May 16, 2020 • 28 mins
Dipping back to a 2015 episode. Despite all the fun cartoons on the packaging featuring tiny humanoid sea creatures having wacky fun and wearing clothes, Sea Monkeys are just brine shrimp. But the story of Sea Monkeys and their inventor is actually pretty surprising -- and quite dark.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Everybody. Today is May sixteenth, which is National
Sea Monkey Day. The origins of that observance are unclear,
which is something that we talk about in today's classic
episode on the Dark History of sea monkeys. Uh. This episode,
which I will confess is a favorite of mine, covers
how Brian shrimp came to be packaged and marketed as
(00:23):
a novelty product and the discovery that the creator of
that product had ties to several white supremacist organizations. And
this originally came out on January four. Welcome to Stuff
You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello,
(00:47):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm
Tracy B. Wilson. So, Tracy, did you have sea monkeys
when you were a kid? I did not have sea
monkeys personally, but when I started, well, hang on, hang on.
When I started at How Stuff Works, which is now
really almost a decade ago, you're making the most astonished face.
For some reason, we had an office set of sea
(01:09):
monkeys for a while. I thought, for sure this is
because of some kind of article on the site, but
I cannot find said article. So now I think maybe
we just had sea monkeys for fun. I had lots
of batches of sea monkeys when I was a kid. Uh,
more than a few packets were purchased throughout the years.
I've been debating and over getting more lately, but uh,
(01:30):
I had one super hardy batch of them when I
was working in a library. They lived in a little
tank on my desk, and they propagated and kept going
for like two years until a cold snap got them
when the library lost um power and so there was
no heat and it kind of got very very icy
in there. But despite all those fabulous packaging cartoons featuring
tiny humanoid sea creatures having wacky fun and wearing wacky clothes,
(01:52):
sea monkeys are as everybody knows, just Brian shrimp, and
they're even sometimes referred to as kind of an elaborate
hoax of marketing, uh, like a classic case of selling
a lot of sizzle with no real steak. But the
real story of sea monkeys and their inventor is actually
pretty surprising in some ways. It's kind of like, uh,
(02:12):
when we thought, oh, we'll talk about the people that
discovered the Verosa facca, that cute little lemur, and then
it turned out they had done some horrible things. It's
kind of similar in that regard, although it did not
come as a surprise to me this time because I
knew you knew ahead of time and pursuit pursued it. Anyway, Yes,
they are really interesting creatures to look at in my opinion,
(02:35):
even though they're not making civilizations full of castles and
what not on your desk, I concur but I like
all of the creatures. So so we're going to start
with the story of Harold von Brownhood, which is the
inventor of sea monkeys. The man himself was as intriguing
and unbelievable as many of his inventions. He was born
(02:59):
Harold Nathan Brown Hut on March thirty one in Memphis, Tennessee,
and when he was still very young, the family moved
to New York City. Yeah, he has like a one
of those wild histories that kind of comes across as
a lot of tall tales, but a lot of it
is substantiated, although there are some question marky ones. As
(03:19):
a young man, he actually raced motorcycles as the Green Hornet,
and later on he would transition into managing talent. So
if you've ever seen and you may have only seen
the cartoon versions like divers that jump from great heights
into impossibly shallow bodies of water, or mentalists who can
read minds and ben spoons. Those are the kinds of
acts that he managed, and he was really, at his
(03:41):
heart a showman. He was also ever the novelty man,
and aside from the novelty acts that he managed, he
also sold novelty products like invisible goldfish, guaranteeing their invisibility
to consumers. He also invented stray specs, so those glasses
(04:01):
that were supposed to let you see through all manner
of things. Yeah, it's funny. And all of the research
that I did, particularly some of the more modern journalism pieces, Um,
they'll talk about how everyone, every kid that bought X
ray spects was trying to look through people's clothes, but
if they were questioned, they said it was like a
much more No, I'm trying to look through walls. But
(04:23):
I don't know. Eventually, Von brown Hutt owned hundred nine patents,
and those are for all kinds of novelties and other inventions,
including bulletproof fabrics and insect observation kits. People described him
as eccentric, similar to a cartoon character come to life.
They also described him as a sweet, older gentleman who
(04:45):
could talk your ear off at a wedding. But his
story goes way beyond sea monkeys, and while he said
to have turned down a licensing partnership with the company
because of other products in that company's catalog that he
thought were too risque, his own story actually has a
pretty dark streak running through it. But first, we're gonna
(05:06):
talk a little bit about the creatures that made him
famous in the toy and novelty world. And before we
dig into those briany little pets, do you want to
do a quick word from a sponsor. Yeah, we know
it's early, but we're trying to keep a big chunk
of the story together. Yeah, the next two sections are
really his two big inventions, and I want to keep
those together, So we'll be right back with those. So
(05:37):
the exact moment that inspired Von Brown Hut to create
sea monkeys is a little bit unclear, not terribly, but
there are two different versions of the story that go around. Uh,
it's pretty universally accepted that this happened in nine seven,
and in one version of the tale, he just noticed
Brian Shrimp in a bucket that were like part of
a um uh bait bucket. And in another version he
(06:02):
noticed them being sold in a pet store as food
for other marine life. And the pet store story is
by far the more popular of the two. It's the
one that he told most often in his life, particularly
later in life. Any interviews that he gave which weren't
a whole lot, he always said it was a pet store.
In either case, he became completely fascinated by the idea
of Brian shrimp, and because they can naturally survive for
(06:26):
years and kind of a suspended animation while dried out,
they're easily package herble, which meant in his mind they
could be marketed and sold. Yeah. So, in nineteen sixty,
sea monkeys first appeared in comic book ads, although they
had not been christened with their famous name yet. In
those early ads they were marketed as Instant Life, and
(06:46):
they sold for a mere forty nine cents. Instant Life
was not an instant success, just did not grab the
attention of comic book readers the way he hoped that
they would, and so he put the product through a rebranding.
Yeah so, if we have any comic book fans in
our our listener base, they might recognize the name Joe Orlando.
(07:08):
He was a comic book artist. He was an editor
at d C Comics. He was an associate publisher on
Mad Magazine. All at various stages of his career, he
did a lot of other really impressive things. And he
was actually the artist that was responsible for the art
that accompanied the upgraded Sea Monkey packaging. So those cartoons
that we know so well in which in many cases
sparked imaginations and lured in consumers, were his work with
(07:31):
those cartoons and a new name. Instant Life was relaunched
as Sea Monkeys in nineteen sixty four, and the name
was inspired by the Brian shrimps long tale. I always
wondered that, and now I know. Yeah, And now the
Brian shrimp that Harold von brown Hutt had first encountered,
which was our teamyus selena, are not quite the same
(07:52):
ones that are sold in Sea Monkey kits. Yeah. He
teamed up with a marine biologist to first figure out
how to mix the neutral ants and dry form that
you could add to tap water to create the ideal
environment for his Instant Life. Incidentally, the medium that he
created to treat tap water and make it into the
sea monkey paradise has never been duplicated by another lab
(08:14):
despite various attempts, So for a long time, only Harold
and his wife Yolanda knew the formula. Even so he
was always working on improvements right until the end of
his life. Yeah, they allegedly mixed those right on their
like private property, in the barrel, and then they would
distribute them in the packets. Uh. But then after they
(08:36):
had figured out this sort of perfect nutrient balanced mix,
he further developed these tiny marine critters to be really hardy. So,
like we said, they were not the Artemius selina that
he had initially encountered. So he and that same biologist
worked for years to constantly improve the product by cross
breeding different species from the genus Artemia until they got
(08:57):
the breed that continues the sea monkey line today. And
that's now called Artemia NEOs, which is n y O S.
And that n y o S stands for New York
Oceanic Society, And that's the lab where this species was developed.
Trans Science was the company von Brownhood founded to manufacture
sea monkeys, and from the early nineteen sixties on the
(09:18):
company was always promoting this amazing product. What's really funny
is that if you read trade publication ads for Sea
Monkey stock, it's almost identical in tone to the ads
that were running comic books for direct sales. There's a
lot of all caps for emphasis. The overall vibe is
one of excitement, excitement, excitement, come to where the money
is Sea Monkey Country, which is the ads that went
(09:41):
out to retailers and sounded a lot like the ads
to buyers. Yeah, it was kind of funny, and Von
Brownhod was the copyman behind all of this very enthusiastic verbiage.
He uh, it's his copy has this sort of wonderfully
vaudevillian feel to it, so it's like heart huckster and
part mad scientist and all entertainer. Initially, the brick and
(10:05):
mortar retail market had eluded Von Brownhood. Just before he
brought his Sea Monkeys to market, another company, Wammo, had
tried an instant fish toy as well, and that had
not gone very well because the product did not work,
and that made the entire retail arena petrified of doing
anything similar. But once Sea Monkeys established themselves through direct sales,
(10:29):
retailers started to come around and wanted to have them
in stores also, and that at that point they really
cemented sea monkeys in like the history of Kitch in
the History of Toys in there was an attempt to
bring Sea Monkeys to television. It was written by Howie
Mandel and directed primarily by Sean McNamara, who would go
(10:50):
on to direct lots of shows for the Disney Channel.
The show was pretty abysmal, and it only lasted eleven
episodes before cancelation. Yeah, if you just on a like
torture yourself for a few minutes, you can find a
lot of those on YouTube. Uh, they're awful. They're really
really awful. On October twenty nine, more than four hundred
(11:12):
millions sea monkey eggs went into space. They were on
the same mission that made John Glenn officially the oldest
man to fly in space. So that was the nine
day STS ninety five mission aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery.
And during that mission, the tiny Brian shrimp were exposed
to radiation zero G and of course the violent force
of re entry. They were hatched eight weeks after they
(11:34):
came back to Earth and seemed completely unaffected by all
of that time away from terra Firma and the things
that happened while they were in space. Yeah, so they're
it was kind of a fun little experiment. It's that's
one of those things that gets taught a lot in
elementary school classrooms when they're talking about sea life and
suspended animation. Uh. And the next thing we're going to
(11:54):
talk about is a very different type of invention that
Von Brown Hutt created and it was absolutely not a novelty.
It was a weapon called the Kyoga Agent M five
and the Kioga, which was marketed as the Steel Cobra,
was intended, according to advertising, to be a concealed weapon
that you could deploy in the event that you found
yourself face to face with a mugger or the attacker.
(12:17):
The ad copy in magazine advertisements read Kyoga. The Steel
Cobra is an automatic magnetically triggered steel whip that is
armed with a heavy caliber striking tip when every second counts,
This instant action feature frees you from the need to
first locate a push button trigger in order to fire
it at your attacker because it goes off by human
(12:39):
reflex action alone. It always works when needed, and there's
actually a ton of copy in those ads, it's very
wordy and it goes on to extol the virtues of
this small weapon, promising that the steel coils can make
contact through a leather jacket. It also promises that a
blow to the header jaw can knock an attacker out
(12:59):
coal old. Basically, this was a small trigger action, spring
loaded baton that could be purchased for n plus postage
in the early days. Yeah, and we'll actually share a
link to one of the ads for it offering this deal.
And early on in the life of the Kayoga, Mr
(13:20):
brown Hunt was actually arrested on illegal weapons charges when
he tried to pass through LaGuardia Airport security with a
half dozen of them in his briefcase, and he got
out of the charges by saying, no, this is not
a weapon that's ever been listed as forbidden, but it's
an interesting side note to the story. In nineteen eighty one,
Burt Reynolds used a ki yoga in the film Sharky's Machine,
(13:43):
and even though the movie was kind of a flop,
it basically was a great advertisement for this steel whip.
Over years, prices for the kyoga went up. It eventually
retailed for fifty and the advertising shifted from that kind
of aimed at women like this is a great self
defense tool to if you need a gun but can't
get a license. That was actual copy that was used
(14:07):
in their later advertising. And this is going to lead
us to kind of the dark part of the story.
So before we get to that, let's have a word
from a sponsor. So getting back to uh, von Brown
(14:27):
Hut and the kyoga, and we're getting into kind of
more modern history. But because this person sort of fame
and notoriety cemented a little bit earlier in the century,
he becomes a pretty fascinating figure. And even though a
lot of this revealed fairly recently, it's pretty important to
the story. So in the late nineteen eighties, the kyoga
catalyzed basically what became a public image calamity for Von
(14:51):
Brown Hut. So at the time, the leader of the
white supremacist group the Aryan Nations, whose name was Richard Butler,
was in trouble with the law. He had been indicted
by a federal grand shirt jury for seditious conspiracy to
overthrow the government by violence, and in a fundraising letter
(15:12):
to his fellow white supremacists that Butler sent out around
this time, he included a brochure for the kyoga. He
also included messaging that the inventor and manufacturer of the
weapon had pledged twenty five dollars to his defense fund
against the federal charges for every kyoga that was sold. Unsurprisingly,
it did not take long for journalists to get a
(15:34):
hold of this information had looked deeper into it, and
the news was not great. Butler uh the sort of
The first wave of problems was when Butler, again head
of the Arian Nations, confirmed to The Spokesman Review, which
is a paper out of Spokene Washington, that yes, he
and von Brownhote were friends, they had known each other
a long time, and that the inventor had supported the
(15:56):
Area Nations for quite a while. The Washington Post ran
a story soon after exposing even more affiliations with hate groups.
Not only was Harold von brown Hutt a frequent attendee
of the Aryan Nations World Congress, he also had ties
to the ku Klux Klan and had helped an Ohio
branch of the KKK purchased firearms. He also published his
(16:19):
own anti Zionist newsletter full of rather terrifying and shocking
rhetoric it was. I read a few snippets of it,
and I sent an instant message to Tracy, and I
was like, I don't want to say any of these
words on the air while we record. They're just they're
exactly the horrifying things you would imagine, perhaps more graphic. Uh.
(16:41):
In an odd snippet of detail, it also came out
that while attending these Area Nations gatherings, Von brown Hutt
often wore a clerical collar and claimed to be an
ordained priest. I was not able to hunt down any
confirmation that he was ever actually ordained. He may or
may not have been, but I just thought it was
odd that he only lived that image when he was
(17:02):
sort of involved in these groups. So the real irony
in the Washington Post article was that it also outed
von brown Hut as a Jew. In a completely bizarre twist,
it appeared that a major funder and friend of the
anti Semitist movement was indeed Jewish, at least by birth,
according to multiple friends of the brown Hut family. And
(17:27):
you would think that this would mean that the Arian
Nations would want to sever ties with him, But despite
this revelation, he was still welcome with the supremacist group.
Most likely most people theorized due to the funding that
he continued to donate. He had deep pockets and he
gave them a lot of money. In fact, he even
ended up presiding over the funeral of Richard Butler's wife
(17:50):
long after this story broke, wearing, of course, his full
clerical ensemble. Throughout all the coverage in the press about
these allegations and plenty of people corroborating them, and photographs
of him posing at his priestly garb in front of
a Nazi flag, Von brown Huot denied any racism or
anti Semitism, but then in the late nineteen eighties, he
(18:13):
gave an interview to the Seattle Times in which he
openly made racial slurs against Korean shop owners and then said,
you know what side I'm on, I don't make any
bones about it. However, from that point on, Von brown
Hut basically refused to answer any questions from reporters about
his heritage or his stance on racism or neo Nazism.
(18:33):
It's also at about this time that he left New
York and moved to Maryland to set up an animal
preserve called the Montrose wildlife conservation on a seventy acre property. Yeah.
He Uh, it's sort of one of those weird contradictory
image puzzle pieces that he, you know, was involved with
(18:53):
all these really horrible things. He also really loved animals
in nature and wanted to like study and preserve them.
It's very hard for me to get my head around
all of these contradictory pieces. It's a lot easier to
think of people who have those sorts of views as
like mustache twirling villains. Yeah. So then when you're like, oh,
(19:13):
but he was really quite kind to animals, it's like,
well that it almost makes it more distasteful because you
can't kind of compartmentalize it super easily. And like we said,
a lot of people described him as just this charming, eccentric,
sweet cookie old man as he got older. So it's
it's a very complex puzzle. Uh. In two thousand, a
(19:34):
Los Angeles Times article about von brown Hunt relaid the
news that there have been two different distributors that had
annulled their Sea Monkey licenses because of their unease with
Von brown Hunt's personal politics. First was Laramy Limited. There's
kind of a he said, she said, going on with
this one. Von brown Hut claimed that he wanted to
end the business partnership because Laramy was neglecting sea monkeys
(19:57):
in favor of bigger sellers like the super Soaker water gun.
Al Davis, who was an e v P at Laramie
at the time, told a much different story. He claimed
that after hearing about about Von brown Hutt giving money
to hate groups, he called the inventor on it. So,
according to the Davis version of the story, Harold told
(20:18):
him Hitler wasn't a bad guy, he just received bad press. Yeah,
that's a quote that gets used in a lot of
different stories. That's the first story that I saw it in,
or the earliest story that I saw it in, But
it gets reused a lot because it is in terms
of SoundBite, like you kind of can't ask for a
better sensationalist quote. Another licensing ventor in the nineties nineties
(20:39):
involved the company Big Fund, which specializes in novelty key chains,
and they were working on like this little key chain
mini aquarium that you could put like one or two
sea monkeys in and carry them with you throughout the day.
And initially Von brown Hut assured Big Fund president Alan
Dorfman that all of that bad press about him and
his ties to the Area Nations was really just rumormongering
(21:01):
that was started by an enemy that he was having
legal issues with, and initially Dorfman accepted that explanation until
a few months down the road there was a New
York Times article that ran that identified the Sea monkey
inventor as a speaker at that year's arians Aryan Nations Congress,
and so pretty quickly thereafter the business arrangement was severed.
(21:23):
According to George c. Atamian, who was an executive with
Educational Insights when his company bought the license to sea
monkeys in the mid nineteen nineties, Von brown Hut had
agreed to cease all of these public political activities when
some are brought the l a Times reporter who broke
the story of the business fallout because of von brown
(21:45):
Hutt's political views, he pushed a Tamian on the issue
of the inventor's involvement with the white supremacist movement. At
that point, the Educational Insights executive admitted that he had
never personally confronted Von brown Hut, but that he would
Attaman contact. Had brought a couple of weeks later, and
he said that he had confronted von brown Hut and
(22:07):
that von brown Hut had denied his involvement and that
in his mind, that was all that was needed. Yeah,
there's a sort of a more complex it gets a
little soap opera element to that, and it's all in
the l a Times article which will link to you.
There was actually one of his anti Zionist newsletters that
this reporter handed at Tamian and another executive involved and
(22:29):
said like, uh, this is you know, his work, this
is the newsletter, this is the stuff he's spreading, Like,
are you really comfortable working with this person? And they
both independently are said to have asked von brown Hut,
did you write this? And he said no, And the
one guy said to him, the evidence that made it
completely believable when von brown Hut denied his involvement, was like, no,
(22:52):
this is a man who loves copy and he loves
writing and he really prides himself and this newsletter is
terribly written. So to me, that's the evidence. It's all us.
Like they're in a bit of denial at that point
about the person they're working with, but uh. In two
thousand three, Harald von brown Hutt died after falling his home,
and since that time there has been sort of a
(23:12):
constant stream of various legal battles around Sea Monkeys and
who has the rights and whether they're paying Von brown
Hut's widow her royalties, etcetera. Nothing outside of like usual
business jockeying. But that's just what's going on with the company.
After about it seems that von brown Hutt kept his
word to Atamian and the rest of the leadership of
(23:34):
Education Insights. UH. He either ceased his ties to the
Aryan Nations or started hiding his involvement. The Anti Defamation League,
who had amassed a substantial dossier on his connections to
hate groups up to that point, doesn't really have anything
else the track after that. Yes, so he it does
(23:56):
seem like he kept his word uh in that business
deal where he's said he would no longer publicly be
involved in any of these hate groups. But Sea Monkey
sales have made Transcience and their various affiliates and licensees
many millions of dollars throughout the years, and National Sea
Monkey Day is May the sixteenth, although we don't know
(24:17):
where that started. Yeah, is that like their own marketing
thing or we do not know. Uh. I was looking
at one of those like you know, wacky Holiday each
day websites where they track these sorts of things, and
they're like, we can't figure out where this originated. If
it was marketing or just like a super fan that
(24:37):
sort of spread the word kind of like how talk
like a Pirate Day grew organically. They don't know if
this was a similar thing where it was like a
fan group that started it and it just kind of
became accepted without anyone questioning it. So that's a sup
of Sea Monkey Day number one. I think if this
were going on now, there would not be any Oh,
I will just stop having eyes to these white supremacy
(25:01):
organizations like I think the uh bad Press and fewer
are on the part of the Internet would not let
that stand. Yeah. I had a similar thought while I
was researching this, like there's just no way one he
couldn't the odds of him having been able to be
(25:22):
involved in these sorts of activities for so long without
anybody realizing it or calling him on it, although there
were allegedly rumors throughout the toy industry about him leading
up to that, but there wasn't any evidence. I guess
that people knew it just wouldn't happen. They would be
outed so much more quickly and so vocally and so
publicly through social media that I think it would be
(25:42):
a lot different if this all went down today. I
also had no idea until uh, I got this outline
from you basically, which is kind of weird, because I
feel like I know so many um Like, there are
so many kind of urban legend about you know, so
and so CEO of this organization is a racist and
(26:05):
it's not actually a true thing, right, And in this
case where he really was having direct involvement with all
these white supremacist organizations, I had never heard anything about
it until this episode. Yeah, that l a Times article
which is a really good read um that we referenced,
referenced a couple of times. He even mentions at the beginning, like, oh,
(26:26):
I thought I was doing kind of a fluff piece
about nostalgia toys and you know, sort of kitch in
the modern era, and how there's this new wave of
interest in toys from the fifties and sixties, and then
with minimal digging and like he reached out to the
anti Defamation League after he started hearing these things and
they sent him a copy of this huge dossier that
(26:49):
they had a math. He was like, this is a
very different article than I started writing. Uh, we don't
know what that's like at all. Yeah, yeah, it's a
it's so sort of mind blowing to me. This again,
it's the disparity of his image of being this sweet,
wacky guy, like a nutty inventor and a a little
bit of a flam flam man in some ways, and
(27:11):
then also being part of this just horrific thing and
that he was Jewish and part of all of this
is really hard for me to get my brain around.
But he is deceased, so no one can ask him,
and if you weren't, he probably would not want to
answer any of those questions anyway. Do you know if
his widow is still living. She is, she was involved
in a legal action as recently is about a eleven
(27:33):
or twelve months ago, but she also will not answer
any questions about his background or his political views. So
that's pretty much all lockdown on all such discussion. Uh.
It's fascinating stuff. Thank you so much for joining us
(27:53):
today for this Saturday Classic. If you have heard any
kind of email address or maybe a Facebook you are
l during the course of the episod owed that might
be obsolete. It might be doubly obsolete because we have
changed our email address again. You can now reach us
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we're all over social media at missed in History, and
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(28:17):
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Happy Saturday. Everybody. Today is May sixteenth, which is National
Sea Monkey Day. The origins of that observance are unclear,
which is something that we talk about in today's classic
episode on the Dark History of sea monkeys. Uh. This episode,
which I will confess is a favorite of mine, covers
how Brian shrimp came to be packaged and marketed as
(00:23):
a novelty product and the discovery that the creator of
that product had ties to several white supremacist organizations. And
this originally came out on January four. Welcome to Stuff
You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello,
(00:47):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm
Tracy B. Wilson. So, Tracy, did you have sea monkeys
when you were a kid? I did not have sea
monkeys personally, but when I started, well, hang on, hang on.
When I started at How Stuff Works, which is now
really almost a decade ago, you're making the most astonished face.
For some reason, we had an office set of sea
(01:09):
monkeys for a while. I thought, for sure this is
because of some kind of article on the site, but
I cannot find said article. So now I think maybe
we just had sea monkeys for fun. I had lots
of batches of sea monkeys when I was a kid. Uh,
more than a few packets were purchased throughout the years.
I've been debating and over getting more lately, but uh,
(01:30):
I had one super hardy batch of them when I
was working in a library. They lived in a little
tank on my desk, and they propagated and kept going
for like two years until a cold snap got them
when the library lost um power and so there was
no heat and it kind of got very very icy
in there. But despite all those fabulous packaging cartoons featuring
tiny humanoid sea creatures having wacky fun and wearing wacky clothes,
(01:52):
sea monkeys are as everybody knows, just Brian shrimp, and
they're even sometimes referred to as kind of an elaborate
hoax of marketing, uh, like a classic case of selling
a lot of sizzle with no real steak. But the
real story of sea monkeys and their inventor is actually
pretty surprising in some ways. It's kind of like, uh,
(02:12):
when we thought, oh, we'll talk about the people that
discovered the Verosa facca, that cute little lemur, and then
it turned out they had done some horrible things. It's
kind of similar in that regard, although it did not
come as a surprise to me this time because I
knew you knew ahead of time and pursuit pursued it. Anyway, Yes,
they are really interesting creatures to look at in my opinion,
(02:35):
even though they're not making civilizations full of castles and
what not on your desk, I concur but I like
all of the creatures. So so we're going to start
with the story of Harold von Brownhood, which is the
inventor of sea monkeys. The man himself was as intriguing
and unbelievable as many of his inventions. He was born
(02:59):
Harold Nathan Brown Hut on March thirty one in Memphis, Tennessee,
and when he was still very young, the family moved
to New York City. Yeah, he has like a one
of those wild histories that kind of comes across as
a lot of tall tales, but a lot of it
is substantiated, although there are some question marky ones. As
(03:19):
a young man, he actually raced motorcycles as the Green Hornet,
and later on he would transition into managing talent. So
if you've ever seen and you may have only seen
the cartoon versions like divers that jump from great heights
into impossibly shallow bodies of water, or mentalists who can
read minds and ben spoons. Those are the kinds of
acts that he managed, and he was really, at his
(03:41):
heart a showman. He was also ever the novelty man,
and aside from the novelty acts that he managed, he
also sold novelty products like invisible goldfish, guaranteeing their invisibility
to consumers. He also invented stray specs, so those glasses
(04:01):
that were supposed to let you see through all manner
of things. Yeah, it's funny. And all of the research
that I did, particularly some of the more modern journalism pieces, Um,
they'll talk about how everyone, every kid that bought X
ray spects was trying to look through people's clothes, but
if they were questioned, they said it was like a
much more No, I'm trying to look through walls. But
(04:23):
I don't know. Eventually, Von brown Hutt owned hundred nine patents,
and those are for all kinds of novelties and other inventions,
including bulletproof fabrics and insect observation kits. People described him
as eccentric, similar to a cartoon character come to life.
They also described him as a sweet, older gentleman who
(04:45):
could talk your ear off at a wedding. But his
story goes way beyond sea monkeys, and while he said
to have turned down a licensing partnership with the company
because of other products in that company's catalog that he
thought were too risque, his own story actually has a
pretty dark streak running through it. But first, we're gonna
(05:06):
talk a little bit about the creatures that made him
famous in the toy and novelty world. And before we
dig into those briany little pets, do you want to
do a quick word from a sponsor. Yeah, we know
it's early, but we're trying to keep a big chunk
of the story together. Yeah, the next two sections are
really his two big inventions, and I want to keep
those together, So we'll be right back with those. So
(05:37):
the exact moment that inspired Von Brown Hut to create
sea monkeys is a little bit unclear, not terribly, but
there are two different versions of the story that go around. Uh,
it's pretty universally accepted that this happened in nine seven,
and in one version of the tale, he just noticed
Brian Shrimp in a bucket that were like part of
a um uh bait bucket. And in another version he
(06:02):
noticed them being sold in a pet store as food
for other marine life. And the pet store story is
by far the more popular of the two. It's the
one that he told most often in his life, particularly
later in life. Any interviews that he gave which weren't
a whole lot, he always said it was a pet store.
In either case, he became completely fascinated by the idea
of Brian shrimp, and because they can naturally survive for
(06:26):
years and kind of a suspended animation while dried out,
they're easily package herble, which meant in his mind they
could be marketed and sold. Yeah. So, in nineteen sixty,
sea monkeys first appeared in comic book ads, although they
had not been christened with their famous name yet. In
those early ads they were marketed as Instant Life, and
(06:46):
they sold for a mere forty nine cents. Instant Life
was not an instant success, just did not grab the
attention of comic book readers the way he hoped that
they would, and so he put the product through a rebranding.
Yeah so, if we have any comic book fans in
our our listener base, they might recognize the name Joe Orlando.
(07:08):
He was a comic book artist. He was an editor
at d C Comics. He was an associate publisher on
Mad Magazine. All at various stages of his career, he
did a lot of other really impressive things. And he
was actually the artist that was responsible for the art
that accompanied the upgraded Sea Monkey packaging. So those cartoons
that we know so well in which in many cases
sparked imaginations and lured in consumers, were his work with
(07:31):
those cartoons and a new name. Instant Life was relaunched
as Sea Monkeys in nineteen sixty four, and the name
was inspired by the Brian shrimps long tale. I always
wondered that, and now I know. Yeah, And now the
Brian shrimp that Harold von brown Hutt had first encountered,
which was our teamyus selena, are not quite the same
(07:52):
ones that are sold in Sea Monkey kits. Yeah. He
teamed up with a marine biologist to first figure out
how to mix the neutral ants and dry form that
you could add to tap water to create the ideal
environment for his Instant Life. Incidentally, the medium that he
created to treat tap water and make it into the
sea monkey paradise has never been duplicated by another lab
(08:14):
despite various attempts, So for a long time, only Harold
and his wife Yolanda knew the formula. Even so he
was always working on improvements right until the end of
his life. Yeah, they allegedly mixed those right on their
like private property, in the barrel, and then they would
distribute them in the packets. Uh. But then after they
(08:36):
had figured out this sort of perfect nutrient balanced mix,
he further developed these tiny marine critters to be really hardy. So,
like we said, they were not the Artemius selina that
he had initially encountered. So he and that same biologist
worked for years to constantly improve the product by cross
breeding different species from the genus Artemia until they got
(08:57):
the breed that continues the sea monkey line today. And
that's now called Artemia NEOs, which is n y O S.
And that n y o S stands for New York
Oceanic Society, And that's the lab where this species was developed.
Trans Science was the company von Brownhood founded to manufacture
sea monkeys, and from the early nineteen sixties on the
(09:18):
company was always promoting this amazing product. What's really funny
is that if you read trade publication ads for Sea
Monkey stock, it's almost identical in tone to the ads
that were running comic books for direct sales. There's a
lot of all caps for emphasis. The overall vibe is
one of excitement, excitement, excitement, come to where the money
is Sea Monkey Country, which is the ads that went
(09:41):
out to retailers and sounded a lot like the ads
to buyers. Yeah, it was kind of funny, and Von
Brownhod was the copyman behind all of this very enthusiastic verbiage.
He uh, it's his copy has this sort of wonderfully
vaudevillian feel to it, so it's like heart huckster and
part mad scientist and all entertainer. Initially, the brick and
(10:05):
mortar retail market had eluded Von Brownhood. Just before he
brought his Sea Monkeys to market, another company, Wammo, had
tried an instant fish toy as well, and that had
not gone very well because the product did not work,
and that made the entire retail arena petrified of doing
anything similar. But once Sea Monkeys established themselves through direct sales,
(10:29):
retailers started to come around and wanted to have them
in stores also, and that at that point they really
cemented sea monkeys in like the history of Kitch in
the History of Toys in there was an attempt to
bring Sea Monkeys to television. It was written by Howie
Mandel and directed primarily by Sean McNamara, who would go
(10:50):
on to direct lots of shows for the Disney Channel.
The show was pretty abysmal, and it only lasted eleven
episodes before cancelation. Yeah, if you just on a like
torture yourself for a few minutes, you can find a
lot of those on YouTube. Uh, they're awful. They're really
really awful. On October twenty nine, more than four hundred
(11:12):
millions sea monkey eggs went into space. They were on
the same mission that made John Glenn officially the oldest
man to fly in space. So that was the nine
day STS ninety five mission aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery.
And during that mission, the tiny Brian shrimp were exposed
to radiation zero G and of course the violent force
of re entry. They were hatched eight weeks after they
(11:34):
came back to Earth and seemed completely unaffected by all
of that time away from terra Firma and the things
that happened while they were in space. Yeah, so they're
it was kind of a fun little experiment. It's that's
one of those things that gets taught a lot in
elementary school classrooms when they're talking about sea life and
suspended animation. Uh. And the next thing we're going to
(11:54):
talk about is a very different type of invention that
Von Brown Hutt created and it was absolutely not a novelty.
It was a weapon called the Kyoga Agent M five
and the Kioga, which was marketed as the Steel Cobra,
was intended, according to advertising, to be a concealed weapon
that you could deploy in the event that you found
yourself face to face with a mugger or the attacker.
(12:17):
The ad copy in magazine advertisements read Kyoga. The Steel
Cobra is an automatic magnetically triggered steel whip that is
armed with a heavy caliber striking tip when every second counts,
This instant action feature frees you from the need to
first locate a push button trigger in order to fire
it at your attacker because it goes off by human
(12:39):
reflex action alone. It always works when needed, and there's
actually a ton of copy in those ads, it's very
wordy and it goes on to extol the virtues of
this small weapon, promising that the steel coils can make
contact through a leather jacket. It also promises that a
blow to the header jaw can knock an attacker out
(12:59):
coal old. Basically, this was a small trigger action, spring
loaded baton that could be purchased for n plus postage
in the early days. Yeah, and we'll actually share a
link to one of the ads for it offering this deal.
And early on in the life of the Kayoga, Mr
(13:20):
brown Hunt was actually arrested on illegal weapons charges when
he tried to pass through LaGuardia Airport security with a
half dozen of them in his briefcase, and he got
out of the charges by saying, no, this is not
a weapon that's ever been listed as forbidden, but it's
an interesting side note to the story. In nineteen eighty one,
Burt Reynolds used a ki yoga in the film Sharky's Machine,
(13:43):
and even though the movie was kind of a flop,
it basically was a great advertisement for this steel whip.
Over years, prices for the kyoga went up. It eventually
retailed for fifty and the advertising shifted from that kind
of aimed at women like this is a great self
defense tool to if you need a gun but can't
get a license. That was actual copy that was used
(14:07):
in their later advertising. And this is going to lead
us to kind of the dark part of the story.
So before we get to that, let's have a word
from a sponsor. So getting back to uh, von Brown
(14:27):
Hut and the kyoga, and we're getting into kind of
more modern history. But because this person sort of fame
and notoriety cemented a little bit earlier in the century,
he becomes a pretty fascinating figure. And even though a
lot of this revealed fairly recently, it's pretty important to
the story. So in the late nineteen eighties, the kyoga
catalyzed basically what became a public image calamity for Von
(14:51):
Brown Hut. So at the time, the leader of the
white supremacist group the Aryan Nations, whose name was Richard Butler,
was in trouble with the law. He had been indicted
by a federal grand shirt jury for seditious conspiracy to
overthrow the government by violence, and in a fundraising letter
(15:12):
to his fellow white supremacists that Butler sent out around
this time, he included a brochure for the kyoga. He
also included messaging that the inventor and manufacturer of the
weapon had pledged twenty five dollars to his defense fund
against the federal charges for every kyoga that was sold. Unsurprisingly,
it did not take long for journalists to get a
(15:34):
hold of this information had looked deeper into it, and
the news was not great. Butler uh the sort of
The first wave of problems was when Butler, again head
of the Arian Nations, confirmed to The Spokesman Review, which
is a paper out of Spokene Washington, that yes, he
and von Brownhote were friends, they had known each other
a long time, and that the inventor had supported the
(15:56):
Area Nations for quite a while. The Washington Post ran
a story soon after exposing even more affiliations with hate groups.
Not only was Harold von brown Hutt a frequent attendee
of the Aryan Nations World Congress, he also had ties
to the ku Klux Klan and had helped an Ohio
branch of the KKK purchased firearms. He also published his
(16:19):
own anti Zionist newsletter full of rather terrifying and shocking
rhetoric it was. I read a few snippets of it,
and I sent an instant message to Tracy, and I
was like, I don't want to say any of these
words on the air while we record. They're just they're
exactly the horrifying things you would imagine, perhaps more graphic. Uh.
(16:41):
In an odd snippet of detail, it also came out
that while attending these Area Nations gatherings, Von brown Hutt
often wore a clerical collar and claimed to be an
ordained priest. I was not able to hunt down any
confirmation that he was ever actually ordained. He may or
may not have been, but I just thought it was
odd that he only lived that image when he was
(17:02):
sort of involved in these groups. So the real irony
in the Washington Post article was that it also outed
von brown Hut as a Jew. In a completely bizarre twist,
it appeared that a major funder and friend of the
anti Semitist movement was indeed Jewish, at least by birth,
according to multiple friends of the brown Hut family. And
(17:27):
you would think that this would mean that the Arian
Nations would want to sever ties with him, But despite
this revelation, he was still welcome with the supremacist group.
Most likely most people theorized due to the funding that
he continued to donate. He had deep pockets and he
gave them a lot of money. In fact, he even
ended up presiding over the funeral of Richard Butler's wife
(17:50):
long after this story broke, wearing, of course, his full
clerical ensemble. Throughout all the coverage in the press about
these allegations and plenty of people corroborating them, and photographs
of him posing at his priestly garb in front of
a Nazi flag, Von brown Huot denied any racism or
anti Semitism, but then in the late nineteen eighties, he
(18:13):
gave an interview to the Seattle Times in which he
openly made racial slurs against Korean shop owners and then said,
you know what side I'm on, I don't make any
bones about it. However, from that point on, Von brown
Hut basically refused to answer any questions from reporters about
his heritage or his stance on racism or neo Nazism.
(18:33):
It's also at about this time that he left New
York and moved to Maryland to set up an animal
preserve called the Montrose wildlife conservation on a seventy acre property. Yeah.
He Uh, it's sort of one of those weird contradictory
image puzzle pieces that he, you know, was involved with
(18:53):
all these really horrible things. He also really loved animals
in nature and wanted to like study and preserve them.
It's very hard for me to get my head around
all of these contradictory pieces. It's a lot easier to
think of people who have those sorts of views as
like mustache twirling villains. Yeah. So then when you're like, oh,
(19:13):
but he was really quite kind to animals, it's like,
well that it almost makes it more distasteful because you
can't kind of compartmentalize it super easily. And like we said,
a lot of people described him as just this charming, eccentric,
sweet cookie old man as he got older. So it's
it's a very complex puzzle. Uh. In two thousand, a
(19:34):
Los Angeles Times article about von brown Hunt relaid the
news that there have been two different distributors that had
annulled their Sea Monkey licenses because of their unease with
Von brown Hunt's personal politics. First was Laramy Limited. There's
kind of a he said, she said, going on with
this one. Von brown Hut claimed that he wanted to
end the business partnership because Laramy was neglecting sea monkeys
(19:57):
in favor of bigger sellers like the super Soaker water gun.
Al Davis, who was an e v P at Laramie
at the time, told a much different story. He claimed
that after hearing about about Von brown Hutt giving money
to hate groups, he called the inventor on it. So,
according to the Davis version of the story, Harold told
(20:18):
him Hitler wasn't a bad guy, he just received bad press. Yeah,
that's a quote that gets used in a lot of
different stories. That's the first story that I saw it in,
or the earliest story that I saw it in, But
it gets reused a lot because it is in terms
of SoundBite, like you kind of can't ask for a
better sensationalist quote. Another licensing ventor in the nineties nineties
(20:39):
involved the company Big Fund, which specializes in novelty key chains,
and they were working on like this little key chain
mini aquarium that you could put like one or two
sea monkeys in and carry them with you throughout the day.
And initially Von brown Hut assured Big Fund president Alan
Dorfman that all of that bad press about him and
his ties to the Area Nations was really just rumormongering
(21:01):
that was started by an enemy that he was having
legal issues with, and initially Dorfman accepted that explanation until
a few months down the road there was a New
York Times article that ran that identified the Sea monkey
inventor as a speaker at that year's arians Aryan Nations Congress,
and so pretty quickly thereafter the business arrangement was severed.
(21:23):
According to George c. Atamian, who was an executive with
Educational Insights when his company bought the license to sea
monkeys in the mid nineteen nineties, Von brown Hut had
agreed to cease all of these public political activities when
some are brought the l a Times reporter who broke
the story of the business fallout because of von brown
(21:45):
Hutt's political views, he pushed a Tamian on the issue
of the inventor's involvement with the white supremacist movement. At
that point, the Educational Insights executive admitted that he had
never personally confronted Von brown Hut, but that he would
Attaman contact. Had brought a couple of weeks later, and
he said that he had confronted von brown Hut and
(22:07):
that von brown Hut had denied his involvement and that
in his mind, that was all that was needed. Yeah,
there's a sort of a more complex it gets a
little soap opera element to that, and it's all in
the l a Times article which will link to you.
There was actually one of his anti Zionist newsletters that
this reporter handed at Tamian and another executive involved and
(22:29):
said like, uh, this is you know, his work, this
is the newsletter, this is the stuff he's spreading, Like,
are you really comfortable working with this person? And they
both independently are said to have asked von brown Hut,
did you write this? And he said no, And the
one guy said to him, the evidence that made it
completely believable when von brown Hut denied his involvement, was like, no,
(22:52):
this is a man who loves copy and he loves
writing and he really prides himself and this newsletter is
terribly written. So to me, that's the evidence. It's all us.
Like they're in a bit of denial at that point
about the person they're working with, but uh. In two
thousand three, Harald von brown Hutt died after falling his home,
and since that time there has been sort of a
(23:12):
constant stream of various legal battles around Sea Monkeys and
who has the rights and whether they're paying Von brown
Hut's widow her royalties, etcetera. Nothing outside of like usual
business jockeying. But that's just what's going on with the company.
After about it seems that von brown Hutt kept his
word to Atamian and the rest of the leadership of
(23:34):
Education Insights. UH. He either ceased his ties to the
Aryan Nations or started hiding his involvement. The Anti Defamation League,
who had amassed a substantial dossier on his connections to
hate groups up to that point, doesn't really have anything
else the track after that. Yes, so he it does
(23:56):
seem like he kept his word uh in that business
deal where he's said he would no longer publicly be
involved in any of these hate groups. But Sea Monkey
sales have made Transcience and their various affiliates and licensees
many millions of dollars throughout the years, and National Sea
Monkey Day is May the sixteenth, although we don't know
(24:17):
where that started. Yeah, is that like their own marketing
thing or we do not know. Uh. I was looking
at one of those like you know, wacky Holiday each
day websites where they track these sorts of things, and
they're like, we can't figure out where this originated. If
it was marketing or just like a super fan that
(24:37):
sort of spread the word kind of like how talk
like a Pirate Day grew organically. They don't know if
this was a similar thing where it was like a
fan group that started it and it just kind of
became accepted without anyone questioning it. So that's a sup
of Sea Monkey Day number one. I think if this
were going on now, there would not be any Oh,
I will just stop having eyes to these white supremacy
(25:01):
organizations like I think the uh bad Press and fewer
are on the part of the Internet would not let
that stand. Yeah. I had a similar thought while I
was researching this, like there's just no way one he
couldn't the odds of him having been able to be
(25:22):
involved in these sorts of activities for so long without
anybody realizing it or calling him on it, although there
were allegedly rumors throughout the toy industry about him leading
up to that, but there wasn't any evidence. I guess
that people knew it just wouldn't happen. They would be
outed so much more quickly and so vocally and so
publicly through social media that I think it would be
(25:42):
a lot different if this all went down today. I
also had no idea until uh, I got this outline
from you basically, which is kind of weird, because I
feel like I know so many um Like, there are
so many kind of urban legend about you know, so
and so CEO of this organization is a racist and
(26:05):
it's not actually a true thing, right, And in this
case where he really was having direct involvement with all
these white supremacist organizations, I had never heard anything about
it until this episode. Yeah, that l a Times article
which is a really good read um that we referenced,
referenced a couple of times. He even mentions at the beginning, like, oh,
(26:26):
I thought I was doing kind of a fluff piece
about nostalgia toys and you know, sort of kitch in
the modern era, and how there's this new wave of
interest in toys from the fifties and sixties, and then
with minimal digging and like he reached out to the
anti Defamation League after he started hearing these things and
they sent him a copy of this huge dossier that
(26:49):
they had a math. He was like, this is a
very different article than I started writing. Uh, we don't
know what that's like at all. Yeah, yeah, it's a
it's so sort of mind blowing to me. This again,
it's the disparity of his image of being this sweet,
wacky guy, like a nutty inventor and a a little
bit of a flam flam man in some ways, and
(27:11):
then also being part of this just horrific thing and
that he was Jewish and part of all of this
is really hard for me to get my brain around.
But he is deceased, so no one can ask him,
and if you weren't, he probably would not want to
answer any of those questions anyway. Do you know if
his widow is still living. She is, she was involved
in a legal action as recently is about a eleven
(27:33):
or twelve months ago, but she also will not answer
any questions about his background or his political views. So
that's pretty much all lockdown on all such discussion. Uh.
It's fascinating stuff. Thank you so much for joining us
(27:53):
today for this Saturday Classic. If you have heard any
kind of email address or maybe a Facebook you are
l during the course of the episod owed that might
be obsolete. It might be doubly obsolete because we have
changed our email address again. You can now reach us
at history podcasts at i heart radio dot com, and
we're all over social media at missed in History, and
you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts,
(28:17):
the I heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen
to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a
production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I
heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or
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Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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