Sea Monkeys

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

I read a lot of comic books back in the day. I mean, I still do, but I read a lot back then too, to borrow a joke from Mitch Hedburg. One big difference between comics today and back in nineteen-seventy-something is that they used to have a couple of pages filled with these crazy mail-in offers.

Yes, these pages would be filled with all sorts of things you could order, usually for just a few bucks. You cold get “X-ray glasses” and magic kits and glow-in-the dark skeletons and build-your-own-submarine kits and books on how to hyptotize people. It was a cornucopia of crazy items that I’m just about 100% sure were all just too-good-to-be-true scams.

How am I so sure? Well, because my sister and I wera absolutely obsessed with one of those ads — for these amazing pets you could send off for called “Sea Monkeys.” Yes, the ad

See VIEWPOINT, page A6 VIEWPOINT

From page A4

showed this cartoon drawing of a family of weird pink creatures that could be ours for the low, low price of just $2.99 plus shipping and handling. Naturally, we wanted them really, bad, so we collected enough glass soda bottles to exchange at the store (remember that?) and bought a money order and sent off for our amazing Sea Monkeys.

What we got, four to six weeks later, was a clear plastic tank about the size of a box of macaroni and cheese and three small pouches of powder about thesize of a pack of Sweet & Low. One powder contained Sea Monkey eggs, another contained sea monkey food and the last one contained some sort of “activator” for the Sea Monkeys.

Excitedly, we mixed up the concoction in the tank, filled with water, and then we waited, and waited, and waited… On about the third day, we finally saw our new “pets” in the little magnifying bubbles placed along the walls of the tank.

They were little tiny specks but they were actually moving around the tank. They really were alive. They were not, however, little pink humanoid alien-looking things like the illustration suggested. In fact, they had no discernible physical features at all. They looked like little specks of pepper or something that had somehow come to life.

They did eventuallly grow a little, to the point that we could finally see what they really were — which was little tiny brine shrimp, maxing out at the size of a screw for your eyeglasses.

A couple of weeks later, our cat knocked the whole tank over and promptly lapped up all the Sea Monkeys, bringing the whole sad saga to an end.

And people think they are getting ripped off by Wish.com and Temu these days. If they only knew.

By the way, those X-ray specs didn’t work either…