Below are eleven of the most-dead soft drinks in my collection, each with its own story to tell, each way past its expiration date. Relive the glories of things you used to drink! Crystal Pepsi: I think part of the reason why Crystal Pepsi was considered such a flop is because Pepsi built up its debut like the second coming of Christ. I mean, you buy a minute-long Superbowl commercial where Van Halen credits Crystal Pepsi as the root of a cultural evolution, and you damn well better be more than a can of Pepsi without any brown in it. Still, it was one of those things that people had to try at least once. There was no excuse for avoiding a novelty factor that high. A childhood friend and I forced his little sister into doing a blind taste test, and we were shocked when she couldn't tell which glass was regular Pepsi and which was Crystal Pepsi. I don't think the phrase 'BOOYAH' had even been coined yet, but there we were, screaming it at this poor little idiot girl who couldn't tell Pepsi from its bastard naked cousin named after the worst secondary character from Roseanne history. Trying to market soda as something pure is a fool's game, but the truth is, Crystal Pepsi didn't taste that much different than the regular stuff. It was different, but not hideously different. People slammed the taste, but most of our gripes were on a psychological level. It looked like a citrus drink, or worse, really flat Pepsi. Proper, non-fruity soda is supposed to look like sewer water. After sales went to **** Pepsi tried to capitalize on our wrongful assumptions of Crystal Pepsi by transforming it into 'Crystal By Pepsi,' which was actually meant to taste like citrus soda. I'm a bit unclear as to what the thought process was for this strategy, because it was basically them saying, 'Well, you assume our product tastes like some crap you don't like, so we're going to actually make it taste like that crap you don't like.' Needless to say, Crystal By Pepsi lasted half as long as its already short-lived predecessor. (1993) Coke II: Most of you know the basics of the Great New Coke Fiasco of '85, where Coca-Cola made friends with Father Suicide by recalculating its star beverage for no good reason at all. Losing some (not a lot, but some) of their market share to Pepsi, the Coke folks freaked out and tried to make Coca-Cola taste more like Pepsi. For better or for worse, millions of people had spent years absorbing Coke and growing to consider its acid-like sting as an extension of their lives. Changing Coca-Cola sounded downright sacrilegious, but since people didn't want to look like retards who'd claim 'blasphemy' over a cornerstone of Americana switching from sugar to corn syrup, we just got spiteful and said that New Coke tasted like **** Really, it tasted like any other soda, but when you're pissy, you go for the throat. The company only halfway caved at first, keeping New Coke but bringing back the original formula as 'Coca-Cola forbidden for far longer than needed, because I remember drinking cans with Coca-Cola forbidden annihilated. Only, it wasn't annihilated forever. Stubbornly refusing to collect their losses and move on, Coca-Cola brought the beverage back as 'Coke II' in 1990, where it survived on life support for over a decade in just a few cities across the country. One of those cities was Chicago, and even when I visited a friend there in 2001, Coke II was still on store shelves. I'm still kicking myself for not picking up a 12-pack and figuring out some way to wall-mount it over my television. Now it's been completely discontinued, and I hate that, because it's so cool when sodas get sequels. (1990) Pepsi's Wild Bunch: I realize that it's still hard for many of you to grasp the concept of a 'soda collectors' market,' but I swear, it exists, and it's given me powerful knowledge about soft drinks most of the world never knew existed. Sharing this information is what makes me special. In 1991, the folks at Pepsi had their big annual company picnic, and let's just say that the grass had never been so green. The next day, Pepsi put into motion a plot to introduce three new fruit-boosted brands in the hopes that Wild Cherry Pepsi's success could be, literally and figuratively, bottled. This trio of would-be conquerors was collectively known as the 'Pepsi Wild Bunch,' and I CANG UNDERSTANG why it never made it past a few test markets. Maybe they just tried too hard -- aside from throwing a 6-pack here and a 12-pack there at a bargain price, Pepsi actually sold the new flavors in a boxed three-pack, meant to look like a shipping crate from the jungles of Sha'boochla. 'Fresh from the tropics,' they claimed. When you got inside the box, the three bold new Pepsi flavors Strawberry Burst Pepsi: This is my favorite of the three Wild Bunch flavors, but since I never actually tasted them, I'm just going on pure hypothesis and cool can designs. I'd be curious to know just how much different Strawberry Burst was from Wild Cherry Pepsi. Probably just a bit sweeter. Since most stores aren't willing to dedicate a second aisle to soft drinks just because some tyrant at Pepsi wants to make 146,000 different kinds of it, it's likely that the Wild Bunch failed because the public and the stores they shopped in felt like they'd already hit their limit on the amount of Pepsi brands they could introduce to their lives. While regular soda often goes fruity, the reason so many fruity takes on forbidden anomaly. Cherry worked because diners made their own Cherry Coke and Cherry Pepsi concoctions during the soda boom of the 1950s, and there was a residual interest. Cherry worked in soda not because it was a fruit, but because ...
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