In The Room is our exclusive behind-the-scenes questionably-sourced comprehensive guide to the stories behind the stories of the stories with people so convincing you are sure that they know someone who knew someone who was actually there.

Advertising Executive 1: We were originally going for something temperate and almost somber.

Advertising Executive 2: Yeah, more like an “oh yeah” that was like you just received some mildly interesting information and were still trying to determine its impact on you.

Kool-Aid Man: I was going through my third divorce and there’s only so much alimony one can pay when you’re being typecast as one kind of mascot.

Advertising Executive 1: So originally we thought he would bring that kind of defeated by the world sensibility to this project. Maybe he’d have a baseball cap on, a 5 o’clock shadow, and be smoking.

Advertising Executive 2: Yeah, real cinema noir kind of stuff. Honest, gut wrenching, real.

Kool-Aid Man: That was my personal life. I wanted to keep the work separate. The work sustained me. I wanted my work life to be fun and full of flavor, because at home there was a 9mm with my name on it as it was.

Advertising Executive 1: We still wanted him to break through a wall, but only as a metaphor.

Advertising Executive 2: Yeah, we all have challenges, but maybe if you took a moment to smell the flowers – or obviously more importantly drink the sugary liquid – you could start to fell that everything could be ok.

Kool-Aid Man: I hit my lowest point, figuratively and literally, when I started drinking the contents of myself. Why hit the bottle when you can hit the pitcher you yourself are? Especially when schnapps can so easily and unndetectedly be added to the sugar mix?

Advertising Executive 1: He came in and it looked like the drink mix in his pitcher has been replaced with loose stool. Very unappetizing. Our makeup people had their work cut out for them.

Advertising Executive 2: The liquid has to look intoxicating. Something you want to escape into on a summer day. He looked like a scene out of Trainspotting.

Kool-Aid Man: So much was going wrong in my life. The divorces. The public urination charge. The lost weekend with Teddy Kennedy…

Advertising Executive 1: We were aware of some issues in his personal life. And that has to take its toll. But we had a shoot to do.

Kool-Aid Man: I also wanted to break into snack foods, which I thought were very compatible with sugary drinks. I was being pigeon-holed. Neither my personal or professional lives were moving in the right direction…

Advertising Executive 1: I’d worked with him many times by this point, and you can tell when he poured everything he had into a project. Somehow the liquid in his pitcher would almost but not completely overflow.

On the next episode of In The Room: the public brawl with Tony the Tiger.