My Little Panzer - TV Tropes

"You put munitions chips in toys!?"

• Bakugan should get a warning sticker of their own as of New Vestroia's second season. Good thing their real world equivalents cannot transform into their true forms.
• Bakusou Kyoudai! Let's & Go!! has children playing around with real knife and cutter blades as they implant them into toy cars. Deconstructed as they evidently hurt themselves and Moral Guardians as well as the protagonists in-universe do not approve it, though some, particularly Professor Ogami, don't seem to be concerned about the idea of turning Mini 4WD cars into what amounts to weaponised toys.
• Battle B-Daman
  • The B-Daman launchers cause some pretty painful (if minor) injuries in the anime. Real life versions can put an eye out under certain circumstances.
  • This escalates, and by Crash B-Daman, the battles are essentially gunfights, with even the B-Daman designs becoming more weaponlike and more damage being done.
• In Betterman, Akamatsu Industries developed some remote controlled model-sized tanks... that actually blew up when they took a direct hit. As these "toys" could only be purchased by ''licensed demolition experts'', it didn't sell well.
• Beyblade, no matter the version.
  • With some of the things Beyblades do to each other in the stories, they wouldn't be approved for kids in most real countries. The real ones are much less dangerous, but you should always make sure the parts are on tight. It doesn't help that there are military helicopters in Metal Fusion designed to specifically launch Beyblades as weapons.
  • Beyblades specifically used as weapons is as old as the second arc of the first season of the original series, when it's revealed the whole Chinese team are trained to use them as weapons. This discovery comes right after a Bruce Lee Clone showed up with a nunchaku-mounted Beyblade launcher. Then we get in Western Europe, where the top four bladers enter significant matches in full armour and include the launchers in functional weapons. By the final arc of season one it's almost expected that the Russian team tops that by having their Beyblade launcher looking like firearms and, in one case, being used as such (thankfully it was a single-shot sniper rifle).
  • And then we have the Bit Beasts, which are powerful spirits that are inside the Beyblades and have the capacity to create incredibly powerful localized hurricanes, flash floods, lightning storms and in one occasion even a black hole that ate the stadium and a good chunk of the surrounding downtown area, apparently needing little more to be as destructive as a small nuke than the user being on the "right" mindset (anything from Hot-Blooded to a full-on "kill-whatever-is-annoying-me-and-damn-the-consequences" Villainous Breakdown).
• Crush Gear Turbo: Crush Gear vehicles have a tendency to fly apart.
• Digimon Tamers. Renamon found her way to the real world, in part, through Rika's love of the card game; Terriermon materialised from Jenrya's computer game; Guilmon was created from a piece of fan art drawn by Takato. If your kids' computer games and card games ended up spawning monsters, you should probably take the thing back to the shop.
• Several examples in Doraemon. For instance, the Tin Toy Soldiers who can shoot live bullets (though of the Amusing Injuries variety), used to fend off Gian with great effect.
• In one episode of Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu, when a thug explains to his boss the features of the Steyr SPP machine pistol, an ad reminiscent of the 50s or 60s plays, advertising the gun as "fun for the whole family!" while a father, mother, and two children spray bullets willy-nilly. The SPP might be the civilian version of the TMP, but it's no toy.
• Taken in a rather literal sense with Girls und Panzer.
  • The tank Combat in real WWII tanks is seen as an appropriate activity for little girls. The main character, Miho Nishizumi, is a sixteen-year-old veteran.
  • Its prequel manga Little Army has tanks being driven around by 10 year olds!
  • Der Film shows Miho's bedroom at her house... which contains a Panzerfaust, of all things. Decorated with a pink ribbon.
• While not an actual product, in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Keicho Nijimura's Stand is Bad Company, an army of toy army men with real weapons.
• In Kirby: Right Back at Ya!, the Holy Nightmare Corporation, started by the embodiment of all evil... has a toy division. While few things produced by Holy Nightmare Toys are shown, they apparently make robotic puppies that are the perfect playmate for kids who are nice to them... but can electrocute those who aren't nice to them, and have a self-destruct sequence that can be activated by accident. And by self-destruct, we of course mean explode violently.
• Taken to the extreme with LBX: Little Battlers eXperience. Miniature LBX robots have a military application and have been used in assassinations before. However, due to the creation of the Fortified Cardboard that provides safe fighting arenas, it has become the most popular children's toy the world has ever seen! Lampshaded since LBX were banned for safety reasons before those arenas came around.
• Medabots.
  • The Medabots carry weapons that can damage the surrounding landscape, concrete and steel included. They're quite popular with the kids. Fortunately, the live weapons have only appeared in video games. However, this doesn't change the fact that the Medabots have self-healing capabilities and are VERY durable. If it weren't for the fact that their medals can be ejected with enough damage (or manually) these things could take over the world. At one point in the past there was an incident where Medabots went rogue and nearly destroyed the world. Oddly enough, Metabee has attacked his owner several times, with no lasting ill effects to the latter.
  • Played even more straight with the Kilobots, because its creator and target audience are "Stop Having Fun" Guys who want Meda-Battles to be Curb-Stomp Battles with them as the ones doing the stomping. As such, the ones closest to the "mook" scale of power are still a chore to deal with and the really nasty ones are virtual Weapons of Mass Destruction. One episode has a Super Prototype Kilobot being accidentally released and going on a rampage that destroys a significant part of the city and the police just cannot stop.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!:
  • Duel Monsters really should come with the following disclaimer: "WARNING — May cause getting kidnapped by evil organizations, Freak Outs, Mind Rape, the emergence of a Superpowered Evil Side, summoning of Eldritch Abominations, soul-stealing, and various physical hazards up to and including death. Not for loners or anyone with Parental Issues." (And skipping school and going broke.) Note to Pegasus: never design a children's card game based on ancient Egyptian mythology. Especially if you have an ancient Egyptian Artifact of Doom implanted in your eye socket!
  • Even worse near the start, where every game or toy was turned into a game that resulted in someone breaking psychologically. One wasn't Yami's fault, even; in "The Evil Dragon Cards", wannabe Imori tries to use the Soul Jar and the Dragon Card game to get ahold of the Millennium Puzzle; the dragons of the deck slowly consume the soul that gets trapped in the jar after losing the game. Yugi loses the first game, and Yami takes over. Imori loses to Yami, and the jar can only hold one soul at a time...

• The Beano had a long-running strip featuring "General Jumbo", a schoolboy who had a fully functional remote-control set of toy soldiers and military vehicles created for him by a friendly neighbourhood Mad Scientist. He used them to fight crime. A number of British comic creators have gone on to create Expies, most notably Robin "Toybox" Slinger and her father "Colonel Lilliput" in Top 10 and "General Tubbs" in Jack Staff.
• In El caso del bacalao, Mortadelo and Filemón get involved in a fight with mafioso Lucrecio Borgio. Mortadelo holds him in gunpoint with a rubber gun, to which Borgio just laughs in the belief it is a bad attempt at a bluff. Mortadelo then surprisingly shoots him in the face, revealing the gun was perfectly functional despite being made of rubber.
• There was/is a European (most likely Franco-Belgian) comic called Charly featuring a young boy and his Captain Lightning starship toy. It floats. It has lasers. It can blow a hole in a wall large enough to walk through (and kill an unfortunate sheep on the other side). The government finds out about it, things escalate, and the toy demonstrates that it is quite capable of annihilating a squad of special forces. At some point, there was a background story about a different boy with a tank toy.
• Played with in the Disney Ducks Comic Universe comic "The Hypno-Gun". Although he considers it extremely irresponsible, Donald has no trouble believing that someone is marketing a Mind-Control Device as a children's toy. Unbeknownst to him, of course the toy doesn't really hypnotize people — the boys were just pretending (unfortunately, this doesn't protect their uncle from the power of suggestion...).
• Gaston Lagaffe did this twice. One time he repaired a nephew's toy tank that shot sparks on the day there was a gas leak in the office. Another time, he made a working toy tank that shot tiny firecrackers and a toy bomber (that moved around the ceiling on wires) that dropped little bombs, to prove that kids need to learn what the real things are like.
• Mister Stuffins is a sophisticated robotic teddy bear running a secret agent emulator program. The program was not included by the manufacturer.
• PS238 has this in spades, as the cast is primarily elementary school children who are superheroes. The Revenent, for example, has no problems with 8-year-old Tyler using whatever throwing stars, tasers, smoke bombs, and grapple rockets he can carry. Meanwhile, Emerald Gauntlet, one of Tyler's classmates, has a gauntlet that's an Expy of a Green Power Ring and Zodon has an armored hover-chair with numerous built-in weapons.
• Richie Rich once had a nightmare in which an experimental drug that removed the need for sleep caused his father to lose his mind and lock him in his room, with guards posted outside, while he planned to Take Over the World. To stop him, Richie and his friends used a life-sized toy tank that shot pies at the guards, then put his dad and them to sleep with "toy" stun guns.
• Robin (1993): Toyman and the General modify an already dangerous collectors toy tank by making it capable of firing live ammunition and being remote controlled in order to steal from a toy collector who they know will put the thing in his vault once he's purchased it.
• In Spider-Boy, Toy Soldier is a remote-controlled action figure intelligent enough to respond to voice commands while also having the Super-Adaptoid's ability to use the powers of any of the Avengers. This means it can flatten cars at Killionaire's behest with ease and can cross the distance between planets (albeit not as quickly as the Silver Surfer or Thor given its size).
• Spider-Geddon: In one issue of Edge of Spider-Geddon, Kang the Conglomerator tries to capture Spider-Man by siccing an army of autonomous Spider-Punk toys on him. These toys are cute, spout ridiculous corporate slogans, and are dangerous enough to go toe-to-toe with this universe's version of the Annihilation Wave.
• This is the entire gimmick of Superman villain Toyman. Exploding off-brand Nerf darts, planes with bullets, and later lasers, pogo sticks that let him dodge Superman... every incarnation has been both brilliant and a little batty (even Hiro).
• Viz has done many parodies of General Jumbo and featured one-off strips about evil living toys and similar things. Regular strip "Tinribs" is based around a young boy's "robot" (actually glued together from random parts and unable to do anything mechanical) which is typically used to mutilate or kill the boy's teacher in every story. Another recurring strip using the trope was "Tommy Salter's Chemical Capers" about a boy who would perform horrifically dangerous, and usually fatal to others, experiments with his chemistry set.

• Coreline: While other examples exist throughout the setting, a specific one appears on the short story Legends of the Fourth of July (Coreline): The "Fakehuggers", mechanical replicas of the Facehugger that are programmed to act just like the real thing, except that they knock their victims out with non-lethal sonic stunners instead. Meant as a practical joke, the scared reactions of people to the Fakehuggers' attacks (which included various fatal heart attacks) drove their developing company to ruin.

• In Kim Possible Movie: So the Drama, Dr. Drakken's master plan involved these: After purchasing Bueno Nacho, he would use the Prometheus project designs he stole from Dr. Mr. Possible's mind (a project to make a robot that can grow and change shape) and incorporated into the Little Diablo (based off a design he stole from a toymaker's mind) that would be sold in the new kiddie meals of Bueno Nacho. At the right time, his control tower would send the signal to turn these adorable little devil dolls into giant rampaging robots.
• Lightyear: Sox is a robotic "therapy cat" who comes equipped with a toy mouse, a white noise machine, an assortment of rain sounds, a laser pointer, tranquilizer darts and a blowtorch.
• The Nightmare Before Christmas has the main artist of Halloween Town taking over Christmas. The people of Halloween Town misinterpret Christmas rather badly, resulting in terrifying and dangerous toys for children.
• Shrek 2 has the kiddie meal at a restaurant come with a battle axe.
• Though never outright addressed, some of the toys in Toy Story seem a bit too dangerous for little kids to play with:
  • The Buzz Lightyear figure has wings that can pop out with enough force to tear through duct tape like it was wet tissue. The helmet flips back and forth rather forcibly, enough to make Woody cry out in pain when his hand got caught. While his laser certainly isn't a gun, the singular point it makes suggests it is an actual laser pointer, which can easily blind a child for life.
  • Stinky Pete's pickaxe is apparently sharp enough to cut through fabric and function as a screwdriver (he also tries to use it to cut Woody in pieces when the latter refuses to listen to Pete anymore), though he comes from a time when safety standards for toys weren't as strict.
  • When an actual toyline based on Toy Story eventually released, the toys didn't play like the movie counterpart for obvious reasons. For example, the closest equivalent of the movie Buzz Lightyear toy (which come with a spaceship-shaped packaging) lacks pop-up wings, the helmets are flipped slowly, and it lacks the laser pointer.
  • The Toy Story Toon "Small Fry" parodied the subject of recalled toys. One kids meal toy in the support group, a boxing turtle, was recalled because her fists can be shoot rather forcefully. The toy doesn't explain further, but after the turtle toy says "I was recalled because...", her fist flies off hitting another toy.

• The sci-fi movie Evolver features a robotic AI toy that just happens to have been installed with a state-of-the-art weapons-grade military AI chip; the robot is meant to be a harmless children's game, but it soon begins learning how to arm itself with more lethal weapons. The Evolver unit was originally a military battle robot prototype that was re-purposed after killing people in a field test. It got made into the grand prize for the top scorer of the Evolver VR Game so that they could play it in real life. The problem starts when its military programming that was left in gets reactivated by the protagonist's sister dramatically "dying" after it scores a "kill" on her and then getting back up. It realizes that its "weapons" aren't lethal, as they're "supposed" to be; to it, the Evolver game is a live fire War Game and refits itself to compensate.
• The twist ending of the low-budget Roger Corman Alien rip-off Galaxy of Terror is that the pyramid full of flesh-eating beasts and giant rape worms is actually a toy designed to test young members of the potentially omnipotent "Masters" through solid representations of the subjects' worst fears.
• In The Hazing, Jacob is killed when a lawn dart (one of the items from the Scavenger Hunt) is hurled into his forehead.
• In Jumanji, the titular board game is capable of summoning monstrous versions of real flora and fauna, kidnapping people into its world, mutating humans into animal hybrids (do not cheat Jumanji) and seems to actively fight attempts to finish the game and reseal its horrors. It does warn prospective players, in a deceptively simple way, but even so much as touching the pieces counts as joining the game. The two sequels have Jumanji take the form of a video game, which is equally unassuming until it sucks players into the game world.
• The titular robot from M3GAN is super strong, durable, agile, can hack electronic systems, and has no restraint whatsoever when it comes to killing. It was still going to be marketed as a toy for children.
• The Santa Clause: Tim Allen's character speaks out against his company's design for a Santa in a tank as a toy for the kids.

  Scott Calvin: Well, isn't that a pretty picture, Santa rolling down the block in a PANZER! Well kids, I... I certainly hope you have been good this year, cause it looks like Santa just took out the Pearson home. Incoming!

• Santa Claus: The Movie: B.Z. establishes his credentials as a Corrupt Corporate Executive and Child Hater Lex Luthor Expy^note  with a darkly hilarious Congressional hearing exposing his horribly unsafe manufacturing methods for children's toys (the Teddy bear full of sawdust and nails comes to mind). The first batch of magical lollipops his company makes works as advertised, but the second batch made for the film's climax turns out to have the capacity to explode like a grenade if they are exposed to too much heat, which he only cares about as far as to have a plan to run for Rio before people start dying.
• Small Soldiers: This is the premise of the movie. The new CEO, a defense industry contractor, wants the toys to be able to "play back", so he has them designed with advanced robotics. Larry, in his haste to rush the product to market, finds a discontinued line of military-grade artificial intelligence chips and has them repurposed as the CPU for the toys. The reason the toys are so dangerous is that nobody bothered to program that military-grade artificial intelligence with stuff like The Laws and Customs of War, so the soldiers came out as the single-minded psychopaths their limited programmed dictated (see lawn darts for another such brainfart). Ironically, though, the monstrous, presumably intended to be "villainous" Gorgonite toys are rather personable, since they started out as educational toys that were hastily repurposed as an enemy for the Commando Elite. At the end, the Corrupt Corporate Executive decides to recoup his losses on the toys by "sticking a few zeroes on the end of the price" and selling them to the Army for use in brush wars in South America, making it an inversion.
• Spaceballs parodies this when Yogurt tells the heroes about his greatest venture yet: merchandising. Among many other things, like coloring books, cereals, and a doll shaped like him is a working Flamethrowah!

  "The kids love this one!"

• Tank Girl. Sam's Danger Ball is one of these, much to Iggy Pop's surprise. It shoots out blades when anyone claps their hands nearby. From what we see, it appears to be a self-defense tool to fend off potential rapists or other kinds of perverts (which Iggy's character was).
• Toys: This Robin Williams vehicle focused on the new owner of a toy factory switching production to toy tanks and helicopters armed with real weapons he meant to sell to the military. He also starts a videogame division to get kids into violence in order to have future soldiers. The videogame was actually a simulation/prototype. The new owner's plan was to have kids remote-control operate actual war machines without knowing it.
• A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas has Wafflebot, a waffle-making robot with searing-hot maple syrup and a waffle iron that can be swung like a metal fist. Harold lampshades this.

  "It's extraordinarily unsafe, but it did save our lives."

• Zathura uses a similar premise as Jumanji, just Recycled In Space!. So it won’t send out an animal stampede and a demented hunter to destroy you - it will send meat-eating aliens, a Killer Robot and a black hole. The book was written by the same author who created Jumanji, with that game even making a cameo in the book version to show that they are in the same 'verse.

• There is a joke whose origin nobody can point out, but had been popular in the Eastern Bloc:

  Dad: What have you done today at school?
  Little Johnny: We made nitroglycerin in the chemistry class.
  Dad: And which classes do you have tomorrow at school?
  Little Johnny: What school, dad?

• The Alcatraz Series has teddy bears that double as hand grenades. They are explicitly designed to be used by kids for self-defense.
• In one of the Animorphs books, Ax mentions in passing that on the Andalite homeworld, nuclear fusion is considered such a mundane power source that it's used in dolls.

  Marco:... The Andalite Toys R Us must be a pretty wild place, huh?

• The short story "Bobo's Star" has kids in the future being given their own miniature star-creation kits at home. The titular character's star turns into a black hole and devours the Earth because nobody would listen to him.
• Confessions of Georgia Nicolson: Georgia Nicolson worries about her little sister's "Pantalitzer" doll, described as having a terrifying face, steel forks for hands, and easily detachable parts that hurt when thrown at Georgia.
• A Dear Dumb Diary book features Jamie holding a yard sale. She mentions that some of the things being sold are toys no longer marketed as safe for kids. One of the toys drawn in her diary is “Mr. Puncture”, a doll with thumbtack-like spikes on his head, nose, and limbs.
• Discworld:
  • When Death substitutes for the local Santa equivalent in Hogfather, a little girl asks for a sword (as well as a few other gender-abnormal toys). He gives her one (Death does not have a very good grasp of parenting), although he's eventually convinced to transmute it into a wooden one.

    Store Owner: You can't give her that! It's not safe!
    Death: It's a sword. They're not meant to be safe. Besides, it's educational.
    Horrified Parent: But what if she cuts herself?
    Death: That will be an important lesson.

  • Lampshaded in Thud! when Sam Vimes suspects that there are intruders in his house and is looking for a weapon. Sadly, he's in his son's bedroom, and he notes he and his wife completely overlooked the range of toys with sharp steel parts. He settles for the leg of a rocking horse.
• In China Miéville's "An End To Hunger", the hacker Aykan brags about his idea for a nanobot-based children's game. His idea is that children would inject themselves with nanobots from a kit, then challenge other kids with similar bots in their blood, mix drops of their respective red stuff together and see whose bots won the resulting battle.
• Garrett, P.I.: In Cruel Zinc Melodies, a little dwarf girl begs Garrett to help her parents, who've been beaten up by something in a basement. Before venturing down, Garrett borrows her helmet, axe and sword, which are child-sized but fully functional; apparently, it's normal for dwarves to encourage their kids to play with My Little Panzer.
• Downplayed in Have Space Suit – Will Travel, Kip accidentally sets fire to the barn where he has his lab. His mother worries but his father merely comments that one should be careful about making explosives in a frame building. However, while the book's target audience was middle-schoolers protagonist Kip was in his last year of highschool, old enough that entrusting him with flammable or corrosive substances wouldn't be considered out and out negligence even in this day and age. This also justifies the fact he was able to obtain a supply of go-pills for his refurbished spacesuit's emergency survival kit without much difficulty, although obviously there's a bit of Values Dissonance there.
• Harry Potter gives a lot of magical versions of mundane children toys that definitely amp up normal games:
  • Playing cards that explode, albeit without much force. The game in question is called Exploding Snap.
  • Gobstones, marbles that squirt nasty-smelling liquid in your face when you lose a point.
  • On the non-magical side of things, Dudley owns a small, working tank that he once ran over the neighbor's dog with.
  • Wizard's Chess gives us chess pieces animated to act as real persons, viciously attacking the opposition. The Power Trio are later forced to play a human equivalent and discover it isn't any different.
  • Bludgers in the Quidditch games. They can give somebody a pretty nasty concussion if they hit you in the head, and knocking you off your broomstick at certain heights is also dangerous in and of itself.
  • Fanged Frisbees, living frisbees that have teeth on their edges.
  • How about the actual broomsticks? They can travel over 100 mph, they fly more than high enough to cause fatal falls, and kids ride them without any licenses, seat belts, safety equipment, lights, or air traffic rules. Even in blinding rain and thunderstorms. Neville, Harry, and a few other characters actually sustain broken bones and concussions from falling off brooms, but nobody in the wizard world seems to think broomsticks are dangerous. Justified, since wizarding magic allows broken bones and such to be healed with a flick of a wand or potions (heck, the Potters became wealthy through inventing some potions). Even missing bones can be regrown overnight with a magic potion. Furthermore, first-years (generally) aren't allowed to have their own brooms; in fact, that's generally when they have lessons for using them over the course of the year.^note  There are toy brooms that only hover a few feet off the ground.
  • Love Potions. As illustrated in Half-Blood Prince, they are incredibly potent and ripe for abuse, being not much more than magical date rape drugs. They are apparently unregulated other than not being allowed on school grounds, and are openly marketed and sold to children in a joke shop. This one has not gone unnoticed by the author or the characters; Harry at one point compares love potions to Dark magic. And it turns out, Voldemort was born because of one (maybe).
• How to Be a Superhero warns the would-be superhero about putting his name to merchandise without checking its safety, citing such previous PR disasters as Captain Feline and Blackie the Wonder-Cat's "Kitty-Fun" playsets (a variety of ways for a child to torture a cat) and the Mr. Inferno dressing-up kit (one costume, one bottle of kerosene, one box of matches).
• In "Mimsy Were the Borogoves", a scientist from millions of years in the future working on a prototype time machine uses some educational toys as a test subject. They end up teaching some children how to vanish into Another Dimension.
• Night Shift (1978): The story "Battleground" has a hitman who killed a toy designer attacked by an army of toy soldiers, complete with air support. They eventually kill him by breaking out a tiny nuclear weapon.
• The Rolling Stones (1952): After Cas and Pol are arrested on Mars for tax evasion, their father notes that at least it wasn't for experimenting with atomics inside city limits - this time.
• Toy Terror: Batteries Included is filled with these. From Nasty Kathy, a sinister doll leading a toy rebellion, to toy policemen who executes a Zerg Rush on their victims, Zorg aliens who can spit actual acid... and the crowner of killer toys, a kid-sized toy robot called the Annihilator 3000 who can fire deadly lasers and freeze rays.
• In the Philip K. Dick short story "War Games", Earth has a safety board inspecting toys from Titan, with whom they are having a political Cold War, but whose goods are still popular. We see at least one dangerous toy, a VR costume-suit which causes the wearer to lose contact with reality. The safety board is afraid everything could be like this, so they have a paranoid eye on everything, except for a board game that looks like a Monopoly variation, but isn't (no, the board game doesn't count unless you consider undermining capitalism dangerous).

• CSI: NY: The exploding-cigar murder in "Child's Play" is traced back to a young man who'd targeted a back-of-the-comic-book toy dealer. As kids, he and his best friend had taken a comic book ad's boastful claim that a cardboard submarine could take you on "amazing undersea adventures" literally, and she drowned in a lake.
• James May's Toy Stories often features this trope by its very premise. The aim is to revive interest or nostalgia for the classic toys James grew up with, by way of using them to accomplish something far beyond their original scope. By definition, it means doing things that the intended child market could not hope to achieve, and by extension, it's usually something that would be ridiculously dangerous for them to attempt. For example, one episode builds a working drawbridge in Liverpool out of nothing but Meccano pieces (punched metal beams and fasteners, similar to an American Erector Set). Playing with this toy ultimately takes a team of architects, a group of engineering students, construction equipment, and a safety harness for the ceremonial crossing.
• In Loriot's classic sketch "Weihnachten bei Hoppenstedts" ("Christmas at the Hoppenstedt's"), Father Hoppenstedt buys for his offspring a model nuclear power plant. It makes "poof!" if you did a mistake while assembling it. It does go 'poof', blowing a hole through the floor and into the apartment beneath.
• In the Get Smart episode "Our Man in Toyland", Max and 99 take on a bunch of KAOS agents in the toy department of a department store using only the (highly-destructive) normal toys on sale there, up to and including the knockout blow, Destro the toy nuclear missile.

  Agent 99: Max... you were wonderful!

  Maxwell Smart, Agent 86: No 99, the real credit belongs to these toys. After all, we had at our disposal every fiendish and destructive plaything ever devised for the pleasure of little children. Those poor devils, all they had were real guns and bullets.

• MADtv (1995) had "Spishak's 'Hey, It's Ovens for Kids!'", a children's gas oven. There's also Yule Blazers (plutonium-powered Christmas lights), the Bris-O-Tine (a mini-guillotine designed for circumcision), the Snoorfpk (a spoon/fork/knife combo), etc.
• Merrick And Rosso had a sketch involving two modified remote controlled toys from hell; One being a Thomas the Tank Engine with a buzzsaw on the front, the other being a Barbie-style van with a flamethrower, both tearing up mundane toys. (Except the official Merrick and Rosso inaction figures).
• A number of the Mad's contributions to the Invention Exchange on Mystery Science Theater 3000 fit this trope: a flame-throwing Godzilla figure and the Unhappy Meal are just two examples, and Joel and the 'Bots would call Dr. F out for his depravity.
• Joked about in an episode of Mythbusters, in which the main duo were trying to determine whether a Hot Wheels car could defeat a real car in a short distance race down a hill, when both are running entirely on momentum. Both Adam and Jamie build their own custom toy cars for the purpose, with Adam's offering being effectively a block of lead with wheels. When Adam jokingly comes up with an advertisement for his creation, Jamie joins in, adding, "and if you throw it at your brother really hard, it could kill him!"
• RoboCop: The Series has this in spades with the Commander Cash toys. Black Comedy aside, these toys can seriously kill and maim. For example there is a Commander Cash action figure (The Commander Cash Nighty-Night doll) that is actually a fully functional hand grenade, And it's pitched as a bedtime buddy!
• Australian youth program Saturday Morning Fly had a joke ad regarding hating hackeysackers. What do you do about them? Chuck them a hackeysack which explodes!
• Saturday Night Live:
  • In the 70's, Saturday Night Live had toy maker Irwin Mainway (played by Dan Aykroyd) appear on a consumer watchdog show called "Consumer Probe", and hopelessly defend his company's extremely dodgy and dangerous products, and drawing comparisons with the dangers of actual commonplace products. In one episode, he tried to defend a series of Halloween costumes, including "Johnny Space Commander Mask" (simply a plastic bag and a rubber band), "The Invisible Pedestrian" ("NOT FOR BLIND KIDS!"), "Johnny Combat Action Costume" (which comes with an actual working rifle, ammo not included. Allegedly popular in Detroit), and "Johnny Human Torch" (oil-soaked rags and an oversized torch. "It lights up the night!")
  • Then you got "Bag O' Glass", along with its spin-offs Bag O' Nails, Bag O' Bugs, Bag O' Vipers, and last but not least, Bag O' Sulfuric Acid.
  • One of those pathetic attempts to defend his products involved a harmless toy phone; Mainway argued kids could choke themselves with the long stretchy cord. These days, what with the CPSC wiping out long cords of all sorts on kids' toys, the dangerous phone is Harsher in Hindsight (much like most things on SNL).
  • SNL also had "Happy Fun Ball". It was a kid's toy with an increasingly bizarre disclaimer, containing warnings such as "May suddenly accelerate to unsafe speeds" and "If Happy Fun Ball begins to smoke, seek shelter and cover head," culminating with the famous quote, "Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball". It can be seen here.
  • Lots of the SNL's fake toy commercials are for toys that would never be sold in real life (whether it's because they're physically dangerous, will cause complaints from Moral Guardians who think that kids are impressionable enough to be screwed up by what they play with, or are just plain useless and/or lame). Some examples include: Gangsta Bitch Barbie (comes with Jolly Ranchers, a pack of Newport cigarettes, and a restraining order against her boyfriend Tupac Ken), Nerf Crotch Bats, Big Red (A viking who sprays massive gushers of blood-red liquid), Litter Critters (using cat crap to make clay figurines), and the dangerous toy commercial, Li'l Poundcake (a doll that administers vaccinations against the HP virus for girls under 10).
  • A 1996 episode showed an ad for the game Froonga, a Jenga parody using glassware instead of wooden blocks. Once the glass tower tumbles, everyone runs away. The ad touts the company's other dangerous toys, such as "Silly Knife Ball" and "Volty, the electric tub duck."
  • During Norm MacDonald's reign as Weekend Update anchor, at the end of the year he'd comment that topping the list of toys deemed unsafe by the U.S. Safety Commission was Mattel’s "Gasoline-Powered Sharp Thing" or "Eye Poker Outer."
• On Stargate SG-1 the replicators were created by the android Reese, to keep her company and entertain her. Over time the human population of that world grew distrustful of her, so she gave the replicators the ability to defend themselves, to the great detriment of the other inhabitants of the planet, and many others as well.
• In the Ultraseven episode "Android Zero Directive", the Alien of the Week Chibull builds toys that not only looked real, but could shoot and harm for real. At midnight, he planned to mind control all the unsuspecting children who bought his toys and turn them into Child Soldiers. That is, until he drew the attention of the Ultra Garrison.
• One comedy variety show had a series of sketches for Toy Planet product recalls, including such gems as razor-edged frisbees, solid, heavy footballs, and an industrial-strength slinky - composed entirely of a spring that looked like it came out of the suspension of a railway wagon. The footballs and frisbees are seen to cause injury, but the probably-dangerous-in-reality slinky is simply shown to disappoint the children. It simply stops on the second-from-top step upon release, rolls off to the side and stops.
• Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!: The iJammer, "the first digital music box with two revolutionary dance tones!," combines this with Brown Note. Kids who are exposed to its frequencies develop symptoms including seizures, wildly aggressive and destructive behavior, and addiction ("I just need one more bump!").
• The Haunting Hour: The episode "Near Mint Condition" gives us Mangler, a cybernetic teddy bear made for the Show Within a Show Robo-Bears. Originally released in the 80s, the Manglers were linked to accidents and the outright murder of several children, so they were recalled, leaving only seven in existence. The plot kicks off when the super-nerdy Ted tracks down a Mangler, which promptly comes to life and starts violently attacking those who mock or try to stop it.

• Old Master Q's solar-powered, automated robot toy in one strip. Mr. Chiu decides to borrow it for a "test-drive", despite the former's warning... cue the toy using Chiu's face as a punching bag.

• Musician Doctor Steel has this as his gimmick, too. That and megalomania.
  • In "Lament for a Toy Factory", he mentions "babies with buzzsaws, dollies with knives, gasoline-filled super soakers" as the too-drastic toy designs that got him fired... and were later used for revenge against the factory.
    • Fortunately, he has an ever-growing volunteer army of Toy Soldiers who are trained to use them responsibly. And by responsibly I mean hilariously. And by trained I mean gratuitously hinted.
• The Frank Zappa song "Uncle Bernie's Farm", featured on the album Absolutely Free, is about a line of toys that are absurdly dangerous, such as a plastic troll that eats people's arms and bombs for blowing up one's parents.
• Insane Clown Posse's "Toy Box" (from their Riddle Box album) has a bullied schoolboy making these toys on purpose in order to kill his tormentors in revenge. He then brings them to class for "Show and Tell," which results practically the entire class getting strangled by Slinkies, decapitated by sword-wielding robot figurines, and - most horrifyingly of all - shot to death by cute rubber duckies that go "Squeeku....squeeku....BANG!" Faux Affably Evil to the max, especially with a Howdy Doody-like voice cheerily announcing: "Nothin' beats a good hardy-har-har, right, boys 'n' girls?!"

• In Bloom County, Oliver Wendell Jones's father gives him a chemistry set as a gift. Said chemistry set is promptly used to genetically engineer what is supposed to be a long-tailed hamster, but ends up making a number of freakish mutants. You'd think Oliver's father would have learned his lesson from the Pentagon hacking, homemade nuke, and subliminal hypnosis incidents...

• The now-defunct Mexican music station "Radioactivo 98.5", during The '90s and early 2000s ran every holiday season spoof toy adds of "Juguetes Radioactivos: Ofensivos Inhumanos" (Radioactive Toys: Offensive and Inhumane), which included:

• 1001 Science Fiction Weapons for D20, contains a chapter each on scuttlebombs and attack drones. Some may well be mistaken for toys, and are often designed like this deliberately by unsavoury characters. The simpler ones are attack drones that can be made to look like toy helicopters, robot butterflies and robotically animated teddy bears, but have scalpel blades or miniature power tools stuck on. Other such "toys" may be able to fire lasers, inject poisons or pathogens, or explode.
• In Heroes Unlimited, some of the Dread Micro Wizards of Chaos possess magical children's toys which turn into deadly weapons when an appropriate magic word is spoken, such as plastic swords that become real steel and frisbees which turn into flying sawblades.
• Quite a few of these can crop up in Werewolf: The Apocalypse, usually as a result of Pentex's ongoing attempts to corrupt the world. Created and distributed by Avalon Inc, Pentex's resident toy business, many of these toys have been corrupted or infested by the power of the Wyrm, usually just for the sake of turning kids into sociopaths, but occasionally for more violent ends: for example, the Doctor Chuckles Surgery Kit, which not only magically imbues children with a lifetime of surgical knowledge, but comes complete with a syringe of paralyzing venom so they can "practice" on family members!

• The foot-tall Robos of Custom Robo are actually pretty harmless themselves, despite being able to shoot lasers, bombs, or swords. They can only work within specialized arenas called Holosseums. Except illegal parts can do rather horrible things to whoever uses them, and the local Cthulhu happens to have accidentally possessed one. These behaviors might be excusable since they're not well known. The part where losing in a Holosseum knocks you head first into the ground and quite often knocks you unconscious might not pass the CSPA muster. That last bit happens only when the "safety switch" is off, which allows the robos to use their abilities to the fullest extent. Regular, day-to-day Holosseum battles are massive nerfs of the robos so that no one is hurt. Illegal parts are actually capable of killing someone if the switch is off (though this is rare, even with the ridiculously powerful illegal parts)... this is why they're illegal.
• In Dawn of the Dragons, several of the familiars the player can collect are toys created by the gnome inventor Bosso. Said toys are usually faithful reproductions of World Raid boss monsters, like the toy based on an acid-spitting dragon that also spits acid, the toy based on a dragon with retractable spines that also has retractable spines, and the toy based on a dragon that literally overflowed with power that is also Made of Explodium. According to the flavor text of various items, at least one child was nearly killed when she hugged the spiky dragon toy too hard (luckily there was a cleric with healing magic nearby). One jerk accidentally killed his mistress with the exploding dragon toy, and then used another one to kill his wife on purpose. Then he got run over by a carriage and went to hell for his sins. He had the gall to blame Bosso for it claiming that he wouldn't have been tempted to commit murder if Bosso's toys didn't make murder so easy. Bosso also made a dragon toy big enough to ride (which is a mount in-game) that is covered with spikes, claiming they are a safety feature. When the player character calls Bosso out on it, he claims that he meant that the spikes would make it safer for the person riding it, not the people in its way. Bosso is perfectly aware that his toys are dangerous. He just thinks that safety isn't as important as making his toys as accurate as possible.
• Daze Before Christmas is an old platformer where your enemies includes hostile toy tanks, cars, planes and roller skates who can hurt you on contact.
• In Eternal Fighter Zero, we have Unknown, one of the Final Bosses: Her fighting style involves using a vast array of toys, included, but not limited to toy knives, plushies, a squeaking mallet, even a huge surprise barrel, which she can drop on her opponent's head; and her Final Memory involves riding on a giant plushie to ram her opponent.
• In the pre-war backstory of Fallout: New Vegas.
  • REPCONN sold rocket souvenirs filled with actual radioactive rocket fuel, which kids mistook for Nuka-Cola, and subsequently developed a sickness called the "REPCONN Shakes". They subsequently unloaded their stock at the Dino-Bite gift shop in Novac, where they sat for the next 200 years.
  • Euclid's C-Finder is a toy gun that is actually the target designator for the Archimedes II Kill Sat. Not quite a straight example because it wasn't designed as a toy, some kid just found it in the post-apocalyptic rubble and used it as one until the Player Character gets hold of it. Luckily for the kid, Archimedes II itself isn't activated unless you do something about it.
  • Sure a BB gun can be dangerous, but no normal BB gun compares to the "Abilene Kid LE BB gun". It deals the typical low damage of a normal one, but it has the same Critical damage of a normal Sniper Rifle.
• Gotcha Force is a game about an invasion by toy-sized robots and the other toy-sized robots who resist them. They get bigger.
• Grand Theft Auto (Classic) had explosive RC cars.
• One of the early missions in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City involves using a toy helicopter to carry timed explosives into an uncompleted building to blow it up. Security guards and construction workers come after it once they catch on to your charade, but you can kill them by running the chopper into them.
• Subsequently in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, after you buy Zero's shop, all of the three missions you must do for Zero involve My Little Panzers.
  • The first involves defending from a swarm of RC planes dropping bombs with a minigun, and the second has you using a prototype RC biplane armed with an infinite-ammo cannon to kill employees of Berkley RC, Zero's arch-rival in the business of RC toys. Serious business indeed.

    Zero: They're not 'toys'! They're just smaller!

  • Oh, and the third? Seems like the actual use for these things: a car tries to drive a road into a base. Berkley's helicopter drops obstacles that your helicopter has to remove. Berkley also has actual tanks shooting at his car, albeit with low-powered ammo for their size. You have access to antitank bombs.
• The eponymous fireplace of Little Inferno is powerful enough to consume virtually anything in its fires, and the player is encouraged to throw in things like batteries and chainsaws.
• Krogan in Mass Effect have a children's board game called Giant Fire-Breathing Thresher Maws of Doom. It's played with actual flamethrowers. As a demonstration of how tough krogan are, they're affected by a Sterility Plague, and at least one krogan character is annoyed at how krogan children are "coddled" as a result, saying they play children's games with weapons that inhibit their Healing Factor.
• One Step From Eden: During Saffron's boss fight, if brought down at half-health she'll start dropping plushie versions of herself on the battlefield. These act as self-defense turrets, damaging anyone who attacks them until they're destroyed (including Saffron herself if she's not too careful).
• While not toys by any means, the Scoobies from Phantom Crash are often piloted by children. In fact, the shop owner who sells you upgrades gets called out by one of the top pilots for essentially selling weapons to children. The shop owner brushes it off and it's never brought up again.
• Power Pete: The title character, a popular action figure, emerges from his packaging to travel through the Toy Mart, collecting additional weapons and power-up accessories in order to fight off other toys while rounding up the escaped Fuzzy Bunnies. Several are VERY dangerous, including the Summer Fun™ Backyard Flamethrower (which was actually recalled in-universe, but a few boxes were missed), exploding birthday cakes and power-up accessories that activate a spreading ring of fireballs and geyser-like explosions, with lethal results for enemy toys that get caught in their path.
• Shadow Hearts: Covenant has the Tin Lion, and Shadow Hearts: From The New World has the Golden Tinny. Both enemies are optional bosses featured in the pit fights that resemble toy lions. They can instantly kill a character and are immune to most attacks and magic. In particular, the bestiary entry of the Tin Lion says they were popular toys until they rebelled against humanity, leaving thousands of grieving parents...
• In Super Mario RPG, Gaz has a Geno doll. Even before it becomes possessed, it has a "Shooting Star Shot" that is capable of knocking a grown man out if it hits.
• Warthog's ending in Twisted Metal 4 which is a parody of General Jumbo, except the opposite way. He wished for a world with unending warfare, so he gets put in a sandbox with other little toy versions of the other competitors. And then they came out with Twisted Metal: Small Brawl.
• The Wario Land 4 Wario car action figure-like enemies. Oh, the irony of a toy based on Wario driving his car being something that's dangerous enough to kill him in the toy-themed levels. It also had a metal spike on the front (hence how it was so dangerous), could drive through more spikes, and was apparently a pretty good throwing weapon.

• The Bravest Warriors episode "Dimension Garden" revealed that Chris and Beth owned a sword and shield and a flamethrower, respectively as children. That's to say nothing of Wallow's collection of toys including such wholesome ones as Princess Dysentery, Colonial Plague Caitlin, Chlamydia-Eyes Cat, and Menigicoccal Meningitis Paco.
• In the animated short film The Colors of Evil, Vivian owns a book titled Demon Summoning For Kids, which she uses to summon the demon Belphagor. Subverted, in that he turns out to be friendly, harmless and fluffy...which is a problem for her, because she wants him to eat Nancy, the Alpha Bitch who keeps picking on her.
• In the Homestar Runner universe:
  • It's implied that practically everything sold at Bubs' concession stand is highly unsafe and quite possibly illegal. The most overt example would be Hollerin' Jimmy's Hobby Kit, whose slogan is "We have no idea what's inside this box!"
    • The Stab Yourself! Try not to stab yourself!
    • That said, not everything Bubs sells is dangerous. The stuff he sells out back on the black market is quality goods. In fact, in his capacity as a black marketeer, he's so devoted to customer satisfaction (as opposed to his capacity as an official businessman, in which he relies on not having any competition) that if you specifically want something that will cause an allergic reaction, he'll sell you the allergenic stuff. Though he sold a Strong Bad piñata that was filled with...

      Homestar: [singing] Bwoken glass, Bwoken glass, Bwoken glass Bwoken glass!

  • An example not related to Bubs is Strong Bad naming his preferred kind of Free Prize at the Bottom as "anything heavy and pointy enough to do lasting damage to the face". He uses a die-cast toy car with a chainsaw on it to demonstrate. On Homestar.

• Cassiopeia Quinn: Cassiopeia's childhood companion Beebot is a rather serious piece of technology that doesn't have much business being a toy. Its AI is fully sentient, or something very close to it, being able to display emotion and understand pretty much everything its owner says, while its anti-gravity propulsion system is powerful enough to lift young Cassiopeia quite high off the ground. The Rant of his first appearance actually Lampshades this, noting that the toys were eventually recalled after kids kept getting hurt trying to use them to fly.
• Genocide Man: Deconstructed in the backstory regarding genetic engineering. "Hamster X", a home genetic engineering kit for pets, was released in 2030. An open-source group rootkitted it the next year. In 2037, the first battle was fought involving genetically enhanced child Super Soldiers, beginning the Genocide Wars that devastated the world.
• Girl Genius presents...
• Narbonic: In "A Week of December 18th Story", a parody of A Christmas Story, little (future Mad Scientist) Helen's Christmas toy of choice is the BioBeam 8000 gamma irradiator with 5-liter containment chamber, cesium 137 radiation source, optional remote monitoring station, and a thing on top that tells the time.
• The children's book in Oglaf's Puddleduck.^note  The story in the book is perfectly innocent, from what we see. Trapping the souls of the damned in the book to read it aloud to children so their busy parents don't have to, however, has unforeseen consequences.
• Sam & Fuzzy: Mr. Sin is revealed to have made a product line of children's toys that are robotic duplicates of Fuzzy (Eric agreed to license his apperance for the toys, something Fuzzy does not remember.). Sin being Sin, the robots also have superhuman capabilities, foot-long retractable razor claws and a voice-activated defense mode that lets anyone with the right command code turn them into a Killer Robot that eviscerates opponents on command.

• Discussed in the Angry Video Game Nerd episode on the Magnavox Odyssey. The Nerd is really shocked to find out that the Shooting Gallery accessory resembles a real-life rifle a bit too well. Then gets Played for Laughs when he gleefully tries it out...only to shoot his TV, destroying it.

  The Nerd: Well...the Odyssey doesn't fuck around. I mean, this is what you call a gun. I mean look a–it's a gun! It's a fucking rifle! I mean...they could never get away with this nowadays! You could never ever...It just—i-it just blows my mind that there could exist a video game console that has a gun like this! (gleefully) Let's try it out!

• The Creepypasta "Real Action Toys" is about a toy company that released a full bunch of Super Mario Bros.-themed deadly toys, starting from Mario and Luigi rubber figures with hard heads that can easily hurt children, a Fire Mario toy that shot out plastic balls filled with acid fluid, to Bowser and Bowser Jr. toys spitting real fire, a Petey Piranha toy with sharp, rusty nail teeth and petals made out of poison ivy, up to a Koopa Troopa toy that bounces and spins around while shooting fireballs and rusty nails and also emitting seizure-inducing lights.
• Among the many themed shops in the various lands of Neopets, the toy shop in Darigan Citadel specializes in these, with its Wicked Toymaker shopkeeper describing its items as "clockwork wonders and other toys that will amaze and delight". Among its wares (full list here) are board games that ooze acid, plenty of things with spikes, and dice rigged to always roll the wrong number. Despite their nature, playing with them will not actually have any ill effects on one's Neopets — though whether this is due to mere Gameplay and Story Segregation or Neopets routinely surviving far worse isn't clear.
• RPC-312 "No-Play Ground", from the RPC Authority is a playground filled with lethal equipment, including a slide with unrealistic black hole physics and a bottomless sandbox.
• There are two major groups that create these in the SCP universe. Dr. Wondertainment creates toys that often just fly in the face of physics, and are safe when used properly. Of course, one of them has such features as a fire drill, a boom ray, an Atomic Grenade, and Robo Dance. The Factory, on the other hand, appears to make its various objects with malicious intent behind them, and are very dangerous even when used properly. Many other toy SCPs exist, some just weird, some threaten the world itself.
• SuperMarioLogan:
  • In "Bowser Junior Goes to Disney World", Doofy the Dragon advertises Doofy-O's cereal, with a knife as the prize that wins them a trip to Disney World inside specially marked boxes.
  • In "Bowser Junior's 7th Birthday!" Chef Pee Pee buys Junior a "Can You Kill Doofy?" party game, complete with a real knife to pin on Doofy.
  • In "Bowser's Driver's License", during a Doofy the Dragon-themed McDonald's commercial, as if the burger with nails, broken glass, and a mousetrap wasn't bad enough, Doofy also advertises nine-millimeter guns as happy meal toys.
  • In "Bowser Junior's Game Night 3", when Junior, Joseph, Cody, and Jeffy play "What's in Ned's Head?", Jeffy manages to find a real loaded gun in Ned's head. Junior and Cody even question why someone would put it in a children's board game.