4 Movie Energy Drinks That Should Be Real: Brawndo, Booty Sweat, Minotaur, Chernobly

My ops man JW at work is a fan of energy drinks and he’s been through them all: Monster became 5 Hour Energy which became Red Bull which became Redline, which is when he started shaking in the afternoons. So he backed it down to some ‘healthy’ gimmick where you twist the cap one way to drop vitamins into the drink, then twist it open. There are millions like JW, so on their behalf I ask the beverage and/or pharmaceutical companies to bring the following movie drinks to life. I also acknowledge that this post has little to do with finance, except to say that I look forward to my promotional royalties.

BOOTY SWEAT: I’m learning as I write this that Booty Sweat, the drink that Alpa Chino was pimping in Tropic Thunder, is already a real product. I considered Booty Sweat all the way way down on my list of viable movie-to-life transitions, but this proves just how down you have to be to understand low culture. Actually the more I say Booty Sweat, the more I remember how funny it was when one of the Flaming Dragon thugs finds the empty can in the forest and reads the name out loud—and I realize how wrong I was to think this wasn’t a top choice for a real-life product. As is Booty Sweat’s accompanying Bust A Nut Bars and also another Tropic Thunder apparel product that would easily outsell Sean John or Marc Ecko: the Alpa Chino chinos.

MINOTAUR: Next lowest on my list when I began this post was Minotaur, but it too has gained ground because Role Models already laid out the business plan crystal clear: get aging party guys who need work and won’t ask moral questions to go into schools as movie energy drink salesmen and give talks about this incredible drink. They also took an age old energy drink concept to new heights with the Minotaur promo truck that’s an actual snorting, smoke-breathing minotaur. In one of the funnier movie bits of the last several years, Minotaur salesman Paul Rudd is in a rage after leaving a school assembly and rams the truck into the school’s horse mascot, and the kids come out to see the minotaur has mounted the horse. So just some minor repairs to the truck following this incident, and the Minotaur marketing team is on the road.

BRAWNDO: In Mike Judge’s prophecy Idiocracy, Brawndo is what has replaced water everywhere except for toilets in the year 2505. Both babies and cows are raised on Brawndo, and it’s got what plants crave. It’s got electrolytes. The drink’s maker takes over the FDA and restructures the food pyramid to include only Brawndo: The Thirst Mutilator. Brawndo was actually made in real life for awhile but a quick surf didn’t reveal any information to confirm that it’s still out on the market. Not that Mike Judge is any stranger to merchandising. I still have a Beavis & Butthead remote control circa 1994 in our remote collection. Not that he needs the money either, he’s apparently working on new Beavis & Butthead episodes. YES! THAT KICKS ASS!! Wait, what was I talking about?

CHERNOBLY: This is Rob Corddry’s Russian energy drink from Hot Tub Time Machine. Here he clearly describes the ingredients. The incredibly deep use of Chernobly as the movie’s core plot device at first made it my top choice for converting to real-life product: Corddry spills Chernobly on the hot tub controls which is how they go back to WinterFest 1986, then some Red Dawn obsessed party adversaries steal their last can and they can’t get back until they recover it. Meanwhile the Chernobyl nuclear disaster occurred in real-life 1986. And as we all know from Back To The Future, time travel won’t work without some sort of nuclear-level energy. A deep plot device indeed. But now it’s clear to me that if California of all states can’t legalize marijuana, there’s not much chance of a big market in illegal Russian energy drinks. Stay tuned for the sequel.