He convinced us to look at the jazz hands and lose sight of the footwork. I began to lose faith while trying to verify this doozy, but it turns out that the Internet allows you to watch a man named Henri LaMothe still pulling off this feat at 71 years old, as an opening act for Evel Knievel.Īs anyone sold by the Sea-Monkey ads could tell you, it was hard to say exactly where von Braunhut was walking on the terrain between truth, embellishment and con. He tells Planet X about a stunt performer he used to manage - the article has von Braunhut calling him “a fella by the name of Henry Lamore” - who would dive from a height of 40 feet into a kiddie pool filled with 12 inches of water.
At some point in the years after he raced motorcycles as The Green Hornet, von Braunhut worked as a talent agent of sorts. Granted, he makes some claims that a skeptic is inclined to independently confirm. The accounts Von Braunhut gave of his adventures in American kitsch are consistently winning. According to von Braunhut, the problem with selling Sea-Monkeys early on, ya see, was that “nobody believed it!” He adds, “It’s a little bit like the story of the Wright brothers.” These little critters, you may recall, carry with them the promise of “a BOWLFULL OF HAPPINESS - Instant PETS!” They’re supposed to arrive in the mail, spring to life in water, and soon start horsing around and making babies. In the interview he seems to delight in telling Lobo about his most famous and successful novelty item, Sea-Monkeys. Von Braunhut was a short, balding man who had the accent that turns “beautiful” into “bee-YOO-dee-full,” and he often cast himself as the guy they all doubted until he showed ’em. An inventor and entrepreneur who brought us legions of wonderfully gimmicky toys before he died, at 77, in 2003, von Braunhut holds forth about times gone by, interrupted only when his cockatoo chews at the wire connecting his hearing aid to the telephone. In a 2002 interview with Erik Lobo of Planet X magazine, Harold von Braunhut comes across as the kind of charming old guy who might detain you in conversation a bit too long if you were volunteering at a home for the aged. “Sea-Monkeys, do monkeys / Story of my life / Send three bucks to a comic book / Get a house, car and wife” - Liz Phair, “Gunshy”
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