There are serious laws about snail possession in the US.
Now I want one.
Be careful because this cute little guy:
grows up to be this big guy:
Interesting. The description did say something along the lines of collect your local snail eggs, so there may be legal reasons for not including the snails.
Edit - Amazon also offers a twenty-six dollar snail growing kit that does not include snails. You get a plastic box and a few tools. I’m in the wrong business.
Watch the video. It’s over the top.
Brine shrimp eggs are commonly available at aquarium stores. They’re food for certain fish. I knew someone who raised angelfish and used to buy brine shrimp eggs by the quart can.
You may be interested in this source for sea monkeys and similar:
That… is the exact setup I bought when I was a wee lad (which gave me an appreciation for caveat emptor).
It was a lot cheaper per piece than the bags of standard little green army men (think Sarge and the Bucket O’ Soldiers in Toy Story) and I figured I could expand my play army more cheaply that way.
Don’t know if they still do it, but around the turn of the century, Starfleet, the Star Trek fan club, sold cancelled stamps from many nations as a fundraiser.
Sounds like a reasonable fund-raiser if they aren’t advertising the stamps as having great value. I expect a certain level of exaggeration in many ads discussed here about fanciful products.
I knew what brine shrimp were way before I ever had Sea Monkeys, and thought they were interesting critters. I wasn’t disappointed to learn that was what Sea Monkeys were.
Remember the visible ant farms?
You got a clear plastic box, bag of sand, and live ants.
The ads always showed very intricate tunnels and dozens of digging ants. All for $2.98
Funny, that they show an artists drawing of what you might get. No real pictures. The $2.98 is 8"x9" (pretty small). For $6.95 it’s 10"x16" about the size of a shoebox lid.
Couldn’t help myself:
Circa 1975 I went through the Edmund Scientific catalog ticking off things to buy. Not things I could actually use mind you, just cool to have. I toted them all up and it came to $3,000.
If you want to go back to 60s-era comic book ads, I bought an inflatable T-Rex. I don’t remember if there was a size claim but it turned out to be a balloon, about three feet high and shaped rather like a bowling pin, with a dino printed on it and a cardboard base shaped like two feet with a hole you would slip the tied neck through to it would stand more or less upright.
It was a far cry from the illustration in the ad.
The ads I remember would offer one stamp for free and others “on approval” meaning you’d get another dozen or so and could keep the ones you wanted by sending back the rest. Until you canceled the subscription you’d get another packet of approvals every couple weeks.
I remember the ads in Boys Life telling you to ask your parents what “on approval” meant but if they weren’t philatelists I wonder if they would know.
I never understood the long shipping times. I got a few things from cereal box ads, I remember a decoder ring and a fishing lure.
It always took almost three months to get an order. A lifetime for an impatient kid.
The lure was a basic spoon lure and I had it in my tackle box for several years.
Mine was similar to this. Cheap to make and sell for a few cereal box tops.
That’s exactly what they did.
I have a friend who is an avid coin collector, and he said that many coin shows will have worth-just-above-face-value coins in Baggies, available as door prizes or party favors for children, to get them interested as well.
I vaguely remember Mythbusters doing the vacuum powered hovercraft, don’t remember which episode it was in, but it sort of worked and sort of failed as I remember [I don’t think it was particularly controllable]
I had something just like that, but with Bozo the Clown printed on the balloon.
I saw one these that was built. As in the ads it was only holding up a small child. Without any kind of skirt around the 3 circular ducts I don’t think it was going to get high enough off the ground to travel and in fact it would nose into the ground if propelled to any noticeable speed. The propelling was just hands or feet. And of course it was powered by a vacuum cleaner motor and impellor so you weren’t going any further than an extension cord anyway.
I do wonder if a high-pressure air tank like this could be used to make a hoverboard, a real hoverboard that hovers.