Sea Monkey Ads In Comic Books

Verlag info datenschutzerklärung nutzungsbedingungen hilfe.

Sea monkey ads in comic books. George has the story of one fan who bought one which resulted in an er visit and 28 stitches. Sea monkeys could be ordered by mail directly from the sea monkey headquarters. He secured the services of cartoonist joe orlando who designed and illustrated a series of comic book ads. Vintage comic book ads that were too good to be true.

Comics i was never going to be spider man no matter how i tried to swing from washing lines or scale neighborhood walls or tumble out of trees. These showed humanoid animals that bear no resemblance to the crustaceans. But if you look in older comic books you ll see a treasure trove of sneaky ads. An updated ad campaign began to appear in comic books in 1964.

One of the ubiquitous and most intriguing ads that could be found in the pages of a comic book were those for sea monkeys an underwater family of weird little mammalian fish that you could keep all to your own. With almost no experience of any kind of advertising at all i hardly ever watched tv and 2 out of the 3 channels that existed had no ads i was particularly susceptible to it. How many of us who grew up in the 1960s and early 70s were. Obviously being a superhero was not all.

Sea monkeys were intensely marketed in comic books throughout the 1960s and early 1970s using illustrations by the comic book illustrator joe orlando. It wasn t that no one was buying them it was that no one wanted to sell them so harold got the idea to place an ad for instant life inside comic books to market directly to kids. First they were just miniature shrimp with an incredibly short lifespan. Originally sea monkeys didn t sell at all.

No advertisements to own a nuclear sub or army tank can be found nowadays. To me every comic book page was filled with valuable relevant. The name instant life was replaced with the more market friendly sea monkeys a moniker inspired by the brine shrimps long tails and ability to live in water. If today s generation y and z ers accuse us baby boomers of being cynical and distrustful well i for one blame it all on comic books.

There are a few upsetting truths about sea monkeys. The ads in comic books first drew my attention when i was a very little girl. Comic book squirrel monkeys long time comic readers might remember ads in the pages of 60s 70s comics selling live squirrel monkeys for only 25. I had no filter no ability to ignore advertising as non content.

Many purchasers were disappointed by the dissimilarity and by the short lifespan of the animals. Around the same time von braunhut founded. By jorge khoury sep 28 2008.