‘Hazardous History With Henry Winkler' Review: Perilous Products and Pastimes

Wall Street Journal

20 hours ago

Former children who had the skin peeled off their legs by a 150-degree-Fahrenheit playground slide, broke an arm falling off the monkey bars or became impaled on human teeth at Action Park will have a fondness for 'Hazardous History With Henry Winkler.' It's a goofball series with no production values that celebrates a world with no rules—rules that keep humans from killing themselves. Is there a message? Yes, that our affinity for self-destruction knows no limits. But to paraphrase Mark Twain, persons attempting to find a moral here will be shot, perhaps by a flame-throwing '40s-era 'toy' pistol that fired ping-pong balls at about 50 mph.
'Thrilling' and 'exciting' are how the former Fonz describes the days of unlicensed drivers, head-on train collisions staged as entertainment, and radioactive children's 'laboratories' that came in a box with uranium. But the experts interviewed—who range from an astrophysicist to a 'Jeopardy!' champion—are mostly incredulous. What kind of world do we live in where popular amusements once involved people riding horses off diving boards, getting in boxing rings with bears, and wrestling octopuses? Well, as the show spells out without spelling it out, a world in which everything that works, or is fun, is taken to an extreme—at which point regulations come into it, if only to protect the animals.