It goes without saying that there's no such thing as peacetime between the colas. The Cola Wars peaked in the 1980s and while neither side has ever made a move quite as tectonic-splitting as Coca-Cola's New Coke gambit, their brawl continued into the preceding decade and would occasionally throw up a few fascinating developments, such as the clear cola fad of the early 90s, a short-lived phenomenon that Coca-Cola willfully destroyed with their dirty little kamikaze tactics. Coca-Cola learned how to utilise the commercial appeal of cute and cuddly polar bears, while Pepsi hitched themselves to the Spice Girls' bandwagon and offered bribery in the form of Pepsi Stuff. So ubiquitous was the rivalry that not even Casper could escape it. He was forced to pick a side, and he chose Pepsi (perhaps their underdog status made them more appropriate for the downtrodden young wraith). Hence, there was a Pepsi commercial, around the time of the movie, where we saw Casper wrestle with a can of Pepsi, and discovering, to his chagrin, that aluminum obeys a different set of rules to ectoplasm.
These kinds of commercial tie-ins might strike one as heavy-handed, but it was all part of milieu back in the 1990s, and Casper was far from the only cinematic character to vaunt the joys of Pepsi just in the summer of 1995 alone. There was another ad where Amy, the signing gorilla from Frank Marshall's jungle-action thriller Congo, requested a Pepsi. Heck, even The Simpsons were in on it - they had a tie-in promotion with Pepsi as part of their "Who Shot Mr Burns?" contest. The Congo Pepsi ad strikes me as being somewhat out of character with the movie it's connected to (more so than the Casper ad), and yet the most incongruous movie/cola tie-in promotion of them all would have to be an ad from three years earlier promoting...Alien 3, of all things, which frankly makes that Alien 3 parody we'd occasionally see in the opening sequence to The Critic look tame and sensible by comparison. Here, we discovered that Xenomorphs actually prefer the taste of Pepsi to human fluids, and can be dissuaded from chowing on a prospective victim's hide if you can point them in the direction of the nearest Pepsi vending machine. Too bad that Sigourney Weaver and her crew never figured that out. Heck, we can go back even further, to 1988, and to the other side of the battlefield, where we had a Diet Coke commercial with Jessica Rabbit singing "Diet Coke" over and over, and Roger brandishing a can of the eminent liquid, in case you were at risk of missing the point. I technically find this set-up even more questionable than a Pepsi-drinking Xenomorph, given that Who Framed Roger Rabbit is set in 1947, and Diet Coke wasn't introduced until 1982. Compared to the aforementioned Pepsi ads, there's not even an attempt to create much of a narrative around Roger and Jessica's cola lust; it's pretty much just a case of the characters flaunting the product as much as possible within thirty seconds. I'd brand it the very model of commercial crass, but for the fact that I'm a sucker for any footage with Roger, Jessica and Eddie Valiant rubbing shoulders. In the same way, the Casper ad is neat for all the extra time we get to spend stalking the corridors of Whipstaff Manor (including another glimpse into Harvey's office and of the organ that never got to fulfill its purpose in the finished movie).
The Casper ad boasts an eerily similar premise to that Pepsi ad about a man's ongoing battle with a Pepsi vending machine that wouldn't accept his crumpled-up dollar bill, which received a shout-out in the Negativland song "Drink It Up". By comparison, the Casper ad isn't quite as bleak (we don't get the background noise of "Lonesome Town" by Ricky Nelson to emphasise the aura of almost apocalyptic abandonment), but it's more-or-less the exact same scenario - our protagonist is all alone and desperate for a can of Pepsi, only to find that the limitations of their physical environs are preventing them from accessing the sweetness within. As we leave them, both remain locked in their respective Sisyphean struggle, with the onscreen reminder that Nothing Else Is A Pepsi, and the grim implication that there's nothing else out there for them. Actually, in Casper's case there is a very obvious solution to his problem, which is simply to open the refrigerator door. Come to think of it, why isn't he doing that? Is the can of Pepsi just so alluring that Casper just can't overcome the compulsion to keep his hold, lest he never gets it back again? Then again, maybe that kind of graspiness is perfectly in-character for Casper - it was, after all, his refusal to let go of a sled that led to his becoming a ghost in the first place. Once again, life (signified here by a Pepsi can, and the nihilistic intimation, implicit in the tagline, that the world beyond it is little more than an abyss of unfulfilling nothingness) is something that Casper has to learn to relinquish in order to experience.
Naturally, since Casper ain't got no life, ain't got guts, ain't got no liver, if he were to drink that Pepsi then it would literally pass right through him and leave a sticky puddle on the Whipstaff kitchen floor. But maybe that's one of the advantages of being dead. You're beyond the point where sugar can hurt you.
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