Hi-C Ecto Cooler
The radioactive-green juice box with Slimer grinning on the label. Hi-C's Ecto Cooler was a Ghostbusters tie-in that tasted like tangerines, glowed neon green, and lived in a generation's lunchboxes long after the cartoon was gone.
Ecto Cooler launched in the late 1980s (sources disagree on the exact year) as a Hi-C tie-in with the animated series The Real Ghostbusters, itself spun off from the 1984 film. It wasn't a new recipe so much as a rebrand: Hi-C's existing Citrus Cooler flavor, dyed a fluorescent green and rechristened after the ghostly "ecto" theme, with the slime ghost Slimer plastered on the box.
The genius was the mismatch — a drink marketed as orange and tangerine that came out glowing green — and it made the foil-topped box a lunchbox staple. Remarkably, it outlived the cartoon, which was cancelled in 1991, coasting on pure kid loyalty for years afterward.
As the Ghostbusters license faded, Slimer was quietly dropped from the packaging around 1997, and the drink limped on under new names — Shoutin' Orange Tangergreen in 2001, then Crazy Citrus Cooler in 2006 — before being discontinued in 2007. Coca-Cola brought Ecto Cooler back for a limited run in 2016 to coincide with the Ghostbusters reboot, proving the nostalgia had never really drained away.
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