Children's toys are meant to be entertaining. But as the list below shows, these fun little objects can also play a role in bridging the gap between life and death.
We present you the top 10 toys that saved people's lives.
10. Remote Control Toy Truck
Ernie Fessenden had a brother who was serving in Afghanistan. And of course, Ernie wanted his brother to come home safe and sound. So he contacted a toy store owner, and together they added a wireless camera and infrared lighting to a remote-controlled toy truck and sent it to Afghanistan.
One day, Ernie's brother, Chris, lent a toy truck to a group of soldiers about to go on patrol. They drove the remote-controlled toy truck ahead, looking for danger. And it found it. The toy truck hit wires on explosives hidden on the road, and they detonated. The soldiers were unharmed.
9. Inflatable toy turtle
In July 2017, torrential rains hit the Chinese city of Liuyang, located in Hunan Province. And 13 people were trapped in their homes as the waters quickly rose around them. At that moment, some quick-thinking police officers ran to a nearby toy store. There, they found a bright green inflatable turtle. Returning to the scene, the police quickly inflated the toy and rescued the people in less than two hours.
Although the police officers' actions were heroic, they themselves were a little embarrassed by the sight of the rescue craft. "Sorry that our boat is... too cute. But the most important thing is that everyone is safe," they said.
8. Toy Lightsaber
Attention Star Wars fans! Apparently Luke Skywalker is alive and living in Rock Hill, South Carolina.
According to eyewitnesses, on the night of Thursday, March 17, 2017, the stepdaughter and her stepfather began to quarrel. In the heat of the argument, the 17-year-old girl grabbed two kitchen knives. But her stepfather had his own weapon - a lightsaber. True, it was a toy, but for a real Jedi, this is no obstacle, right?
Witnesses said the man successfully fought off his stepdaughter's attack. May the Force protect them both.
7. Minion
For those who don't know, the Minions are small yellow animated characters who first appeared in public in the 2010 film Despicable Me. They became so popular that they got their own cartoon, which grossed $1.159 billion in 2015. And while in the cartoon world, the Minions prefer to work for supervillains, in real life they can do good deeds, too.
On the night of July 16, 2015, in Colorado Springs, Colorado, a 5-year-old girl was playing in her bedroom on the third floor of an apartment building. And somehow, she fell out of the window. However, the stuffed minion that the little girl was playing with softened her fall and saved her life. She escaped with a broken wrist.
Well, at least in the eyes of one lucky little girl, the Minions have become superheroes.
6. Doll
In September 1940, a German bomb was dropped on the Welsh town of Haverfordwest. It hit a spot near the house where 2-year-old Dorothy Owen lived.
Her mother found that the ceiling of her little daughter's bedroom had collapsed. Frantically clearing away the rubble, she discovered that her daughter was still alive. The hard head of the doll she had been holding on to when the ceiling collapsed had protected the girl's head from the impact.
5. Clicker
On D-Day, June 6, 1944, Allied forces stormed the beaches of Normandy, France. Some 156,000 men took part in the event, of whom 4,500 were killed and thousands more were wounded or missing.
Some American soldiers took with them a toy that could be found inside a box of crackers. It was known as a "clicker" because of the noise it made.
For Captain Sam Gibbons of the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Regiment, this tiny children's toy became a friend-or-foe identification signal.
Parachuting in total darkness, Gibbons landed in a pasture surrounded by German troops. After half an hour of crawling, he made his way to a road and encountered another soldier. Not knowing whether he was an American or a German soldier, Gibbons clicked his clicker.
"I snapped it and he snapped it back twice. Boy, was I glad to see him," the captain later said.
4. Water weapons
On a hot summer day, a child has several ways to cool down, and the most fun of them is shooting with a gun that shoots water. The modern toy industry offers both small and giant models from which you can douse your opponent from head to toe. And when children get into a frenzy, participating in wet shootouts with their friends, all the parents caught in the crossfire are begging for mercy.
On May 31, 2016, those parental wails must have turned into a chorus of thanks for five North Dakota children. In the midst of an all-out water war raging in the area around their apartment complex, the boys and girls smelled smoke. It led them to an apartment engulfed in flames. Worse, there was a man inside.
The children began shooting water guns in an attempt to put out the fire. By the time the fire brigade arrived on the scene, the fire was already smoldering and nearly out.
3. Toy foxes
A constant participant in many tales about cunning and resourcefulness, the toy also made it onto the list of toys that saved human lives.
During a visit to Beijing, British politician Geoffrey Clifton-Brown received a gift from an online store — several stuffed toy foxes. At first, he intended to throw them away, but then decided to bring them as a gift to his family. And, as it turned out, he made the right choice.
After leaving the hotel, Clifton-Brown fell down a well shaft. And it was the very stuffed animals he wanted to give up that ended up cushioning his fall.
"I took this huge bag of stuffed foxes and by pure luck it literally saved my life," Clifton-Brown said in an interview.
2. Driving skills in the video game Mario Kart
While some seek to ban video games, considering them to be almost the main evil for children, others draw vital lessons from them.
One day, 10-year-old Griffin Sanders and his 4-year-old brother were riding as passengers in a car driven by their grandmother. Suddenly, she passed out and the car swerved into oncoming traffic.
And then Griffin took action.
"I couldn't get to the brakes because my grandmother was in the way," Sanders later said. "So I just drove the car into the ditch."
Sanders then turned and looked at the backseat where his younger brother was playing carefree on his iPad, unaware that his older brother may have just saved his life.
The boy could only thank his driving experience gained in Mario Kart, which helped him keep his cool in a seemingly hopeless situation.
1. Toy cart
This story began as a family idyll: one day, a father put his one-year-old son and two-year-old daughter on a red plastic toy cart and started to roll them around the house.
But something terrible happened: a woman driving up to them in a car took her eyes off the road for a moment and crashed into the cart.
Amazingly, the brother and sister survived, and all because of the little toy they were riding on. Despite being pulled under the car and dragged for 15 meters, the cart did not fall apart and protected its little passengers from certain death.
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