Juice Talk

One of the monkeys in the production department agreed with me that a morning show on cable-access TV during which we would discuss our favorite childhood beverages would be a blockbuster. Although we would speak often of “fruit drinks” and use slang like “bevs” for beverages, we agreed the name of the show will be Juice Talk. We would sit on an orange couch and sip the bevs about which we’d riff. Sample promo voiceovers for our show would include “Wake Up to Juice Talk!” or “The Juice is Loose!”

We developed a preliminary list of childhood beverages, each of which could comprise an episode of Juice Talk.

• Capri Sun (Careful! That straw is sharp!)
• Hawaiian Punch (“Go Hawaiian!”)
• Hershey’s syrup in milk
• Hi-C (Ecto Cooler! Flavor mixing! The pre-sweetened vs. non-sweetened debate!)
• Juicy Juice (The rich-kid juicebox of choice!)
• Kool-Aid (Hey, Kool-Aid Man!)
• McDonald’s orange drink, dispensed from those orange and yellow plastic coolers
• Nestlé strawberry-milk powdered mix
• Nik-L-Nip (What was that fluid?!)
• no-name sodas, like Faygo
• Slush Puppies (they always beat out Slurpees; also, at my local childhood swimming pool, I could request “a suicide,” which was code for the Puppie vendor to mix all of the flavors together into a bruise-colored fantasia that was like a party in my mouth to which everyone was invited.
• Sunny Delight (Wrong on both counts!)
• Tang
• those 25-cent multicolored drinks in squat, translucent plastic barrels topped with a foil seal
• those steel cans of pineapple juice with peel-off tabs
• Yoo-hoo