We have a famous philanthropist here in Rhode Island. Allen S. Feinstein started his fortune by selling stamps in the back of magazines, These were very beautiful stamps that had little or no value but it made him millions. At least he’s giving a lot of it back.
Yes, still looks kinda deceptive. Anyways, a lot of people like to be fooled. I really didn’t mind the Sea Monkeys too much. At least they were alive. Sea Monkeys required you to add water conditioner or some such for the first couple days, then add the Sea Monkeys. One clever thing that I heard they did was slip some Sea Monkey Eggs into the first pouch of conditioner. That way they had time to grow a bit before you started looking for them in a couple days. Of course a couple days to a young kid is like a couple weeks.
My brother and I bought literally tons of stuff out of comic books.
X-Ray Specs, the fake $1 million dollars (1840), toys, gadgets, you name it.
He even bought the Universal Bodybuilding program. It was like 5 bucks a week and every week for 12 weeks they would send him a lesson plan in booklet form. He did the method that did not require weights. You used things around the house like chairs and broomsticks and such. Believe it or not he actually built himself up pretty good over the summer of ‘82 when he was sixteen. His arms got huge!
Alas, mini subs have been struck off the chick magnet list since that guy in Denmark did for subs what serial killers did for van conversions.
From the submarine website - Does this one look a bit dangerous?
My dad got picked up a Joe Weider weight set somewhere cheap when I was pretty little. My older brother never used it but a couple of years later I began to follow Joe’s prescribed workout course, for a minute or two. More years went by and at 16 I began to work on the body that would one day look like a pale white version of the Hulk. But it took more than that skimpy weight set and I couldn’t get any more real weights right away so I found some info on the Charles Atlas Dynamic Tension technique of exercise and worked my way up for a while with that until I could locate more weights and eventually go to a gym with the real stuff.
Several of those rich people water toys sound like accidents waiting to happen. The Orca sub that dives and jumps out of the water? Every all-sports lake around here is a madhouse of boats pulling tubers and wakeboarders, going every which way, and collisions are fairly common even with craft that’s always above water. Plus, it hydroplanes up to 50 mph(!).
The ‘world’s fastest amphibious car’ goes up to 44mph on water. It’s shaped sort of like a Jeep-- not the slightest bit aerodynamic (aquadynamic?). If a wave catches the front of that thing I imagine it could turn into the world’s fastest tumbling deathtrap.
Meh, that’s in the neighborhood of my comic book toy budget. Of course, my comics were upscale. Instead of X-ray glasses, they sold Pet-scan (positron emission tomography) glasses. I saw the good stuff with those. 
So your “PET Specs” were kind of like this, huh? What every comic book-reading preteen boy back in the day was hoping the ‘xray specs’ were actually going to do 
That the pieces were all 2D would explain how they could pack all of that into a “footlocker” measuring 6.5" in greatest dimension (see measurements on the ad). When I was a kid, I always wondered how they could fit all that into a box that small.
I received a Sea-Monkey set as a gag gift from my secretary when I was in my 20s; I actually did use it, and had a little plastic tank full of brine shrimp on my desk for a couple of months.
From what I recall, the “training” was described in the instruction booklet, and it had something to do with brine shrimp being light-sensitive; if you shined a flashlight into their tank, you could get them to follow the light around.
But, yes, that ad, among many other exaggerations, likely suggested to impressionable young people that they could be “training” their Sea-Monkeys to do all sorts of tricks.
Yeah, my dreams of running a Sea Monkey Circus like a miniature Sea World, charging long lines of neighbor kids 25 cents admission and making a fortune, were horribly dashed. 
Exactly! We didn’t want to see the bones. We wanted to see the soft (…and supple) tissue above the bones.
That reminds me of the first time I recall being conned. I was 5yo and attended a backyard “circus” put on by a group of pre-teen girls. They charged 25 cents to view a “monster with tentacles” inside their tent. I paid the 25 cents (which I was supposed to use to buy cotton candy and popcorn) and entered the freak-show tent. The “monster” was 2 pairs of hands thrust into a hole in the tent with wiggling finger tentacles. It was at that moment I realized this was a vicious world.
It’s a lesson we all have to learn eventually, and usually the hard way 
Phototaxis in invertebrates is a behavior used in neurophysiology to study how learning happens.
Take your research organism and measure how quickly it moves toward light. Then pair light repeatedly with a negative stimulus. Later show that the organism moves more slowly toward light, compared to controls, etc.
Finally, show a difference in a cell in the organism’s nervous system. Voilà, you’ve shown how learning occurs.
I’m an easy mark. The talk about Sea Monkeys made me curious to see how much a kit sold for these days (about sixteen dollars on Amazon). I got excited when I saw this grown your own prehistoric sea creatures kit. Brine shrimp again. https://www.amazon.com/Discovery-Prehistoric-Creatures-Horizon-Group/dp/B08GYH7DZ1?th=1
I have to respect the company that is selling grown your own snail kits for ten dollars and not including any snails. You get a plastic bottle and I think some tweezers.
Edit: Ooh! I could grow some little live aqua dragons!
Grow Your Own __________ kits:
https://www.thisiswhyimbroke.com/grow-your-own-escargot-kit/
Of particular interest are the fake weed, the hairy beaver, and the Grow a Pair of Balls kits.
This must be the new comic books ads.
I see a crystal growing kit. Those never worked for me.
No, it isn’t.