This video is a surprising history of those sea monkeys that you used to see advertised in comic books — I raise them routinely and mundanely to feed to fish, and I was surprised by a couple of things. First, the “instant life” gimmick was faked — they lied about the contents of the little packages you got when you ordered them (I never did that part, I get the eggs direct), and the other surprise…well, if you must know, skip ahead to around 11 minutes in the video.
Now I’m just glad I never ordered them from the original company, and Braunhut never got a penny of my money.
I had a grade-school friend, a bit of an odd duck, who boosted his weekend popularity by frequently hosting pool parties. I remember sea monkeys gamboling about in the bucket you dunked your feet in before entering the pool and before entering the house. I didn’t believe in spontaneous gestation, but presumed that they were somehow more developed versions of that toe-jam John Lennon spoke of.
A nice video, but this was basically all covered in the NYT Magazine a year and a half ago.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/magazine/the-battle-over-the-sea-monkey-fortune.html
I used to get sent old Superman comics by my American cousins, so I remember seeing the cartoonish adverts for sea monkeys (I never understood what they were meant to be, not that I could ever have afforded the transatlantic P&P back in the days when I used to get just five pence pocket money per week). I also remember seeing adverts for a tabletop American football game that looked to be made of tin and had slots and levers which you could use to move the players backwards and forwards — I have no idea how that was meant to work either.
In contrast to that I wish I’d kept the Superman comics. They’d be worth a small fortune now.
Whats up with the american Nazis carrying around weird shields all the time? Saw that in the coverage of Charlottesville and now in this video. I never saw that anywhere here in germany. I mean besides the police when they beat up left protestors.
I remember seeing the original ads in Mad magazine when I was a kid in the ’70s. My daughter got them for her fifth birthday in June, but hers were called Aqua Dragons. She lost interest a couple weeks after they hatched. They died off within a couple months.