to have the flame
retardant chemicals because um, to to burn fire needs oxygen
(15:38):
and if there's no oxygen really between the kid's skin
and the pajamas because they're snugly, snug fitting pajamas, then um,
the fire is probably not gonna happen. So they don't
have to have flame retardant chemicals. That's the one loophole.
Isn't that fascinating? Well, yeah, and now we can get
back to the long standing tradition of leaving a lit
(15:59):
candle in your baby's for the first month. Well, there
was one other thing I saw, chuck too. There is
a long standing rumor that it was actually the tobacco
industry that got the Flammable Fabrics Act pushed through because
they were trying to deflect the blame for um death
by fire accidental fire from cigarettes to the actual fabric manufacturers,
(16:22):
even though a lot of people die in their beds
from their mattress going up because they fell asleep with
a cigarette in their mouth. Smoking in bed it seems
like such a such a thing that nobody would do anymore.
But I know people still do it, yes, but it's
still shocking when you see it in a in a
movie or TV show, which I used to us see
(16:43):
that all the time in movies, But now when you
see it, you think people really smoke in bed. I
don't know. Yeah, I don't know either. I don't I
don't smoke. All right, Well, let's take a break, um
and we will come back and talk a little bit
more about different kinds of toy testing right after this. Alright, so, um,
(17:22):
there are mechanisms in place and regulatory bodies in place
now that are in charge of making sure toys are safe,
and these are constantly It's not like they wrote the
book on it and said all right, we're good. Um,
as toys expand and are developed, the safety standards need
(17:42):
to be changing all the time, and they do, which
is great. So um. One thing I saw, ironically enough,
is that somebody actually did write the book on this.
Well yeah, but it's not a finalized version, right Oh yeah.
See do you mean like they updated as new science
comes in? Yeah, yeah, agreed, agreed. Um. But even that,
you know, just the idea of creating standards again is
(18:05):
pretty new because I think until like the nineties, Um,
they they didn't really update the toy safety requirements for
a while. It started to finally pick up, I think
in the nineties, and then in the two thousands there
is a group, um, an organization called a st M.
Could not for the life of me find what that
stands for, but they created the Standard Consumer Safety Specification
(18:28):
for Toy Safety, which apparently is the universal guidelines for
toy safety, American standards for toy manufacturers. Maybe that's not bad, Chuck,
all right, that was my first stab at it. That's
pretty good. Uh. You also have companies like in our
article here at how Stuff Works called Intertech, not in
(18:51):
a tech? What's in a tech? I think that was
office space, wasn't it? Oh? I think so um Interchech,
which basically they they're professional toy testers. They have laboratories
where they have technicians that say, here, let me um,
let me see if I can bite the eyes off
of this doll into my mouth, and let me see
(19:13):
if it's so small that I can swallow that I
let me rip it apart, let me light it on fire. Uh.
In England they have I think actually not even just
England and all of Britain. They they have a rule
that a toy burn rate can be no more than
one inch per second, with the idea that if a
toy does catch on fire, at least your kid has
(19:33):
enough time to throw it away, throw it towards the
gas can and run. And then the EU has their
own set of standards too. So with that burn thing,
I should say, at least if if a toy burns
faster than thirty millimeters a second, which is a little
over an inch, um, then it can't be sold in
(19:55):
the EU. Right. And then if it burns between ten
millimeters second in thirty millimeters a second, it still has
to have a warning that says warning, keep away from fire,
right right? Um? And yeah, the whole idea is like,
if the kid sees the thing on fire, they're gonna
throw it and run and the household kitch on fire.
(20:16):
But the kid's not gonna burn up, right unless the
kid goes and tells the grown up. I think that
should be in the in the warning too, Throw doll, run,
tell grown up, right, don't go make like a ham sandwich.
I saw this really great video from inter Tech and uh,
it's called Teddy Bear testing. Did you see it? It
(20:37):
is great. It's that they clearly are aware of what
that what they're doing is bizarre and morbid if you
just start standing there watching it as an observer. But
you know, the point to the whole thing is actually
quite quite noble and heroic. But one of the things
that they did was there's this like three pronged It
(20:59):
was almost like you know those things that a jeweler
uses to pick up diamonds with tweezers kind of. But
they have one that's like a three pronged thing where
you push down on the end and the prongs extend
and open a little bit, and you pick something up
and then release the end and it it draws it
up and tightens it and holds it. Snuck's that's gonna
(21:20):
be in the O E. D one day, I think.
But with this that was a little bigger and much sturdier.
And they hooked the dolls, the teddy bears I to
this thing and then pull the teddy bear back to
see how many pounds of pressure it could be saying
before it came off. And that's the other thing too.
They're not just like pulling this and like having fun
like they're they're making measurements and they're using like standardized
(21:42):
um like force that they're applying to this, right, Like
the the seems the sewing has to um be able
to withstand like one kilogram of wait for ten seconds
without opening up. Just things like that, right, And it's
thanks to these groups like the EU or the A S. T.
M and who who have gone through and said this
(22:04):
is like if your toy makes a sound, it should
be no louder than this. Or if you are manufacturing
a toy gun, it should be marked like this, so
it's obviously a toy and not a real gun. Like,
just comprehensive standards that everyone could adhere to to keep
little kiddies two d's safe. I just think it's great
(22:25):
that there's people out there doing that because it's a
kind of a new thing. Well sure, and they ostensibly
have done the research on, like they really cover all
their bases, like what what could we imagine a child
doing with this thing? You know, I suspect that even
as much time as they spend doing that, kids still
(22:47):
come up with some black stuff to do with toys. Yeah,
I mean, I told the story during the Evil Kneedl thing,
we used to make uh coat hanger hoops and dip
them in gasoline to jump. I wish I would have
known you back then so I could stand there and
watch that. Man. Well you would have been putting on
your we would have been running the pyrotechnic for your
(23:08):
bon Jovi concert. Oh wow, good thinking, Gott and I
would have been all over that. You know, it's not
too late, that's true. Um, all right, so that's toy
making sure toys are safe. Um. Once the toy is safe,
then there's this whole second thing that we were kind
of talking about from the movie Big. Um, like the
(23:28):
great scene when Tom Hanks is first and uh, growing
up Josh Baskin is in the office. What did you
look up his name? Or do you just walk around
knowing it? No? No, I know the movie Big Inside. Now, Wow,
is that one of your favorites? I you you've been
running around asking people on movie Crush with their favorite movie?
(23:50):
Is what's yours? It's Big It No, no, no, but
it's up there. I love the movie Big I've seen
it a dozen times or more easily. Josh bat Yes,
a little Josh Baskins all grown up in the office,
and um, what's his name? Was it? John? Heard that
he recently passed away. He's the the evil corporate executive
that has his idea and remember his famous line stop
(24:13):
having fun? Yeah? And he he makes his big presentation.
I think it was like a building that turns into
a robot. And Tom Hanks very sweetly just raised his handset.
I don't get it. He's like, what do you mean?
I don't get it. Uh, And that's basically what they
want to ask kids, like, do you want to play
with this? Is it fun? Like? Adults design these things,
and they might. I would assume that if you're a
(24:35):
toy designer, you have a mind of a child to
a certain degree, but you're still not a kid. Yeah,
it's got to pass that test, right exactly. That's the
whole point of having toy testers. It's it's kids like
that's they're not adult toy testers. Maybe their parents are
there or something like that. But the whole point of
actual market development toy testing is by just giving did
(25:00):
some toys and seeing what they do with it. That's right.
And there's a lot of a lot of places that
do this right, Like um, apparently Mattel has something called
the Mattel Imagination Center in El Segundo. And if you
live around Al Sagundo or willing to travel to Al Sagundo,
and you have a child at zero to thirteen, there's
(25:20):
a pretty high likelihood that you will be able to
get into the door and your kid will be able
to play with some toys and and be watched by
scientists behind two way mirrors. But that's pretty I mean
that's a little I think that's pretty close to reality.
I think that the places where you go to actually
test on site with toys are a little more fun
(25:40):
than like a like a room with a two way mirror,
But it's still the same principle. Generally, you're being observed
while you're playing with toys as a kid. Yeah, and
there's um to get these gigs, the dream job for
a kid or I guess you think the job from
hell for a parent. Um attention, Like sometimes they might
(26:01):
get in touch with you. Sometimes you might can follow
the social media page of like the Mattel Imagination Imagination Center.
Uh they I mean if you just google toy testing jobs,
there are pages and pages on places where you can
submit your name and uh it's you know, from there.
It's probably a bit of a lottery like experience, depending
(26:24):
on what exactly they're looking for. Like you might fit
your kid might fit a demographic, but there's still a
lot of kids in that demo that they have to
sip through. So it's not like you can say, you know,
don't promise your kid you can get them a job
as a toy tester. Right, Well, yeah, you may want to.
I don't even tell them that that's a job until
you've secured it. Just don't even say the word toy
(26:46):
around your kid. Yeah, that exactly. Um, So there's that's
there's The old school way is like going directly to
the company, like to go to Mattel or um Fisher
Price maintains something called its play Lab, and you can
email these companies directly and basically send your kids resume,
maybe a video of your kid playing with a toy. Um.
What they would be looking for, Like you said, they
(27:08):
might be looking for a certain demographic um, but they
more often than not if they're just looking for like
a go to toy tester to where your kid actually
has the job of being a toy tester, where somebody,
some company or companies are mailing your kid toys to
test you. You basically need to audition for that, and
you would want to include a video and that your
(27:29):
kid in the video would want to be using like
coherent words that express how he or she's feeling about
that toy at that moment um, and you may get
picked up. That's the old school way of doing it,
although if you want to do super old school, like
use a video camera and sending like a VHS tape
of your kid playing with the toy. That's the old
(27:50):
school way to do it. Now you can go onto
onto social media, like you were saying, Chuck, and um,
they there's a lot it's a lot easier for companies
to reach out in a targeted way, um to to
basically tap kids to become toy testers. Yeah, if you
are a mom, mommy blogs are huge. They are huge
(28:14):
on the Internet and they get sent everything from you know,
um baby products that they can use to mommy products
to toys. So tell your mom start a blog, become
a top blogger, and she'll thank you because then she'll
be rich. Yeah, say, mom, start a viral blog today?
(28:34):
Who is it? Ellen degenerous as a as a show
feature where she has these kids that come out and
test toys on TV. Um, you're not gonna get that
job because these two kids already have it. Well that
one of the kids. I'm not sure what trade Hearts
background was, but Noah Ritter, he was the apparently kid
on Allen Remember him, m No. He he came off
(28:56):
ride and was asked by a local newsperson like what
he thought of the ride? He's like, well, apparently Um,
I thought it was great. Had me scared half to death.
You've never seen the video of that kid. It's beyond adorable.
He's one of the two toy testers now, so that's
how I got that gig. Yes, good for him. What else?
(29:17):
You can start a YouTube channel? There are actual kids
out there with their own YouTube channels where they test toys. Uh.
And beyond that, I want to recommend have you ever
seen our buddy Joe Randazzo's Lego Dude reviews? Yeah? I have.
I don't know if you have to be a friend
of Joie or not, but go out there and look
at Lego Dude reviews, Lego City Logging Truck and our
(29:40):
friend Joe formally of Onion, informally of at Midnight Fame,
our comedian writer friend. It's just the funniest thing I've
ever seen. And it doesn't translate everyone because there are
comments like is this guy for real? Right? Yeah? Because
it straight But it's like all those reviews like they
(30:02):
start off with the box that it comes in and
said Joe starts off of the box and how well
taped up it is. It's just it's just really funny.
He's a nice, nice spoof leg reviews, Lego Dude reviews,
and there are all kinds of those, but specifically Lego
City Logging Truck. Uh. And you'll you'll just see that
sweet face of Joe's and you'll know it's him. But
there's a boy called well, I don't know what his
(30:24):
full name in was. Evan tube HD is a YouTube channel.
Yeah he didn't his sister do reviews. Yeah, and he is.
He has four and a half a million subscribers. Is
that as of today? Yeah, yeah, four point six. I
noticed that they did like a pizza challenge where they
just put weird stuff on pizza and it has like
(30:44):
sixty five million views. Unbelievable. It is unbelievable. It's crazy, Chuck.
If you if you ask somebody like back in to
conceive of like what TVs like in the future, and
they said, Um, it's people just opening up toys on
on TV and that's it. And you'd be like, that's
(31:07):
a pretty good, pretty good description. I would buy that.
Well the futures. Now, well there's the other one, the
um Disney Collector. Br Right, this is who I'm talking about.
Nine and a half million subscribers, and like you said,
there It is literally nothing but the hands of some woman,
some anonymous uh robot ai creature. Right now, it's a
(31:31):
real person's hands opening up toys and playing with them
and talking a little bit in a very creepy voice.
If you ask me, I think it's great. You think
the voice is great? Dude? Yeah, Pepper Pig. It creeped
me out. Oh I liked it. Her Okay, So her
name probably is Vera crid didiou woman, vera money bags. Yeah,
(31:53):
a woman. Yeah, get this, she's she's even more wealthy
than you realize. She's a woman in winter Park, Florida.
If her, then that's so. That's that's that's supposedly her
and her husband, messiest critdio um. He has something called
Blue Toys Club Surprise, which is the boys version basically
(32:15):
of Disney Collector b R. And together they seriously are
probably clearing twenty plus million dollars a year, making a
video every day and uploading it. And she will say
Peppa Pig or something like that and say what it
is the product that she's holding or opening or playing
(32:39):
with or whatever, and that like that's it. Man, It's
like you were saying, like all you see her her hands.
She's opening the packaging. She's actually really good at opening packaging.
She never gets frustrated. I didn't see her like, um,
I didn't see them have to cut and like there
was no jump cut or anything like that. She's really
good at opening packaging. Um. And then she kind of
(33:00):
says what it is out loud and then just like
sets it down to the side. And I was watching
it like, this is ridiculous. This is the first ten seconds.
This is ridiculous. People actually watch this. I can't believe this.
And then the next thing I knew. The next four
minutes were me sitting there with my mouth kind of
open a little bit, just zoned out watching this. I
(33:20):
think that's the whole point. It's um, kids love it.
Toddler's love watching. I can see why her husband though,
or I should say Blue Toys Club Surprise, he didn't
talk at all. And then I find a little creepy.
He he just like plays with them. He plays with
them more than she does. She just opens them. He
(33:42):
opens him and plays with them, but he doesn't talk.
But again, you just see the hands. Twenty million dollars
a year. What a world. It is quite a world.
It's the future. All right, should we take another break? Yes,
all right, let's do that, and we're gonna come back
and finish up with a little fun with some of
the most dangerous toys of all time right after this. Okay,
(34:24):
we're back, man, Are you ready? I'm ready. So this,
this list could go on for years. Yeah, there are
lots of lists like this out there, so in this
and it's not meant to be comprehensive. This is just
a selection of some of our favorites. Huh so um.
One that I saw was the snack Time Kid cabbage
(34:45):
Patch doll, yes, which you could feed real stuff to
her that in the ad they feed like the cabbage
Patch kid a French fry or two or maybe I
think it came with food, That's what it was. It
came with food and you could feed it and it
would just keep chewing and swallow and then bam, the
plastic French fry was gone. Your cabbage Patch kids just
(35:06):
ate a French fry, can you believe it? And that
was the whole thing, right, But they they would chew
no matter what was placed in their mouth, yeah, like
fingers or hair, right, and they wouldn't stop either. Yeah.
So you're a little kid could end up with like
a crushed finger, lose a big tuft of hair, and
(35:28):
the cabbage patch kid would just be all fists and
elbow saying more and more and more, give me more. Yeah,
that's a here's that's something for your nightmares. Is a
cabbage patch kid just chewing their way towards your exactly
connected by your hair to you. Uh so that was
recalled by Mattel So they did the right thing there, Yeah,
(35:49):
they did. Um. Probably the most famous one of all
time is lawn darts. Yeah, lawn darts. Uh, I played
it when I was a kid. If you haven't seen
lawn darts, just you're of a newer generation, just google it.
And they were you. You would have two big kind
of hula hoop rings, uh, kind of like a horseshoe game,
and you would launch these large plastic, sharpish darts plastic
(36:14):
on one end. Yeah, the fins were plastic. Yeah, that
the stick part or the what would you call that
the dead end? The pizzer sure, yeah, was metal and
it was sharpish. It wasn't like a you know, like
a a razor or anything, but it was sharp enough
to where if you launch this thing from across the
yard and you look up and go, I can't see it.
(36:37):
It's in the sun. All of a sudden, it's in
your eyeball and you're blind. Yeah, that happened to some people.
Like people were getting injured by these things. Apparently there
were seven thousand reported injuries from lawn darts. Would you
call them jarts? M M no, I never said that.
I thought you'd call them charts earlier. Okay, Um, that
(36:58):
is the thing, though, I've heard of yarts. What are they?
I thought that was the same thing. So maybe that
was the brand name. Maybe I'm not sure, but they
they were banned. Actually, they didn't even have a chance
to be recalled. They were banned in so it is
illegal to manufacture, sell, possess, and certainly play with lawn
(37:19):
darts in the US by punishment of death by lawn darts. Yes,
I just looked it up quickly. By the way, darts
was the brand name for at least one of them.
I'm sure there was more than one kind. There definitely was,
because the one I saw was Franklin yard Darts. Franklin.
They made the shuttle cocks that my family used to
play badminton with Did you know I was like a
(37:41):
world class badminton player. I'm just learning so much today
now that I think about it. World class is probably misleading.
Neighborhood class. Neighborhood class for sure. Yet I could destroy
the neighborhood at least. Yeah, I will still play a
game of badminton. My brother set one up a couple
of years ago. Of course, how did you do? It
was okay? Good enough? Yeah? Have you ever watched like
(38:05):
Olympic Babin. Oh, it's it's awesome. It's so it is amazing,
But I can't even follow it. I'm just they might
as they could be out there faking like there is
no shovel cock and I would never know. Yeah. The
only way it could get better is if Disney collector
b R commented on it but didn't even talk about
(38:26):
what was going on. She just said extra squeezy. Alright,
So this next one is um Actually, these next two
are legit scary. The atomic energy Laboratory in a. C.
Gilbert invent of the Erector set, and he released this
energy lab like a it's sort of like a little
chemistry lab set thing, but it actually had uranium. It
(38:51):
had real radioactive materials, so you could see, like you
could create mistrails and things. Yeah, it was like a
chemistry set for kids, but with radioactivity. That was the
point of it. This is at a time when the
government was like, no, no, it's all fun radio activities. Fine,
it's good for you. It gives you a healthy glow. Yeah.
And the next one the c s I Fingerprint Examination Kit. Uh,
(39:14):
this was on I O nine's list, was the number
two most dangerous toy of all time. Yes, I think
also thanks for saying that. The last three were from
the Band Toy Museum online. Yeah, And like we said,
all these and I've looked at a bunch of these
lists and it's mostly the same stuff, which is good
to know that it's not you know, like, there's really
(39:35):
a hundred things and we're just picking our favorite. Uh.
So the c s I Fingerprint Examination Kit, you could
play c s I get dust for fingerprints, uh with
trim a light, which is one of the deadliest kinds
of asbestos. The powder that you used to dust had
about seven percent trim a light. And this was really
(39:57):
scary and it's amazing that it got through because this
was not the nineteen fifties. Yeah, No, it was just
like the early two thousands, I believe because it was
a C s I brand fingerprinting kit and I guess
so I saw that that that, um what is it
trema light? Yeah? Is it's an actual like I think
(40:19):
they used actual fingerprint dust and that's like part of
something that fingerprint technicians have to work with. Is this asbestos? Um?
But they packaged it up and sold it for kids,
and the company went bankrupt pretty quickly. Yeah, I would imagine.
So what about Buckie Balls. It's kind of a legendary one.
Do you remember those? Yeah. I didn't know that these
had a had a a bad ending because I remember
(40:43):
my nephew and niece got Bucky balls for Christmas, um whenever,
I mean not too long ago, and they were awesome
and cool and I played played with them like crazy
at their house. Yeah, they're fun. There, There were great.
They're like ball bearings that are super strong magnet. Right. Yeah,
it's really neat, so far, so good. You can build
stuff out of them, you can hold stuff to a
(41:05):
refrigerator with him, whatever you want to do. It's just
a great round magnet. But um, the problem is is
that if you swallowed more than one, you could be
in big trouble because these things were very strong magnets,
and if you had one in your intestine and another
one and a part of a different part of your intestine,
they would come together and your intestine would be pinched
off right there. Yeah, and this actually happened to the
(41:28):
extent where um about a thousand or so kids required
surgery to get these out. And they were a big hit.
It was kind of one of those, uh, just one
of those Christmas toys that really captured. Yeah, must have
Christmas toy. And the I guess the inventor did not
want to acknowledge this, so he basically said, I'm not
(41:52):
recalling these. These are a hot item. The federal government
sued him. He dissolved his company instead of funding a recall,
and so they went after him personally to try and
get fifty seven million bucks out of him. Yeah, supposedly
settled for about one percent of that. I know, fifty
seven million down to what Yeah, that's that was my
(42:15):
calculation too, But I was like, that's so small. I'm
not very confident about saying it out loud. Thank you
for swooping in. Well, I think that's right, And I
didn't calculate it, and I'm terrible at math. We'll find
out I am too, buddy. Um, and look look how
far we've gotten in life. Yeah, uh so, thank you
for using the UM. And then lastly, Chuck, we've mentioned
(42:38):
it before. We mentioned the prototype four that was banned,
the Easy Bake Oven itself, the famous one that was
in the National Hall Toy Hall of Fame in two
thousand and six. Um, was itself banned? Yeah, this one
did not. So was that to deal with the other
one that was a prototype? No? No, I mean it
was like a predecessor to is what I mean? Yeah,
(43:01):
because Easy Bake Oven never got up to six hundred
degrees No, but it got up to two hundred degrees
celsius four hundred degrees fahrenheit. That's it's that's you don't
bake anything that like that much like that hot? That
is hot? Yeah, like you could go campizza in that thing. Yes,
not well but you could, yes if you had time. Sure,
(43:22):
But they had some problems with him over the years.
I mean, this is a is a like you said,
a Hall of Fame toy. It's been around forever and
beloved by boys and girls for generations and two hundred
and fifty incidents reported, uh, sixteen cases of second or
third degree burns. Yeah, and it was specifically a design
(43:44):
flaw that that got little kids fingers trapped in the
oven when it was hot. Um, and one one little
girl apparently had to undergo a partial finger amputation, says I.
Oh nine, very sad. It is sad, But we know
about this stuff if it weren't for consumer protection. And
(44:04):
I guess that that's the moral of the story. That's
becoming the moral of the story lately our Restaurant Inspector's episode.
Now it's toy testing. Yeah, there you go. Good point. Uh.
If you want to know more about toy testing, you
can type those two words into the search bar houseolforks
dot common and will bring up an article. And since
I say that it's time for listener mail, I'm gonna
(44:27):
call this, uh something we missed in the FOIA episode.
Hey guys, a long time listener, first time writer, just
listen to the Freedom of Information Act episode acknowledges he's
a little behind and I wanted to bring something to
your attention. Many states have laws modeled after the FOIA
and there's a disturbing trend the last few years. There
are many special interest groups and activists out there that
(44:49):
have begun using FOI request to stall legitimate research. This
sounds familiar, Yeah, exactly. With facilities having hundreds of terabytes
of data to potentially sift through complying with the request
or say every interdepartmental email from two thousand to sev
they can completely shut down an operation with only a
(45:09):
handful of researchers. Another tactic is to cherry pick from
tons upon tons of data to attempt to piece together
an argument to discredit unfavorable study results. The group's making
the request know this, so it's a win win for them.
They get tons of private emails to look through to
spend into something nefarious, and even if and when they
find nothing, they still throw a wrench into legitimate research
(45:32):
and endeavors. How about that man, He said he was
a little disappointed we didn't mention it. But um, first
of all, Brandon I didn't know about this sore, that's why. Uh.
But he said, you guys, I realized you focus more
on the federal version, so that's not much of an
issue there. So yeah, he says, you guys are awesome.
Keep up the great work. Uh, sincerely, Guy you should Know,
(45:55):
Brandon ben Zack. Thanks a lot, Brandon, it was pretty smart. Um.
Thanks for letting us know so we could, in turn
let everybody else know terrible stuff. I gotta look into
that now. UM. If you want to alert us to
something that we walked right past, please do. We always
want to know that kind of thing. You can tweet
to us at s y ESK podcast or joshuam Clark.
(46:17):
You can hang out on Facebook at Charles W. Chuck
Bryant or Stuff you Should Know. You can send us
an email the Stuff podcast at how stuff Works dot
com and has always joined us at our home on
the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com. For more
on this and thousands of other topics, is that how
stuff Works dot com
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