Pepsi
From Futurepedia, the Back to the Future Wiki
Pepsi-Cola was a company that manufactured various soft drinks. In 2015, they sold Pepsi, Diet Pepsi, Pepsi Max, Pepsi Free, and Pepsi Perfect.
Marty McFly was a drinker of Pepsi products, as well as his son Martin McFly Jr.
Below are a series of instances involving Marty and Pepsi:
- Marty had a can of Diet Pepsi Free beside his bed
- Marty was drinking a Diet Pepsi during dinner in 1985, as was his brother Dave.
- At Lou's Cafe, Lou demanded that Marty order something. After Marty asked for a Tab, he asked for a Pepsi Free, and was told that if he wanted a Pepsi, he would have to pay for it. Lou's restaurant has advertisements for Pepsi on the walls as well, including a thermometer.
- The Baines family has a half-full bottle of Pepsi on their dinner table
- In 1955, Marty got a bottle of Pepsi from a vending machine at Texaco, but tried unsuccessfully to twist off the cap. George has to open the bottle for him, using the bottle opener built into the machine.
- The loudspeaker used by Marvin Berry & the Starlighters sat upon an upside down Pepsi crate, although the crate was gone by the time Marty started playing the guitar.
- Marty hitched a ride on the back of a Jeep, and the driver was wearing a cap that advertised Mountain Dew, another product of the company.
When Marty arrived in 2015, there were no other cola brands visible to him except for Pepsi products. Pepsi Perfect was vitamin-enriched, and came in a bottle with its own built-in straw. Due to inflation, a bottle of Pepsi cost almost fifty dollars.
[edit] Behind the scenes
In commentary on the DVD, Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale discussed product placement, and said that they looked for products that had changed appearance between 1955 and 1985. While the Coke bottle had remained the same during that time, the Pepsi bottle's appearance had undergone several redesigns during the same period, and Pepsi products were featured as part of the first two films. Although the advertising agency wanted the reference to Tab (a Coca-Cola product) dropped, Gale commented that the joke was too good to leave out. A reference to a "cherry Coke" remained in the final production.
Ironically, Coca-Cola was featured even more prominently in the first drafts of the Back to the Future script than Pepsi was in the final version, and for entirely different reasons. In the first script, Marty accidentally spilled Coke into the power circuits of the time machine, and the resulting chemical reaction between the cola and the plutonium made it possible to generate enough electricity to power to make time travel possible. In addition, the script called for Marty to return to a world where Coca-Cola was the main power source.
After 1985, actor Michael J. Fox was signed to a deal to appear in Pepsi commercials.
Pepsi was not invented until 1898 (and Coke in 1886) so there were no colas in the 1885 setting for Back to the Future Part III. However, there was a Pepsi billboard at the Pohatchee Drive-In as Marty prepared to leave 1955.
[edit] Appearances
- Back to the Future
- Back to the Future Part II (Pepsi Perfect in the Cafe 80's)
- Back to the Future Part III (Pohatchee billboard)
