Hot Thing Summer: Fantastic Four Snapple

I don't think I had ever bought a bottle of Snapple before the summer of '25, and yet on one magical day, I bought enough to last me for the rest of my natural life. Why? The Thing made me do it.

Of all the Fantastic Four: First Steps promotional food items, the four branded Snapple bottles were the ones that took the longest to show up on shelves near where I live, in July 2025. Weeks earlier, I saw the Mr. Fantastic apple drink on a food cart in New York City. When this didn't translate to me driving home and immediately finding it, I got a little worried. But I soon found them all on the shelves of a nearby Wawa.

For the lineup, we had Mr. Fantastic on apple, Invisible Woman on peach tea, the Human Torch on zero sugar peach tea, and the Thing on strawberry kiwi. These were all on 16-ounce bottles. I did find a much larger peach tea with the Torch on it, but none of the others. I choose to believe that this was the only size bottle for kiwi strawberry.

If the Thing could have been on any of the four bottles, strawberry kiwi seemed like the best bet. I later found out that Snapple drinks are just...well, they're okay. I wasn't excited about any of them. In case you're wondering, they do still have Snapple facts under the caps.

After I got the four bottles (okay, I got eight), I figured that I was done with my search, and it didn't take too much effort to cross these off my list.

And then I found out that these bottles came in both branded six- and 12-packs! And wouldn't you know it, the Thing was printed on the cellophane wrapping of each. So I ended up going home with 20 bottles of Thing juice in various packaging.

Much like the cereal boxes and milk jugs, I had to consider what I was going to do with these huge packages. I ultimately decided to just keep the wrapping, and a couple of the individual bottles. It's insanity that I can live with.

On average, I drink about one of these every three months, so it looks like I'll have Thing juice in stock until about 2030.

Around this same time, Snapple released a Fantastic Four promotional comic. Who knows how or where this was distributed (I found a copy on eBay), but it looked like this. It's a reprint of Fantastic Four #36 by Lee and Kirby, with an appearance by Lady Medusa and the Frightful Four. I'm not sure why they chose this issue, as the content didn't tie in very much with the First Steps movie. The cover is new, of course, though the costumes the team wears are also a bit strange. They're not the First Steps costumes, they're not the costumes the characters wear in the book, and they're also not the most recent iteration. In fact, these look like a new, slight redesign of the classic look, with a new Fantasticar design in the background as well. Who knows! Some young artist got a paycheck for it, and that's good.

I would have demanded that the cover feature all of the characters drinking Snapple.