When I was a yout (maybe eight?), my friend and I would read comic books and on the back cover would be the sea monkey advertisement we’d seen for years. The one with the obviously sentient sea monkey lord with his trident or something. Terribly curious about it, one day we finally decided to pool together our meager monies and order some.
We had no clue these were brine shrimp or anything like that. They were sea monkeys! After several weeks an envelope showed up and we followed the directions to start our tiny civilization.
We checked on them for the next couple of days and we finally saw activity. We got pretty excited about the whole thing and as boys are wont to do, we got to wrestling and ended up knocking the sea monkey kingdom from atop his dresser down to the carpeted floor of his room thereby dooming the sea monkeys.
We were a bit devastated. After all, it was our first destroyed civilization.