Holiday Ayo - This Lato-Lato game is now a toy that is being loved by all ages, from children, teenagers to the elderly.

At first glance, there is nothing special about the game, which is made of two balls with a string tied with a ring.

The way to play this game is to make the two balls collide and produce a sound 'knock tock'

This game is called Lato-Lato. However, Lato-Lato is not from Indonesia. This game is a traditional game originating from the United States.

In America, this game is known as Clackers Ball. This game is also known to Italy as 'Lato' in Italian which means side.

In the late 1960s people were playing a frenzy with two small, heavy balls over the strings. This Lato-Lato can explode because it is made of acrylic. Until finally, this Lato-Lato game was officially banned.

By the early 70's, hundreds of toy makers had sold millions of clackers around the world. The clacker is similar in design to the boleadora, the weapon of choice for gauchos (Argentine cowboys) trying to catch guanacos.

In the US, regulating toy safety was originally the job of the Food and Drug Administration. Obviously, clackers are neither a food nor a drug, but the FDA did have the authority to protect people from playing with silly things that went wrong through a 1966 law that forced them to ban toys that contained "chemical, flammable, or radioactivity hazards." 

Then came the clacker ball otherwise known as click-clack, balls or knockers. In the early 1970s, clackers were so popular that it was up to residents of a small Italian province called Calcinatello (population 12,832) to hold an annual competition for clacker fans, according to John P Swann, an FDA historian.

Keep blowing up and not in a good way. The toy was originally marketed as a way to teach children hand-eye coordination. But the fact that the toy could turn into a dangerous projectile meant that the game was also banned to prevent blindness.

In 1971, the FDA put its heads together and established new safety standards for manufacturers that included prescriptive testing and rigorous record keeping. It was a major hurdle for clacker makers, then the toy was pulled from the market.

The popularity of this game also reached Indonesia in the 90s. This game no longer uses acrylic material which is at risk of breaking and is dangerous, as stated in Quartz. Even though the shape is still the same, this game is made safer because it uses polymer plastic material.