I’m raising sea monkeys right now


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.

Comments

  1. anbheal says

    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.

  2. Rich Woods says

    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.

  3. kurt1 says

    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.

  4. says

    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.