Starting in the Silver Age, this peculiar comic ad endured the market for at least three generations. Billed as Sea Monkeys, these little suckers were really Saskatchewan brine shrimp put together by notorious swindler Harold von Braunhut who also made the outrageous x-ray glasses. Your special "Sea Circus" was provided by the Honor House Prod. Corporation who helped solidify the scam that consumed comic book readers. Some of the initial Sea Circuses were really just paper cutout of a layered stand of a cardboard audience marveling at a fake tank with weird water monsters. Honor House took it up a notch by advertising them as actual living creatures. Just add water, but not in the cartoon way where you just put a single drop on it and ta-da, instant pets! The ad only mentions providing you with the dried-up doodads, so you have to go out and get your own expensive tank or fishbowl. After getting the buggers in the mail for the low price of a single buck, you can hatch them with in 1-3 days, although what an anxiety-ridden child of the 60s was supposed to do with their life while waiting for their new subjects to finally come out to play must have been a nail-biting experience. The inch-long shrimps could reportedly live for about eight years, although there is a serious doubt if your average kid would genuinely bother keeping them around that long when they are finally starting to hit puberty. One of the attractions they put in bold for this ad was that you could arrange the Sea Monkeys in various colors of white, red, or pink which allowed you to see their internal organs, so if you wanted to view nearly microscopic lifeforms in bright pink, you might be getting your money's worth. The ad wants you to believe that the owner of these aquatic acrobats would have the power to control the tiny creeps into performing for your entertainment, even though they're just puttering around in tank, and you could only really see them in the dark with a flashlight. Bright pink living droplets swimming in a tank that you watch in a dark room is hardly what most children would consider as a fun time. Later incarnations of Sea Monkeys would add on special containers for the small things to be kept in, thus multiplying the number of sales that could be made from this sham. Harold von Braunhut went on to endorse a self-defense weapon called a Kiyoga spring whip which was sold with the same cartoon charm as the Sea Monkeys, and he pledged all the profits of the whips to the racist Aryan Nations, this was a huge way of letting you know that Harry wasn't playing with a full deck. So, if you were suckered into buying one of the three ring sea circuses, you were very possibly helping to raise funds for white supremacy, and considering that Crazy Harry himself was Jewish, this makes the whole trap one big two-faced anti-sematic catastrophe. It's bad enough that innocent children wasted their money on this, but to have it turn out be such a hypocritical scandal makes it one of the single darkest frauds in the history of comics.
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