Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Lawn Darts

Episode Date: May 27, 2020

There was a time when kids had to look out for flying darts that could pierce their skulls when they played in the backyard. 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, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck.

This is short stuff. Giddy up. Let's go. Look out. Above. Is that what people shout? Look out above? It feels wrong.

I think they say look out below, but that didn't make any sense. No, neither one. They just say, how about just look out? Or heads up. That's a good one. Or no, not heads up. You'll get a lawn dart in your eye.

Just move out of the immediate area quickly. Duck and cover. There you go. Yeah, I don't know if that would help either, because Chuck, get this. We're talking about lawn darts, and when they get a real wind up under them, they strike with a force of around 23,000 pounds

per square inch. That's right. And we are talking about lawn darts, and if you're like, what is a lawn dart? I mean, you're probably younger than we are because we grew up in the 70s and 80s with these toys that was, it's basically a giant oversized dart,

like you would throw at a dart board with plastic fins, and they're about, what are they, about a foot long or so dish? And the idea is that it was sort of like cornhole. You would get on opposite sides of each other, like horseshoes, and you had these big hula hoops,

basically you would put on the ground, and you would throw the lawn dart up in the air, and try and get it to come down and stick inside of that hoop. Yeah, and you get some points for that. You just let it arc gracefully back down into that hoop, and that was it, and it was a lot of fun. The problem is, it was a lot of danger as well,

because these things, again, a lot of them had like a blunt end, but not all of them did, some of them were sharp, especially the first ones. They would come back down to earth, with a lot of force behind them, and if they happened to come back down to earth via your body, they could really mess you up really well,

especially if you were a little kid, whose skull hasn't fused fully yet, because you're not 20 years old, and some kids suffered tremendously at the hands of the lawn dart industry. That's right, and the government comes into play here, before we were born in 1970, and this was, I think they debuted in about 1950-ish.

The FDA banned these things, because they were like, these are really, really dangerous, and the manufacturer said, nah, they're not so dangerous. Let's send our lobby in, the toy lobby, and get them brought back to the market, because we gotta get these lawn darts out there. Nothing is more important.

Right, right, then getting the lawn darts back to market, getting the people their lawn darts, and Chuck, you lived through the 70s, I lived through the 70s, although I wasn't fully aware, except toward the end there, but do you know how dangerous something had to be to get banned in the 70s?

Yeah, I mean, SNL had a skit about dangerous toys, with an acroid. Exactly, so there was a push to get rid of lawn darts, but the lawn dart industry, very surprisingly, if you ask me, pushed back, and they struck a deal and said, look, how about this? We won't market to kids anymore,

so lawn darts are officially not a toy. We'll sell them in the sporting goods section of department stores, and we'll put a warning on the box about just how dangerous they are, because we didn't say, Chuck, lawn darts are the direct descendant of a weapon of war called the plumbata.

I read this Mashable article about these, and a plumbata is a lawn dart, except a lawn dart that you used in war, starting with the ancient Greeks in about 500 BCE, all the way up to the Middle Ages, people were using plumbata. Yeah, to great effect. Right, and so the lawn dart industry,

the recreation sporting goods industry said, we've got to get these weapons of war back onto the market, and so they struck a deal with the FDA, and the FDA said, fine, you can start manufacturing them again. That's right, and that's what we got in on the second wave of lawn darts in the 70s and 80s,

when they said, we won't sell them in the toy section at Target, we'll sell them in the adjacent sporting goods section at Target. Right, kids will never see them. They'll never know. It will be like they don't even exist to them, and so they came back,

and when they came back in that second wave that you and I were a part of, they were bigger than ever even, like lawn darts were a thing for a little while there, but they weren't any less dangerous than they were before, as we'll see right after this message break. Well, now when you're on the road,

driving in your truck, why not learn a thing or two from Josh and Chuck? It's stuff you should know. Stuff you should know. All right. 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. It's a podcast packed with interviews,

co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger

and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

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. 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.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay, so Chuck, in that second wave, that really began in earnest in the 80s, you could go to that sporting goods section of your department store. And you might be there to buy like a volleyball set,

but TS for you, because including that volleyball set is a set of lawn darts and you have to buy them if you want that volleyball set. And that's how they were sold in a lot of cases. Yeah, I don't, that part I don't get. Oh, yeah? Yeah, like why they would include another toy, a completely different toy in this volleyball set.

I just don't get it. Well, I think that they were saying like you, customer have shown that you have a desire for outdoor fun and recreation in your backyard. Here's another game that we're gonna throw in that we apparently can't move on its own. So we're just going to- So was that the deal?

That's what I wonder. We're gonna sweeten the pot on this volleyball net. Why are they giving away toys? That's what I, that's how I took it. Well, regardless, Mental Floss reported that David Snow, this aerospace engineer in California did such a thing in April of 87 and thought like any reasonable parent like,

oh boy, I should hide these for my children, which he did in his garage, but his children found them, started playing with them. And very tragically, one hit his seven year old daughter in the head, lodged in her brain. And three days later, she was declared clinically dead and removed from life support. And it was a big, big tragedy and a big, big deal.

And yeah, so David Snow happened to be the kind of guy who like this would get to anybody, obviously, losing your child like this. But I think, you know, there's a significant portion of people who would just be so dead inside that they just had no drive or resolve for much of anything after that. He was the opposite kind of guy.

He went the opposite direction and he became a citizen activist, self-taught lobbyist, self-funded lobbyist who made it his mission to get Laundarts banned again. But by this time, this wasn't the 70s anymore, this was the Reagan era 80s. And getting any industry or business banned or regulated more than it was before

was not the easiest thing in the world to do. So he approached the Consumer Product Safety Commission which had taken over from the FDA and he said, you gotta get rid of Laundarts. First of all, look at what happened to my daughter. And they say, well, we're really sorry about what happened to your daughter. But if you look at the numbers, man,

they're just not that dangerous. They're certainly not dangerous enough to enact an outright ban again. So sorry, no, we're not going to be doing that anytime soon. That's right, but what nobody noticed at first was that these numbers included, they were just dart injuries. So that included just throwing regular darts

at a dart board. I mean, I think we've all had one of those bounce off and stick into our thigh at one point. It's like nothing. No big deal. You're not gonna go to the hospital for an injury, most likely from a regular dart board. No, and if you do, if you do,

you are making a really big deal out of this. That's right. So they said, wait a minute, what if we pull all those darts out? And what if we actually just did a little research on Laundarts, because that's what we're talking about. And it was a big deal. Over eight years, Laundarts had sent

more than 6,000 people to the emergency room, 81% of which were kids 15 or younger, half of which were 10 or younger, and they were to the eyes, to the ears, to the face, and the head for the most part. Yeah, and again, kids were particularly vulnerable because their skull was infused. So when a kid got hit in the head with a Laundart,

it could very easily penetrate the skull. And they found that this was happening a lot more than anyone had ever realized before. So now they had a problem on their hands. Now they had real numbers that showed that, actually this thing is bad enough to ban. And they looked a little further and they commissioned a study that found

that the Laundart industry was not following those rules that it had agreed to from when the 1970 ban was overturned. So they were marketing it as toys. They were selling it in the toys section. They weren't including warnings on the box. And just completely going back on the agreement from before. So it started to look more and more like,

okay, maybe we should ban these. And again, Chuck, it's really hard not to step back and be like, these are Laundarts. Yes, just ban them, who cares? But that was, they would not do it. They were very deliberate in undertaking this ban on Laundarts. But finally, thanks in no small part to news,

the week that the vote on the ban was gonna go through of a little girl in Tennessee who had been put into a coma by Laundart, they enacted the ban two to one. They voted in favor of the ban. That's right, and Reagan's America, they actually banned a toy. And it's so funny to think there would be such pushback over this one thing.

Over the Laundarts. Like, yeah, you know what? Let's just get rid of the Laundarts, manufacture some other toys, it'll be fine. But they had to have those Laundarts out there in the hands of children. And you can still make your own Laundarts. You can DIY it if you go to, on the web,

there are companies in the United Kingdom that will sell you the parts, which is a bit of a workaround. Yeah, totally. And you can assemble them yourself. And you can still go to tournaments. If you, there is a US LDA Laundart Association and you can go to tournaments and bring out your old darts

and talk about the good old days of no government oversight. And you can pitch those things and imagine drinks and beer and probably have a pretty good time. Yeah, probably have a great time really just sticking it in the eye of the nanny state. Just, yeah, do it safely though, keep the kids away. Yeah, and I want to say one thing. The reason that you can get Laundarts

is because that government ban, ban the import and sale, not the possession. And this one dark company in particular from the UK said, oh, well that means if we just send these things unassembled, they're really just Laundart pieces. And so Ipso facto, it's gray, legally speaking. Ipso facto. Yeah.

So that's it for Laundarts, right, Chuck? That's it. Well, Chuck said that's it, everybody. So that means that short stuff is away. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app.

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