The Dr Pepper Liberation Front
Back during my Bruce Hall years, the University of North Texas was undergoing several growth spurts, the most-prominent of which was the football program’s jump to Division IA (now known as Division I).
As part of that push, UNT redid their logos and colors in an attempt to rebuild the football team’s brand. They also signed several licensing deals, including with Coca-Cola. One day as a result, all of the Dr Pepper vending machines were replaced with brand-new machines painted green & white — and serving only Coca-Cola products.
This could not be allowed to stand. So me, myself, and I formed the Dr. Pepper Liberation Front, with an eye at calling out tyranny that Coca-Cola brought upon the oppressed soft drink of Texas. Below was our opening salvo printed in the campus newspaper.
January 21, 1997
UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TX
BRUCE HALL
DENTON, TX 76203Welcome, purveyor of liquid shame!
WeYe delighted to have you as a partner of the Southern travesty that is the Coca-Cola Partnership Program. The central goal of the Partnership Program is to make your residents sad, depressed and digestively-irregular — by the distribution of a soft-drink that can only dream of being as popular as Dr. Pepper — Coca-Cola.
That partnership also means warping the young, blank slates of freshman minds through glitzy vending machines which, although new, gobble quarters like a goat in a tin-can graveyard … limiting the number of soda machines and the space within them so that alternative products cannot be distributed, as was possible under DP’s benevolent reign over this fair campus … not providing a fruit-juice alternative such as Minute Maid (a Coca-Cola product that is conspicuously absent) that has more than 5% of real fruit juice in its mixture … providing inconvenient plastic bottles that are not recyclable anywhere on your eco-aware campus … charging 50% more than conventional 12 oz. Dr. Peppers, rendering it impossible to buy a drink and a vending machine snack for just a dollar… and using the powerfully oppressive Coca-Cola trademark to bring about a cultural Armageddon down upon the unsuspecting student populace that we ever so dryly refer to as “customers,” much as the British tea exporters thought of those zany colonists in 18th century America before all of that revolution stuff “went down.”
By working together as evil adversaries, we can put an end to this Dr. Pepper rebellion and bring order to the galaxy.
A key benefit of our partnership is to ensure that happiness never returns to UNT for the next eight years. If for any reason the residents do not go along with our scheme, just call our discipline hotline at 800-COKE-SUX to arrange for a “service technician” to “persuade” them to think otherwise.
Again, welcome and thank you for your business.
