the fourth most interesting parking-lot-related video on the internet
When I was a kid, I heard a story about a long-forgotten toy failure and a mass burial that seemed too good to be true. Join me as I try and discover the truth behind the... parking lot that people say has a ton of silly putty buried underneath it.
You know, some people on YouTube investigate important things like crimes and history? I'm glad those people exist. It lets me do things like this.
This video came together pretty fast. I spent a couple of months researching the story - digging through newspapers, going to the archives, reading every book I could find that mentioned this story. Ultimately, the issue came down to a lack of documentation - most of the people involved are long gone, and in other cases, organizations that would keep the best records of these sorts of events did not exist yet. The FDA no longer would be the authority in charge of thhe toy recall, for example, meaning that getting information from them was prohibitively difficult.
The story itself has legitimately been in my head for a while - I first read the myth in a copy of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader of all places as a kid, and I realized later on that Hasbro being headquartered here in Rhode Island meant that the lot was likely within driving distance of me. Once I had that idea, the video shaped itself around that. I knew before I had written a word that we needed to go there for our finale.
I do wish I had uncovered more information, though - perhaps someday in the future I will revisit the topic...