Vintage Cherry Coke Tangle Fidget Keyring 🥤 NOS Sealed 1990s Soda Promo "Do Something Different"

What Was Cherry Coke's Do Something Different Campaign? 🍒 A Vintage 1990s Cherry Coke Tangle Fidget Keyring, Sealed

Size: 1 1/2" x 1 1/2"

A Tangle twist toy in see-through red plastic full of glitter, made into a closed-loop keyring with a yellow plastic connector and a metal split ring, still sealed in its clear factory bag. Printed in white along the segments: DO something different! with its TM, and the stacked, hand-lettered CHERRY COKE logo over a little trademark line - plus a blue Tangle script logo on one segment. Twist it and it folds into loops and knots that never quite repeat. Every one I have is sealed.

📅 The late 1990s

The logo and the slogan date it. That rough, hand-lettered Cherry Coke logo came out overseas in 1994, reached the United States in August 1996 and lasted until about 2002, and Do something different was Cherry Coke's late-90s ad campaign, made by the agency Cliff Freeman and Partners. Coca-Cola filed DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT with the Patent and Trademark Office in January 1995, first used it that November and registered it in August 1996, registration No. 1,994,191 - and let it lapse in 2003 when nobody renewed it, which lines up neatly with the logo going away. So this promotion comes from about 1996 to 2002 - the grunge years of Cherry Coke.

🍒 Cherry Coke

People had been asking soda jerks to squirt cherry syrup into their Coke for generations, but Coca-Cola didn't bottle it until February 19, 1985, after trying out flavors on visitors to the 1982 World's Fair in Knoxville. Cherry Coke landed the same year as New Coke, and outlasted it. By the 90s the brand wanted to look young and a little off-beat, which is exactly what that scrawled logo and do something different were for.

🌀 Tangle

The story handed down among toy and fidget collectors credits a sculptor, Richard X. Zawitz - born in Pittsburgh, trained in fine-arts sculpture at the University of Hawaii - with dreaming up the shape around 1980 and 1981. As the story goes, Zawitz was experimenting with sculptural forms in his studio when he landed on a simple, elegant idea: a chain of rounded quarter-circle segments, each able to spin a full turn at its joint, with no clasp or pin holding it together. Twist one end and the rest follows. In 1981 he went to Hong Kong to get it manufactured, the next year he first sold Tangle at the San Francisco Gift Show, and it's been in classrooms and occupational-therapy offices and on office desks ever since. He made Tangles in metal as sculpture and jewelry too - the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City holds Tangle bracelets with his name on them as designer.

Collectors and old hands in the advertising-specialty trade recall that Tangle's segmented shape became a particular favorite of promotional-products reps in the years that followed, precisely because one mold could be recolored and reprinted for almost any client - soda brands, banks, phone companies, dentists - and unlike a pen or a flyer it kept moving in somebody's hands, keeping the slogan in view far longer than most giveaways ever managed. That's where this Cherry Coke edition comes from: a licensed run of an already-famous toy, dressed in Cherry Coke red.

🍒 About these

It's about 1 1/2 by 1 1/2 inches as a loop in the bag and stretches out to around six inches. Keep it sealed for a Coca-Cola collection, or open it and fidget through your next meeting. The supply is finite - nobody's making Cherry Coke Tangles anymore, and once these last sealed ones are gone, they'll be very difficult to acquire.