Script
I was 11 for all but two days of 1994. It was a momentous personal era – formative – and youth time is approximately 42 times longer than adult time. The things I remember from that year – events, movies, tv, products, friends, the basic minutiae of life – seem to be more than 365 days could possibly contain.
I can think of a few explanations for this.
- That’s just the way memory works. Certain years imprint on you more than others. 11 years old seems to be a common time for that to happen.
- My family moved. Just a few blocks away, but when you are young, your neighborhood is your world. Friends are based on proximity more than anything, so moving means new friends, more often than not, and new friends can mean a wholly new lifestyle. This was the case for me. The move from 27th Avenue North to Woodcrest Drive marked the change from the Courtney Shattuck years to the Jeff Edlund years.
- In early 1994 I was in sixth grade at Longfellow Elementary School, the “good” public elementary school. We were very wholesome. Kids. The biggest scandal that year involved Scott Winjum being suspended for igniting a single match in the boy’s bathroom. Then there was summer and the move. By the end of the year I was in Junior High School, and the so called “kids” from Horace Mann Elementary were finger banging each other and smoking cigarettes. It was a real shock.
- My tastes were changing. I was shifting away from consuming whatever, culturally, appeared in front of me to seeking out particular things, developing taste. I went from Richard Marx singing about waiting for his beloved over synths to, mostly, guitar heavy songs about being sad. I’m still not sure that was an improvement.
So the beginning of 1994 and the end of it really seem like two different lifetimes. Lifetimes which carved many lasting wrinkles in my juvenile brain meat.
Here’s an incomplete list of things I remember, which I’m setting to Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start” the fire, even though that’s a little on the nose and a total cliché. That song was a big part of my life in 1994 – Billy Joel was so omnipresent at this point, he seemed like a neighbor – so I think it fits.
All right. Here we go.
“We Didn’t Start the Fire”
Bill Clinton, Special K, hot pockets microwaved
Courtney Shattuck, Jeff Edlund, Longfellow.
Rock and Cindy Messerschmidt, mini van, television
Chad and Ryan, mom’s cryin’, Super Nintendo
Michael Jordan, Scotty Pippen, Mugsy Bogues, Cal Ripkin
Forrest Gump, Goldeneye, Airheads, True Lies.
Elementary’s ending, Junior high, I’m a tween,
Lite Rock 105, family moved to Woodcrest Drive
I didn’t start the fire
I was only eleven
just a passive observer
I didn’t start the fire
All in all
94 was a good year
Full House, Family Matters, Step by Step, TGIF
Hulk Hogan, Bryan Adams, not a good Woodstock
Quiz Show and the Crow, I gave jerking off a go,
Green Day, Offspring, alternative rock
Simpsons, Frasier Crane, Sister Sister, Major Payne
Sleep Overs, Duckman, Ace Ventura, Kerrigan
Harding, Gingrich, Ross Perot, Make a Wish
Mountain Dew, Big League Chew, I got my own room
I didn’t start the fire
I was only eleven
just a passive observer
I didn’t start the fire
All in all
94 was a good year
Peter Paruccinni was my friend, so were Erik Vosseteig,
Paul, Cody, Josh, and Tony, Jake Schaan and Ben
West Acres, Hornbachers, moldy fruit in my locker
Kurt Cobain, suicide, Jeff Edlund bought Insesticide
Buddy Holly, Weezer, baseball with Peter
Juji Fruits, husky jeans, swimming in a white t
U2, Wisconsin Dells, Stephen King, Dad yells
Watched scrambled porno, read Crichton’s Congo
I didn’t start the fire
I was only eleven
just a passive observer
I didn’t start the fire
All in all
94 was a good year
Grisham, REM, Mr. Discher teaches gym
SNL, Lutherans, Wings in the basement
Computers, Castlevania, Jim Carrey Mania
Ben Franklin Junior High, I was still pretty shy
More kids, school dance, some kids say they’re having sex,
Sixth grade, I got all a’s, I also did in seveth grade!
I didn’t start the fire
I was only eleven
just a passive observer
I didn’t start the fire
All in all
94 was a good year
This song has too many verses
I bought Pearl Jam’s versus,
Farley, Spade, Myers, Saturday Night Live
Cute girls take a pass, Wes Staton’s in my class
“Wheel of Fortune”, Billy Joel, Metallica, Tootsie Roll
Lego sets, homeless vets, AIDS, crack, Bernie Goetz
Hypodermics on the shores, China’s under martial law
Rock and roller cola wars, I can’t take it anymore
I didn’t start the fire
I was only eleven
just a passive observer
I didn’t start the fire
The year is gone,
But it still lives on thanks to this song
I didn’t start the fire
I was only eleven
just a passive observer
I didn’t start the fire
All in all
94 was a good year
I didn’t start the fire
I was only eleven
just a passive observer
I didn’t start the fire
All in all
94 was a good year
Anyway, I tell you all of that to get to this. Somehow, OK Soda is a kind of synecdochye, a part of a thing that wholly represents all of it, for 1994 and my experience within it.
Even typing the words OK Soda fills me with oceans of sticky sweet nostalgia.
Ok Soda was a soda. A pop, as most folks call it up here – it’s shameful what we’ve done with language – made by the good folks at the Coca Cola Corporation, dreamed up by the same ad wizards that created New Coke, the Coke that tasted like a Pepsi. Full caloried sodas were all the rage back then, as the boomers hadn’t yet caught the health food bug. It was wreaking havoc on everyone as has pretty much everything the boomers did and didn’t do. Also many things they kind of did. As a result, everybody in 1994 was hideous – bloated and pallid, capped by fluffy hair, wearing either long sleeve, white collared polos with pleated khakis or Big Johnson t-shirts and jeans so grotesque you wouldn’t believe me if I described them to you.
Ok Soda was created for one purpose – to obtain the spending money of the cynical slackers known a Generation X. These plaid clad sneering lay-abouts were hip to the wiles of the advertisers thanks to such rabble rousers as John Cusack, Howard Zinn, Chester Cheetah, and their droll, aged but fearless leader, Kurt Loder, so a new tact was needed.
The tact was this: go meta. Gen X loved meta. They wore shirts that said loser and zero, for cripes sake.
So, meta the Coca Cola Corporation went, as far as a massive multi-national corporation can go, anyway, which is to say, they designed some interesting packaging and pushed out a few droll commercials. Also, there was a phone number, which we’ll get to.
The advertising campaign went something like this: It took the form of a fifties commercial – a cheery male voice and some upbeat Tijuana Brass style background music. But, instead of doing you the tremendous solid of informing you of the many health benefits of Lucky Strike cigarettes – and they’re so Smooooooth! – the voice was, gasp!, telling you that nothing matters and everything is artifice, but not even that matters and things are going to be OK. Irony, I believe it’s called, though, you know, let’s not get into the definition of irony.
Here’s a clip of one of those commercials:
(commercial)
God, don’t you just want to drink whatever soda it is they’re selling? To hold a cold or even room temperature can of that unremarked upon beverage in your prepubescent fist and be a part of that blissful indifference and hip cynicism? I do.
And the packaging! My god, it was and is something to behold. I have an empty can sitting on my shelf and I still get lost in its studied, market tested, expensive lo-fi coolness. There’s a Daniel Clowse drawing on it! Daniel Clowse! He’s a guy from the underground that people know! It’s silver with black print and a few red highlights, so Coke basically, but cool Coke. The Clowse drawing is of a dazed looking young man staring right at you with blank, hypnotized eyes. Another can has a bored looking man with, blank, unhypnotized eyes. Yet another can has a dazed looking woman with blank, gypsy eyes. Yet another has a sort of Picasso type face and yet another has a weird red man in a bowler hat. Collect ‘em all!
On the back there’s a UPC code over a guy’s face as if to say, “We’re all just products in corporate America.” Whoa. And then on the top it says “Ok Soda says, “Don’t be fooled into thinking there has to be a reason for everything,” with just a few more quotation marks than you might expect. Sooooo, subversive.
There are also a couple of comics panels – the bland, vaguely sad hip graphic novel type that maybe make people think, not the fun kind that make people happy. Very thought provoking. Very deep. As if that weren’t enough there’s a numbered coincidence, to make you feel like you should probably find a way to hear about the other coincidences. Mine says:
(coincidence)
And if you look really closely there are all kinds of wry nods at anti-commercialism on there! Easter eggs, I guess they’d be called today. I adore anti-commercialism and will pay any amount of money, buy any product, to make that known! I’m such a 90s kid!
I’d love nothing more than to kick back on a Friday night and crack open a sixer of OK Sodas with my pals Eddie Vedder and Pam from the Real World San Francisco and talk in low tones about how much we hate corporations while seated in a tucked away corner of a party we’re too cool for! And I realize that this probably comes off as sarcastic, but I promise you that this sounds like heaven on earth to this old Dad’s ears. As a 90s kid, I simply cannot help but sound sarcastic at all times. It’s a real burden.
There was also a phone number, as I mentioned, 1-800-IFEELOK. You could call and leave a message about some wild coincidence that occurred while you were guzzling OK Soda or just listen to the messages of other dedicated consumers, in case you were feeling alone in your fandom or just in general, I guess.
Anyway, for all of my life, right up until just moments ago, I assumed this was a national campaign. But I was wrong. Turns out, Fargo, where I live and lived, was a test market for OK Soda, which might be why it imprinted so strongly, not just on me, but everyone my age give or take from around here. We’re not a test market for a lot of things, as far as I know. We had OK vending machines and the grocery stores were fully stocked with cleverish OK displays. There were radio ads. Television ads. Newspaper ads.
The target marketing was so effective because it was pointed right at me, like a diabetes gun or a childhood obesity crossbow or a cavity axe.
Well, maybe not right at me. I think I fell a bit short age-wise of their target market, but I also don’t think the target market fell for their campaign. I didn’t have quite as many defenses up. Just about no defenses, actually, outside of a lack of funds.
Now, it’s entirely possible I only drank OK Soda a handful of times. It wasn’t around for long, I never purchased anything on my own, and I can’t imagine my parents were keeping it stocked.
But it feels like I drank it all the time.
And somehow it felt like a revelation. A soda is a strange place to first experience counter culturalism in a meaningful way, but combined with everything else that was happening around that time, this was how I met the resistance.
Wry and disillusioned felt right to me.
The drink itself was completely beside the point of course, although I liked it. Tasted like Suicide, where you pour all of the options in a fountain machine into one cup, which I was already doing regularly. They hardly mentioned the actual product in the ad except to call it fruity and curious, whatever that means.
But the ad campaign spoke to new possibilities that I’d yet to consider. I called the phone number constantly, mostly from the payphone at El Zagel golf course, where I’d often play a sloppy 9 holes with friends.
I’d also attempt to call phone sex numbers, specifically one called 1-800-WET-BUTTS, which we all found hilarious because it is hilarious.
I was so enthralled with OK Soda that I set out to co-opt it to fund a boat I hoped to make, for some reason. Jeff Edlund and I had decided we should have a boat to sail down the Red River, a raft, to be more precise, which would be powered by a motor I’d make without any knowledge of motors from a toy motor kit I’d received for my birthday. It would never work, but no one told us this.
Jeff’s mom Patty bought us all the OK Soda you could fit in a Sam’s Club cart and we set up a soda stand – kind of like a lemonade stand but with soda and helmed by two homely tween boys far too old to be doing such a thing – and went about raising the funds for lumber.
We made a surprising amount of money, but I’m not sure what happened to it. There was never a boat, which is probably why I’m still alive to tell you all of this. The strong currents of the mighty Red surely would have sent us to our great reward.
Like my attempt to build a boat, OK SODA was a non-starter and was discontinued in 1995. Apparently the gen-xers were too busy smoking cigarettes and drinking cheap beer to go in on a dubiously flavored soda.
I think they made a terrible mistake, but they also gave us Pavement, so I’ll let it slide.
Anyway, I’m not sure I’ve successfully explained why OK Soda is so ingrained in my very being. A foundational text, laser printed on aluminum. But we’ll get there, I hope, in the thrilling prologue to all of this, next time on The Irrationally Exuberant.
