Thursday, November 09, 2006

Amazing Sea-Honkeys!

I had a jar of Sea-Monkeys when I was a kid. I went all out, buying them a Banana Flavored dessert (we all know how aquatic animals dig bananas) and a bag of plastic "diamonds" for them to play with.
I'm probably the only person in the world who thinks the little google eyed guys are way cuter in real life than the cartoon sea martians used to promote them.
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Look at them. What's on their chests? Scales? Hair? Multiple Breasts?
I looked up their history and learned some dirt the guy who invented them.

In the late 1950s Harold Nathan Braunhut came up with the idea of selling brine shrimp kits marketed to kids. He played up on the "instant pets" angle since their eggs can be dried for years yet still hatch when returned to water. A few years later he renamed them Sea-Monkeys and the 2oth century had a new icon.

Here's where it gets weird. According to the Anti-Defamation League, Braunhut was a member of the Aryan Nations and the Ku Klux Klan. Holy makeral! The man who spawned Sea Monkeys was some racist loon in a sheet? Another childhood icon tarnished!

I don't know how involved Braunhut was involved with the adds and packaging, but it is interesting that both the human family and the Sea-Monkey family are white.
The only Sea-Monkey with hair is a blonde. Hmmm.
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The cartoon made me wonder: Were all Sea-Monkeys white? Or was this a segregated bowl? Who the hell did these Sea-Monkeys think they were, anyway!?
What if the Sea-Monkey charecters were in fact the secret racial ideal of a kook caucasian breeding plan? Tall, slender, blonde, with a modest pink blush, these creatures also have super powers, like coming to life instantly and breathing underwater. Plus according to the picture they can build a mean castle.
With that in mind, I reworked the add into a mock propaganda piece.
The multi-breasted caucasian of tomorrow:
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There's more dirt. According to Wikipedia (and assuming nobody is screwing with me), Harold "KKK" Braunhutwas born and raised Jewish. Huh? Now I'm really confused.

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