Citation Needed - Comic Book Advertisements

Episode Date: September 23, 2026

Comic book advertisements are a common feature in American comic books mainly from the 1940s onwards. As these advertisements were directed at young people, many made sensational claims,[1] and sold the products for a few dollars or less, to be sent to a post office box. Products offered included novelty items, toys, and self-improvement courses such as drawing and body building.

Hello and welcome. Citation Needed, a podcast where we choose the subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia and pretend we're experts. Because this is the internet, and that's how it works now. I'm Heath, and I'll be hosting this episode about direct marketing ads. Just going to, hold on, just going to set my oven real quick and forget it. And I'm joined on the panel of discriminating shoppers who also, like me, never got tricked by an ad for a stupid product. She's all Noah Marsh and Tom.

Did modest needs advertise? I don't remember. All right, so this thing didn't help my abs, but it was great for masturbation, and that made it worth the price. It didn't matter of it. I had that, too, for the same reason. So I just want to direct market my revolutionary new set of kitchen scales, just so the ad can include,

there's got to be a better way. That's good. It's got like it. I've been waiting four to six weeks at my mailbox since I was 12 years old for something good to happen. And it's been a long wait, guys. All right. Noah,

what person, place, thing, concept phenomenon or event? Are we going to be talking about today? Today, we're going to talk about all that weird fraudulent bullshit they used to sell in those overcrowded comic book ads.

Okay. And what made you pick that topic? Okay, so after you did your essay on Count Juan Raphael Dante, and you mentioned that he was the, yeah. You mentioned that he was the guy behind those fucking nine ways to kill a man with a comb pamphlets

that used to sell in comics. Master of Karate, yep. Yeah, and I wondered if any of the other weird shit in those ads had a fun backstory. So four hours later, I am 20 leagues down in this rabbit hole going, the Sea Monkeys guy was a fucking Nazi. So I thought I had enough to share with the whole class.

That's an interesting sentence. The Sea Monkeys guy was a Nazi questioner. Okay. So what is all that weird, rogolent bullshit they used to sell in those comic ads? Okay, so like pretty much every other kid growing up in the 80s, I had a comic book collection. Actually, my brother had one, so I didn't need one. And one of the staples of comics back then were these advertisements. Sometimes it was Kool-Aid man doing property crime with impunity.

Sometimes it was Gumby and Poki selling out their artistic integrity to Hawk Brock's Gumdinger Pops. Sometimes it was superheroes defeating bad guys with hostess fruit pies. But my favorites were those collage ads of bullshit that promised us the ability to see through our friends' clothes, throw our voices, and become deadly ninja assassins. Yeah, just like

Count Dante. Lots of them pulling someone's dick off as part of the idea. See, I had no idea that's how ventriloquism worked. You learn to you every day. So I distinctly remember one time, my brother and I, we went through one of those ads and we filled out the order for them and we pooled

our allowances in hopes of obtaining these modestly priced marvels. But mailing envelopes was still the purview of my parents. So we had to take all this shit to my dad and ask him to send it off for us. And that's when he broke it to us that none of this shit in those ads actually worked. So I asked him, I'm like, well, isn't there a law that says you can't sell stuff that isn't the thing that you said it is? And my dad, who was a cop at the time, he thought about it for a long minute. And he goes, not if you're a kid, no.

I'm fucking true. Anyway, let's go to church. We're going in search now. So case in point, the Polaris nuclear sub. According to the ad copy for this thing, it was over seven feet long. It sat two kids. It had, quote, controls that work, rockets that fire, a real periscope, firing torpedoes, and an electrically lit instrument panel, end quote.

All this for the literally unbelievably low price of $6.98 cents. Would have been cool if it was like candle lit as an instrument. Oh, there you go. There you go. So the copy further entice you with promises of the, quote, hours of imaginative play and fun as you and your friends dive, surface, maneuver, watch the enemy through the periscope and fire your nuclear missiles and torpedoes. Video game controller, not included.

It's imaginative fun in the sense that you have to imagine you've got a submarine. Yeah, exactly. Again again, given America's current munition stocks, I think you guys are maybe two weeks away from having to deploy one of those subs to the straight-of-home movies. I sure, no, it's the 80s. So like, okay, mom, I'm heading off my $7 submarine to play underwater back some time before Wednesday was totally fine. Yeah, right, right. Hey, Germany, can we borrow some of your paper submarines that we get?

We need to do a thing. But don't answer yet because I haven't told you how sturdy this thing is. The copy tells you that it's, quote, sturdily constructed of 200-pound test fiber board and quote, which sounds really impressive because it says 200 pounds in it, right? And there's no chance in hell that a kid knows that refers to the cardboard's puncture resistance,

not how much weight you can stack on top of it. Hell, kids probably thought that meant the sub-weighed 200 pounds, right? They also probably think that it can exist in water, given that it's being advertised as a fucking submarine. Yeah, you said cardboard, right?

Okay, in fairness, it was made of atoms that each have a nucleus. So, nuclear. Makes sense. And technically, you know, we called it a submarine because you could slide it underneath a Navy seal if you wanted to. You could. Now, as jaded as we are today, maybe you think that where they really getcha is on the shipping. But no, there was a shipping charge, but it was modest.

Again, according to the ad, quote, because of the polaris, subs giant size. We must ask for 75 cents shipping charge, end quote. But here's the best part. You could order it COD. That is cash on delivery, a concept that has to be baffling to our

younger listeners. But here's how that works described in the copy. There's a box you can check for prepaid or you can check a box that reads, send it COD. I enclosed $1 goodwill deposit and I will pay postman $5.98 on delivery plus

COD postage. Because they figured that most parents would be too embarrassed not to shell out the additional six bucks when the mailman showed up with the thing. Okay, but these days they'd be delivered by Amazon. You've got a note telling you they'd left your submarine in your neighbor's pool.

Yeah, right. But of course, despite the 10-day money-back guarantee, the Polaris sub did not live up to the hype. It was, in fact, a bunch of cardboard with just labyrinthine assembly instructions. The picture is amazing. It looks like a gigantic cardboard pencil shaving.

It does. It does. Honestly, if you just handed me this kit with no instructions, I'd be like, okay, I'm going to make myself a slutty butterfly costume. A slutty butterfly. So you're putting the swallow in swallowtail. Head in death's head, muff. Oh, okay. All right. To be I had to Google to find butterfly names that I could make sound slutty.

and then in doing that, I found out there is a butterfly called a large heath. And honestly, I can see the resemblance. I can genuinely see the resemblance. Sure, if it shaved his beard down a little bit.

So the firing rockets on the Polaris of, they were rubber band based. This periscope was a tube with two pieces of foil at angles. The electric panel was a cheap, dangerous-ass-looking light bulb attached to a battery pack that sat beneath a cardboard display

back when light bulbs got hot. Yikes. Yeah. And it only seated two if one of them was a premature baby fresh from the NICU. In the very unlikely event

that you ever got it assembled, you were left with a cardboard box you could sit in until literally any moisture touched it. It's actually a lot like the Titan submersible. It really is, man. I love that they stiffed you

on the seating capacity because at most That saved them like 40 centimeters of compost. Okay, sure, sure. It doesn't live up to the hype, but the cost per drowning ratio here is outstanding. No, it is. It is at just $7. Now, I'll be honest with you, even when I was nine years old, I was savvy enough to look at the Polaris nuclear sub ads and know that they had to be bullshit.

Braggie. But there were other bullshit ads that were just close enough to plausibility to trick even a budding young skeptic. myself. For example, one of the staples that you see was a hundred plastic army men kit. Yes. It came with a foot locker to store a man. Right? Yeah. And that was pretty much a staple of every kid's toy box in the 70s and 80s, but the comic book price was too good to be true. Just $1.25. Yeah. And somewhere Pete Haxeth is desperately rummaging through old boxes of comics at the Pentagon looking for a solution to your military supply chain. Right. Right. Hey, has anyone tested the plastic military men's testosterone?

Okay, well, now luckily for me, my dad stood firm between me and pissing money away on this one because I would learn later from kids with less studious dads that he promised four tanks, four jeeps, four battleships, eight machine gunners, et cetera were flat two-dimensional images. Oh, no. Also, they weren't even like proportional to one another, so you didn't set them out in a and they were made so cheaply that the plastic kind of curled up at the edges so you couldn't even lay them down.

Fuck you. I love it. Also, the footlacker was cardboard and some assembly was your friar. Those motherfuckers! The origin story of IKEA is complete. Right. Yeah. One of the most brazen examples of this fraudulent level of overselling that I could

find was a bit before my time, though. The frontier cabins' ads showed a stunted little cabin with a small door that said Billy on it. Well, I kid, presumably Billy, sat out front with a coon skin cap and a rifle protecting the home front. According to the copy, it was, quote, big enough for two to three kids. And the copy further claimed that, quote, this huge Western-style cabin is a child's dream come true.

Size approximately three feet high, nine feet square, 23 cubic feet. No tools needed nothing to assemble, end quote. Great for conjoined triplets in the NICU. home front. But they do end up fighting over who gets the skin hat and the rifles. Extra hats and rifles sold. COD. Don't have a penis. No problem. The ad copy knows that, quote, special girls playhouse now available.

And quote, the price? A mere $1. And if you bought four, they'd give you a fifth one for free. Wow. That's how they sell houses in East St. Louis, too. Detroit too, yeah. Now, for the listeners at home that don't know this scam, I want you to imagine the cheapest, shittiest, most disappointing thing

that this could possibly turn out to be, it's worse. Because the frontier cabin play set was nothing but a polyurethane sheet meant to be draped over a card table, not included, that had long cabin images printed on it. Yeah, no, and you could cut windows out of it once it was draped with your scissors, not included. That was literally all they were selling you, which makes it fucking nuts that they included size

specification. It really does. But also, if the ad had gone with almost nothing to assemble, it would have been accurate in that it's almost nothing and you still have to reset it. All right. Well, I just unrelated, I bunked my head on

something. It doesn't matter what it was. So we're going to take a quick break. Some apropos of nothing. Okay, so I realized the other houses that I showed you were not home runs. One of them had a foundation that was an actual chemical fire. Yeah, yeah, but it didn't have any roaches. That was nice.

Because of the fire. I know, I know, but this one should be pretty amazing. Okay, it's small, but the listing says that it's ready for an addition and comes with 0.89 acres. Okay, here it is, everybody. Oh, it's a card table with a tablecloth on a... That is not a tablecloth. That is your new home.

I mean, it's painted like a house with a white picket fence, but it's a tablecloth. It's technically a semi-synthetic polymer. Do you mean plastic? I do you mean plastic, yes. Not very roomy under here. The ceilings are low.

It's really low. Yeah, because it's a cold table. Well, you can always upgrade the frame of your house to a high top-type bar table. You lose a little of the size with the height, though, and the walls don't actually align. line up with the sides anymore.

Is that a holding tank of carcinogenic chemicals on the property? Well, you're in Hammond, Indiana. All properties have them. Oh, okay. Yeah. I guess. Why does that one have a Chicago Bears logo? It's a publicity stunt. Yeah, I don't think we're going to want this one. Before you go, before you go, hold on. I just want to point out that you can change the exterior of the house pretty easily. You can add a whole room. Here, look, let me just, I'll just, I'll move this over here and now it's a mid-century modern

with an attached garage. Is that a little Tykes cozy coop under the garage table? It is a little Tykes Cozy Coop. Yes! Ow! And we're back. When we left off, comic book ads had nothing to make Childhood Heath

get the shapely hips that he wanted and he had to get a thigh master. It did not work very well. What's next? All right, so of all the comic book ads that spoke to baby Noah, none of them caught my eye quite like these stop being a skinny fucker Charles Atlas ads. So these ads were set up in panels like a comic book and they opened with a skinny guy on a beach getting called out and beat up for having visible ribs. His hot girlfriend is so disappointed in how, I guess, punchable, his face turned out to be that she leaves him.

But then he takes the Charles Atlas man buffing course. He solves his problems with violence and he wins back the girl who says, says in the final panel, quote, oh, Joe, you are a real man after all, end quote. And below this is a photographic image of Charles Atlas and his tidy Whitey's offering to make you a new man in only 15 minutes a day. Okay, see, this is how Count Juan Rafael Dante sold his karate. Like, you could work out every day, have discipline, do this whole thing, hoping to become Charles Atlas, or you could sweep the leg and rip a guy's dick off. So a lot of people, it was like the easy way out. Okay, but I love how even in this story, the weedy guy was already with the hot girlfriend at the start.

That's the backstory that I want to see explored further. That and the psychosexual motivations of a guy who beats men up based on their rib visibility. It's a rich world they were building, is what I'm saying. I love a workout plan based in naked capitalism and your own personal selfishness. Like, the best exercise in that program are the Atlas Shrugs. Well done, sir. All right, so no, of course, Charles Atlas was a real guy. He was an Italian-American bodybuilder who was born Angelo Siciliano in 1892.

And from all the photographic evidence I've seen, he seems to be the guy who discovered abs. He was the most popular bodybuilder of his day, a distinction that sounds impressive until you try to think about who the most popular bodybuilder of today would be. But he also spawned one of the longest running ad campaigns of all time. I think it's clavicular today. Yeah, probably is, isn't it? So his ads started running in comic books in 1929 and continued running well into the 1990s. The officially recognized longest running ad campaign is De Beers Diamonds Are Forever, which they started using in 1948, which means that I was already podcasting when they overtook the Hay Skinny ads. Now, of course, not everything advertised in comics was complete bullshit.

There were at least a few annoying prank props on offer. This included classics like the very fake looking plastic fly frozen in the very fake looking plastic ice cube. The spring loaded mousetrap for thumbs designed to look like chewing gum and forever destroy a child's budding knowledge of altruism. And of course, agents of chemical warfare like stink bombs and itching powder. Yeah, the last one is guaranteed not to work on anyone from Indiana, though. It says it right in the fine print.

Okay, but surely any kind of powder can be itching powder. if the grain is cold. Right, exactly. Right. Now, among the most enduring items from this list of pranks is, of course, the whoopee cushion. Now, the earliest record

of the principle behind the whoopee cushion dates back to the 10th century. Apparently, an emir of the aglobid empire named Zayadat ala the third was in the habit of inflating animal bladders and then placing him under the cushions

of his palace to embarrass unsuspecting guests. A claim that, by way, basically has a red flashing, this is almost certainly bullshit tag on Wikipedia, but it was too good not to pass on. Hey, boss, your memo to me said you want me to get, quote, a big thing of animal bladders.

That weird, it's going to be like a whole, is this going to pay off for sure? Absolutely. But surely, it sounded like you just passed wind. Surely that's significantly less embarrassing than, hey, why did you keep all these animal bladders in your living room? So the joke's always going to be very much on him at this point. Look, I'm just gratified knowing that farts being funny has crossed every cultural and temporal barrier.

Yes. I would be zero percent surprised if tomorrow there was a cave painting of butts with squiggle lines just to discover an effort. Seriously, I've said this before. If I stopped finding any fart noise to be funny enough where I actually laugh audibly, which I do every time. If that stops, I'm moving to Vermont and it's done. That's what's happening. So the modern. rubber whoopee cushion was invented in the 1930s in Toronto, Ontario. I'm not sure Trump might have changed the name of that province by the time this episode drops, but right now it's Ontario. Anyways, some folks that worked at our rubber company were dicking around with the scrap

rubber and they discovered they could use it to make fart sounds. So they take it to this dude, Samuel Sorensen Adams. Imagine how much better this story would be of his name was backwards, Adams, Sorensen, Samuels. But anyway, so they take this, he's a well-known inventor and seller of practical joke stuff. He's the real life R.K. Maroon. But he decided this was too vulgar and he passed on it. The rubber company then offered it to another company, which entered into flatulent history with the best-selling practical joke item of all time. Adams actually would later market his own version

called the Raspberry Cushion, which presumably let out a less vulgar, like more petite fart sound. Okay. The light squeak is funnier, though. They're like, br-roo? Like, this is like a Betamax thing. to attack didn't get famous. Yeah, it's higher definition and harder to rewind. Absolutely. But even some of the practical joke items sold in comic books ads would blur the lines of fraud. As you'll recall, the ubiquitous joy buzzer was sold as though it delivered an electric shock.

It didn't. She had a little nipple that vibrated really fast and mimicked what a shock would feel like. Interestingly enough, it was patterned after an even less considerate prototype out of Germany that had a blunt point on the end designed to actually hurt. hurt the recipient's hands, which is such a German thing to invent. Hey, Hans, Hans, stick your fingers this tiny guillotine. God, their prank condoms could be a whole episode. Yeah, it's all still more popular than the 1930s German will be cushion, which contained actual gas.

Jesus, God. Well, that's the show, guys. It's been a good time. Anyway, AFD just won an election. That's fun. Yeah. And speaking to Germans, I need to talk about the most famous name in the bullshit comic book ad business. The man who invented lying to children, Harold von Braunhot.

By the time of his death in 2003, von Braunhardt had acquired no fewer than 195 patents, most of which fell under the allowance theft business model. For example, he held a patent for the invisible. goldfish. That was just a goldfish and supplies with no fish. He also, Hey, there's a card inside mine. It just says, fuck you. You're amazing. Here's an invisible coin. You should invest in it.

He also somehow managed to patent putting a hermit crabs in a box and selling them as crazy crabs. Okay, but no wonder the crabs were crazy. He took a bunch of hermit crabs and made them live together. Cohabiting in a commune, that's right. They like their space. But he was also

the inventor of the two things that you probably thought of first when we started talking about bullshit from comic book ads, x-ray specs and sea monkeys. My grandparents bought me

sea monkeys when I was a kid. I still see their cursed and grinning faces from those box advertisements. Oh my nightmare. Yeah. So Bronauts, we'll start with the x-ray specs.

They were sold with this copy, quote, scientific optical principle really works. Imagine you put on the x-ray specs and hold your hand in front of you. You seem to be able to look right through the flesh and see the bones underneath. Look at your best friend. Is that really his body you see under his clothes? Loads of laughs and fun at parties, end quote.

What? Yeah, to reinforce the utility, there's an image of a guy wearing said glasses looking at his hand and just beyond him is a buxom, young blonde in a tight-fitting dress. Okay. I feel like I'm getting like a weird takeaway here, but boomers went to interesting parties as little kids. Right. Did he just see her bones then?

I'm confused. I don't know when to look through clothes and when to look through skit. Yeah. You've got to admire the specific wording, though. Like, you seem to be able to see your bones. It's not actually making a claim there, is it? And then they say, is that really your friend's body? you see under his clothes.

No, it isn't, and you'd be a fool to think that. Yes, right. But you're allowed to ask the question. Yeah. Now, so the reality of the glasses were a disappointment squared. I mean, quite obviously, you couldn't actually see through skin and clothes. The principle was just refraction, right? So the idea is that if you see like two slightly overlapping images of your hand,

the parts that overlap kind of look like bones, by at least in the fingers. And you can see through them, right? So it looks like a skeleton hand if you squint just right. Now you too can experience what it's like to be slightly cross-eyed. Yeah, right. That's what we're selling. As to the question of your friends closed, the answer, as Marsh pointed out, is just no, you can't see through those. And it doesn't look like anything either.

But even that, even now, I am overselling them because when you wore the glasses, you had to angle them pretty exactly to even get that refraction effect. So mostly, you just couldn't see any goddamn thing at all through the little pinhole aperture. Great. Now she just has a single overlapped boob. That doesn't... Still? 14, so... Yeah, right, right. But of course, Bronhon's most famous... I will wait for 20 minutes while dial-up shows me a single...

It doesn't care if it's staticky. I can watch them staticky. But of course, but Brunhunt's most famous contribution to pop culture was the Sea Monkey. Sea monkeys were of course, and still are, brine shrimp, tiny gross translucent water bugs that arrived at your home as dehydrated eggs. But you would never guess that shit from the advertising. There were a bunch of different ads over the years, but the most famous one showed a family of mer creatures. A dad, mom, child, and baby, right?

The mom had a hairbow and lipstick in a very like Ms. Pac-Man-esque effort at genderization. Fucking terrifying. humanoid faces. They're so fucking creepy. Mom has her legs modestly crossed and dad's tail is obscuring his joke. But the clear implication is that there is a sea monkey dick back there. Oh God, yeah, definitely. I love the tiny, tiny caveat in the bottom left corner with his advert. It reads, caricatures shown are not intended to depict Artemia Selena.

And it's not least because like even if you spotted it, that tiny caveat, nothing in the ad identifies the sea monkeys as Artemia Salinas. It doesn't really have a caveat anything. Some kind of crazy argument happened to require that little caveat. They're going to think. But the copy is somehow even more misleading than the images. According to the ad copy, the brine shrimp are quote,

so eager to please they can even be trained, end quote. But what's the sea monkey dad packing under there? Great question, child. just do a reverse mortgage on your allowance and you can... They can be trained. Trained to do what? They're shrimp that grow to a maximum

15 millimeters in length. You're hardly able to turn it to a sub-aquatic team of sled dogs. Right, right. Wait, it goes on to lie, quote, always clowning around. These frolics and pets swim, stun, and play games with each other.

Stun. I have no idea, man. Boom! Because they are so, full of tricks, you'll never tire of watching them. Best of all, we even show you how to teach them to obey your commands like a pack of friendly trained seals. What a way to surprise your guests, end quote.

So the hardest part of training you see, monkeys, is finding a bowl smaller to balance on their little noises. Were this like, like a lot of kids who were also accomplished Pinniped trainers just looking for a new challenge out there? Yeah, but suffice to say, every sentence of, you know, but suffice to say, every sentence of that is a lie, except the one where your friends will be surprised that you're trying to entertain them by yelling, I said fetch to a cloud of brine shrimp. But you do get more than an envelope of brine shrimp eggs, of course, included for your buck 25 plus 50 cents shipping and

handling and another 50 cents for super rush orders if you absolutely cannot wait to start training your sea monkeys. In addition to the sea monkeys themselves, you get one, a one year supply of growth food, also known as food. growth is implied. Two, living plasma, whatever the fuck that means. Three, water purifier. Four, a magnificent,

fully illustrated manual of sea monkey care, raising, training, and reading. And five, their famous growth guarantee in writing. Okay, can I answer that? Can I answer yet? But don't answer yet. There's more.

For nothing but additional money, you can also get the deluxe microview ocean zoo plastic aquarium for your sea monkeys that's good I didn't answer yet yep yep he also sold a brine shrimp dessert called a banana treat uh you can because it's probably really hard to find things that brine shrimp would be willing to eat in your home uh you can also get sea monkey medicine i made a little cupcakes but they don't see yeah right this motherfuckers uh you also had sea monkey medicine which was quote, almost as good as having a team of sea monkey doctors standing by in the ER.

No, almost. I don't think having a team of the Sea Monkey Doctors in an ER would be that useful. Right? Way too small to operate on the equipment at all. But I would watch that hospital drama. It'd be slightly more realistic than Graydon. Oh, okay, there you go. But my personal favorite, you can also buy for your Sea Monkeys, Cupid's Arrow.

That is an aphrodisiac that was for, quote, shy sea monkeys afraid of marriage What if my sea monkeys don't want to fuck me? Okay, no, never mind. See, that's why you don't answer you. And if they develop any malaise or morning sickness, it comes with a bottle of thalidomide. Jesus.

I'm just glad those sea monkeys aren't having immoral premarital sex like the briny whores they are. Yeah, right? Now, apparently, Von Braunhot got the inspiration for sea monkeys when he saw a bucket of brine shrimp being sold as aquarium store food, like fish food for real pets. And he was like, hey, let's just cut out the middleman here. Yeah, and then Taco Bellag can take inspiration from that

and just start selling liquid shit in a paper bag. You know, some might argue. It's an invisible paper bag. It's loose shit. And of course, what made this viable as a mail order business was the fact that brine shrimp eggs dehydrate really well. dormant brine shrimp bags stay viable for years or even decades. According to Google, they can last 100 years in ideal conditions.

And then you just drop them in water and they pretty much instantly spring to life. So von Braunhot teamed up with a marine biologist to create a hearty, long-living strain of brine shrimp and went on to sell literally billions of them. So eventually von Braunhot would be sued for false advertising. But somehow he won the lawsuit with the, my lie is too silly to be believed to devoid. defense, a defense that seems less logically justifiable in the Trump era. Fox News tried that argument when Tucker Carlson lied about Dominion voting. They did, yeah. The Fox legal team wasn't apparently quite as good as the Sea Monkey guy.

But I said, you guys are so lucky that Eli's missing for the show where we learn that is a valid defense. It's so unfortunate he's not here. I asked them to take the day off, yeah. But despite the utter bullshit undergirding the entire business model, a lot of people actually liked pretending that brine shrimp were pets, and sea monkeys still sell to this day, despite the fact that we all know what they are now.

Now, there is a bizarre post script to the sea monkey story that I already hinted at, in which Von Braunhot turns out to be a Nazi. All the more surprising since he was raised Jewish. But yeah, after making millions lying to kids and having the courts tell him that was okay, he went a little deep end. But at least his deep end was tastefully,

decorated with a plastic castle. Right, right. He would go on to invent a weapon that he called the Kioga, which was a spring-loaded semi-flexible steel baton that you could whip people to death with. Okay, this guy clearly named it with the noise he made when he was doing karate chops. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.

It's like, it's called the Ki-Oga. And somebody's like, is it because you always say, Kiyoga? No. No. That's why I was talking about this when I did that. Differently. Now, apparently he got arrested for him. carrying it once, but eventually the judge let him go because he had to admit that nobody had thought to make a law against that thing yet. Again, fortunate that Eli isn't here to learn that the law can't punish you if your weapon

is novelin. Right. In all fairness, with enough dedication, you can beat someone to death with just about anything. Right. Yeah, can't be illegal for all of them. So he also, he sold a bunch of different bulletproof clothing. I have to imagine, though, that the people dumb enough to trust their bulletproofing to the sea monkey guy, weeded themselves out of the gene pole long ago.

No, it was fine. Those bulletproof vests were rated to 200 pounds and they can fit two people in them. Oh, well, that goes, yeah. So money back guarantee if it doesn't work. But in 1988, the reputation of the professional lunch money thief was degraded even further when it was revealed that he was a virulent, unapologetic, raging bigot. He was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, a member of the Aryan nations, close friends with the grand dragon of the KKK.

he distributed a white supremacist's newsletter, and he had a poster signed by Herman Goring hanging in his study. He has also since announced his bid for Senate. He has a tea, though. It's going to win, too. Yeah, it was a simpler time back then, I guess, when all of this came to light in the late 80s and got covered in the national media,

the part that bothered him the most was that the newspapers revealed his Jewish heritage to all his Nazi friends. What does this guy sell? Not Sea Monkey. Don't see. Monkeys. So, yeah, so it turns out

that the comic book ads were even worse than you thought and the nuts-ass karate dad that Heath told you about might have been the least unpleasant person working in the ripping kids

off with mail order bullshit business. All right. If you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence, what would it be? Despite all my dad's

fervent protestations, I still wish I'd pulled the trigger on that nuclear sub. And are you ready for the quiz? Damn right I am. Okay, Noah, you're just smarter than I was. Because then I was a kid, I wanted, A, all of this shit.

I just wanted all of it. B, I was not a smart kid. C, I thought nunchucks were better than just having a stick until I was like 30. D, they aren't worse. They are. No. Than a stick. All right, I'm going to take secret answer.

E, I was not smarter than you. I just had a dad that was a little more vigilant about not letting me order shit. fair. All right, Noah, so that Nazi really wanted to fuck a sea monkey or some sort of marine life, very clearly a kink. Where did he go to find his porn? A.

Barely legal seafood. B. Prawn hub. C. Love in the times of trawlera. Nice. D. Only fins. Oh, amazing. Amazing. It's amazing to me that

Prawn Hub wasn't the reason you were doing. You actually went better than Pran Hub. D. Onlyfins, obviously. Correct. Well done. All right, Noah. Sure, they had ads in the comics. But what comic book hero is blatant

marketing ploy used to sell some shitty product? A. Adobe Acrobat Man, B, Fridier Devil. C. Howard the duct tape or D. Captain America.

Was there a movie called Howard the Ducks? That didn't make any sense. Right, Tom? All right. That's it. That's true. Cecil, I think that Captain America might be my favorite joke in the history of this show. D.

Is definitely D. Okay, Noah. Why did the C monkey guy support the Nazis? Is it A? He liked how they occupied the brine land. is it B he was a big believer in Shrimperialism

is it C he felt the Germans needed more Liebans prong is it D his favorite movie was birth of a crustacean or is it E he was just following

hors d'oeuvre Oh my God okay now the best last one was the best one All right yeah no that might be my favorite now Holy shit I'm going to go with secret answer E

he was just following orders. That's amazing. Very good. Right. Marsh, you are the victor. Well, two in a row. Two in a row. Well, given that I will be here next week, I'm going to leave you with an Eli essay. Oh, you're assholes.

All right. Well, for Cecil, Noah, Marsh, and Tom, I'm Heath. Thank you for hanging out with us. We'll be back next week, and Eli will allegedly be an expert on something else. Between now and then, you can listen to cognitive distance, no rogan experience, skeptics with a K, year old dads, godolph movies, the scathing atheist, the skeptocrat, and D&D minus. And if you'd like to join the ranks of our beloved patrons, you can make a per-episode

donation at patreon.com slash citation pod. And if you'd like to get in touch with us, listen to past episodes, connect us on social media, or take a look at the show notes. Check out citationpod.com.