2021 Christmas Presents – page 20
Oh, come on. You know we couldn’t make it through a whole set of imaginary Far Out There merchandise without at least ONE Xal-Gox product! I dunno if it’s more or less weird to imagine what a Xal-Gox drink would taste like than it is the whole Can of Beard thing.
Also, “New classic formula with even more of the exact same flavor” is one of my favorite nonsense sentences I’ve written in a while.
Xal-Gox Classic (or just Xal-Gox Soda) is actually just Xal-Gox Blood, which is “naturally” both sweet and carbonated (as naturally as an artificially created life form made purely to become snack food can be). Xal-Gox 2 incorporated changing the flavour by feeding the developing Xal-Gox various sodas until they found one that they liked, ending up with feeding them a Cola Soda that made Xal-Gox 2 taste more like Cola than Xal-Gox. It failed because people buying Xal-Gox Soda wanted a drink that tastes reminiscent of the Xal-Gox Sweet, and most feel like Xal-Gox 2 went away from that. Interestingly, blind taste testing actually disputes this, with Xal-Gox 2 near universally being considered to have a closer taste to Xal-Gox than Xal-Gox Classic or bottles of Xal-Gox Soda (from before Xal-Gox 2 came out). And the “near” is only because some of the “blind taste tests” either were later found not to be blind at all, or had participants who’s sense of taste was actively not working during the test.
My marketing professor several decades ago was fond of pointing out, presumably as an example of the power of marketing over reality, that 90% of people who expressed a strong preference for one or the other actually could not tell the difference between coke and pepsi in a blind taste test, and, even more surprisingly to me, 50% of people could not tell the difference between coke and sprite, which seemed hard to believe as i thought they were utterly different in taste, but then he would demonstrate with volunteers from the student audience and sure enough, turned out to be true. So any narrative we come up with for xal-gox soda could hardly be more cynical than the reality of the wars between actually the nearly identical tasting sugar water we consume in RL.
Re: hovertext – I always assumed that the “Classic” in say, classic coke, no longer distinguished it from new coke, but rather from the 72,918 other flavors coke has introduced since then. So just substitute “breeds” for “flavors” in that sentence when referring to xal-gox.