Harold von Braunhut, who ingeniously marketed one of the ugliest and most boring aquatic creatures in existence — the almost-invisible brine shrimp — as” Sea Monekys,” died last month.
“…Mr. von Braunhut’s piece de resistance was Sea Monkeys — which come from dried-up lake bottoms, not the sea, and are not monkeys but brine shrimp. His extravagant claims for the crustaceans — for example, that they come back from the dead and that they can be trained and hypnotized– are convincing because they are sort of true. (The shrimp do follow light.)
Billions of shrimp have been sold, not to mention a Sea Monkey aphrodisiac and a wrist watch filled with swimming shrimp. There are Web sites for sea monkey fans; CBS briefly had a Sea Monkeys series on Saturday mornings; 400 million of them went into space with John Glenn in 1998; and, for the lazy, a new Sea Monkey video game allows a player to ‘virtually’ care for a shrimp colony, lest the animals ‘virtually’ die.”