Enamored by the empty Jones Green Apple bottle. Did it originally come full? If so, why bother emptying it? Did they drink it in 2002 and then wash the bottle and return it to its packaging? Did they let it fester for 2 decades before cleaning out the bottle for resale? Or did the bottle come empty? If so, why? Did they want you to buy Jones Green Apple soda and transfer it to the funny Starfox Adventures bottle for the Ultimate Gamer Look™? Did some Jones exec wheel and deal Circuit City management into thinking this was a conscionable idea, let alone a good one? Who gives a target demo of middle-school-years-old a glass bottle, even in 2002? I cannot pretend to begin to understand the Nintendo/Jones Soda crossover beyond Jones Soda being so thoroughly oversweetened as to stimulate the ashen fields and salted earth known as an American 12-year-old's taste buds. But everything else in the kit is clearly for a bathroom! Why is there an exceptionally conspicuous glass bottle of green apple soda (or, even more conspicuously, an empty glass bottle intended to contain green apple soda) next to a door hanger, air freshener, and roll of toilet paper that is so thin, it's literally translucent? This thing leaves me beyond words.
Yeah hi hello me again. Couldn't stop thinking about this stupid thing so I did .01 seconds of digging and found an eBay listing that didn't immediately 404, and, uh,
The bottle is supposed to be full.
All things considered, the much more reasonable outcome. The empty bottle theory was on the verge of being impossible to begin with. But that just brings me back to the questions about the full bottle theory: why? I get putting a snack/drink in, that's the easiest bait in the world for kids, especially if it fluoresces. But Jones Green Apple soda? Even for 2002 that's weird. How much heavier did the stupid hipster glass bottle make this box? Was it a legitimate logistical issue that the glass bottle full of liquid probably doubled or even tripled the weight of every unit of this pile of junk? Did they produce enough of these for that to meaningfully affect shipping?
The eBay listing also enlightened me to one other point of interest that the original post didn't highlight:
The temporary tattoos! I honestly do miss temporary tattoos, but also come on. These are not great ones, just by the design. While a temporary tattoo of Spiderman or a nice butterfly or Hello Kitty or something is undeniably cool, the box art render of Fox from Starfox Adventures is not, uh. Good. As something to bond to your skin. And Krystal is like 1% better purely because I really hate this render of Fox.
Oh also, I didn't even notice this the first time, but the front of the Circuit City Starfox Adventures Survival Kit has a red cross on it, so technically this product is a war crime. Which I agree with, for very different reasons.
Did I mention the price of this eBay listing, by the way? Because it's $1500 + $63 for shipping. Yup. For a pre-order bonus.
Sidenote: just spent like 30 minutes trying to find the original price for this stupid thing. There's plenty of anecdotal evidence saying it was a pre-order bonus, and so I went hunting for 2002 Circuit City catalogs in an effort to track down the actual price. And I...couldn't. Despite finding a September 2002 Circuit City catalog (yes it's a YouTube video, you try tracking down anyone else who preserved these), which should be the exact timeframe for something like this, it has the same issue other contemporary catalogs (November 2002 and April 2001, namely) have; no GameCube. There's Xbox and PlayStation and Gameboy, but that's it. Literally no evidence of the GameCube anywhere, let alone even a hint of that delicious green apple Jones soda. This leads me to believe the marketing was primarily in-store materials, rather than catalog advertising. Given that, I can't find a hint of this thing's cost anywhere. If any of you can, please, let me know. I need to know what the markup was for them to throw in a glass bottle and confetti-tier toilet paper.
Anyway. I've now spent over an hour of my life researching a Starfox Adventures promotional box of Stuff from 2002. I hope any of this was interesting.