Hello again, this time from…the Pacific Northwest. I’ve driven with two friends up to Snoqualmie, Washington, to attend the Twin Peaks Fest convention, a celebration of the cult TV show that ran from 1990-92. I’d never made it up to see this part of the U.S., and this year’s Twin Peaks gathering seemed like a sufficiently nerdy excuse to make the journey. Twin Peaks was popular in Japan, one of the early kaigai dorama (foreign TV dramas) to win big with Japanese fans, made available through video rental shops mostly and heavily marketed by ABC in what would be a pattern repeated by other networks. Its popularity was helped along by the Coca-Cola company, which hired David Lynch to direct a series of TV commercials for its George Coffee line of canned coffee. In the commercials, Special Agent Dale Cooper is searching for a Japanese girl named Asami, who’s gone missing in the town. He follows a series a clues, drinking can after can of refreshing Georgia™ coffee along the way, and eventually finds the girl. One of the first products sold on the proto version of J-List I ran back in the early 1990s was Georgia Coffee Twin Peaks posters I’d, ah, liberated from Japanese vending machines. Good times, good times.
Georgia is damn good coffee…and hot!
