A Pepsi commercial (posted on YouTube) that reportedly aired on December 13, 1950, begins with a sudden, vibrant tune emanating from an unmanned piano. Four teenagers are standing around the piano, puzzled — including a 19-year-old James Dean, who slaps the piano, prompting it to burst into a bebop-style jingle. Dean and his fellow extras dance and sing along: “Pepsi-Cola hits the spot/A big, big bottle and it’s got/bounce, bounce, bounce…”
The commercial was reportedly filmed in Griffith Park, which would later serve as the site for the iconic knife fight in “Rebel Without a Cause,” as Keith Elliott Greenberg notes in his book “Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die: James Dean’s Final Hours.” According to Greenberg, Dean also met and befriended fellow actor Nick Adams — who went on to play Chick in “Rebel Without a Cause” — on the commercial’s set.
In the four years between the Pepsi commercial and “Rebel,” Dean starred in an Easter TV special as John the Baptist, moved to New York City, and began taking acting classes with Lee Strasberg, as Claudia Springer notes in “James Dean Transfigured: The Many Faces of Rebel Iconography.” Dean clearly grew artistically in those four years, but despite the fact that Dean’s clean-cut jitterbugging felt a far cry from knife fights and car races, the Pepsi commercial and Dean’s iconic role in “Rebel” were at least loosely connected.
