If you ever read a Marvel comic in the seventies you saw them. Full-page ads for sea monkeys in full garish color featuring Daddy, Mommy, big brother and little sister sea monkey. An entire 1950’s nuclear family in a fishbowl. Some ads even shows a noble, bethroned king sea monkey complete with crown, scepter and harem of nubile young sea monkey maidens.
So, you shell out $4.99 (plus $2 for shipping and handling) for the super deluxe kit which features “Toys” for your little friends to play with (and isn’t that extra dollar a small price to pay for your sea monkeys quality of life?).
Every day you race home from school. Not because just your eager for your sea monkeys to arrive, but because Todd Snodgrass the school bully has threatened to knock your teeth out. Nevertheless, four to six weeks later your package arrives. You carefully prepare the water and wait for your new aquatic playmates to hatch. That’s when you receive your first hard, cold lesson in capitalism…. Caveat emptor, buyer beware.
Instead of the playful anthropomorphic creatures depicted in you Spider Man comic, you get gruesome squigglies that look like something from a stagnant pond.
So tell me, how could fraud on such a grand scale go on for so long? Were the politicians in the pocket of the multi-billion dollar sea monkey/industrial complex? Was Ralph Nader too busy with exploding Pintos to address sea monkeys and X-Ray Spex? Is there a class action suit I can join? Was it just a right-of-passage into the big cold world?
Not at all bitter
Adam “Inky” “Anybody want a subscription to “Grit”?” Greene