I posted this because I was looking at Tonka trucks for a friend's kid and noticed how they were all plastic now, and wanted to find something about this. This

I posted this because I was looking at Tonka trucks for a friend's kid and noticed how they were all plastic now, and wanted to find something about this. This was from 2011, so the rot must have set in quite a bit earlier. Does anyone have more information about what changed in, like, late 1999? Did we all get plugged into the Matrix and the robots don't want us to get hurt as kids? More seriously, was there a sudden wave of lawsuits or something then that changed things?