Rondo Thirst

In the summer of 1979, I started seeing commercials for a new soft drink called Rondo that strongly appealed to my adolescent male self. In the commercial, we'd see guys engaging in extreme sports or other vigorous activity as a macho-sounding voiceover said, "This man is working up a Rondo Thirst. And when he gets done, he's doesn't want a soda that he has to sip. He's gonna want a Rondo!"

Next we'd see one of the dudes swigging one down from an aluminum can, with sweat dripping off his face and droplets of soda-pop coming off the side of his mouth, while the voiceover continued, "Rondo is lightly carbonated so you can slam it down fast! Rondo has a clean citrus taste that's never sticky!" Finally, the dude in the commercial would crush the aluminum can he just slammed down in his fist and the voiceover said, "Rondo! The thirst crusher!" The label even looked like a beer can with the word "premium" and the slogan "blended from fine essences."

The commercial inspired lots of young guys like myself to drink Rondo, and even challenge our friends to Rondo-slamming contests, where we'd see who could slam one down the fastest, with the winner being determined by who would crush the emptied can first in his bare hand, just like in the commercial. (Try impressing the girls with THAT. "Hey babe, I'm a champion Rondo slammer!") In my area, Rondo was also available in 16 oz. returnable glass bottles, which would be a lot more difficult (not to mention dangerous) to crush in your bare hand. 

Rondo, marketed by Cadbury-Schweppes, originated in Australia as a soft drink called Solo, with a nearly identical label and commercials (with an Aussie-accented macho voiceover). The name was changed to Rondo in the U.S. because at the time, there was a brand of dog food called Solo. A Cadbury-Schweppes spokesman said in a July 1979 article for the Washington Post-LA Times wire service, "The word Rondo really has no meaning. It's just a computer name...but it sounds familiar and macho, doesn't it?" 

The product was test marketed in 1977 and 1978, rolled out nationally in 1979 and was "aimed at the 14-to-25-year-old active male segment because they are the single biggest consumers of soft drinks. And these heavy users are seeking a thirst-quenching, lower carbonated drink with less sugar," according to an industry spokesman in the Post-Times article. In 1980, sugar-free Rondo was introduced with a softer ad campaign.

By about 1981, the marketers decided those Rondo commercials were a little too macho, that they were actively turning off female consumers (who do most of the grocery buying). New commercials featured people relaxing in various outdoor settings while an adult contemporary-style jingle sang, "Sippin' a Rondo is laid-back and easy." (I can tell you, those commercials actively turned ME off. I didn't want something to sip, I wanted something to slam down fast! Whiskey is for sippin'.) 

Sales plummeted further, and the macho dude commercials made a brief comeback, but by 1984, Rondo was no longer available, at least in my area. 

The Squirt Soft Drink Subjective Color Acid Test

On July 25, 1967, television viewers with black-and-white TV sets were startled to see flashes of color on their monochrome screens for about ten seconds during a 60-second soda-pop commercial. A letter to a columnist in the September 14, 1967 Detroit Free Press asked, "Before I see an eye doctor, let me ask Action Line: Is it possible to pick up color TV on a black and white set? I SWEAR I saw a Squirt soft-drink commercial in color. Not pink elephants Green Squirt!" The image was described in the newspaper column as a red, green and blue sign that had flashed on the screen.

A viewer in Chicago told Popular Photography magazine (July 1968), "I saw pink! It knocked me for a loop...the letters S-Q-U-I-R-T looked greenish or light turquoise...and it kept up for maybe 10 seconds." (Meanwhile a viewer in San Francisco claimed he didn't see anything colorful.)

   

It was the national debut of an experimental television commercial using a special production process that would give the optical illusion of color. The commercial first aired a few months earlier locally on KNXT, the CBS-owned television station in Los Angeles, and viewers there were just as stunned. Squirt and its advertising partner Color-Tel Corporation of Los Angeles, at the time decided to make no prior announcement of this experimental commercial, preferring to see just how viewers would respond. And respond they did. Within hours, thousands of viewers were asking if they really saw what they thought they did, color on their black-and-white TV screens, according to Popular Electronics magazine (October 1968).

The burst of color was not "living color" (as NBC frequently touted in the 1960s), but something called "subjective color." The process was developed by James F. Butterfield of Color-Tel, a corporation founded in Los Angeles in early 1966. It gave the illusion of color by pulsating white light in a particular sequence for each color with a rotating device attached to a regular black and white TV camera lens. Butterfield had found in his many years of research that the human brain perceives colors through complex electronic codes. Butterfield was able to figure out the individual codes for the colors red, green and blue, and by pulsating white light in predetermined patterns with the device on the camera lens, could induce the brain of the television viewer to perceive color. Beyond that, ordinary monochrome equipment could be used in filming or taping, broadcasting and viewing.

There were a few drawbacks. The images were nothing at all like true color TV. It didn't have the intensity or range of colors. As the technology currently stood, the effect could only be used on still images. The "subjective color" could only be seen in about one-fourth of the TV screen area, and, because it relied on flickering light, there was a lot of flickering. It was also found that some people could not perceive the colors at all, yet some people diagnosed as color-blind could see the colors.

Nonetheless, Popular Science, in its August 1968 issue, saw many possibilities for the technology, particularly for special effects. "Color will appear in cartoons, commercials and special presentations. Polka-dots on a clown's suit will be seen as red flashing dots. You'll see the designs and lettering on a cereal box in pulsating green and blue. A girl will plant a kiss on a boy's cheek--and a red lipstick print will appear on your screen."

Popular Electronics (October 1968) went on to report, "Right now, Color-Tel engineers are checking into the possibility of using electronic color for such things as color radar displays, color computer readouts, and perhaps even color sonar pictures. It may be true that, in its present stage of development, Butterfield's process is nothing but a scientific curiosity — however, 25 years ago, so was television."

Popular Science predicted, "You can expect color on your black-and-white TV by this fall [1968]." But there was one giant flaw in that rosy prediction. By 1968, black-and-white TV was well on the way out. The vast majority of programming (outside of old movies and TV shows) were being broadcast in "living" color by then, and while most U.S. households still had black-and-white TV sets (color sets were big, bulky and expensive in those days), more and more homes were purchasing color television sets every year. Had James F. Butterfield perfected the process ten or fifteen years earlier, in the 1950s when 90 percent of television broadcasts were black and white, it might have had more of a serious impact.

Although James F. Butterfield had many patents to his credit before his death in 2013, it appears this experiment didn't go as far as the press of the time might have suggested it could. Color-Tel last renewed as a corporation in 1972, and we can not find any evidence of other "subjective color" broadcasts beyond the Squirt commercial.

7-Up Folklore

While it's no longer the case, in the Twentieth Century, 7-Up was a major soft drink brand, for a time the largest-selling non-cola (or Uncola) soft drink. With its crisp carbonated lemon-lime flavor it was a refreshing drink and popular mixer with hard liquor, and its advertising almost rivaled Coca-Cola's in its volume, with ads appearing in major magazines, TV and radio, and on signage outside of diners and ma-and-pa corner stores across the United States and foreign lands. There was also a lot of folklore that surrounded the soda-pop that came in the emerald-green bottles. For instance, there's a story of how 7-Up was able to put out a cooking fire and baste hams at the same time.

The alleged account appeared in the October 2, 1946 issue of the 7-Up Refresher, a newsletter for a group of Midwestern 7 Up bottlers, supposedly recounting a conversation between women in a beauty parlor after a fire truck went by. According to the short piece, one of the women told this story:

"During the holidays we were cooking several hams on top of the stove. Somehow or other the flame from the gas jet ignited the grease on the ham, and in an instant all the hams were ablaze. Flames were shooting up in an alarming way and we all were running around hysterically. Someone phoned the fire department but it looked as though the whole kitchen would be [on] fire before the firemen came.

"There happened to be a case of 7-UP on the floor. My nephew grabbed a bottle, pulled the cap, shook it with his thumb over the top and then squirted the stream of 7-UP at the burning hams. It blanketed the blaze and soon everyone had a bottle of 7-UP squirting at the hams. When the fire department arrived, the fire was all out and the hams were cooking away unharmed.

"You know, far from doing any damage, the 7-UP improved the flavor of the ham--it's the finest basting we ever had for them. Plain water would have ruined them all and probably wouldn't have put out the fire either. I always have said that one bottle of 7-UP is worth a gallon of water!"

On the same page was this unrelated anecdote:

"Little Johnnie was taking his third grade spelling the other day and was asked to spell the word straight. He spelled out s-t-r-a-i-g-h-t. The teacher pronounced the word as being correct and then asked the meaning of the word.

"Johnnie answered: 'Without 7-UP.'"