 Sea Monkeys, those happy looking, lovable creatures that live in a castle under the water. The story of their creation and success is not only inspiring, but also shocking and tragic. Sea Monkeys are the invention of Harold von Braunhut, born March 31, 1926. Harold was the grandson of Tobias Cohn, who was the head of the T. Cohn Toy Company until the early 1940s. The T. Cohn Toy Company specialized in tin metal noisemakers and various toys. Many of these toys are still sought after today by collectors and regularly go for high prices on eBay. As a child, Harold wanted to be a magician. He would spend hours and hours a day perfecting his latest tricks, but by the time he was in high school, his focus had shifted on inventing and designing gadgets and toys. As a young adult, Harold continued to work on his inventions on the side, but joined the workforce. One of his first jobs was with the New York subway systems. He took part in the creation of the Direct-O-Mat, which was an early version of GPS, allowing subway riders to track the locations of the train that they were wanting to get onto. While continuing to work there, Harold was simultaneously managing the careers of two people. One was an acrobat named Henry Lamothe, who would dive from 40 feet in the air into a 12-inch kiddie pool full of water, a feet which he repeated over and over into his 70s. The other person that he managed was known as the Amazing Dunninger. He was billed as the most prolific mind reader of the times, putting on shows where he would read the minds of patrons in attendance. He was on many, many radio shows, appeared on television, and even wrote books on mind reading. Since the mid-50s rolled around, Harold was trying his hardest to invent his own hit toys, but was having very little success. Things finally started to change once Milton Bradley scored a major hit nationwide with their ant farm sets. Kids everywhere were buying them up. Harold quickly took notice and thought, wow, what a simple idea. All they're selling them are ants, dirt, and a plastic case to hold them in. It's genius. Now how can I be original and different, but tap into the same market? Knowing that everybody was going to copy the ant farm, he decided to go in a different direction. Instead of it being on land or dirt, he went for water. He thought about fish at first, but those did not seem like an option for what he wanted. So he started researching things that could grow in water or could hatch with water. He discovered that there was a fish food called brine shrimp eggs. You could pour them into the tanks and the fish would eat them as the eggs floated around. If the fish missed any of the eggs, then eventually they would hatch and the fish would eat them then. These were perfect. They would hatch within a couple days, they looked very unique, and they could even reproduce. All he had to do was send along some water purifying packets, along with some food to feed them once they grew. And he called them Instant Life. Not long after the launch of his product line, the Whammo Company showed up at the New York Toy Fair and they amazed everybody by growing fish. That's right, they had a new product and they named it Instant Fish. The Whammo Company's product came in a kit with a mud substitute that had the eggs of African killy fish in them. You could add water and the eggs would hatch. The problem was that they took a lot longer to hatch. They had a very low hatching rate and they could not reproduce. Whammo started receiving a lot of negative feedback and they cancelled the line in order to protect the brand names of their other products that were doing very well. You would think that this would be good news for Harold and his Instant Life, but it wasn't. Because the names were so similar, the retailers didn't want to carry the product and the customers just assumed they were the same thing. Sales started to bottom out quick. Not being one to give up, Harold decided to seek help from another creative person. The acrobat that he managed was the one that drew the first advertisements for Instant Life. But this time he needed a rebranding. He needed a new name and a whole new look. So he went looking for an artist. Just when he met Joe Orlando, an up-and-coming go-getter of a guy. Joe wanted to be a writer, an illustrator, a cartoonist, an editor, and a publisher. Joe was currently working for a small comic book publishing company and he was doing side work. Harold hired Joe to help him rebrand. The two started having brainstorming sessions and during one of those meetings, Harold said these shrimp have tails like monkeys. Boom! Creativity hit. They were both inspired and within minutes, sea monkeys were born. Joe started designing the packaging and advertising artwork to resemble an underwater world with kings, queens, families, and children living in castles. Harold rushed out to see if the name Sea Monkeys was already taken and it was not. So he applied for the trademark. When it was time to start advertising, Joe suggested that he use comic books first. The ad rates were cheaper and the target audience was perfect. Once the ads with the new name and artwork started to appear in the comic books, the orders started rolling in fast. The more ads Harold ran, the more orders that would come in. At one point Harold was quoted to have had ads in over 3 million pages of comic books per year. Joe Orlando continued his pursuit of working in the comic book industry, eventually helping form Creepy Magazine. After that he became the associate editor of Mad Magazine, which eventually led him to become Vice President of DC Comics. With a bona fide hit on his hands and money to launch new products, Harold went wild, amassing over 195 patents and scoring lots more big hits, one of which was the X-ray glasses. These glasses were selling almost as fast as the Sea Monkeys. At one point Harold said that the vast majority of the orders contained both Sea Monkeys and X-ray glasses in them. Success continued on for decades and life seemed great for Harold and his wife Yolanda. But in 1988 things started to change when Harold was quoted by the Seattle Times making a disparaging remark about people of Korean descent. This drew a backlash to him and his company. It started small but eventually got worse. Reporters started digging into Harold's affiliations and soon realized that he had been giving money to Richard Butler, one of the founders of the Aryan Nation. Despite the bad publicity, Harold was able to continue on with his businesses with only minor interruptions. It wasn't until 1993 that he found out the Anti-Defamation League along with reporters had been watching the whole time and uncovered some more allegations. One of the groups that was being watched actually had a newsletter that was printed and sent out. The return address and the mailing information was from a PO box in Maryland that had been used by Harold's companies to sell baseball kits which he owned a patent on. This was just too much to deny. This was all around the same time that the Anti-Defamation League had uncovered the fact that Harold was actually Jewish but he had changed his birth name to prevent people from knowing his ancestry. His birth name was actually Harold Nathan Bronhutt but he changed it to Harold von Bronhutt to sound more German and less Jewish. With all of this coming to light, many stores and distributors rapidly stopped distributing his products. He was losing places he was allowed to advertise and having a hard time finding manufacturers. At this point he had to start cutting deals with companies to license his products and let them market the products under their own brand names. The money was drying up fast. Things continued to decline right up until Harold's death in 2003. Harold's wife Yolanda Signorelli inherited his estate along with all of the brands. During the 1960's Yolanda had been an actress and starred in some pretty risqué movies for the time but now she had the task of figuring out a way to generate income from the still viable products. Yolanda decided to make a deal to license the Sea Monkeys brand to Big Time Toys. They would in exchange pay her royalties from each item sold and would buy and use the brine shrimps supplied by her. By this time Yolanda's company had increased the life expectancy of the brine shrimp to live up to two years. This agreement worked for both parties for quite a few years but in 2013 Yolanda filed a lawsuit against Big Time Toys claiming that they had stopped paying her royalties and were now also buying the brine shrimp from China. The lawsuit has seen numerous postponements and delays causing it to drag on for years. Yolanda claims that Big Time Toys is doing this to financially ruin her so that they can keep the Sea Monkeys brand for themselves. She claims that the lawsuit has been a financial drain causing her to live without power and water at times and that she has had to seal off part of her house and live only in one room to keep the bills low so that she can continue to fight the lawsuit. As of the early part of 2020 it looks like the lawsuit continues. I hate to hear this and I hope that everything can be resolved so that Yolanda can continue to receive royalties off the products and live a comfortable life from the brands that her husband created. If you have made it this far into the video I hope that you leave focused on the creativity and motivation that it took to build these iconic brands that are now part of pop culture history. Stay safe, think positive, and be creative. If you enjoyed that video make sure you hit the subscribe button right there so you can stay up to date on all things geek culture. Also go ahead and check out one of these two playlists on the side for more videos just like the one you just watched. I'm Shane and if you're coming to NTV the only place on YouTube where all geek culture collides. Take care geeks.