Why can I still buy Sparks?
One of the colorful ads that, according to state attorneys, was aimed at attracting underage drinkers. What they failed to realize is that Sparks was really targeting the vast Urban Manchild market share and picked up teenagers by mistake.
When I first heard about the government winning the war on Sparks, thus forcing 19-year-olds across the land to take the extra step of combining Red Bull and vodka, the press release from Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller seemed to clearly state that there would be no Sparks, no longer:
MillerCoors will stop producing, marketing and selling “Sparks,” its top-selling pre-mixed alcoholic energy drinks, Attorney General Tom Miller said Thursday.
Seems pretty straightforward, right?
On top of that, much of the Death of Sparks coverage on my radar was of a mournful, candle-in-the-wind bent: It’s gone. It’s dead. After January 10, 2009, it’s OK Cola.
Friends with whom I used to drink Sparks in college and I were therefore bummed that a historically accurate recreation of that one legendary night of the taser, the two feet of snow and the ¿Quien Es Mas Macho? contest was now off the table for future college reunions.
We made some grandiose statements about the end of an era, swore up and down we were going to buy up all the remaining cases in the city for future black-market sale out of an ice-cream truck parked behind Making Time, forgot, then promptly turned to crystal meth to make up for the loss in party stamina.
Kidding about the meth part! Meth is terrible! But when orange-and-silver cans continued to show up on shelves well after the back inventory should have run out, I shrugged, figured maybe MillerCoors had taken it to court after all and forgot about it just as completely as I forgot about my stockpile/grocery cart/Making Time plan.
But wait, have you looked at those cans lately?