The Battle Over the Sea Monkey Fortune | Hacker News Reader

The Battle Over the Sea Monkey Fortune

nytimes.com

120 pointsamk_39 comments

That's not a subtitle one reads too often: "A former 1960s bondage-film actress is waging legal combat with a toy company for ownership of her husband’s mail-order aquatic-pet empire."

When I used to work at a grocery store, they came in once a week to buy day old bread to feed the animals on their land. She's actually a very sweet lady, and he was a cranky old bastard who once confused one of my co workers wu tang clan tattoo for thr ku klux klan and had a really awkward conversation.

He was a Jewish born Neo-Nazi according to the article. That would make for a very awkward conversation indeed.

And that's not even mentioning the fact that the husband was an ethnically Jewish Nazi.

As a child I received some Sea Monkeys as a gift, after growing them for a couple of days I started to notice the number of individuals shrinking and the remaining Sea Monkeys growing quite large, eventually I was left with just one "Sea Monkey" that was almost an inch long. Turns out I'd been given Triops, cannibalistic crustaceans, not cute little harmless Sea Monkeys. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triops_longicaudatus

Dude, you had a living fossil as a pet! That's possibly cooler than Sea Monkeys. (Though, I enjoyed having Sea Monkeys as a kid.)

A well meaning family friend gave my son Sea Monkeys for his birthday years ago. When my wife discovered they were really vermin, they had an unfortunate accident.

On the topic of Sea Monkeys, did anyone ever buy that submarine in the back of comics where the Sea Monkeys were sold? I couldn't sleep as a kid wishing I had the $5 to buy that submarine and take it to the lake.

Thanks for the memories. it never worked as well as you imagined it would. there are plenty of videos on youtube of it. just search for 'baking soda sub'

You can also buy baking soda powered fish lures.

Oh god. That's right. I just KNEW I could RULE THE SEAS with that sub.

The business of disappointing and deceiving young children is still surprisingly profitable I see.

You're cutting awfully close to declaring war on christmas here

What do you mean? My son setup his sea monkey set nearly a year ago, and it's still in my office going strong, with only the slightest maintenance.

Would your son rather have a miniature brine shrimp aquarium, or an Amazing Live Sea-Monkey habitat?

The branded humbug is specifically designed to make the mundane seem more interesting, even to the point where someone would actually buy brine shrimp as pets.

As a business, breeding brine shrimp for the toy market alone is worthless. You also have to package the reason for someone to buy them, which is the story that makes them a catalyst for the imagination.

It's why you can take two copies of the same doll, dress one up as Mr. Milquetoast, forensic accountant, and the other as Muscles McUltrahero, beloved comic book character, and see such a dramatic difference in sales.

Obviously, Big Time Toys saw no value in the product itself, as they changed suppliers. The entire value of the box is in the brand, which they stopped paying for.

As much as I enjoy the schadenfreude that I feel when I see con artists cheat each other, I have to come down of the side of the underdog with the moxie to sell people fluff and nonsense and still make them love it. Big Time isn't selling Amazing Live Sea-Monkeys (TM) any more. They're selling cheap Chinese brine shrimp.

And they are doing it to the only group on the planet who can be deceived by that kind of marketing (little kids), while other people smile and look at it as a magical thing. It's not. It's such a notorious borderline scam that an early South Park episode touched on it.

Rather than $5-$10 million a year in brine shrimp sales.

It's harmless, though. Considering nothing in life has an value at all except how it makes humans feel, as long as it makes people net happier than sadder (which it seems to do), then Sea Monkeys are a moral positive.

I was pretty disappointed with my Sea Monkeys. Can't imagine I was alone in that.

It's 10 million a year, that's what it is.

You would think that if you were going to con someone, it would be better to con someone with money, or at least a steady income, but no, conning children is also apparently profitable.

Because your mark does another con on your behalf to get the money, which works because they have absolutely no idea that they are just a catspaw in your own con.

Marketing aquatic vermin as 'Sea Monkeys'? It could be worse. They could have tried to push cockroaches as 'Fridge Gorillas'.

I guess we can infer from the name that Muscles McUltrahero is a full-stack web dev, which undoubtedly boosts sales.

it was the A/B testing that put him over the top

I still vividly remember the awe that my Sea Monkeys inspired in me as a child: what were these little critters exactly? had they really sprung spontaneously into being from that tiny packet? The theatre of it was genius, and knowing the (rather banal) reality would have ruined the magic.

The article says that the original variety of brine shrimp grows full sized more quickly and survives longer, giving you a slightly enhanced possibility that you would indeed "amaze all your friends".

I don't think the longevity of the brine shrimp is the issue, and I'm sorry if that's the impression you took away from my post.

Have you ever played a modern freemium game?

Once, but I've also been in a casino, so I recognized the business model.

That was a beautifully written piece.

My thoughts as well. The author does a wonderfully subtle job exposing that strange naivete that seems so universal to the human experience. It's no surprise that he's a contributor to "This American Life," which I find often hits on that same sentiment. Thanks for sharing this article, OP.

I bought some Sea Monkeys last year. Suddenly they are even more special! For some reason, I never set up the tank, but now I am going to dig them up and set up the tank. But first I need to check netflix.....

Am I the only one who clicked on the article expecting a discussion about the Mozilla suite?

No :) Debian's no-non-free-stuff build, actually. Now extinct.

The tl;dr for the long article:

The company that owns the Sea-Monkeys trademark, Transcience, contracted with another company, Big Time Toys, to handle the 'fishbowl' kits, marketing, and distribution. Transcience continued to provide the brine shrimp, which the company says are specially bred to handle the rigors of postal transport better than other brine shrimp.

Big Time Toys had the option to buy out Transcience completely for $10 million, with $5 million as a lump sum and the rest paid as a percentage of yearly profit.

In 2013, Big Time Toys stopped paying towards the $10 million, stopped buying the brine shrimp from Transcience (they switched to Chinese suppliers), and kept using the Sea-Monkeys name for their products.

Big Time Toys claims that the money they've paid Transcience for brine shrimp counts for the buyout, and that they now own Transcience (and its trademarks).

It's a charming story that ought to be read in its entirety rather than being reduced to a dry, Reuters-like press release.

I think it depends on the person reading. The article ran on a tad long for me, with too much backstory; I was more interested in the technical story and I appreciated the tl;dr.

There's certainly much more in TFA but I do appreciate the effort of the summary.

I really wonder how many companies have done this.

They enter into an agreement for a buyout and then after a series of say 3 or 4 payments simply declare they own the company now and start using the trademarks and logo and effectively push out the original company.

If I owned a small company and was engaged in some form of agreement like this I'd be petrified something similar would happen.

That's why you have to make sure you have a good contract with all potential what-ifs covered. Then the big company will have to find a what-if that you didn't cover and if you're luck it will be ridiculous enough that you won't need a massive legal team to defend your agreement.

Either that or you go into it just hoping to get all of the money, but you make sure that the up-front money is enough to keep you floating down the river.

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