What i read said that most of the problems involving those came from people holding the hand guards. The places with the hand holds is actually meant to protect the hands while you hold the base and that holding the hand guards would cause instability and lead to injury.
I know at least one of my coaches actually insisted that was the handle, but most of us ignored her anyway. One problem was they seemed built smaller than they should have been, at least the ones when I was in 5-6th grade.
I was born in 2002, I have no idea what any of those are. (No, but really tho, what are they? I think they might be more of an America thing rather than a 90s thing)
I was born in '75 and we had those things too. Another thing we had was a projector that used a roll of film and a seperate record player (who remembers vinyl?). The film was advanced 1 frame at a time manually and 1 student was tasked with rolling the film everytime the record would ping.
https://youtu.be/QfIDU3YarvU
https://youtu.be/QfIDU3YarvU