12 Beloved Beverages of the Stickiest Kid at a ‘90s Public Pool

Grape soda tastes nothing like grapes. It also doesn’t really taste like something you should drink. Neither of these things matter, because it’s the purple fuel for a kid who will break his arm within the week.

These are perfect because they already look like fuel pods for some sort of alien weapon. Our tiny guy can crush one of them with a single inward breath and spike his blood sugar to levels the CIA would be interested in.

A neighbor to the fruit punch barrel, but in a container that seems to beg the user to slow down. Of course, speed isn’t the biggest problem when he’s crushing a six-pack by himself like a stepdad in training.

If Gatorade and Powerade are two storied knights in a age-old battle, All-Sport is the weird squire badly copying their moves in the courtyard. Really, you guys went with “body quencher”? Huh.

Back then, if something had “fruit” on the label, our sweet parents assumed it was at least kind of good for us. In reality, Fruitopia was more of a slurry of fruit flavors and pure sugar — a more healthy looking version of mixing every soda at McDonald’s together. This is what that nightmare drinks when his parents are actually watching him.

Another drink that somehow snuck past our parents in a vitamin-filled disguise. I won’t argue that it was delicious, but I’ll also say it tastes like what someone forced to try to recreate orange juice on an alien planet would make. Sticky kid has knocked back a family-size jug, and has enough Vitamin C for a month. Which is good, because he’s now eating a half-melted fudgsicle off the ground.

I still don’t know exactly what SoBe is, or how it got so popular. A bottle of what looks like watered-down milk, with a lizard on the front doesn’t make my mouth water. Our tacky friend, however, loves it, because it looks like the things under the sink he used to drink before his mom padlocked it.

The most beloved, devious drink container ever designed. Capable of inflicting both paper cuts and puncture wounds at the same time. In a zombie apocalypse scenario, you could probably use one of these as an improvised syringe. Our red-mouthed friend’s hands tell the story of the many Capri-Suns he’s drained, covered in scratches and scrapes like he’s got a pet hedgehog that doesn’t particularly care for him.

A company that apparently started by making iced tea, only to eventually succumb to filling bottles with the sugar slop that kids crave. The regular lemonade is too close to an actual, culinary product for the pool child. For him, it’s pink lemonade or bust, because that’s the one that makes his braces hurt, which he kind of likes. 

Side note: Why aren’t they making lemonade pink anymore?

Oh, sure, let’s throw caffeine in the mix, because he wasn’t trying enough front flips off the diving board when his parents weren’t looking.

Better yet, let’s get dairy in on this action. That way we can really complicate this kid’s strange, fermented odor.

It didn’t start as a drink, but it’s one now. A lukewarm cup of pure sugar syrup. The sort of thing Goku would drink to power up if he were six years old. I watched a kid drink this at the pool, and I swear to god he was hovering two inches off the ground.