Posted on 08/27/2017 8:48:42 AM PDT by SandRat
My wife recently came into the house and announced that there were strange looking creatures living in our stock pond. She is from Scotland, so at first, I was concerned that she had gotten into the cooking wine and had seen the Loch Ness Monster again. However, when she described the creatures to me, I realized she was talking about brine shrimp. Of course, every Baby Boomer who grew up in America knows them by their proper name, which is sea monkeys.
For those who ever read a comic book in the 60s and 70s, you would have seen the sea monkey ad on the back of the comic book. The ad included an illustration of these humanoid-looking creatures with what looked like crowns on their heads. For a buck and a quarter plus fifty cents for shipping and handling, you could “own a bowlful of happiness.” Never mind that the word bowlful was misspelled.
According to the ad, the sea monkeys were so eager to please that they could be trained to do tricks. “Always clowning around, these frolicsome pets swim, stunt and play games with each other.” They were so easy to raise that “even a six-year old could do it,” claimed the ad.
Of course, they weren’t really sea monkeys or anything close to that, and they could in no way be trained. Sea monkeys are brine shrimp, which look like big swimming fleas. The sea monkey idea was invented and marketed by someone named Harold Von Braunhut, who figured out how to put the eggs and nutrients in packets that could be sent through the mail. Brine shrimp, otherwise known as vernal pool fairy shrimp, don’t do anything but eat algae and provide a food source for other animals. The brine shrimp eggs can survive after the water puddle dries up and will hatch again when the rains come back.
When subsequent generations wonder why Baby Boomers are so reluctant to believe anything that they read on the internet or hear on the news, you can trace their skepticism to comic book ads. Just about every kid from the comic book era got conned by the sea monkeys, the x-ray specs, the ventriloquist device, the Hypno coin, and, of course, the 7-ft Polaris nuclear sub that could fire rockets and torpedoes and had an electrically lit instrument panel.
I mean, what gullible young boy wouldn’t want all of these things? Fortunately, most parents wouldn’t let their children waste their meager allowance money on anything advertised on the back of a comic book. They knew the sea monkeys were just brine shrimp, the x-ray specs and Hypno coin were cardboard fakes, the ventriloquist device didn’t really throw your voice, and the nuclear sub was a painted cardboard box. We learned what fake news was before the term was invented. We didn’t need Snopes to tell us what a hoax was. Our parents did that for us.
Unfortunately, nowadays kids have access to the internet and if they somehow get ahold of your credit card number, you can wind up with a whole garage full of sea monkeys faster than the darn things can hatch.
One of the other famous ads that used to appear on the back of comic books was the Charles Atlas ad. Charles Atlas was the Arnold Schwarzenegger of his day. His ad included a comic strip that showed a puny man getting sand kicked in his face by a bully at the beach. Fed up with being a wimp, he buys Charles Atlas' book about body building. After a few weeks of the training, he goes back to the beach and punches the bully in the nose. His girlfriend clings to his arm and says, "Oh Mac! You are a real man after all!" Above Mac's head, the words "Hero of the beach" are emblazoned.
My, how little the world has changed.
Charles Atlas’ name was originally Angelo Siciliano. He immigrated to America from Italy in about 1903. He was supposedly scrawny like Mac in the comic ad but built his body up through an exercised program that he developed on his own. So, unlike the other comic book ads, Charles Atlas' body building program was real, and many famous athletes like boxer Joe Louis used his body building program with great success. I'm not sure Angelo was ever really bullied at the beach, but he could have been.
It just goes to show you that even in a sea of fake news monkeys, you can still occasionally find the truth.
Ooh. Missed that one. Dang it. Say, do they still sell comic books?
Not that I want to order a 7-ft Polaris nuclear sub or anything.
This article brings back a lot of memories for me!!
It did for me, too. But that pic of the ad for the sea monkeys really brought ‘em back.
Great post #4. Perfect for this thread.
Oh yes, Comic Books are definitely still being sold.
Most of them are very expensive though, full color, some printed on thick glossy paper like collector’s editions.
Most have become either overly gory and dark in theme, focusing on the ugly, the bizarre or the very sleazy.
The depictions are exaggerated to get your attention.
Many of the buyers for comic books are adults who never stopped reading and collecting.
Others have become yet another tool for promoting PC values.
Marvel Comics went through a phase where they changed The Mighty Thor from a male figure into a female figure.
Green Lantern outed himself as gay.
Sales plummeted soon after this experiment began in 2014.
Last summer in 2016, they finally changed Thor back into a man. There was much tsk-tsking and finger pointing about
a readership ‘so behind the times, so very misogynist it was crazy’, but they did change him back.
I don’t know about the Green Lantern. Sometimes, what has been outed, can never be reversed.
They’re still around: https://www.amazon.com/Educational-Insights-000000006725-Sea-Monkeys-Blister/dp/B00005YWOB
I had the baking soda operated bathtub plastic submarine and at another time I had the baking soda frogmen. They were actually good tub toys until my mother got tired of providing the baking soda.
Cool!
And my parents wouldn't buy me one...
Had the same baking soda frogmen. They were neat. Came in a Raisin Bran cereal box. My mom didn’t have a problem with re-distribution of the baking soda supply. It was my habit of opening the new cereal box before the old one was finished and thrusting my arm in to get to the toy at the bottom. Was careful to do that while she was out. But she always knew right off the bat. Maybe the cereal flakes on the counter tipped her off.
Great.
You gave away the secret.
Now North Korea will buy like a bazillion of these tanks.
I took this ad to a Navy base and told them I wanted a seven buck sub.
They sold me one.
I took it back after nine days.
Once you shoot off all the nuclear missiles, all the fun is gone.
I’d order it just to get the “Feeding Spoon”.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/magazine/the-battle-over-the-sea-monkey-fortune.html
... Timmons represents Yolanda Signorelli von Braunhut because years ago he used to go to this legendary Halloween party hosted by a larger-than-life opera singer known as Maestro Signorelli, a Bohemian possessed of “this gravitational-like field of energy.” The grand patriarch of a bustling family, Signorelli taught bel canto to locals determined to improve their coloratura. His annual Halloween masked ball attracted hundreds of “musicians, dancers and artists,” all of whom came in their most flamboyant costumes. Some attended, if only to meet one of his five beautiful daughters.
The second-youngest, Yolanda, was particularly stunning and began a film career in the mid-1960s. She played Lorilie in the 1967 bondage classic “Venus in Furs” — based on the Leopold von Sacher-Masoch novel of that name, as well as various minxes in “All Women Are Bad,” “Too Much Too Often!” “Death of a Nymphette” and “Assignment: Female.” I watched three of them, for research, and was struck mostly by how these films appeared long before the phrase “money shot” entered the lexicon and the director’s mandatory scene list. When I finally screwed up the courage to ask Signorelli von Braunhut about her previous career, she casually said: “In those days, they might have been racy, but today? I don’t think so.” Which is true. If anything, her brief movie career looks presciently campy — less like porn than like a Mike Myers parody titled, “Cool It Baby” (which is also the title of a 1967 Signorelli von Braunhut film).
On paper, including the legal summary Timmons gave me, the issues of Yolanda von Braunhut v. Big Time Toys might be technical — breach of contract, sure — until you find yourself reading affidavits that suggest this could be one of those unusual contests, not of law but of meaning — maybe not the tail end of a universe expressing itself, but definitely one that leads into that lively place between ordinary truth and hopeful dreams and all the way to the essential contradiction at the core of the American character...
So the Sea Monkeys were making porn films.
I knew it. I.....just.....knew.....it.
We were kids.
We thought they were just wrestling in their bowl.
Another fond childhood memory shot in the donkey.
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