7 Fictional Drinks From Pop Culture (Tested In Real Life)
What do you get when you set a TV show during World War II, film it in the style of a '60s action pulp mag, and cram it full of enough alcohol to take down all of Nazi Germany? You get the ridiculously delightful Danger 5, a show about Nazis, spies, fighting, and drinking.
As you can clearly see in this screenshot from the show.
In addition to being televised entertainment at its finest, it holds the record of most drink requests I've received for one of these types of articles. I can't go into the comments section ...
... or on Facebook ...
... or even Twitter ...
... without someone requesting I try a drink from Danger 5.
Because I'm the kind of guy who always gives in to peer pressure, I decided to humbly poison myself with a ton of alcohol for your amusement as I have done before. Since I shamefully neglected such a great source of fictional cocktails in the past, I decided to focus solely on Danger 5 this go-around. But there's a lot of alcohol in that show. Seriously, have you seen it? They drink all the time. If I was going to do this, I was going to have to choose my cocktails wisely. And what better way to do that then go straight to the source? So I reached out to Danger 5's creators, Dario Russo and David Ashby, hoping they could offer me some guidance. Their response?
Well. Shit! If that's what the masterminds behind the show want, then that's what I'm going to do. So wish me luck as I drink six episodes' worth of Nazi-killing cocktails and try to cheat certain alcohol-related death.
The Beyond Chunderdome
Allow me to present the Beyond Chunderdome. This is a drink for all your bros and bro-wannabes to chug and then immediately die. It comes from the episode of Danger 5 called "Final Victory," in which Adolf Hitler amasses a team of giant monsters a la Godzilla or Voltron. Also, the monsters are Nazis and one has a flaming chainsaw.
This was the only drink on the list that required prior preparation in the form of a freezer, so I drank it first. That may have been a mistake.
The Cocktail
9 parts vodka
4 parts grape fruit drank
Freeze overnight
Serve in plastic cups
That cool, curvy glass up there is what nine parts vodka looks like. "Parts," I learned a bit too late in life, equates to an ounce or a little less than one full shot glass full of liquid. So, essentially, I'm expected to down nine shots of vodka in a single glass, which is a lot of fucking vodka. I mixed my vodka and laughable amount of grape juice into a cup and popped that sucker in the freezer overnight.
When I took it out the next day, I had a cold, purple slushee that smelled like everyone I hung out with in college. My first swig was actually not too bad. Anyone who has chugged vodka straight from the bottle can attest that it's not a big deal to gulp it down, especially if you're a seasoned drinker. The problem was the frozen slush and the grape juice made me want more because of the chilly, fruity aftertaste. I think the trick to this bad boy is that you'll want to drink as much as you can as fast as you can before your body knows it's poisoning itself. Before I knew it, the Chunderdome was gone and I was waking up naked, face down on my neighbor's lawn. Be that as it may, I would definitely recommend this drink to extremely depressed people who need to forget an entire evening, or to a small animal who wants to see what dying is like.
The Swiss Kiss
After the Chunderdome knocked me on my ass, I really needed something that went down smooth and didn't beat the crap out of me. That's why I next went for the Swiss Kiss, from the episode "Fresh Meat For Hitler's Sex Kitchen." This episode is about prostitutes infected with a disease that turns anyone they bone into a Nazi. It also takes place in Switzerland, the home country of my new favorite drink in the whole, wide world.
Typical Swiss ...
The Cocktail
2 parts creme de cacao
1 part vodka
Pour over crushed ice
Add milk
Finish with chocolate flakes
Don't tell my wife, but I'd totally fuck this drink. If you're sampling the ingredients as you go along, then every part of this drink is just enchanting. After dumping the crushed ice into my glass, I combined the cacao and vodka. I topped it off with milk and then dug around my pantry for chocolate flakes. I didn't have any in flake form, but I had plenty of chocolate, so I opted for a frozen Reese's cup that I ran through a cheese grater. If Willy Wonka became an alcoholic, he'd have a river of this stuff flowing through his entire factory.
This drink is so smooth and sweet, you would think it was Patrick Stewart. Even though I almost broke up with vodka in my previous entry, all was forgiven when I tried this drink. It's probably akin to a white Russian or a dulce de leche rum cocktail of some variety, but for me it was like an alcoholic chocolate milk. Until I have children, I think this might be the most beautiful thing I have ever put together. In fact, I'm considering just keeping a crib full of these in place of actual children.
The Fruit'n'Khamun
Just when things were starting to look up for me and my liver, one of my least favorite liquors reared its ugly head. I hate gin the way Mel Gibson loves it. So when I grabbed the recipe for this cocktail from the episode "Hitler's Golden Murder Palace," my throat tensed up and my body started to convulse like I was just tasered for waking up naked on my neighbor's lawn. I assume. I've never experienced that, because that totally never happened.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm not too excited for this entry.
The Cocktail
1 part gin
1 part pomegranate syrup
Fill with pineapple juice
Serve over crushed ice
My saving grace for this drink was that the pomegranate and pineapple proportions outweighed the amount of gin I would be tasting, so flooding Gin City with the equivalent of Carmen Miranda's hat was very exciting to me.
The result of this combination could only be described as "fruitylicious," because it was both fruity and delicious. Commercials, you can have that one for free. And even though I'm a guy who doesn't much care for gin, I would definitely recommend this drink to a friend. In fact, in my drunken stupor, I even added more gin to keep this sucker going a bit longer. The pomegranate and pineapple did their job well, because I got to the bottom of the glass with none of those arid, ginny consequences. You might think this cocktail would change my position on gin, but just thinking about that almost full bottle down on my bar shelf right now is giving me PTSD, so it's probably best to just move on.
The Chinese Whisper
This next cocktail had me mixing soda and liquor, which sounds like it should be great, but in reality has burned me time and time again in the past. So I had entered into this one with a kind of cautious optimism just to be on the safe side. The Chinese Whisper originated in the episode "Kill-Men Of The Rising Sun," in which Hitler and Emperor Hirohito create an army of unstoppable, brainwashed super soldiers to fight Danger 5. I learned some very important things from this episode, but none more important than the answer to the question: What the fuck is a lychee?
The Cocktail
1 part rice wine
1 part lychee juice
Pour over crushed ice
Fill with soda
Raise your hand if you've ever heard of lychee before today. I'll assume the only hands up are my own and one supermarket in a 100-mile radius of my house that sold lychee juice. Through my research, I found out lychee is a type of soapberry, which I had also never heard of but was nevertheless thrilled to try, especially because it has the word "soap" in it. So I got my ingredients together and cracked open the can of lychee.
My best description of the smell would be "a burning rubber tire's fart." Just like there's a smelly kid in every classroom, there has got to be a fruit you can label as "the stinky one." That would be lychee. To turn it into juice, I just dumped the whole she-bang into my blender and turned it on liquefy. When you add soda and sake to it, prepare to get a little sick about how the dissipating foam leaves you with this horrifying consequence:
Despite this cocktail's best efforts to turn me off, it turns out it's very refreshing. You mostly taste the soda, but you also get a hint, a whisper, if you will, of the lychee juice. Even though it smells like someone's colon, the taste of lychee is actually comparable to melon or anything you might find in a typical fruit cocktail. So if you're "lucky" enough to be able to find lychee juice at your local grocer, go ahead and pick up some sake and cola while you're at it, because this drink gets a thumbs-up in my opinion. At the very least, it's a good novelty that you can impress your friends with while acting all pretentious. "You've never had a Chinese Whisper? I suppose next you'll tell me you've never tried lychee."
The Carlos Sultana
Whenever I recommend Danger 5 to anyone, I always tell them about "Lizard Soldiers Of The Third Reich," the episode where Hitler acquires an army of Nazi dinosaur soldiers. And from now on, whenever I recommend a drink from Danger 5 to anyone, it's going to be the Carlos Sultana. Pretty much any drink that requires ice cream is going to be a complete banger, and the Sultana is certainly no exception.
The Cocktail
1 part dark rum
1 scoop vanilla ice cream
Fill with cream soda
Finish with raisins
I gotta tell you, that Carlos Sultana guy was on to something. The drink bearing his name is just great. I poured my dark rum into a pint glass, then plopped a scoop of ice cream on top. It was tough to not drink that whole thing as a shot, because it looked delicious. But I'd already had enough alcohol to slay a baby rhino, so I decided maybe that wasn't the best idea. Instead, I added my cream soda and sprinkled raisins to top it off. The cream soda and ice cream made a froth so thick, the raisins had nowhere to go.
A lot of the other drinks on this list were great at disguising themselves as nonalcoholic drinks, but that was not the case with the Sultana. The dark rum totally overpowers all the other flavors in the glass. But at the same time, you're aware you're drinking what boils down to basically a toddler's dessert. If you're not a fan of raisins, don't worry -- they might as well be nonexistent, because I certainly forgot about them until the end. And by that point, I had a bunch of alcohol-infused treats waiting for me at the bottom. So you're enjoying your rum-filled soda float, and then WHAM! Raisin surprise! This drink was superb from start to finish, and I honestly can't recommend it enough.
The Heil Hitler
Normally I would steer away from a drink named after one of the worst dudes ever, but the drink mentioned in the episode "I Danced For Hitler" contains orange soda, a beverage of which I am a big fan. Plus, I drink Arnold Palmers all the time and I think I read somewhere that he ate an entire baby once. So just know that I don't condone anything Hitler has done, but I really wanted to try this drink out for myself.
The Cocktail
2 parts dark rum
Crushed ginger
Fill with orange soda
My dark rum was getting a run for its money tonight! I knew from the Sultana that the rum would overpower the ginger and the soda, so I decided to use a lot of both. After adding the two parts, I started sprinkling the ginger on top. But it wasn't coming out fast enough, so I gave it a good shake and basically buried the whole drink under a giant clump of ginger. If you don't understand why that's a bad thing, track down some powdered ginger, put the tiniest bit on your fingertip and taste it. The upside is that at least it would combat the rumness of it all. After topping it all off with the soda, I was ready to Heil my Hitler.
Admittedly, I was a little drunk at this point, so my stirring capabilities were limited. This resulted in a fucking mouthful of ginger powder, which caused a little bit of a gagging fit, proving that even after his death, Hitler is still causing problems. But that wasn't going to affect my assessment of the drink, so I took another swig. This one brought me to a revelation I never would have come to on my own: Rum and orange soda go great together! I'd go into more depth about the taste, but really, what more can I say about it? It's orange soda, rum, and ginger. And it tastes exactly like those three things.
Reviewing what I've written so far, I can see a couple folks being bummed that none of these drinks were spin-kicking my stomach. Well, if you're one of those people, this final entry is for you.
The Fruit Madrid
The Fruit Madrid comes from the same episode as the Heil Hitler cocktail. But before I get into the actual drink itself, I need to say something totally serious, all jokes aside. I want there to be no mistaking the following statement for sarcasm or exaggeration, because I am as serious about saying it as I would be with giving a family member's eulogy: The Fruit Madrid is one of the worst things I've ever tasted. That being said ...
The Cocktail
2 parts grenadine syrup
1 part chartreuse
A pinch of salt
A fresh mint
That's not a typo; you are reading that correctly. That's two parts grenadine syrup to one part actual, drinkable liquid. Drinking that much grenadine syrup is a little like sipping a glass of that glue that sticks to the back of a gift card. And now they want me to throw chartreuse at it? For those who don't know what chartreuse is (I sure as hell didn't): It's a little bit like someone sucked all the fun out of Jagermeister and put the remaining residue into a bottle.
My Bar Manual book says that you only need a little bit of chartreuse to give a cocktail some flavor. I just dumped a whole ounce of it in, because if I'm going to be tongue-fucked, I might as well go the whole distance. You would think adding salt to anything but a margarita would make for a problem, too, but that wasn't the case with this, because the salt remained intact at the bottom of the syrupy mess, like sand on a beach made out of sewage.
After I threw the mint in, I approached the drink like a clueless mouse in a snake tank, with absolutely no idea what was in store for me. My first taste went a little like this (and no, I'm not acting ... that is the genuine wince of the recently damned).
I can't even say I wasn't warned about this, because the inventor of the cocktail flat-out told me it was the worst. First of all, the "fruit" in Fruit Madrid is a total put-on. This tastes more like you're drinking poison ivy, and it's all the chartreuse's fault. Look, I tried, you guys. I really tried to make this drink work, but every sip was worse than the last. When I finally did manage to swallow some, it didn't stay down for more than 20 seconds. The grenadine totally ruined a perfectly good sink in the process, as well.
The Fruit Madrid is bad news from start to finish. Thank god for the Internet, because I was able to express my distaste to the showrunners immediately afterward.
And to think, I had plans for all of us to become best friends and fight Nazis together. Thanks for nothing, Fruit Madrid!
Follow Erik Germ on Twitter, give him some drink requests, and, as always, kill Hitler!
Make yourself a Thankstini from How I Met Your Mother this Thanksgiving after you read 6 Fictional Alcoholic Beverages That Actually Get You Drunk, and check out the effects of Funky Juice from 30 Rock in 7 Fake Movie And TV Drinks That Got Us Drunk In Real Life.
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