The Fantanas
Coca-Cola invented four fictional spokes-girls to lip-sync about wanting Fanta, and for most of the 2000s the jingle lived in everyone's head rent-free. Each Fantana repped a flavor; together they were the bubbliest, most aggressively catchy thing on television. "Wanta Fanta — don't you wanta?"
Ogilvy & Mather built the campaign for Coca-Cola starting in 2001, and the four Fantanas debuted in 2002: Nina for strawberry, Calli for orange, Leelee for pineapple, and Raquel for grape, complete with a manufactured backstory about being discovered on Fantana Island. The "Wanta Fanta" jingle — produced by John Alters and co-written by Alters and Eric Kupper — did the actual work: the women on screen lip-synced while session singers made it inescapable.
The campaign's trick was reinvention. The lineup cycled through a "Mod" era from 2004 to 2006 and a "Party" phase through 2009, then a full 2009 relaunch with four new Fantanas, before an eventual co-ed rebrand in 2017; Robot Chicken parodied them in 2006, the surest sign the culture had absorbed them. The joke underneath is that Fanta itself is old — born in Germany in 1940 as a wartime Coca-Cola substitute and not widely available in the US until the 1960s. But for a generation of American kids, the soda simply is those four women and that jingle, learned by heart before anyone thought to ask why.
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