Did Pepsi actually launch an ad campaign in which they seemed to promise a Harrier jet to anyone who collected enough Pepsi Points? Strange as it sounds, they did. The Netflix documentary series Pepsi, Where’s My Jet? follows the case of John Leonard, the man who attempted to get Pepsi to give him a jet and ultimately sued the corporation when they refused to come through.
Netflix just dropped the trailer for the docuseries and announced the four-part series will premiere on November 17, 2022. The streaming service also released the following description of Pepsi, Where’s My 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.”
Andrew Renzi directs and serves as an executive producer along with Andrew Corkin, Nick Boak, Theo James, Andrew Fried, Jordan Wynn, Dane Lillegard, and Sarina Roma.
