Up next in 10
Sea Monkeys are a novelty that have provided hours of quasi-entertainment to young people across the world. They were also created by a man with ties to the Aryan Nations, were at the center of a multimillion dollar legal dispute, and led to a TV show starring Howie Mandel. Not necessarily in that order.
The story of The Amazing Live Sea Monkeys is much more than a stroll down memory lane. It's a look at entrepreneurship, identity, and the good old fashioned pursuit of the almighty dollar. You'll learn unbelievable true facts about the sordid path the Sea Monkey empire took, and why there's much more to Sea Monkeys than that little packet of "Instant Life."
Throwback is a new series from Mental Floss where we take a deep dive into some of the most fascinating stories behind the toys, trends, and events you might remember from your childhood.
For even more Sea Monkey facts, check out Erin's piece on the Mental Floss website, 16 Amazing Facts About Sea Monkeys: https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/56755/16-amazing-facts-about-sea-monkeys
Subscribe here for new Mental Floss episodes every Wednesday: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpZ5qUqpW4hW4zdfuBxMSJA?sub_confirmation=1
Don't miss a video! Subscribe NOW: https://www.youtube.com/@MentalFloss?sub_confirmation=1
About Mental Floss:
Mental Floss is where curious people come for trivia-tastic information. Mental Floss produces lists of fun facts, debunks common misconceptions, and tells untold stories from history, science, culture and more.
Website: http://www.mentalfloss.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/mental_floss
Facebook: https://facebook.com/mentalflossmagazine
Copyright Notice: This video and YouTube channel contain dialog, music, and images that are property of Mental Floss. You are authorized to share the video link and channel, and embed this video in your website or others as long as a link back to this YouTube Channel is provided.
Show More Show Less View Video Transcript
0:00
A man walks into a pet store, sees a bucket of tiny brine shrimp being used as fish food
0:04
markets those shrimp to children via mail order by giving them human faces, makes millions
0:09
of dollars, funnels that money into an illegal gunrunning operation, is outed as a white
0:13
supremacist who supports the Ku Klux Klan, funds the Aryan nations, says Hitler was an
0:18
okay guy, and inspires a TV show starring Howie Mandel. Then, things get weird
0:24
It's all part of the incredible true story of sea monkeys, today on our first ever episode
0:28
of Throwback. Welcome to the series where we take a deep dive into some of the most fascinating stories
0:38
behind the toys, trends, and events you might remember from your childhood. If you have something you'd like to see us explore in a future episode, let us know in
0:44
the comments. Hopefully, it won't be long before we're shooting those episodes in the super fun studio we
0:48
were designing for this series, which mostly consisted of me spending a lot of time on eBay
0:53
trying to find things from my childhood. For now, though, we're doing the safe thing and filming from home
0:57
the sea monkeys I have in the office will have to fend for themselves. I'm your host Erin McCarthy, and if you're like me, you probably had sea monkeys as a
1:04
kid without knowing what they were or where they came from. The short version? It was a get-rich-quick scheme that actually got someone rich quick
1:11
But trust me, the long version is worth sticking around for. In 1957, a man named Harold Von Braunhut walked into a pet store and noticed a bucket filled
1:22
with brine shrimp. He didn't know it at the time, but that pail of fish food was Artemia salina, a
1:27
species of brine shrimp found in salt lakes. Aselina, as von Braunhut discovered, has some
1:32
fascinating biological traits. It can exist in a state of suspended animation known as cryptobiosis
1:38
where living organisms shut down their metabolic processes and the absence of water
1:41
It's nature's version of carbonite freezing. Aselina can survive for years in its protective
1:46
casing in the event a lake dries up. But when you add water, their protective shells hatch
1:51
revealing a translucent creature born with one eye. They develop two more upon reaching maturity
1:56
and can breathe out of their feet. Males have tiny little whiskers under their chin
2:00
and the females can self-fertilize eggs. To most people, the shrimp were just fish food
2:05
To Von Braunhut, they were a way to capture the imagination of children by selling what he termed
2:09
a bowlful of happiness. If he could send the dehydrated eggs in the mail, then have them come
2:15
to life in water using his secret nutrient formula, he was certain kids would lose their minds
2:20
Remember, this was 1957, when children were content to play with toys like Freddy Fireplug
2:24
and hobo mutt, a one-eyed stuffed dog dressed like a homeless person
2:28
Why did Von Braunhut consider this secret world of shrimp so appealing? Maybe because he had a tendency to see magic in the world
2:35
Von Braunhut was born in 1926 in Memphis but grew up in New York City
2:39
As a teenager, he performed illusions as the amazing Telepo. After dropping out of Columbia University, he became a talent agent for acts like Joseph
2:46
Dunninger, a famous mentalist, and Henry Lamothe, who spent decades jumping from a platform 40 feet
2:51
feet in the air and landing in a kiddie pool as shallow as 12 inches without killing himself
2:56
The secret, Lamothe said, was arching his back, which gave him the posture of a flying squirrel
3:01
He lived to see his 70th birthday, which he celebrated, like he did many of his birthdays, by jumping into a kiddie pool from the Flatiron Building
3:07
In other words, von Braunhut knew a good act when he saw one. Kids at that time were already fascinated by ant farms, and von Braunhut thought the
3:14
little critters could be a brine gold mine. He spent years working in a barn on his property, assembling a mail-order package that consisted
3:21
of one packet to condition tap water, one packet of nutrients including yeast and algae
3:26
and one packet of the shrimp eggs. Owing to their amazing ability to emerge from something that looked like Kool-Aid powder
3:31
Von Braunhut dubbed his product Instant Life and began approaching retailers in the early
3:35
60s with what he thought was a guaranteed hit. It wasn't, because there was already something called Instant Fish
3:41
That idea came from Wham-O, the toy company responsible for the hula hoop, and had a similar premise
3:47
African killifish also lay dormant in dry conditions, and Wham-O marketed the eggs stuck in a cube
3:50
of mud on the promise they would come to life in a water tank. But the killifish weren't as plentiful as the brine shrimp, and Wham-O couldn't
3:56
raise enough to meet demand. It was a misfire and one that retail buyers remembered when Von Braunhut came calling Instant life was considered an instant failure Then Von Braunhut had another idea Instead of trying to convince executives his shrimpies would
4:09
be lucrative, he decided to aim his pitch directly at his target audience, impressionable children
4:14
In 1962, taking out an ad in a comic book was inexpensive compared to the television
4:19
commercials that major toy companies were producing. Von Braunhut went on an ad-buying spree
4:24
grabbing space in everything from Batman to Archie to romance titles. He didn't discriminate, at least not with comics, and made his appeal to as many young readers as
4:32
he could, using the time-tested method of selling straight-up b**** to kids
4:40
According to Von Braunhut, who wrote the Sea Monkey ads and the 32-page handbook that came
4:44
with the kit, these little critters could be hypnotized. In truth, Brian Shrimp will follow
4:49
light around, but that's not exactly a form of hypnosis. Obey commands. Aside from following light, sea monkeys have as much regard for instructions
4:57
as cats. They pretty much just do what they want. Play baseball. I just have no clue where that's coming from. Though it did involve sending
5:05
money if you wanted to purchase a patented baseball diamond for your sea monkeys, so
5:09
that's nice. Dance? They seem to like music, so sure. Race. Von Braunhut sold a Speedway kit. Shrimp don't really feel a sense of urgency, and while
5:18
they did swim around the track, they're identical, so you couldn't really tell who won
5:22
Rise from the dead. This referred either to cryptobiosis or the fact dead sea monkeys could
5:27
be replaced by unhatched eggs, but this is not quite the same as reanimating them. Sorry kids
5:33
but your hopes of becoming a necromancer will have to wait. Von Braunhut later said that sea
5:37
monkey ads appeared in 303 million copies of comics annually. That's probably an exaggeration
5:43
but with popular comics selling hundreds of thousands of copies a month
5:47
he had plenty of prospective buyers. He began getting five sacks of mail every day from customers
5:52
who were now shelling out one dollar for this secret society of shrimp. But what about this
5:56
instant life claim? The one that said that the shrimp would materialize before your eyes and
6:01
water? Ever the magician, Von Braunhut was using a little sleight of hand. When kids dumped that
6:05
first packet of nutrients in the water and were told to wait 24 hours before adding the second
6:09
packet of eggs, they didn't realize the first packet actually had some of the eggs. The second
6:14
had more eggs, plus a dye that colored the water, meaning the first eggs that hatched
6:19
were suddenly more visible. Hence, instant life. It was also instant death. The tiny
6:24
shrimp usually didn't live more than a couple of days, which prompted von Braunhut to team
6:28
with a marine biologist named Anthe D'Agostino at the New York Ocean Science Laboratory, or NYOS
6:33
to create a hybrid species of shrimp, Artemia NYOS. They were more durable
6:38
thanks to a process that he flamboyantly called superhomogination, in the words of the New York
6:43
times. Like Sea Monkey Shortstops, it was totally made up. Von Braunhut even offered a kind of
6:48
shrimp life insurance, promising that kids would see their tiny pets thrive for years to come
6:53
In the meantime, Von Braunhut had become a mail-order mogul, using a carnival barker approach to market an entire array of novelties, to name just a few
7:02
Remember X-Ray Specs, which promised to let the wearers see through clothing
7:06
That was Von Braunhut. Young voyeurs were disappointed to find out that they were
7:10
really just glasses stuffed with bird feathers that diffracted light, creating two images
7:15
and a darker area where they overlapped that you could interpret as an x-ray image
7:19
There were hypno-specs, which promised to put people under your control, but the spinning
7:23
spirals on the lenses were more distracting than hypnotic. That led to aquaspecs, which promised to let you see right into water, eliminating glare
7:31
These were just tinted lenses. There was hair-raising monsters, which was a monster on a card that sprouted something
7:36
resembling hair from mineral crystals when watered. He also marketed crazy crabs, which were nothing more than a hermit crab shipped in a box
7:44
But Von Braunhut's real triumph, meaning the one thing that should have gotten him sued
7:48
but didn't, was invisible goldfish, a kit that guaranteed a breed of fish you'd never
7:52
be able to see. Kids who sent away for it got a fish bowl, some seaweed, and fish food, but no fish
7:58
They were, after all, invisible. None of it resonated quite like sea monkeys which got another boost in the early 70s when a comic book artist named Joe Orlando drew the most famous sea monkeys advertisement ever a depiction of an entire sea monkey family with human facial features There was a disclaimer Caricatures show not
8:14
intended to depict Artimia's selina, but kids who are not known for reading the fine print
8:19
were captivated. They could buy vitamins for their sea monkeys, a mating powder that was
8:24
supposed to make for some kind of sea monkey date night, and a banana treat. The tank came
8:28
with a built-in magnifying glass to see the shrimp in all of its three-eyed glory. There
8:33
was even an aqua leash to relocate the sea monkeys in case kids bought the optional necklaces
8:37
or wristwatches that could temporarily house their aquatic pets. As an added bonus, the
8:41
aqua leash could also be repurposed to suck out the corpses of dead sea monkeys
8:45
Thanks to von Braunhut's new species of brine shrimp and his marketing techniques, sea monkeys
8:50
were a certifiable sensation, one that made him a millionaire. And really, the idea of
8:54
attempting to breed a master race of pet shrimp wasn't so far-fetched. Don't forget that Von
8:59
Bronhut was, in the words of the Washington Post, quote, active in the anti-Semitic neo-Nazi right
9:06
He was also Jewish. We'll do our best to make sense of this, but no promises. Von Bronhut was
9:11
actually born Harold Nathan Bronhut to parents Jeanette and Howard Bronhut. The family went to
9:16
synagogue, at least occasionally, and Bronhut, according to his cousin's recollection, probably
9:20
had a bar mitzvah. His father died in 1957, the same year Bronhut discovered the shrimp
9:24
and his mother followed in 1960. Both were buried in a Jewish cemetery, which Braunhut paid
9:29
maintenance fees on. Somewhere along the line, he added the Von to his name so it sounded more
9:33
Germanic, according to the Daily Telegraph. And then he invented the Kyoga Agent M5
9:38
a self-defense weapon Von Braunhut began working on in the late 1960s that looked a little something
9:43
like this. The Kyoga was a collapsible baton with coils, which Von Braunhut marketed as a tool for
9:49
people unable to get a license to carry a firearm. It was responsible for a few of the roughly 200
9:54
patents he was awarded in his lifetime. In 1979, he was actually arrested for bringing this type of
9:59
weapon through LaGuardia Airport, though the charges of possessing an illegal weapon were
10:03
dismissed when prosecutors realized it was too new and too strange to fall under the relevant
10:07
legislation. The Cayoga is an important part of sea monkey lore. In 1988, The Washington Post and
10:13
the Spokane Spokesman Review published stories revealing that the weapon was being advertised
10:17
as part of a fundraiser for Richard Butler, the leader of the Aryan nations who needed money to
10:22
fight charges of sedition, the polite term for plotting to overthrow the government
10:26
Butler wrote that for each Cayoga his followers bought, the manufacturer, that would be von
10:31
Braunhut, would pledge $25 to his legal fund. Butler, who was acquitted, called von Braunhut
10:37
a longtime friend and a, quote, member of the Aryan race who has supported us quite a few years
10:42
According to news reports, von Braunhut had attended numerous Aryan nations gatherings
10:46
He was also leader of the Imperial Order of the Black Eagle, which was affiliated with Aryan
10:50
Nations. Even though they always suspected he was Jewish, the white supremacist didn't seem to care
10:55
probably because he was a generous donor. In 1985, it was reported he lent a grand dragon
11:00
of the Ku Klux Klan named Dale Roosh $12,000 to buy 83 illegal guns. Roosh was indicted and
11:05
received a fine in probation, but von Braunhut was never named in the prosecution's case
11:10
He was said to be happy to cooperate, though, and even brought some sea monkeys to his meeting with
11:14
the U.S. attorney. Von Braunhut refused to comment on the allegations, other than to tell
11:19
the Seattle Times that, quote, you know what side I'm on. Okay, Harold, thanks for clearing that up
11:25
It's not sinister at all. If you think lighting a cross on fire at a white power rally is a bad
11:30
look in the toy business, you'd be right. And that isn't a hypothetical. According to the Southern
11:34
Poverty Law Center, von Braunhut did exactly that. As the Sea Monkey Empire grew, he enlisted a
11:39
company called Laramie Limited to handle distribution. After his ties to the Aryan
11:43
nations were revealed, the company confronted von Braunhut, who told their vice president that
11:47
Hitler wasn't a bad guy, he just got bad press. They distanced themselves from von Braunhut
11:52
and many comic book publishers stopped taking his ads. But that wasn't the end of the Sea Monkeys
12:00
In fact, their highest profile project came not long after, in 1992 when Howie Mandel co produced and starred in a CBS Saturday morning live series titled The Amazing Live Sea Monkeys Mandel played a professor who left his human shrimp creations alone in his lighthouse laboratory
12:16
to get into trouble. Some sequences used animatronics, and others were done in the hybrid animation style, featuring
12:21
puppets and miniatures provided by the Kyoto Brothers, who produced the large Marge sequence
12:25
in Pee-wee's Big Adventure. Mandel said he did the show after his daughter became curious about sea monkeys, and he thought
12:31
the premise could be the next Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles phenomenon. The amazing life, Sea Monkeys. The amazing life, Sea Monkeys
12:39
Brandtrip in a big tank. Brandtrip Power. CBS said it was one of the most expensive kid shows to ever air on Saturday mornings
12:47
They eventually found a way to cut costs by canceling the show after 11 episodes
12:51
That wasn't their only moment in the pop culture sun, though. Sea Monkeys have been name-dropped in songs by Liz Phair and The Pixies, and they've been featured on TV shows
12:58
like South Park, Roseanne, The Simpsons, and Desperate Housewives, to name just a few
13:02
There was even a sea monkey video game, though its reception wasn't particularly warm
13:07
One online review called it, quote, a cheap knockoff of The Sims mixed with a cheaper knockoff
13:12
of black and white. Ouch. The shrimp had more success off of planet Earth
13:17
In 1998, they joined astronaut John Glenn on a mission to space. They returned to Earth to hatch to see what effects cosmic radiation has on organisms
13:24
Brine shrimp are also used to test toxicity of chemicals, which is not a recommended practice
13:29
in the sea monkey handbook. The Sea Monkeys continued to sell to the general public, too, going from one distributor to another
13:36
In 2000, the Los Angeles Times reported that a company called Educational Insights was distributing
13:40
it under their Exploratoi division with the full knowledge of the allegations against
13:43
Von Braunhut. Company executives said they never asked him about the charges directly and didn't think
13:48
he'd be the type of person to spread hate speech. When the reporters showed them newsletters from the National Anti-Zionist Institute
13:54
which used a P.O. Box, also used to order Sea Monkey paraphernalia, executives said he
13:59
denied the allegations. Meanwhile, Von Braunhut, who was also an ordained minister
14:04
officiated over the funeral of Richard Butler's wife one month after signing his licensing deal
14:08
with the company. He was also photographed wearing Aryan Nations lapel pins to planning
14:12
board meetings in Charles County, Maryland, according to the Washington Post. Von Braunhut died in 2003 at the age of 77. Trans Science, the company he started to produce
14:21
sea monkeys, was inherited by his second wife, the amazingly named Yolanda Signorelli Von Braunhut
14:27
whom he married in 1980. She replaced him as CEO of the company
14:31
Yolanda is a whole other story. A former model who appeared in Bondage films in the 1960s
14:37
she claimed her mother was one of the inspirations for Lois Lane. Yolanda continued to run the Sea
14:41
Monkey Empire from her home in Maryland and signed a deal with Big Time Toys in 2007 for
14:46
that company to package and distribute the kits for trans science. The actual shrimp and the
14:50
nutrient packet are all considered trade secrets, and the nutrient formula is locked in a vault
14:55
Those would be supplied by Yolanda. Big Time had the option to pay $10 million for trans
15:00
science and the secret recipe to own them outright. That's $10 million for genetically
15:05
altered brine shrimp. All of this turned into a crustacean controversy in 2013, when Yolanda sued for breach of contract
15:12
and trademark infringement, alleging Big Time had Big Time stiffed her on her contractually
15:17
obligated royalty checks. Big Time insisted they now had exclusive rights to the sea monkeys
15:21
after making enough payments to cover the purchase price. But rather than using her husband's carefully cultivated Artemia NYOS, they were sourcing
15:28
the shrimp from China. Yolanda, meanwhile, claimed she had no income coming in and was forced to live on her sea
15:33
monkey-funded estate with no electricity or running water. The two parties settled out of court in 2017, though the details of the agreement haven't
15:40
been made public. Yolanda continues to sell sea monkey kits online. She also appears to be planning a documentary detailing her struggles to maintain control
15:48
of her husband's shrimp dynasty. She's long said she had no idea about his reprehensible views and doesn't share them
15:53
We'll probably never know why Harold Nathan Braunhut, born and raised Jewish, grew into
15:58
Harold Von Braunhut, who funded anti-semitic groups and stood up for Hitler
16:02
We'll also never know why he saw a bucket of fish food and decided it would send him
16:05
on a path to success. People like sea monkeys can be mysterious creatures
#education