A marathon of the first two seasons of AMC's splatterific The Walking Dead, which is based on the comic-book series of the same name, rolled Sunday, as did a special black-and-white version of the series premiere and a Talking Dead recap.
Hours later came word of a lawsuit filed in Orange County Superior Court in Santa Ana that involves the sale of “Zombie Blood” in transfusion bags. Coinky-drink, er, dink?
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Harcos, a Delaware company that makes novelty products that include its drink called Zombie Blood Energy Potion, is suing Oxnard's Primal Essence, which packaged the drinks; Power Brands Consultants, the international bottler; and Silliker, a division of an international firm that tested the drink for consumer safety.
The gist of the complaint? Zombie Blood doesn't taste right.
It apparently wasn't always so, according to the suit that seeks unspecified damages for negligence and breach of contract as well as the recoup of out-of-pocket losses for developing and bringing the products to market,
storing and destroying spoiled products and lost profits.
Zombie Blood, a green beverage developed in 2009 as a follow-up to a red Harcos energy drink simply known as Blood, apparently flew off the shelves of retailers such as Hot Topic like discarded femurs at an undead brunch.
But then came consumer complaints by the end of 2010, according to the complaint, that the red and green drinks stink, that the novelty transfusion bags explode and–worst of all–that what is supposed to mimic blood (tainted by the walking dead or not) tasted like yogurt.
As if. Everyone knows the blood of zombies tastes a wee bit like liquid Liv-a-Snaps, with a playful hint of papaya and Shane Walsh's back hair. Okay, in my dark dreams it does.
This is apparently no joke to Harcos, which has retained Vladi Khiterer of Newport Beach law firm Khiterer & Park.
The complaint pinpoints a protein used incorrectly in the manufacturing process as the cause of microbial organisms growing and causing the drinks to spoil, the bags to expand and eventually explode and the company to take a financial bite
in the marketplace like a sumo wrestler being dug into by a pack of famished flesheaters.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.