Tanks for the memory, Sean…

Oh dear – Sean Brierley at 38 is clearly too young for nostalgia (MW January 22). In predicting sea monkeys as a future retro product, he is missing out on the fact that one of the reasons they’re selling now is that old fogeys like me are buying them for our children (and ourselves) because we remember the ads for them in US Marvel Comics of the late-Sixties.

Interspersed between the slightly baffling “Sell Grit!” and Charles Atlas ads, there was always one featuring cartoons of a family of alluring little creatures which, while not looking exactly like monkeys, certainly weren’t shrimps, exhorting us to “Enter the World of Amazing Live Sea Monkeys!” Such things were, and remain, redolent of a magical America about which a small boy in Croydon could only dream, even if they do turn out to be just brine shrimps.

Ian Simmons (aged 43)

Operations and marketing director

Techniquest

Cardiff