Remember "Sea Monkeys" ?

If you grew up during the 60's, 70's, or even the 80's and 90's, there's a good chance you read comic books for entertainment.

And a lot of times, the advertising in the comic books was just as entertaining as the comics themselves.

I recently ran across something that reminded me of such an advertisement. It's a classic.......

                                                   SEA MONKEYS

If you read comic books back in those days, you either remember Sea Monkey advertisements, or should have a brain scan MRI done. They must have been on the back of every single solitary comic book ever printed.

The drawing made them look like little amphibious human like creatures, nude. You may even recall wanting to order Sea Monkeys to see if that was the case, because if it was the case, you'd have your own little nudist colony to look at in a gold fish bowl. Go on, admit it, that's what you were thinking. In fact, they had a special ad for tricking little pervs:

Yep, they had us pegged. We were pretty much expecting something like in the drawings, but what did they send us? This:

Bit of a disappointment if you were expecting miniature amphibious people with legs.

They're called "Brine Shrimp" and they live in salt water lakes, such as the one in Utah. Because these shrimp lay their eggs in cysts, the eggs can dry out, and then hatch once they're placed back into water. You could expect these critters to live for a couple years, with reasonable care. They probably wouldn't have sold many had the artist drawn a picture of a bunch of brine shrimp swimming around in a gold fish bowl.

So, once the initial disappointment of not having a little nudist colony to gawk at wore off, they were actually just a stupid member of the shrimp family that didn't need a heck of a lot of attention. 

"So eager to please"? Seriously, look at the picture of this "pet". It's probably not even aware of you, let alone "eager to please" you. And the part about being able to train them...yeah that's a bit of an exaggeration, maybe someone out there got those things to roll over or play fetch, but it's not likely. 

Seriously though, if anyone out there did train some of these things by all means let us know, we'd be fascinated to hear about it, and video footage would also be appreciated.

And,  BTW, the Sea Monkey kit didn't come with a castle either.

But I'll say this, whoever came up with the idea must have sold a mind boggling amount of those things, because the price just seemed to increase with each new issue of Archie or Richie Rich, or which ever comic book you were getting.

Slight inflation in price:

From $1.25 to $13.95......all during the "comic book era."

"Do not resist"....what do they mean by that? Who could resist brine shrimp anyways?