Just in time for holiday shopping, Radar Magazine has put together a top-10 list of the most dangerous toys every released on to the American consumer. It's a trip down memory lane (which all too often ended in the ER.)

From the stark menace of Lawn Darts to the ethereal, whirling faery-death-blades of the SkyDancer, take a journey back to simpler times. My personal favorite is Creepy Crawlers. Our 7-year-old got the contemporary version for his birthday, and it's more like an Easy-Bake oven: heated by a light bulb with a safety interlock to keep you from opening the cooking chamber. But when I was a kid, product liability hadn't been invented yet...

"Nothing says safety like an open hot plate. And nothing says fun like using that open hot plate to create molten, rubbery insects you can throw at your sister while narrowly avoiding setting the house ablaze. The 1964 Creepy Crawler Thingmaker from Mattel, a distant cousin of today's Creepy Crawler toys, came with a series of molds, tubes of "plastigoop," and an open-faced frier, which could heat up to a nerve-searing 310 degrees."
—Radar Magazine via Slashdot

Radar's light tone masks the grim reality that about 20 kids are killed, and over 200,000 injured each year, while using toys. Yes, that's 200k visits to the hospital; you can easily imagine that the actual number of unreported injuries is significantly higher. Visit the Consumer Product Safety Commission for the latest data.

Conveniently, the CPSC has massaged refined these statistics to exclude child death and injury on ATVs. You can scroll down their data page to get the stats: a grim 120 Americans younger than 16 killed last year and 40,000 injured seriously enough to visit an emergency room.