Worst/Best discontinued products that are taboo now but ok yesteryear

Lawn Darts.

People would actually encourage their children to throw large pointed projectiles in the air around other people.

Didn't turn out very well. Discontinued for the most part, not so much taboo.

Those fucking wax Coca-Cola bottle shaped things with the .00005ml of shitty kool-aid in the middle. Everything about them tasted like shit but never stopped me from eating the whole bag wax and all.

We had the same product you mentioned in Germany, only it was called "Negerkuss" (negro's kiss). It was than rebranded to "Dickmann's" (Fat Man's), which apparently didn't sit right with the crowd as well.

They are now known as Schaumküsse (Foam Kisses) or Schokoküsse (Chocolate Kisses).

There's however also a more elaborate pastry version of this which goes by Mohrenkopf (Mohr was considered to be the "polite" way of calling a person of color, Kopf = head), and some bakeries still make and sell them under this name.

I was going to say candy cigarettes, but in the US, they are still around I guess. Elsewhere it's banned.

Sounds like the "Negerkuss" (Negrokiss) or "Moorenkuss" in Germany. Nowadays it's called "Schokokuss" (chocolate kiss) or "Dickmann" (fat man, a brand name). First time I noticed that as a kid was at a bakery that wouldn't sell you a Negerkuss only a Schokokuss. Even our black friend didn't get one.

Leaded goddamn everything. Especially gasoline. It took damn near an act of God to stop that from being a thing, the guy who finally waged the war on leaded gasoline had to go through so many hoops to prove that it was the gas's fault. He literally reinvented what a clean environment was. Seriously, he invented the modern idea of a clean room, because the stuff he had to work with at the time was woefully inadequate at preventing contamination from interfering with his experiments.

Also, and this is a really stupid fact, tornado slides. They used to be pretty ubiquitous, until one day two well meaning parents waged a Crusade against them that successfully accomplished literally nothing.

This one is especially telling. Basically, their kid fell off a tornado slide. If you don't know what that is, look it up it's just a slide that twists round in a spiral a few times. Their kid was on top of one being a kid, screwing around and not just sliding down it, fell off, whacked their head on something, and died tragically. So in an effort to protect other parent's children, they waged a legal crusade to get tornado slides baned from playgrounds. They were successful and governments passed safety reforms for playground equipment, including the banning of tornado slides.

Unfortunately this had two secondary effects. Primarily, kids stop playing at the playgrounds. They were no longer fun, and the whole purpose of a playground being fun is to allow the kid to explore and develop a sense of risk assessment. Consequently, or perhaps incidentally, the second effect was that statistically the amount and severity of childhood injuries in the United States following the changes showed that there was literally no difference before or after the bans. Kids just found other ways to hurt themselves, at exactly the same ratio as before.

The entire crusade had been a futile effort to stop kids from suffering tragic accidents. Unfortunately for them there's nothing you can do to prevent statistical outliers. By appealing to emotion rather than using data, they destroyed the prior appeal of playgrounds for children nationwide. I don't know if any subsequent reforms have changed things again, if I remember correctly this all happened somewhere around the '80s or '90s. Whatever the case, we now have other issues with kids not playing around outside, mostly related to electronic devices. But it's a good object lesson in why appeals to emotion are probably one of the worst logical fallacies there are.

Radium or Cocaine in soft drinks.

Not even a product but a childs game. "Wer hat Angst vorm schwarzen Mann? - Niemand!" Who is afraid of the black man? Nobody!

It's basically about catching each other (with a ball) where you say those words in the beginning.

McDonald’s fries in the 80s and 90s were THE BOMB. Then they changed the fry oil and they got real mediocre.

A little bit about Aunt Jemima for non-Americans:

The image of Jemima isn't bad because it depicts a racial stereotype. Or not just that. The image of the Black domestic is a symbol of wealth and power. It's meant to inspire a sense of nostalgia for the times when children were raised and food was served with black hands.

The image of the black domestic was as wide-spread, public domain, and as common as images of Uncle Sam or George Washington. It's a cultural touchstone, and just like the Rebel Flag, that it might make people uncomfortable is half the point.

Aunt Jemima gets at the heart of race relations in the United States. She's a caricature of blackness, created by white people, for other white people, that somehow every black American has to confront, even if only to rebel against it. Because once something has become a powerful cultural image of what you are, to most people, and maybe to yourself, you're defined by the stereotype, even if it's only in how far you deviate from it.