Stuff You Should Know - How Toy Testing Works

Episode Date: November 28, 2017

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. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant,

and there's Jerry Rowland in there, and this is Stuff You Should Know for all the kitties out there. For the cats? The kitties. There was a D, D. Oh, gotcha. Two D's in an IE.

Not kitties. No, not kitties. Not the meow meow. Nice callback, man. Yeah. Oh, that was a good one. Bass salts. Probably shouldn't mention that

on the one for the kitties. Chuck. Yes? Have you ever tested a toy? No. Did you ever want to? Well, yeah, I mean, I've done some product testing before because I have a friend,

or had a friend that worked in market research and she would occasionally hit me up for a burger taste or a beer drink. Nice. Or a tool test, but never toys. Wow. I'll bet the beer drink was fun. That's great.

You drink a little beer and you get paid like a hundred bucks. Was she like, no, no, you can't swallow. You have to swish it around in your mouth and spit it out. Actually, most of the beer ones, 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?

Yeah. So like the beer wasn't even in the room with you? No. Oh, what a tease. Yeah, they just throw things up and I just go, boring. Yeah. Were 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 though, so who cares? Oh, nice. Is that how much that pays? Sometimes more. Wow. Sometimes, I did a frozen yogurt one for 50 bucks one time, but it ranged between 50 and a couple of hundred.

Very cool. Yeah, cash money. Yeah, why not? 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 do I do this? My parents were like, I don't know.

We both work, we're busy. Go be a latchkey kid. Yeah, 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. 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. Oh, okay. I didn't. I said the scene at the end. Hopefully it didn't spoil it for anybody that big ends eventually. Yeah, don't spoil it, but it has something to do with a dirty bomb.

That's the next episode. The big surprise ending. So anyway, I remember wanting to be a toy tester and it never panned out for me. Now that I have grown up a little bit and I've read this article, especially done a little research, toy testing still sounds awesome if you're a kid. Oh yeah.

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. What? 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 extra stuff you have to do.

You have to pay attention to your kid while they're playing with it. You have to, you've got to write reports and stuff. There's work to it if you're the parent for sure. So in other words, you have to take them out of their small, plain brick room and actually let them play? Yeah, take off their Hannibal Lecter face mask

and their straight jacket. I never thought about it that way. It is a lot of work. It'll get to work. And then put them back in after they're done with their toy. That's right. No, 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 is easily come by. I think although it's a lot easier today to get a job for your kid as a toy tester than it was, say, like in 1990. 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? Right. All right, well, let's go a little further back, Chuck, because there's a lot of different testing that goes on with toys. There's the kind I was just talking about, research, market research, right?

Like you and your beer logos. Yeah, like play with this toy, kid. What do you think? Does it stink? There's also the kind that has to do with actually making sure it's safe, which is another kind of toy testing. And we're going to cover both. But the idea of testing toys to make sure

that they didn't disembowel the kid that was playing with them with some weird sharp edge or a missile that was actually 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 mean, toys have been around for thousands of years. Like they found toys that are potentially 4,000 years old.

I saw a rattle that was from Turkey that maybe like 4,000 years old. Yeah. And by all accounts, this Italian find was sort of like an early easy bake oven kit. Yeah, it was like a toy kitchen, basically, kitchen set. Yeah, so like little kids have always wanted to play with stuff. It's just part of being a child, whether it's

Tuk Tuk Junior or all the way up to modern times. And in the 18th century, it became a thing to where the Enlightenment philosopher said, you know what? Learning through play is a really valuable thing. So legit toys started being 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 like a natural. It may be natural, but observing it is not a longstanding thing among humans. Well, sure, because before it was like, well, you're five years old, not time for you to get to work. Exactly.

Like here, you get a little more cold dust on your face. You look jobless. Yeah. So the idea of kids playing, especially to kind of learn and grow into adults, that's like finds its roots in the Enlightenment. And so you've got that one branch or that one sapling coming up.

And it starts to integrate and merge with another one that comes up later on in the 19th 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. Like the kid may have been just playing with a kitchen utensil, forced to use its imagination.

Yeah. And I just realized that keep referring to the kid as it. Yeah. His or her imagination. Like a broom becomes a horse. Pretty easy. Yeah. Or, you know, I mean, look at stickball.

Sure. Is there anything simpler than cutting a broom into a broomstick and playing baseball? Right. Or a nice ladle can become an electric guitar. Sure. That's always my thing. I always play to air guitar whenever I could.

I would give entire, god, man, when I'm like, now that I am older, how torturous must this have been? I would give entire concerts of like Bon Jovi's Slippery when wet. Oh, boy. But like it would be an either air guitar or a drum set made of like country croc lids for cymbals and then the tubs for the drum themselves

or like a quick Rhodes box or something like that. But I have like a whole like Tommy Lee drum kit made up. All right. I got some questions here. OK. I wasn't done. I was on a whole. Oh, is there more?

Yeah, I would 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, OK, one more. And I'd try to go through at least one whole side of the tape. OK. I don't think I ever made it through a whole side. My aim was to do the whole album.

All right. Well, that answered all my questions, actually. OK. I want to know how long were these performances? Who you subjected them to? My family. And they were long. They must have been excruciatingly long.

Yeah, OK. Yeah, that pretty much sums it up. All 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. 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 1950s. It became a real thing, except back then, the toys were highly likely to injure or kill your child.

Right. Not highly likely. But a lot of them were pretty dangerous, let's be honest. I found this one stat from 1968. And I've seen a question. No one was keeping track. Apparently no one really started keeping track to toy injuries and deaths until the 21st century.

Until the great Langdard incident of 4th of July. Isn't that jaw dropping, man? 21st century is when they started releasing reports with injury and death statistics from toys. So I saw this one. It was a guesstimate. But I saw 700,000 injuries from toys in 1968. And that's not including jungle gyms and swing sets,

bikes, trampolines probably, scooters, nothing like that. These are just straight up toys. By 2012, I saw that there were 11 children who died in the US. Five of them were from tricycles. Two of them were from scooters. Two were from balloons. So really technically, only two children died from what you would consider just a straight up toy,

like a dollar stuff toy or something like a crane or a play dough. 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 it was 1969 that they finally

passed what's known as, well, 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 kind of fun to look at. The Empire Little Lady Stove, which is basically

an easy bake oven mixed with a pottery kiln, 600 degrees Fahrenheit, this thing would get. It's 316 degrees Celsius. Your home oven doesn't get up to 600 degrees, probably. It genuinely does not. I think mine goes to 550. Maybe in cleaning, self-cleaning mode, it gets up that high, but this is not something

a little toddler needs to play with. Right, in self-cleaning mode, it locks itself shut so you can't open the door even. Right. What else? The bird of paradise slingshot, which looked innocuous enough, but the deal with that one was it had these sharp missiles that could make you bleed.

Yeah, I think slingshot just begins and ends at that as far as the safety is concerned. I looked up slingshots 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 rocket. And I looked up today after this article. I was like, I wonder what's going on in the world of slingshots. And dude, you should see some of the slingshots on the market today. Are they even more dangerous than the wrist rocket? Oh, yeah. Wow.

And there are YouTube videos with people with these things that they look like little musket balls that you can fire. Sure. And I mean, this guy was shooting these balls with a slingshot through half-inch plywood. It's like a gun. That is a dangerous toy. Wow.

Yeah, it's really just look up extreme slingshots at some point. And go get one. Yeah, maybe if you're 18 or older and don't have some grudge against anybody. This last one, the Zulu blowgun was that period in America where you could have a kid's toy that was highly racist and very dangerous all in one convenient box. Yeah, I can't imagine what the packaging looked like on that one.

It looks like what you think it looks like. So the kids were choking on the darts. I'm sure putting the dart in and then taking a deep breath. Yeah, exactly. They were like, I should have thought this through first. Pretty much. I regret nothing. And that was that, right?

So that was 1969? Yep. That was the first time they started taking toy safety seriously. And prior to that, the last time they had looked out for little kids was, I think, in the 50s. Because in the 40s, there was a lot of flash fire deaths among children wearing pajamas because pajamas

were made of rayon, this new material at the time. And I guess no one 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 kill them from smoke inhalation from their pajamas, right? Yeah. And even if they survived, they were, again, very badly

burned. So Congress passed the flammable, not flammable, flammable fabric act, I think is what it's called, not flammable. And can we, can I go off here for a second? Sure. Can we all come together and just agree to drop the word inflammable altogether? Oh, that again.

There's no reason for it. It's just a dangerous word. Yeah, it's weird. I'm still beating the drum on that one. Wasn't that a Simpson thing, too? Yeah, it's Dr. Nick. He's like, inflammable means flammable? Yeah.

OK, so Congress passed this act to basically say, all kids wear needs to be flame retardant now. The problem is, is the chemicals they used to make the clothes flame retardant was? Were flammable? They were not. They were the opposite of flammable in their credit. But they supposedly were linked to kids

an increase in hyperactivity and a decrease in IQ. Oh, wow. And still today, it's very, very tough to get kids' pajamas that aren't flame retardant with those same chemicals in them. But apparently in the mid-90s, Congress allowed a loophole to 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 to burn, fire needs oxygen. And if there's no oxygen really between the kids' skin and the pajamas, because they're snugly fitting pajamas, then the fire is probably not going to 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 longstanding tradition of leaving a lit candle in your baby's crib for the first month. Well, there was one other thing I saw, Chuck, too. There is a longstanding 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 death by fire, accidental fire, from cigarettes to the actual fabric manufacturers. Gotcha. Even though a lot of people died in their beds from their mattress going up, because they fell asleep with a cigarette in their mouth. Smoking a bed?

Seems like 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 movie or TV show, which you see that all the time in movies. But now when you see it, you think, do 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. And we will come back and talk a little bit more about different kinds of toy testing right after this. Music On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called David Lasher

and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude. Bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

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Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, OK, I see what you're doing.

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Cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha, cha. All right, so 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. As toys expand and are developed,

the safety standards need to be changing all the time. And they do, which is great. So 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, I see what you mean. Like they update it as new science comes in? Yeah.

Yeah, I agreed, agreed. But even that, just the idea of creating standards, again, is pretty new. Because I think until the 90s, they didn't really update the toy safety requirements for a while. It started to finally pick up, I think, in the 90s. And then in the 2000s, there is a group, an organization called ASTM, could not for the life of me

find what that stands for. But they created the standard consumer safety specification for toy safety, which apparently is the universal guidelines for toy safety. American standards for toy manufacturers? Oh, my. Maybe? That's not bad, Chuck.

All right, that was my first stab at it. That's pretty good. You also have companies like, in our article here at How Stuff Works, called InterTech, not Inatech. What's Inatech? I think that was office space, wasn't it? Oh, was it? I think so.

InterTech, which basically, they're professional toy testers. They have laboratories where they have technicians that say, here, let me see if I can bite the eyes off of this doll into my mouth, and let me see if it's so small that I can swallow that eye. Let me rip it apart. Let me light it on fire.

In England, they have, I think, actually, not even just England and all of Britain, 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 enough time to throw it away, throw it toward the gas can, and run. Right. And then the EU has their own set of standards, too.

So with that burn thing, I should say, at least, if a toy burns faster than 30 millimeters a second, which is a little over an inch, then it can't be sold in the EU. And then if it burns between 10 millimeters a second and 30 millimeters a second, it still has to have a warning that says, warning, keep away from fire. Yeah. Can get burning.

Right, right. And yeah, the whole idea is if the kid sees a thing on fire, they're going to throw it and run, and the house will catch on fire, but the kid's not going to burn up, right? Unless the kid goes and tells a grown-up. I think that should be in the warning, too. Throw, doll, run, tell grown-up. Right.

Don't go make a ham sandwich. I saw this really great video from InterTech, and it's called Teddy Bear Testing. Oh, yeah. Did you see it? I did. It is great. They clearly are aware of what they're doing is bizarre and

morbid if you just are standing there watching it as an observer, but the point to the whole thing is actually quite noble and heroic. But one of the things that they did was there's this three pronged, it was almost like 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 draws it up and tightens it and holds it snug. Tweezers. Tweezers. That's going to be in the OED one day, I think. But with this, there was a little bigger and much sturdier, and they hooked the teddy bears eye up to this thing and

then pulled the teddy bear back to see how many pounds of pressure it could withstand before it came off. And that's the other thing, too. They're not just pulling this and having fun. They're making measurements, and they're using standardized force that they're applying to this. The seams, the sewing has to be able to withstand one kilogram of weight for 10 seconds without opening up.

Just things like that, right? And it's thanks to these groups like the EU or the ASTM who have gone through and said, 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. Just comprehensive standards that everyone could adhere to to keep little kiddies 2Ds safe.

Yes. I just think it's great 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 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 come up with some wack stuff to do with toys. Yeah. I mean, I told the story during the Evil Canevil thing. We used to make coat hanger hoops and dip them in gasoline. I really wish I would have known you back then, so I could stand there and watch that. Oh, man.

Well, you would have been putting on your, we would have been running the pyrotechnic for your Bon Jovi concert. Oh, wow. Good thinking. Scott and I would have been all over that. You know. It's not too late. That's true.

All right, so that's making sure toys are safe. Once a toy is safe, then there's this whole second thing that we were kind of talking about from the movie Big, like the great scene when Tom Hanks is first and the grown up Josh Baskin is in the office and what? Did you look up his name or do you just walk around knowing it? No, no, I know the movie Big inside and out. Wow.

Is that one of your favorites? Oh, sure. You've been running around asking people on Movie Crush what their favorite movie is. What's yours? Is 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 Baskin. Yeah, so little Josh Baskin's all grown up in the office. And what's his name? Was it John Herd that he recently passed away? He's the evil corporate executive that has his idea. And I remember his famous line, stop having fun.

And 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 hand and said, I don't get it. He's like, what do you mean? I don't get it. And that's basically what they want to ask kids. Do you want to play with this?

Is it fun? Like adults design these things. And I would assume that if you're a 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 kids. 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 kids some toys and seeing what they do with it. That's right. And there's a lot of places that do this, right?

Like apparently Mattel has something called the Mattel Imagination Center in El Segundo. And if you live around El Segundo or are willing to travel to El Segundo and you have a child at 0 to 13, there's 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 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 the places where you go to actually test on-site with toys are a little more fun than 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 to get these gigs, the dream job for a kid or I guess you think the job from hell for a parent, pay attention. Like sometimes they might get in touch with you. Sometimes you might can follow the social media page of like the Mattel Imagination Center. I mean, if you just Google toy testing jobs,

there are pages and pages on places where you can submit your name. And from there, it's probably a bit of a lottery-like experience depending 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 sift through. So it's not like you can say, don't promise your kid,

you can get them a job as a toy tester. Right, well, yeah, you may want to not. In fact, don't even tell them that that's a job until you've secured it. Just don't even say the word toy around your kid. Yeah, exactly. So that's the old school way is like going directly to the company, like to go to Mattel or Fisher Price

maintain something called its Play Lab. And you can email these companies directly and basically send your kid's resume, maybe a video of your kid playing with a toy, what they would be looking for. Like you said, they might be looking for a certain demographic. But 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 some company or companies are mailing your kid toys to test, you basically need to audition for that. And you would want to include a video. And your 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. 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 send in like a VHS tape of your kid playing with a toy, that's the old school way of doing it. Now you can go on to social media like you were saying, Chuck. And it's a lot easier for companies to reach out in a targeted way to basically tap kids to become toy testers.

Yeah, if you are a mom, mommy blogs are huge. They are huge on the internet. And they get sent everything from 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.

Who is it? Ellen DeGeneres has a show feature. Where she has these kids that come out and test toys on TV. You're not going to get that job because these two kids already have it. Well, one of the kids, I'm not sure what Trey Hart's background was, but Noah Ritter, he was the apparently kid on Ellen. Remember him?

Nope. He came off a ride and was asked by a local news person like what he thought of the ride. And he's like, well, apparently I thought it was great. I had me scared half to death. Have you ever seen the video of that kid? Oh, it's beyond adorable. He's one of the two toy testers now.

So that's how he got that gig. Yes. Good for him. What else? You can start a YouTube channel. There are actual kids out there with their own YouTube channels where they test toys. 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 Joe or not, but go out there and look at Lego Dude reviews, Lego City Logging Truck. And our friend Joe, formerly of the Onion and formerly of At Midnight fame, our comedian writer friend, it's just the funniest thing I've ever seen.

And it doesn't translate to everyone because there are comments like, is this guy for real? Right. Yeah, because I mean, he's doing it straight. But it's like all those reviews, like they start off with the box that it comes in, and so Joe starts off with the box. And how well taped up it is, it's just really funny.

Yeah, he's a nice spoof. Lego Dude reviews. Lego Dude reviews. And there are all kinds of those, but specifically, Lego City Logging Truck. And you'll just see that sweet face of Joe's, and you'll know it's him. But there is a boy called, well, I

don't know what his full name was, EvanTubeHD, is a YouTube channel. Yeah, he and his sister do reviews. Yeah, and he has four and a half million subscribers. Is that as of today? Yeah, yeah. 4.6. I noticed that they did like a pizza challenge,

where they just put weird stuff on pizza. And it has like 65 million views. Unbelievable. It is unbelievable. It's crazy, Chuck. If you ask somebody like back in 1980 to conceive of like what TV's like in the future, and they said it's people just opening up toys on TV.

And that's it. And you'd be like, that's a pretty good description. I would buy that. Well, the future is now. Well, there's the other one, the Disney Collector BR. Right, this is who I'm talking about. 9 and 1 half million subscribers. And like you said, it is literally nothing,

but the hands of some woman, some anonymous robot AI creature. Right. No, it's a 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, Peppa Pig. It creeped me out. Oh, I liked it. OK, so her name probably is Vera Credidio. You mean Vera Moneybags? Yeah, a woman. Yeah, get this. She's even more wealthy than you realize.

She's a woman in Winter Park, Florida. If that's her, then that's supposedly her. And her husband, Messias Credidio, he has something called Blue Toys Club Surprise, which is the boys' version, basically, of Disney Collector BR. And together, they seriously are probably clearing $20 plus million 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 with or whatever. And that's it, man. It's like you were saying, all you see are her hands. She's opening the packaging. She's actually really good at opening packaging. She never gets frustrated. I didn't see them have to cut.

And there was no jump cut or anything like that. She's really good at opening packaging. And then she kind of says what it is out loud and then just sets it down to the side. And I was watching it like, this is ridiculous. This is the first 10 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 think that's the whole point. Kids love it. Toddlers love watching that stuff. 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 just breathes heavily. He just, right. He just plays with them. He plays with them more than she does. She just opens them.

He opens them and plays with them. But he doesn't talk. But again, you just see the hands. Yeah. $20 million a year. Yeah. 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 going to come back and finish up with a little fun with some of the most dangerous toys

of all time right after this. Hey, dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

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So this list could go on for years. Yeah, there are lots of lists like this out there. So and it's not meant to be comprehensive. This is just a selection of some of our favorites du jour, huh? Sure. So one that I saw was the Snack Time Kid cabbage patch doll. Yes. Which you could feed real stuff to.

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 kid just ate a french fry. Can you believe it? And that was the whole thing, right? Yeah. But 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 your little kid could end up with like a crushed finger or lose a big tuft of hair. And the cabbage patch kid would just be all fists and elbows saying, more, more, more. Give me more. Yeah, that's something for your nightmares. Is the cabbage patch kid just chewing their way toward you?

Right, exactly. Connected by your hair to you. So that was recalled by Mattel in 1997. So they did the right thing there. Yeah, they did. Probably the most famous one of all time is Laundarts. Yeah, Laundarts. I played it when I was a kid.

If you haven't seen Laundarts, just of a newer generation, just Google it. And they were, you would have two big hula hoop rings, kind of like a horseshoe game. And you would launch these large, plastic, sharpish darts. Plastic on one end. Yeah, the fins were plastic. Yeah.

The stick part or the, what would you call that? The dead end? The piercer? Sure, yeah. It was metal. And it was sharpish. It wasn't like a razor or anything. But it was sharp enough to where if you launched this thing

from across the yard, and you look up and go, I can't see it. It's in the sun. All of a sudden, it's in your eyeball and you're blind. Yeah, that happened to some people. People were getting injured by these things. Apparently, there were 7,000 reported injuries from Laundarts. What'd you call them, jarts?

No, I never said that. I thought you called them jarts earlier. No. OK. That is a thing, though. I've heard of jarts. What are those? I thought that was the same thing.

It may be. They were the same. So maybe that was the brand name? Maybe. I'm not sure. But they were banned, actually. They didn't even have a chance to be recalled. They were banned in 1988.

So it is illegal to manufacture, sell, possess, and certainly play with Laundarts in the US by punishment of death by Laundarts. Yes, I just looked it up quickly, by the way. Jarts 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 world class badminton player? I'm learning so much today. Now that I think about it, world class is probably misleading. Neighborhood class? Neighborhood class, for sure, yes. All right, good enough.

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'd you do? I was OK. Good enough? Yeah. Have you ever watched an Olympic badminton?

Oh, it's awesome. It is. It's so cool. Amazing. It is amazing. I can't even follow it. I'm just, they might as, they could be out there faking like there is no shuttle cock, and I would never know.

Yeah. The only way it could get better is if Disney Collector BR commented on it, but didn't even talk about what was going on. She just said, pip-a-peek, extra squishy. All right, so this next one is, actually, these next two are legit scary. The Atomic Energy Laboratory in 1951,

A.C. Gilbert invented the erector set, and he released this energy lab, sort of like a little chemistry lab set thing. But it actually had uranium. It had real radioactive materials. So you could see, like, you could create mist trails 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 fine. Radioactivity's fine. It's good for you. It gives you a healthy glow. Yeah, and the next one, the CSI Fingerprint Examination Kit.

This was on Io9'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 looked at a bunch of these lists, and it's mostly the same stuff. Sure.

Which is good to know that it's not, you know. Like, there's really 100 things, and we're just picking our favorites. Right, exactly. So the CSI Fingerprint Examination Kit, you could play CSI. You could dust for fingerprints with trimelite, which is one of the deadliest kinds of asbestos. The powder that you used to dust had about 7% trimelite.

And this was really scary. And it's amazing that it got through, because this was not the 1950s. Yeah, no, it was just like the early 2000s, I believe. Because it was a CSI brand fingerprinting kit. And I guess, so I saw that that, what is it, trimelite? Yeah. It's an actual, I think they used actual fingerprint dust.

And that's like part of something that fingerprint technicians have to work with, is asbestos. But they packaged it up and sold it for kids. And the company went bankrupt pretty quickly. Yeah, I would imagine so. What about buckyballs? It's kind of a legendary one.

You remember those? Yeah, I didn't know that these had a bad ending, because I remember my nephew and niece got buckyballs for Christmas whenever, I mean, not too long ago. And they were awesome and cool. And I played with them like crazy at their house. Yeah, they're fun. They 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 refrigerator with them. Whatever you want to do. It's just a great round magnet. But the problem 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 in 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 extent where about 1,000 or so kids required surgery

to get these out. And they were a big hit. It was just one of those Christmas toys that really captured. Must have? Yeah, must have Christmas toy. And I guess the inventor did not want to acknowledge this. So he basically said, I'm not 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 $57 million out of them. Yeah, supposedly he settled for about 1% of that. 1%? I know, $57 million down to what? $570,000, right?

Yeah, that was my 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. I didn't calculate it. And I'm terrible at math. We'll find out.

I am too, buddy. And look how far we've gotten in life. Yeah, it's $570,000. So thank you for using the calculator. Sure. And then lastly, Chuck, we've mentioned it before. We mentioned the prototype for it that was banned. The Easy Bake Oven itself, the famous one

that was in the National Toy Hall of Fame in 2006, was itself banned. Yeah, this one did not. So was that the deal with the other one that was a prototype? No, no. I mean, there was like a predecessor to it, I guess is what I mean. Yeah, because the Easy Bake Oven never got up to 600 degrees.

No, but it got up to 200 degrees Celsius, 400 degrees Fahrenheit. You don't bake anything like that much, like that high. That is hot. Yeah, like you could cook a pizza in that thing. Yes, not well, but you could. Yes, if you had time. Sure.

But they had some problems with them over the years. I mean, this is like you said, a Hall of Fame toy that's been around forever and beloved by boys and girls for generations. And 250 incidents reported 16 cases of second or third degree burns over the years. Yeah, and it was specifically a design flaw that got little kids' fingers trapped in the oven when it was hot.

And one little girl apparently had to undergo a partial finger amputation, says I09. Very sad. It is sad. But we wouldn't know about this stuff if it weren't for consumer protection. And I guess that's the moral of the story. That's becoming the moral of the story lately.

Our restaurant inspectors episode. Oh, yeah. Now, toy testing. Yeah. There you go. Good point. If you want to know more about toy testing, you can type those two words into the search bar

at HouseOfWorks.com and it'll bring up an article. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. I'm going to call this something we missed in the FOIA episode. Hey, guys, longtime listener, first time writer. Just listen to the Freedom of Information Act episode. Knowledge is he's a little behind. 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 have begun using FOIA requests to stall legitimate research. This sounds familiar. Exactly. But with facilities having hundreds of terabytes of data to potentially sift through,

complying with a request for, say, every interdepartmental email from 2000 to 2017, they can completely shut down an operation with only a 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 groups 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 and endeavors. How about that? Man. He said he was a little disappointed we didn't mention it,

but first of all, Brandon, I didn't know about this. Yeah, same here, Brandon, lay on. That's why. But he said, you guys, I realize you focus more on the federal version. So that's not much of an issue there. So he says, he's led us off the hook. Yeah, he says, you guys are awesome, keep up the great work.

The sincerely guy you should know, Brandon Benzak. Thanks a lot, Brandon. That was pretty smart. Thanks for letting us know so we could, in turn, let everybody else know. Terrible stuff. Yep. I got to look into that now.

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.S.K. podcast or Josh Omklart. You can hang out on Facebook at Charles W. Chuck Bryant or stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com and as always, join us at our home on the web,

stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, hey dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy, teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye,

bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.