The Dangerous Toys Of Christmas Past

Hungry Cabbage Patch Kids, loose bear eyeballs, hot Creepy Crawlers, and more

- Lenore Skenazy

WHAT’S THAT BARE spot under the Christmas tree? It’s a silent salute to the toys we’ve lost to regulations and lawsuits over the years—toys that delighted many and maimed a few.

Toys like the bizarre Cabbage Patch Snacktime Kid that, one wag noted, always seemed to be high. That’s because the ’90s doll was built to “eat” whatever you could fit into its soft rubber mouth, which served as a portal to some kind of internal turbine that—significantly—did not come with an “off” switch. While you could deliberately feed it everything from a plastic french fry to a stick of chalk, it had the doll equivalent of an eating disorder, obsessively consuming anything that got caught in its maw—including some little girls’ hair.

And so, reported the Associated Press on December 30, 1996, “three-year-old Carly Mize was left partly bald on Thursday...” That was the end of that particular item from Mattel.

The toy world is littered with bad ideas, including the classic Gilbert U-238 Atomic Energy Lab, released in 1950. The set included an electroscope to measure the radioactivity of the samples provided, but a warning stated that “users should not take ore samples out of their jars.” You might expect a toy bringing literal radioactivity into the home would sell like (extreeeeeemely) hotcakes, but this one fizzled in the marketplace.