The Discontinued '70s Pepsi Boomers Still Miss

Soda flavors have a way of coming and going, like wide-legged pants, Rubik's Cubes, and one-hit wonder bands — here one minute, gone the next, and perhaps back again in some new iteration years later. Really, there are too many sodas to keep track of, and one such drink that got lost in the cola shuffle is Pepsi Light. Its glory days were short, and its iconic blue and yellow cans soon faded into the aspartame abyss. Boomers are none too happy about that.

Redditors mourn the loss of their former favorite Pepsi flavor, which they miss both for the lemony taste of it and the nostalgia it invokes. "I loved that drink. In the 70's I'd do grandmother's yard work & get to drink these," someone posted on the r/1970s subreddit. "I'd drink all of it when my parents would buy it," commented another.

Some boomers have even tried to recreate the defunct diet drink by adding lemon to today's cola. Others admit that they have Pepsi Light's catchy jingle ("The time is right for Pepsi Light, lemony Pepsi Light. We put a little lemony taste in and took out half the calories ...") still stuck in their heads decades later (via YouTube).

Despite the cult following that formed around Pepsi Light, this is a discontinued soda some folks don't miss. One person on Facebook likened it to "a bubbly glass of lemon Pledge." A Redditor, who clearly considers the drink to be a serious Pepsi flop, said, "It had an acidic metallic taste with a hint of dissolved plastic liner and a bouquet of industrial by-products. Captured the essence of the '70s excellently."

Pepsi Light wasn't the first low-calorie soda that the company put out. In 1963, it tried launching Patio Diet Cola to a limited audience to see if it would be well-received. When enough people were willing to pop open a Patio, Pepsi forged ahead and launched the drink across the United States in 1964 (the first-ever nationally distributed diet soda), which was renamed Diet Pepsi.

The success of Diet Pepsi spurred the company to branch out, and lemony Pepsi Light was rolled out in 1975. The drink had bright blue packaging with white and yellow accents, and the lemon flavor helped mask the nasty aftertaste of the saccharin the drink was sweetened with.

However, when saccharin was replaced with aspartame in the '80s, it seems that Pepsi saw no further need for the lemon flavoring and removed it as well. Sadly, the modified fizzy drink fell flat. It was discontinued around 1990, but a lemon-flavored cola was briefly reintroduced in 1999 as Pepsi Twist. But that particular twist on Diet Pepsi only stuck around until about 2006.