Surge.
I remember when Coca Cola (or was it Pepsi?) introudced Surge onto the market. They had commercials such as this one, a bunch of rambunctious youths run up, throw themselves in a barrel, and on the command of “SURGE!”, they, um, surged? by rolling themselves down a hill, to their destination… which was a bottle of… Surge, which was, apparently, as this commerical shows, the Ultimate Carbonated Beverage Drink.
I am briefly reminded of the sordid Cola War battles that took place in corporate underwritten public schools in the 1990s, which had one school have a “Coca Cola Day”, Homecoming Week-like students all jumped into Coca Cola t-shirts. One student chose to disrupt the event by wearing a Pepsi t-shirt, and there some legal curiosities bumped themselves in. I would like to think that student wasn’t particularly brand-loyal to Pepsi so much as Pepsi was the obvious conduit for a message of “WTF?” — though Pepsi stpped in and sent the kid a bunch of crap in the ensuing media storm. At any rate, Surge might have gotten further had the cola company had high schools do this barrel-roll to the Surge as a Physical Education activity. (Hey! It couldn’t beat that middle school “yo-yo” exhibition and assembly meeting, which loaded the school down with yo-yos such that they had to figure out what to do with them– which apparently do a 2 week yo-yoing for PE for the next decade.)
We are shortly going to have Bush unleash his new “Surge” product. At the moment, the public is not buying it. Maybe he can get together with the Coca Cola Company (it was Coke, wasn’t it?), and give away their back-stock of Surge at his “listening tour” — or whatever he is going to be doing here.