Anybody Else Remember This Sprite Hip-Hop Voltron Commercial Throwback?

The 90s had all of the world sprung on hip hop. After ten years of sparse but quickly growing media saturation, everyone had their eyes on an angle to capitalize on it. Enter Sprite. They had the only consistent hip-hop marketing campaign on network television: Obey Your Thirst. As a hip-hop head, I was all over it. There was nothing more epic for me as a teen than to see the music I identified with used in a capitalist ploy to get me to buy sugary drinks. Here’s that promo video. It is off the chain like Django in Candyland. Sprite Voltron Complete from FFAKE Animation on Vimeo.   Sarcasm aside, this Sprite commercial was the first time the music of my generation was in the mainstream spotlight. Shit was nuts! It combined the brilliance of quasi-underground rap with the nerdy coolness of Voltron. Real talk, this video came out at a time when hip-hop needed it — The East/West beef was in flux after the passing of ‘Pac and then B.I.G. Diddy was going hard in the paint with the shiny suit rap videos with posthumous Biggie verses. The Midwest and the South were on the come up to fill the void. The culture needed a new hope. The New Hope That hope came in the form of Voltron *cue theme music*. Sprite rounded up the most popping rappers of the time and assigned them each a lion. The ad was split into five parts for maximum efficiency. Each twenty-second episode was half-animated, half-live action and all badass. The animation was tight. Like, opening animation for Thundercat…