COCA-Cola's famous 1971 "Hilltop Commercial" represented the soft drink as a product that not only crosses but erases international boundaries. The 30 second spot featured an international assembly of young people with Coke bottles in hand, lip-synching in "perfect harmony" as they professed their collective desire to "buy the world a Coke." The message was clear: the world was now one seamless market and Coke, the planetary beverage of choice, was the perfect icon for the global village of transnational capitalism. (1) A logical implication of this triumphant "coca-colonialization" might be an inexorable trend towards global cultural uniformity. Around the time the Hilltop add appeared Marshall McLuhan was questioning the whole notion of a passive or homogeneous reception of cultural phenomena. McLuhan asked "whether the same figure, say Coca-Cola, can be considered as 'uniform' when it is set in interplay within totally different grounds from China to Peru" (41).
