soooo today i learned that back in the early 90s, coca cola tried making this thing called “ok soda” as a marketing stunt to beat out pepsi since they had way more of a hold on the “younger/rebellious” generation at the time, and their way of doing that was naming it “ok soda” so that they could copyright the word “ok”, the most popular word in the world, and at the same time brand it as an…ironic soda??? like the whole thing with it was that they tried to brand ok soda as a counterculture soda but instead of making it about typical 90s RADICAL EXTREME!!! fodder the theme of it was uh. unsettlingcapitalist brutalist dystopia. instead of being bright and colorful the color scheme was only stark whites, grays and reds and the cans looked like this. bold shapes and labels stating ominous, robotic things with a figure always staring dead into you on the front, no coca cola branding on it at all.
sometimes there would be “prize cans” of this stuff where instead of having soda inside it there would be hats. and they didn’t sell this option in boxes by the way they just put prize cans in random vending machines. and put like 25 cents in it so hey. you could get an actual soda that isn’t just hats. maybe.
did i mention that this soda also had a fucking MANIFESTO??? because yeah it sure had that printed on some cans and it goes as follows
and there’s these things called “coincidences”, which… yeah it doesn’t make it sound any less ominous
and you might be wondering how the soda itself tastes like does it taste good? ok? well apparently it was just a regular “citric” tasting soda but somehow they fucked it up so bad that it was compared to “carbonated tree sap”, and instead of trying to make the drink taste better they included that it tasted like shit, INTO THE ADVERTISING SCHEME ITSELF. they would literally advertise that it tasted like ass as a part of the ironic marketing, no i am not kidding.
but if you thought that’s where it ended there’s one more curveball and without any exaggeration, you will not expect what i am about to tell you.
take a look at this guy.
this guy is the “face” of ok soda, as in he was printed on the most cans and technically served as a mascot of sorts for the entire thing. his face was a major part of the branding, and this design for the cans was one of if not the most common.
okay. cool. no issue there right?
take a guess on who this guy is based off of.
the artist’s coworker? a generic guy? the artist himself? a relative? some random reference model they hired?
CHARLES MANSON. YES, THIS IS REAL. MEANING FOR A BRIEF MOMENT IN TIME, CHARLES MANSON’S FACE WAS USED AS A MEANS TO SELL COCA COLA.
the lead artist himself has even come forward to say this is the case. and now you may be asking wait. how’d he do this? how’d he possibly get away with this, years after the crimes had been committed?
well according to him, it was simple. apparently none of the contracts he signed said anything against putting a mass murderer on the can. so. there’s THAT.
unfortunately or fortunately depending on how you look at it, ok soda never really caught on since *surprise surprise!* teens really don’t want to buy soda that looks like a brutalist art museum, and it never had a wide release so it was only a thing for like two years between 1993 and 1995. but from what i’ve heard there’s still people who are giving this soda a small modern following, collecting all the cans and merchandise and even coming up with stand in recipes for the soda formula itself.
so yeah! that was ok soda.
what the fuck
There’s things you learn on this site that just stay with you. You know?
im weirdly knowlagable in the history of soda i dont even drink soda why do i know so much about it
coke and pepsi taste different because coke was invent before refrigeration so it was designed to be drunk warm, while pepsi was designed after refrigeration was invented so it was designed to be drunk cold. as a result the tastes are different but if you drink pepsi cold and coke warm theyll taste the same.
Why the fuck do you know this
i honestly have no idea
coke’s recipe was originally green but the designers made it brown so it looked more like tea
Had they never seen green tea?
i dont even know if green tea was invented in 1886 but they wanted to make the public more open to eating the fizzy drink
i will trade u information abt bees and carrier pigeons for information abt the history of soda
no one knows where the origin of the name ‘7up’ started but it did have a mood stabilizer in the original recipe found in present day anti-depressants
i want facts about bees and carrier pigeons now
Carrier pigeons come from a species of Wild Rock pigeon, and their flights could be as long as 1800 km and were used as early as 3000 years ago.
You know in old cartoons where a character throws a beehive at someone, and you think ‘lol, but that wouldn’t work in real life’. Turns out it would, and did. People used to lob beehives at the approximate location of the enemy forces to expose them.
this is amazing thank you
Threads like this are pretty much the reason I come to Tumblr
Coca-Cola was originally green because it was brewed with coca leaves (5 ounces of coca leaves to a gallon of syrup in the original formulation). They still use extractive of coca leaf as a flavoring, but the alkaloid has been removed. (Coca-Cola is the only company in the US licensed to import coca leaves, a fact I learned from John Sculley’s book on “The Cola Wars” - he said PepsiCo had reverse-engineered the formula for Coke and were ready to market it as “Savannah Cola” during the New Coke debacle in the ‘80s, but they couldn’t get legal access to coca leaves, so that plan flopped.) I also read online that they now use kola nut extract rather than actual kola nuts, as of 2016.
