Michael Jackson Pepsi Fire, 1984

My primary memory of this ad was that it came out around the same time as that awful “State of Shock” single from the Jacksons and Mick Jagger, and back then, rewriting “Billie Jean” as “You’re the Pepsi Generation” was an unforgivable cheeseball cash grab, whereas these days it’s just the cost of doing business in an industry that embraces crassness.

But all that is beside the point. We never really knew at the time just how bad this was — The handlers all seemed to brush it off as a minor injury, a slight singe. No, this was a nasty burn. This doesn’t mean that all the quasi-journos saying that this led to his painkiller addiction are right — as Idolator mentioned not long ago, a good portion of the Entertainment Reporting Complex covering this story is writing fan fiction right now — but you don’t get out of something like this with two aspirin and an ice bag.