Crystal Pepsi was a clear, caffeine-free cola that PepsiCo launched in the United States in the early 1990s, riding a brief but intense cultural fascination with transparency as a signal of purity and health. It looked like sparkling water but tasted, more or less, like Pepsi — a deliberate paradox that the company bet would feel modern, clean, and futuristic to a health-conscious consumer. For a moment, it was one of the most talked-about new products in America.
The drink arrived during the early-90s clarity craze, when clear products were marketed everywhere as cleaner and more wholesome: Clearly Canadian sparkling water, Zima from Coors, and a wave of clear soaps and dish detergents from brands like Ivory. PepsiCo’s gamble was that the same logic could sell a cola — strip out the caramel color and the caffeine, keep the cola flavor, and present the result as a purer take on a familiar favorite. It test-marketed the product in 1992 and rolled it out nationally in 1992 and 1993, anchored by a famous Super Bowl XXVII commercial in January 1993 set to Van Halen’s song Right Now.
Trial was strong — curiosity drove a lot of people to try it once — but repeat purchases fell away quickly. Many consumers found a clear cola disorienting: it tasted like cola but did not look like one, a mismatch between expectation and experience that proved hard to overcome. A hurried reformulation, rebranded as Crystal from Pepsi, only muddled the proposition further, and an aggressive competitive response from Coca-Cola helped sour the whole clear-soda category.
PepsiCo pulled Crystal Pepsi in 1994, barely two years after its splashy debut. It has since become one of the most cited product flops in American marketing, studied in business schools and remembered fondly enough that PepsiCo brought it back in limited runs in 2016, 2017, and again around 2022 to capitalize on 90s nostalgia.
For most of the twentieth century, Pan American World Airways was less an airline than an idea of American reach. Founded in 1927 by Juan Trippe, it became the de facto flag carrier of a country that had no official one, the company that taught the United States how to fly across oceans. The blue globe on its tailfins was a corporate logo doing the work of a national emblem, and for decades the assumption that Pan Am went wherever it wanted was, more or less, true.
It earned that stature by being first at almost everything that mattered. Pan Am pioneered transoceanic passenger flight with the Clipper flying boats of the 1930s, launched the commercial jet age as the launch customer for the Boeing 707, and ushered in the wide-body era as the airline that talked Boeing into building the 747. By the time Stanley Kubrick put a Pan Am shuttle into the orbital sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the brand had become cultural shorthand for the future itself.
And yet Pan Am carried a structural flaw that its glamour disguised: it had built a magnificent international network on top of almost no domestic one. As long as overseas flying was tightly regulated and Pan Am held the routes, that did not matter. After the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 turned US aviation into a brawl, it mattered enormously. Pan Am had no domestic feeder system to fill its international seats, and no easy way to build one.
The end came in pieces — an oil shock, a ruinous acquisition, a fire sale of the company’s best assets, and finally the December 1988 bombing of Flight 103 over Lockerbie, which killed 270 people and broke whatever confidence travelers had left. Pan Am filed for bankruptcy in January 1991 and shut down for good on December 4, 1991, the most famous name in the history of commercial aviation switching off its lights in a single afternoon.
LaserDisc was the format that was right about everything except whether anyone would buy it. Introduced in 1978 as the first commercial optical video disc, it arrived two decades before the technology it pioneered became a mass-market phenomenon. It looked like a silver LP record, played a sharper picture than any tape could manage, and offered features that would not reach most living rooms until the DVD era. It also never sold in serious numbers, and it knew it almost from the start.
Developed jointly by Philips and MCA and launched under the DiscoVision name, the disc was a twelve-inch, double-sided platter storing analog video read by a laser. Its picture quality, roughly 425 lines of resolution, clearly outclassed VHS and Betamax, and later discs added digital audio, freeze-frame and chapter access, and the supplementary material that would define the format’s legacy: director commentaries, special editions, and curated transfers that film enthusiasts treasured.
The Criterion Collection, now a byword for serious home video, began on LaserDisc, releasing Citizen Kane and King Kong in 1984 and pioneering the commentary track and the carefully restored transfer. For a small but devoted audience of videophiles, collectors, and film buffs, LaserDisc was simply the best way to watch movies at home, and it held that crown for well over a decade.
But it could not record, the discs were heavy and expensive, the players cost a great deal, many films required a disc flip or side change partway through, and some discs fell victim to a degradation known as ‘laser rot.’ LaserDisc stayed a premium niche, strongest by far in Japan, while VHS owned the mainstream. Then the DVD, which LaserDisc had directly inspired, arrived smaller, cheaper, and eventually recordable, and the parent format had no answer. Pioneer made the last LaserDisc players in 2009.