Chilly Bang! Bang! Juice
OR
Why Sarcastic Teenagers Make Bad Focus Groups
In April of 1989, Mackie International, a stateside distributor for Japanese exporter The Dacay Group, began selling and marketing Chilly Bang! Bang! Juice, a new fruit drink for kids. The gimmick for the drink was simple: unlike Capri Sun's metallic pouch or Hi-C's corrugated cardboard rectangle, the Juice came in a container shaped like a gun.
That's right, folks. A pistol.
And what's more, to drink the juice, you had to tear off a plastic tab from the barrel, stick the gun in your mouth, and pull the trigger. Mm .. that's some good hari-kari!
Needless to say, an uproar from soccer moms and other various entities bent on destroying children's sense of fun brought the company to its knees, production was halted, and the 30,000 guns left on the shelf sold out in their due course.
In August of 1989, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) and Mackie International issued a recall of the guns, citing the removable barrel tab as being a "choking hazard" for small children. Of course, the real reason for the recall was obvious, but a crisis was averted.
What few guns are left were no doubt thrown away. I imagine this would be a highly collectable item for 80s toy fans.
Sources
- http://www.hamline.edu/~mhotujec/text/wierd_news
- http://www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/prerel/prhtml89/89075.html