Monkey “sea” — monkey sue!
The widow of the inventor of Sea-Monkeys is suing a toy company for allegedly failing to fork over close to a million clams a year in royalties.
Yolanda von Braunhut claims in her Manhattan federal suit that in December, Big Time Toys stopped shelling out $62,500 in monthly royalty payments to Transcience, the company founded by her husband, Sea-Monkeys creator Harold von Braunhut.
Dwight Eisenhower was president and Pat Boone’s “April Love” was on the jukebox when von Braunhut was in his lab inventing the hybrid brine shrimp in 1957, originally calling the product Instant Life. He changed the name to Sea-Monkeys in 1963. Transcience would not comment on the court case, but said this about its brine shrimp: “It has been postulated that the symbiotic relationship developed between Sea-Monkeys and humans may be critical to the long-term survival of both species.”
The kits, advertised in comic books, include the creature’s tiny eggs — which are able to withstand long dry periods. Once the eggs are exposed to saltwater, the shrimp hatch.
Comic book ads for Sea-Monkeys boasted that they are “so easy to please — they can even be trained,” and featured humanoid creatures holding court near oceanic castles.
The ads sometimes featured a much smaller picture of the actual organism — far less regal with its multiple legs and bug-eyes.
Sea-Monkeys are sold worldwide, enjoy their own holiday — National Sea Monkey Day is May 16 — and have even travelled to outer space, spending nine days aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery in 1998.
The contract gave Big Time the right to buy Sea-Monkeys and it’s “trade secrets” for no more than $10 million, paid for in a $5 million lump sum, followed by a 5 percent royalty payment per year until the remaining $5 million was reached, the lawsuit states.
Separately, Big Time would also buy “the trade secret pouches upon which the Sea-Monkeys product is based,” at a cut-rate price, court papers state.
The terms of the agreement were amended in 2009, upping royalty fees to 20 percent of gross sales — an estimated $3.75 million a year.
But Big Time Toys claims its secret pouch payments should be counted toward the $5 million initial purchase price, court documents state. In the lawsuit, Transcience calls this notion “unfounded.”