Kool-Aid

Kool-Aid was born in Hastings, Nebraska, where Edwin Perkins had been selling a liquid drink concentrate called Fruit Smack. In 1927, to cut shipping costs, he figured out how to remove the liquid and sell just the powder — and the packet drink was born, moving production to Chicago in 1931 and joining General Foods in 1953 (it lives under Kraft Heinz today). Nebraska never forgot: Hastings throws a Kool-Aid Days festival every August, and in 1998 the governor signed Kool-Aid in as the official state soft drink.

The mascot took a stranger road. He debuted in 1954 as "Pitcher Man" — a smiling face drawn on a frosted pitcher, inspired by the ad man Marvin Potts watching his son draw faces on a fogged window. Arms and legs arrived in 1974, and by the late 1970s the bit that made him immortal was standard: kids cry "Hey, Kool-Aid!", and a six-foot pitcher of cherry Kool-Aid demolishes the nearest wall, bellows "Oh yeah!", and pours drinks amid the rubble. By the 90s the Kool-Aid Man was a full multimedia franchise — he'd already starred in early-80s video games and his own comic books (battling villains called the Thirsties), and in 1994 he went computer-generated for the era's ads.

For 90s kids the drink itself was a ritual: the rip of the packet, the alarming cloud of unsweetened dust, the full measuring cup of household sugar the recipe genuinely required, and the neon result in colors nature never issued. Labels on the packets doubled as currency — Kool-Aid points clipped and mailed away for pitchers, t-shirts, and toys from the brand's mail-in catalog, one of the classic save-up-and-send-away rituals of the pre-internet kid economy. The Kool-Aid Man is still working today, still bursting through walls; the walls have never once pressed charges.