Pepsi is betting that America's soda pop lovers desperately miss the ’90s as the soft drink giant announced that the confusing Crystal Pepsi is returning to shelves come August. The “clear alternative” to normal colas was first released nationwide in 1993, the same year that such cultural phenomenons as Hocus Pocus and Beanie Babies were unleashed into the world. If you want a good sense of what the world was like then, look no further than this Crystal Pepsi commercial:
The spot hails the clear soft drink as a “taste of the future,” but now that we're in the future that seems about as wrong a prediction as that we'd have flying cars by now (we still can't even get those damn self-driving automobiles to work).
When the beverage was first released, sales were solid. But after a few months they quickly fizzled and the drink was taken off of shelves in fall of 1993, presumably because consumers across the country collectively thought, “There's no reason why this needs to be clear.”
Crystal Pepsi's failure was in part due to Tab Clear, a nearly identical soda released by Coca-Cola in response to their competitor's transparent beverage. Both of the drinks failed, but Pepsi is trying to rekindle Crystal's spirit by bringing it back to the masses for some inexplicable reason.
The re-release follows a short-lived campaign for the product last December in which Pepsi fans had the opportunity to win a six-pack of the stuff by entering a sweepstakes. Now, the execs over at America's second-largest soft drink company are bringing the clear beverage back in full force—even though no one asked for it.