Harold von Braunhut was an inventor and mail-order marketer who used comic book advertisements to sell his popular line of novelty items. Some of his most famous inventions include such classics as X-Ray Spex, the ads claimed you could see through clothes and skin; Amazing Air Breathing Crazy Crabs, basically mail-order hermit crabs; Amazing Hair-Raising Monsters, cardboard pictures of bald monsters that would grow hair when you soaked them in water; and of course Amazing Live Sea Monkeys, which were basically brine shrimp. The ads claimed that you could even train Sea Monkeys to do your bidding. Oh for the glory days of unregulated advertising!

And he was truly a nature-lover as the site claims, establishing a wildlife conservation area in Maryland.

But underneath the jolly joke-man veneer was something much darker. In 1988, The Washington Post published a story claiming Braunhut spoke at an Aryan Nations meeting advocating the repeal of the 14th Amendment. The story further claimed that he financed the purchase of almost twelve thousand dollars worth of guns for the Ohio Ku Klux Klan.

In 1996, The Anti-Defamation League published a report claiming Braunhut was actually a member of both the Klan and the Aryan Nations. According to the National Vanguard, a white supremacist publication:

The extent of Braunhut’s financial assistance to Aryan Nations is unknown. At group congresses in the early 1990s, in which he was a featured speaker, he wore a priest’s collar. At a 1995 congress he stated that Jews are “the bacillus of the decomposition of our society.

At this point, all your fond memories of Sea Monkeys are probably tainted forever, but there's more.

Harold von Braunhut was, according to his family, himself a Jew. We will likely never know why or how he came to his extremist beliefs, as Braunhut died at his home in Maryland after an accidental fall on November 28, 2003.

Educational Insights currently owns the rights to Sea Monkeys, which are still sold at toy stores and museum gift shops everywhere.