![]() Yes, for just a few dollars, you too could experience the thrill of chasing a frightened animal to its death, only in the form of barely visible crustaceans!Īll this grifting caught the attention of the New York State Attorney General, Louis Lefkowitz, who issued proceedings against von Braunhut on the grounds that the creatures were not actually monkeys, and thus marketing them as such was fraudulent. Von Braunhut was a keen motorcycle racer – he competed under the name The Green Hornet – and even developed a Sea-Monkey Speedway, but nothing could quite match the strangeness of the Sea-Monkey Fox Hunt. For those who wanted adventure, you could buy the Sea-Monkey Circus, Sea-Monkey Ocean Zoo, or Sea-Monkey Ski Trail. There were a range of treats for your little friends, including a ‘banana treat’, ‘red vitamins’ (containing ‘every known vitamin your Sea-Monkeys need for robust health!’), and ‘sea diamonds’. Keen to further part children from their hard-earned, Grit-selling money, von Braunhut came up with a series of accessories and playsets. The ad copy promised ‘a bowl full of happiness’, and billions were sold to curious, excited, soon-to-be-disappointed children all over America. Orlando created the smiling, pot-bellied humanoids that have become a staple of pop culture kitsch over the years, and von Braunhut marketed them through ads in all kinds of comic books – Marvel, DC, Archie, whatever! – to a saturation point of over three million pages of advertising a year. ![]() In the early 1970s, von Braunhut decided to rebrand the pesky swimmers and enlisted the cartooning skills of comics legend Joe Orlando. What’s more, these creatures breathed through their feet, were born with one eye and miraculously developed two more, and reproduced asexually, although there were both males and females of the species! Sales of Instant Life were steady if not spectacular, and in 1962 von Braunhut renamed his creatures Sea-Monkeys, because he figured their long tails looked like monkey’s tails. To ensure the shrimp would live long enough to hold the imagination, the boffins also tweaked their very DNA, creating a species – artemia nyos (after the New York Ocean Sciences lab in which they worked) – that is not found in nature. Von Braunhut and d’Agostino came up with a way to turn ordinary tap water into an artemia-friendly environment, and would-be shrimp wranglers would be sent two sachets – one containing the brine shrimp and the other containing a powder which would turn their water into brine. Look, we know it sounds mad, but he made millions off it, honest! Von Braunhut had come across them when he visited a pet store whilst still in cryptobiosis, brine shrimp are used as fish food, but von Braunhut reasoned that, if the cryptobiosis could be reversed in the home, the little scamps would make ideal pets. ![]() Essentially, the creatures that would later become Sea-Monkeys were artemia, brine shrimp that entered cryptobiosis – a dormant state that reduces biological functions to an absolute, often undetectable minimum – when they were starved of water. ![]() Questionable politics aside, von Braunhut saw potential in his Instant Life product, and worked with a scientist named Anthony d’Agostino to develop it into a viable prospect. He was a keen white supremacist and was looking to add distance from his Jewish roots – the Washington Post reported that he bought arms for a Ku Klux Klan faction and regularly attended the annual conference of the Aryan Nations. You’d think that a Jewish American who had lived through the Second World War wouldn’t be so keen to play on his Germanic side, but von Braunhut wasn’t an ordinary Jewish American. Von Braunhut was born just plain Harold Braunhut but added the preposition to make him sound more German. The Sea-Monkeys story began in 1957 when, eager to cash in on the craze for ant farms that had exploded the year before, an intrepid inventor named Harold von Braunhut came up with the idea for ‘Instant Life’, an aquatic pet colony formed of brine shrimp. What kid could resist that? What kid wouldn’t want tiny humanoids, albeit with weird tails and antennae, living in the corner of their bedroom? What kid wasn’t disappointed when what they actually received was tiny, tiny shrimps that really didn’t do anything? ![]() These delightful creatures, called Sea-Monkeys (obviously because they resembled the ape-like beings in the ad art, right?), would be dispatched to your door, along with everything you needed to help them thrive and survive. Alongside offers to sell Grit magazine (what even was that?) door-to-door, trunks full of plastic army men, and X-ray glasses that would definitely allow you to see the girl-next-door’s private parts, was an invitation to grow your own friends. Whatever American comic books you read in the seventies and eighties, you couldn’t help but come across adverts for all kinds of wacky stuff. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |