You really have to wonder what they were thinking with Milky. Especially with Kenner, it's maker, pitching it as a pre-school toy for ages as young as 3. Why? Because Milky produced "milk", that the kids couldn't drink, under any conditions. Instead of Milky The Marvelous Milking Cow, she should have been called Milky The Child Poisoning Cow. To compound things Milky was made as a promotional tie-in with General Foods, to promote breakfast cereals.

The advertising blurb with Milky read: "Milky, The Marvelous Milking Cow. Milky drinks from trough, gives pretend milk. HOW IT WORKS: Fill see-through trough with water, place "milk" tablets in udder. Push Milky's head in trough, pump her tail, she drinks. When she's has enough, she raises her head and "moos". Then she's ready to be milked through her rubber udders. Comes with bucket, cow bell, vinyl pasture pad, non-toxic [still don't drink the milk!!!] tablets and booklet the tells the story of how milk gets from the cow to the home."

The true bizarre wonders of Milky can best be experienced by watching the TV commercial for her. Forget the dodgy milk that you had to warn kids not to drink! You were also teaching them that it is okay to ram an animals head into its feed bucket and force feed it, grab her tail and pull on it, until it wails out "STOP!!! No more!" Or "moos" in cow language. Milky the "Let's Pretend" toy of fun animal abuse for all the family. There's no wonder it has since become a cult toy.

The classic creepy toy, that's featured in many a horror movie. This little fellow always randomly starts banging his cymbals, just before something really bad is about to happen. The startling pre-warning to bigger shocks to come.

The classic version of the manic mechanical monkey was manufactured by the Japanese company Daishin C.K., during the 1950s to 1970s under the name "Musical Jolly Chimp". Over the years a number of other toy manufactures have copied the basic design of the monkey, marketed under variety of names. 

The classic monkey, is seen wearing red and white striped pants and a yellow vest with red buttons. The monkeys are often produced with red rings painted around their wide-open eyes, creating an appearance some find disturbing, which could perhaps explain their many appearances in horror, sci-fi and other movies over the years. The earliest known appearence is in 1955's Rebel Without A Cause, when James Dean is shown drunk, playing with one of the monkeys in the middle of the street.

One of the most famous appearances of the monkey is in the 1977 film Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, when one suddenly begins clapping its cymbals as a UFO appears. The toy is featured in "The Monkey", a Stephen King short story from his 1985 book Skeleton Crew, which uses the monkey as its cover image. The monkey has also appeared in computer games, animations, as well as TV shows as diverse as The Simpsons, Dr. Who and Wallace & Gromit.

The Mighty Tint Record Player was produced by Ohio Art in 1970. Ohio Art are famous for the creation of Etch-A-Sketch. the Mighty Tiny Record Player, described under the tag-line "World's Smallest Record Player", ans came packaged with 3 "tiny" 2" records to play on it, each only lasting a matter of a few seconds each. The records themselves were so small, and as it was only lasting a tiny amount of time, they came without labels. Due to them all looking the same, each had a small number etched onto it, so that you could match it up with its sleeve, if you mixed them up. 

The Mighty Tiny Record Player itself was little more than a motorised turntable, and a steel needle that played the record. The needle itself vibrated against a domed piece of plastic, that acted as the player's speaker. The player was turned on by closing the lid, and had no way volume control or ear-phone jack to enhance the sound or listen to the tiny tinny sounds it produced privately. Though the turntable did have an adjustable speed, as the motor was prone to speed fluctuations, that would distort the sound of the record. Another model of the Mighty Tiny was produced called the Stereoper, which resembled a home cabinet stereo system of the period. 

How better to listen to the Monster Mash by Bobby “Boris” Pickett and the Crypt-Kickers (1962), than with this awesome "monster" speaker, based on Universal's Frankenstein's Monster. A 8" high plastic disembodied cranium of the monster, with a speaker built into the top of his flat head. A perfect piece of ghoulish fun to get any party kicking, originally priced at $5.98, these highly collectible kitsch items of horror memorabilia are selling for high prices on eBay.

Prefect for listening to some campy horror rock, like Screamin Jay Hawkins or Screaming Lord Sutch, however hearing The Beatles singing She Loves You or Please Please Me might have been an odd experience.

Given away free with Kix cereal, the Atomic Bomb Ring contained actual degrading radioactive material. The instructions stated that "you'll see brilliant flashes of light in the inky darkness inside the atom chamber." Suggesting that to see the miracle of the atoms of polonium-alpha particles on a zinc sulphide screen, you took yourself off to a darkened room and put the atomic bomb ring to your eye. So that you could see the "frenzied flashes." inside the chamber.

Claiming that the Atomic Bomb Ring was PEEFECTLY SAFE, and that kids could wear the ring with "complete safety" may have been a bit of a naive statement from the manufacturers. Polonium-210, is a deadly element and its alpha particle emissions have a short have life of 138 days. However the silvery metal, found in uranium ore, and originally discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1897 is deadly. It was used to assissinate the former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in London, in 2006. A microgram of Po-210, which is no larger than a speck of dust, would certainly deliver a fatal dose of radiation. So for kids, who like to put things in their mouths, maybe this ring wasn't such a great idea.

This one is a real "what-the-hell?!" toy from Marx toy company. The company that brought you Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots. Released in 1970 Skinny Bones was a creepy construction kit, that allowed children to build a little freaky friend that same size as them. This cute-faced stick thin creature from the bowels of toy hell was part of a whole family of Bones abominations. There was Ginny Bones, the anorexic female counterpart of Skinny. They also had skinny pets. Skinny Bones had a badly neglected nag called Trom Bones (see what they did there?) And Ginny had an emaciated dog called Ham Bones. I assume that the parts of the Bones Family were all interchangeable, so that children could mix and match parts to create even more hideous monsters, to haunt their nightmares. And bring chills to any parent coming in the bedroom, to give their little cherub a kiss goodnight.

What you would do with either Skinny or Ginny bones after you had built them is a mystery. And as far as the tenuous educational value of, "the foot bones is connected to the ankle bone... etc..." Well I can see very little play value in the Bones Family, but years of counselling for owning this life-size plastic skeletal creep-fest was surely on the cards.  

Clip from America TV show Thrift Hunters, featuring Skinny Bones.

Back in 1980s and 90s, there was a rise in paranoia from the right-wing Christian fundamentalists, that kids TV shows were the work of Satan. That characters like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, He-Man and the Care Bears were brainwashing kids to fall under Satan's command. 

And one the top crazies peddling this utter nonsense was an author called Phil Philips. Who claimed after he "studied over a thousand hours of cartoons", that they were full of occult messages and satanic practices. His book Saturday Morning Mind Control, published in 1991, was just one of fanatic Phil's works of raving religious lunacy. He had previously published Turmoil In The Toybox in 1986, which argued that the Smurfs, He-Man, Care Bears, My Little Pony, Cabbage Patch Kids, Mighty Mouse and Rainbow Bright are all the devil’s toys concocted in the deepest layers of hell to lead our children to doom. (Actually he may have a had point with Cabbage Patch Dolls.)

He followed that up with Halloween And Satanism (1987), then Saturday Morning Mind Control (1991), and finally Dinosaurs: The Bible, Barney, and Beyond (1994). An indictment of the evil nature of the big purple singing and dancing demonic dinosaur. 

Turmoil In The Toybox attempts to claim that toy makers purposely use pagan symbolism in toy design. My Little Pony unicorn? Pagan! He-Man? Totally pagan, no question! Yoda and Darth Vader? Big bad pagans! Barbie? A godless pagan worshipping slut! Now rational people can laugh and poke fun at Phil's crazy Christian ravings, but there must be plenty of brainwashed fundamentalists out there who fell for his idiocy. Chucked out all the plastic, turned off the TV and shoved a copy of the Bible in little Johnny's hand. As later copies of Turmoil claimed it had sold over 135,000 copies. 

Whatever most of those instruments are doesn't matter to most, but when you tell people it came with actual radioactive materials, they are often dumbfounded. Yeah sure they were in ore form, and so were not highly dangerous. Little Tommy wasn't going to be making a nuclear bomb from them, but still this was a toy science lab for kids that did have a element of danger. Something no parent these days would even contemplate, in a world where we pretty much wrap our kids in cotton wool.  The Atomic Energy Lab originally sold for $49.50 (around $500 in today's money). The set included radioactive samples (alpha, beta and gamma), as well as uranium ore samples. 

The Jesus action figure has been around a while. I've had a wind-up Jesus for years. But however out there, there are a few zombie Jesus action figures. Spawned for the hellfire of factory manufacturing mistake, back in 2007. The makers of the Jesus action figure wanted to produce a "Miracle Edition" of the toy, replete with loves, fishes and jugs of water to wine. And importantly, glow-in-the-dark "miracle" hands.

Unfortunately due to an error in production, what arrived from the factory were figures with creepy translucent glow-in-the-dark hands and freaky red demonic eyes. How many of these were actually made, and got out to customers, is unknown.

Though if you can't get yourself one of the rare factory mistake "zombie" Jesus action figures, there is always the Fist Of Jesus action figure, that comes in both glow-in-the dark and special edition blood-splattered versions.

Crazy Christian Comic: There's A New World Coming - Published in 1974, the infamous comic book from the Christian publishers Spire Comics. Beware The Great Snatch is coming!

Begotten: Once Seen Never Forgotten - Often described as one of the most disturbing films ever made, Begotten is an utterly stunning piece of film-making. A must see for any cult film fan.

Captain Bible in Dome of Darkness - Fighting evil robots with passages from scripture. Just what every kids wants in their gaming experience. It ain't no Grand Theft Auto, that's for sure.

In 1975 Ideal Games decided to make a board game based on the sinking of the Titanic. You'd have thought after 63 years, time would have passed sufficiently for the game to pass relatively unnoticed. But no, the game courted controversy, and was pulled form the shelves for a while. In the UK the company had to change the name, but not the obvious image of the Titanic on the box cover it would seem, to Abandon Ship Game. 

The game was played in two phases. In the first part players had to help passengers escape the ship. For every roll of a one or a six the ship (which rotated) would be turned, so it looked like it was going down. In part two, once in the life-boats, players must find food and water, by visiting islands!!! What islands? Not only did they make a game that some people found distasteful, they went and changed history too.

In the British version of the game, they simply changed the in-game story-line. The "ship" was now in the Pacific, and had struck a coral reef. Because that makes it all okay. The ending of the game was just harsh. After the Titanic had sank, a rescue ship would appear. The first player to land on one of the rescue ship squares won the game. All the other players and their passengers were left to drown at sea. A game for all the family right there.