Leftovers: The Pepsi Video

sjlemme
3 min readMay 13, 2022

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Welcome to Leftovers, the term I’ve decided to use for blog posts where I dump the stuff I couldn’t cram into my videos. Let’s look at some of the bits that didn’t make it into my first video, Into the Pepsiverse.

Peter Arnell is an extremely quotable person — try as I might, I just couldn’t fit some of his quips into the script. One that particularly stings for me is this gem:

“When I did the Pepsi logo, I told Pepsi that I wanted to go to Asia, to China and Japan, for a month and tuck myself away and just design it and study it and create it … There was a lot of research, a lot of consumer data points … and dialogue that I had with the folks at Pepsi, consumers and retailers. We knew what we were doing.”

This is like peak Arnell craziness. I love the thought process of “Pepsi logo? I know exactly what I must do — get me a plane ticket to Japan!” I first found it referred to in an advertising publication, and I spent a couple of hours on the Wayback machine tracking the original source down.

I then found it on Wikipedia after I was done, and I realized that no one would believe that I had spent the effort to find it on my own. Ultimately, the video just didn’t end up flowing in a direction where it would fit, but I like it too much not to find a home for it here.

Here’s another good one! While I was going through media sources for quotes and b-roll, I happened upon this excellent moment:

In the interview, this was just a (weird) time reference for an unrelated story, so I felt like including it as is would be a misrepresentation. Still, it’s a very funny bit, and I wanted to share it.

I also ended up making a lot of joke Pepsi logos for a bit that I ended up cutting. One of them did make it into the final (which I have dubbed “Biblically-accurate Pepsi”), but the rest will have to go here:

For posterity, here’s Biblically-accurate Pepsi:

While I’m here, let’s talk music. I ended up composing 3 basic variants on the classic Pepsiman theme for this video — a ‘standard’ take, a slower shuffle, and a fast punchier version. Here they are in full:

https://sjlemme.com/freebies/pepsiman-normal-full.wav

https://sjlemme.com/freebies/pepsiman-fast.wav

https://sjlemme.com/freebies/pepsiman-slow.wav

The full version of the standard variant doesn’t actually appear in the video — to fit the intro sequence, I significantly shortened it. Here’s the shortened cut:

https://sjlemme.com/freebies/pepsiman-normal-short.wav

And with that, I think we’ve covered most of the bases. My next video is in the works and it will be out before the month is over. Thanks for taking a look at this random junk with me!

— sjl

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