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Battle Over the Sea-Monkey Fortune.1960s bondage-actress waging legal combat with toy company
NYTIMES ^ | 4/15/16 | JACK HITT

Posted on 04/15/2016 9:09:23 AM PDT by DeathBeforeDishonor1

The way the lawyer William Timmons described the case, it was practically a newsreel melodrama, with a helpless widow being menaced by a heartless tycoon. The story began with the widow, whose name is Yolanda Signorelli von Braunhut. She is a onetime heir to the considerable fortune still generated by her husband Harold’s iconic invention, Amazing Live Sea-Monkeys. As her lawyer told it, she was now isolated, cash-starved, often without electricity or running water on a palatial estate on the Potomac River in southern Maryland. Having retreated to a single room in the old mansion, she was prepping for her second freezing winter, barricaded by thick quilts, her bed next to a fireplace stocked with split wood. From this bunker, Signorelli von Braunhut has been waging legal combat against Sam Harwell, chief executive of a big-time toy company whose name seems straight out of a Chuck Jones cartoon: Big Time Toys.

In his tiny office in Sayville, on Long Island, Timmons spoke in clipped, near-noir tones, handing me a five-page summary of the case, eager to executive-produce the plotline. “The heart and soul of this case is trademark infringement,” he said. Signorelli von Braunhut “believes in the concept of justice,” he continued, “and when you have that on your side, then you can get through the day.”

A few years after her husband’s death in 2003, Signorelli von Braunhut licensed out part of the labor of his multimillion dollar Sea-Monkey enterprise, mostly packaging and distribution, to Big Time. If you’ve ever been 8 years old, then you know that Sea-Monkeys arrive in a small plastic aquarium with several small packets that include the tiny brine-shrimp critters, which reanimate once you add water — by way of a secret formula that Signorelli von Braunhut keeps locked in a vault in Manhattan.

(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...


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To: pluvmantelo

What you did there, I see it.

L


21 posted on 04/15/2016 11:50:12 AM PDT by Lurker (Violence is rarely the answer. But when it is it is the only answer.)
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To: DeathBeforeDishonor1

Thank goodness they stopped with shrimp. Imagine if they could produce millions and millions of Hillarys.


22 posted on 04/15/2016 12:32:20 PM PDT by bgill (CDC site, "We still do not know exactly how people are infected with Ebola")
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To: DeathBeforeDishonor1
Sea Monkeys photo: Monkeys monkeys2.gif "thousand-yard stare"
23 posted on 04/15/2016 12:52:53 PM PDT by tumblindice (America's founding fathers: all armed conservatives.)
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To: DeathBeforeDishonor1

Thanks for posting this.


24 posted on 04/15/2016 1:44:45 PM PDT by ifinnegan (Democrats kill babies and harvest their organs to sell)
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