Airdate: Pepsi, Where’s My Jet?

Challenge accepted!

Upcoming Netflix documentary Pepsi, Where’s My Jet? tells the story of a 1996 American competition entrant who took on the soft drink giant at their word when they joked that 7,000,000 “Pepsi points” could be traded for his very own Harrier fighter jet!

The year was 1996, and the cola wars were raging. Despite Pepsi’s celeb-soaked advertisements, Coke still held the bigger market share, so the second-place brand decided to roll out their biggest campaign ever: Called “Pepsi Stuff,” it featured a soon-to-be infamous commercial implying that if you just bought enough of their products, you could use “Pepsi Points” to purchase sunglasses, leather jackets… and maybe a Harrier jet? Pepsi execs assumed the astronomical “price” of the military plane was set high enough to indicate it was a joke, but college student John Leonard saw it as a challenge, and decided to call their bluff. Enlisting the help (and funding) of mountaineering buddy Todd Hoffman, Leonard hashed out a plan to score the grandest prize of all – even if it never existed in the first place. Shot in a rollicking, irreverent style and soaked in the music and culture of the mid-’90s, Pepsi, Where’s My Jet? sits down with Leonard, Hoffman, the commercial’s creative team, and a truly unexpected cast of tangentially-involved public figures to tell the legendary tale of the kid who sued Pepsi for a fighter jet, and became the hero of a new generation.

Thursday November 17 on Netflix.