Latest Sea-Monkeys News, Web-Site Scam Drama, and New Blog Contributors

Latest Sea-Monkeys® News

Recently the whole Sea-Monkeys® legal drama was seemingly resolved. Amazing Live Sea-Monkeys® was licensed to Dragon-i Toys and re-branded The Original Sea-Monkeys® and Bandai was chosen as the distributor for the United Kingdom meanwhile a new commercial for Original Sea-Monkeys popped up on YouTube.

Shortly thereafter the vice president of Transcience LLC, Brian Nicely, posted a picture of the new "Made in the USA" Sea-Monkeys® egg packet to the Facebook group Sea-Monkeys Clubhouse announcing that all new orders from the Official Web-Site would receive these new egg packets. Nicely also teased that a brand-new handbook was in the works as well.

In spite of all this good news, there has been no announcement of a distributor for North America or the USA yet and the only official legitimate source for Original Sea-Monkeys® in the USA is still Transcience LLC through mail order.

Web-Site Scam Drama

Screen shot of the site, click image to enlarge.

Today it was learned that someone has put up a very professionally designed Shopify site (I refuse to link to it) that appears to be official using the new logos claiming to be selling Original Sea-Monkeys® and official supplies with an online shopping cart. This caused quite a stir in the Sea-Monkeys® fan community and on facebook until a little research was done. Orders are though Paypal to a person with a Gmail account. Whole portions of the content of the site were copied and pasted from old out-of-date Sea-Monkey fan sites from the 90's and early 2000's including my own site! There was no editing done with these swipes so references to Exploratoy being the distributor are still present in the text, as well as implications that the late Harold von Braunhut was still alive! It was later confirmed that Transcience LLC has nothing to do with this site and there is no way to tell if this person is legitimately trying to sell old product or just another scammer. Considering the use of the new logos without permission and all the content stealing, I know what my suspicions are, and I will leave it at that.

I do believe that if the Official Sea-Monkeys site ever does try to do online shopping again that they will set up a shopping cart on their own domain. Be vigilant and pay attention to URL in the address bar during the next few exciting months as Transcience and Original Sea-Monkeys® rebuild.

New Blog Contributors Announcement

Finally I would like to introduce a couple of new contributors to this blog: PaygeM (Shel) and SeaMonkeyUncle.

PaygeM is a Doctor Who fan that I have known for years through Doctor Who fandom who is an avid reader and a fan of British Television. She says she is ready to write about old favorites and whether they have withstood the test of time, from Twinkies (no they haven't) to songs, movies, & video games, and whatever else might strike her fancy.

SeaMonkeyUncle is a fan of Sea-Monkeys, of course! He has a Sea-Monkey fan site that he neglects (kind of like I do mine), that was one of the most popular back during the Exploratoy revival. He also worked as webmaster and designer of the Official Sea-Monkeys® Web-site for a short while. His interests include comic ad mail-order mysteries and nostalgia.

Please join me in welcoming them. I for one, am eagerly looking forward to their future posts. There certainly is no pressure on them and they will contribute content on their own schedules.