GULLIBLE’S BABBLES - 112: "Instant Life" Documentary Updates
- Gullible
- Jan 11, 2022
- 1 min read
The latest information on the 2022 documentary, "INSTANT LIFE"
DOCU-SERIES: "INSTANT LIFE"
From the Sundance Film Festival website
Before she met Harold von Braunhut, Yolanda Signorelli was a young Bohemian actress floating through the exploitation film world of the late 1960s. A mad scientist with a tenacious entrepreneurial spirit, Harold ruled the back pages of comic books by selling novelty mail-order toys like X-Ray Spexs, Invisible Goldfish, and his most successful product, Amazing Live Sea Monkeys®. Harold perfected the formula for bringing these miniature sea creatures to life by combining practical chemistry with a magician’s sleight of hand. After Harold and Yolanda fell in love, the unlikely duo oversaw the rise of a pop culture phenomenon that still endures.
After Harold’s passing, Yolanda became the only person in the world who knew the top-secret formula, but a string of unfortunate developments left her without control of the iconic property. Dispossessed of her livelihood and without electricity or running water, she is forced to wage a legal and existential battle to take back what is rightfully hers. First, she must confront the ghost of Harold, who casts a dark shadow over Yolanda’s beloved Sea Monkeys®.
The world premiere of this riveting three episode docu-series will be presented in its entirety on January 20, 2022.
31 Films to See
at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival
Of course Amazing Live Sea Monkeys—those mid-20th century mail-order toy staples—have a completely wild backstory. Created by Harold von Braunhut and made famous by the mad scientist and his wife Yolanda, the toys were a phenomenon but after Harold died, their secret formula and control of their huge profits slipped away from Yolanda, resulting in a stranger-than-fiction story captured in Mark Becker and Aaron Schock's three-part docu-series.
https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-and-culture/g38770018/sundance-film-festival-2022-best-movies/
Instant Life
(Mark Becker and Aaron Schock, US)
This is sure to be one of the most talked about three-hour, three-part TV series of 2022. Instant Life starts off as an exploration of the totally whacked-out life of the creators of pop culture sensation “Sea-Monkeys®.” But it then unfolds into a tale resembling Roger Corman’s greatest B-movies crossed with the Maysles Brothers’ Grey Gardens (1975). These curious childhood “toys” (they’re actual living creatures) were originally developed in the late 1950s, and were often advertised on mail-order pages of comic books alongside x-ray glasses, hand buzzers, and ant farms. But the actual story of the “king and queen” purveyors of the sea monkeys is a fascinatingly-sensational spiel that somehow is still…
Instant Life from Catapult Film Funds website
Instant Life tells the story of Yolanda Signorelli von Braunhut, the heiress to the Amazing Live Sea-Monkeys fortune, who is engaged in a David and Goliath legal battle with a large toy company to regain control over her husband’s iconic aquatic novelty. Now dispossessed of her sole source of income, Signorelli von Braunhut lives alone without electricity or running water on the Sea-Monkeys estate along the Potomac River where she struggles to restore the novelty’s reputation by regaining ownership of the Sea Monkeys and re-introducing the secret Sea-Monkeys formula to the world.
About the Filmmakers
DIRECTOR/ PRODUCER
Mark Becker
Mark Becker co-directed and edited the documentary Art and Craft (2014), which was shortlisted…