A cavalier Taco Bell customer was captured getting more than his share of Baja Blast—filling up a 5-gallon container with the fast-food chain’s signature drink.
The video capturing the heist comes from creator @jweav772, getting more than 1.3 million views in its first four days on TikTok. It starts with a grainy shot of a man at a Taco Bell with a giant duffel bag on his shoulder, at work at the drink dispenser in a public area of the store.
While he gets refreshment, a voice intones, “Taco Bell didn’t know what hit them” as a riff from Motley Crue’s “Kickstart My Heart” plays.
@jweav772 Bro thought he was slick#fyp #tacobell #bajablast #autismawareness ♬ Kickstart My Heart – Mötley Crüe
In the final couple of seconds of the 10-second video, the man is shown in a photo taken outside by a car. In his left hand, he holds a Taco Bell cup with a tube attached to the bottom of it. In his right hand, he holds a five-gallon water container that appears to have Baja Blast in it.
Putting it all together, it appears the man had the cup in his hand at the dispenser, had the attached tube up his sleeve and then snaking into the water container inside the duffel bag.
The caption reads, “Bro thought he was slick,” and commenters weighed in.
“This brings me back,” one person said cryptically.
Another recalled, “We used to fill up two liters at jack in the box just to see if they would stop us. Never did just looked confused.”
That led a commenter to add, “Had a friend that just had a random jack n box cup and he just walk a block to refill like everyday n no one said anything lol.”
Someone added, “Gonna need a diy tutorial like now.”
One person used it to riff on the classic SNL short “D*ck in a Box” by offering, “Step 1: You cut a hole in that cup” and “Step 2: Put your junk in that cup,” another took it a little more seriously.
That person counseled, “Put a tube in jug lid and cup base that’s it.”
The video appears to be a paean to a piece of old-school internet lore, “Operation Soda Steal.” According to Kotaku, “In 2008, GameFAQs user EpitaphILIP had an idea: what if, instead of buying a cup of soda at Taco Bell and merely drinking it, he bought a refillable cup, built a contraption leading from the cup to a container hidden in a messenger bag and proceeded to pour a whole ton of Mountain Dew.”
The online crowdsourcing that followed, the article went on to note, was instrumental in “helping him solve engineering roadblocks, like how gravity would affect the flow from the tubes into the container and how to stop the soda from going flat once it arrived.”
According to Taco Bell’s site, the Mountain Dew-created drink carries a whopping 420 calories in a large, which retails for $2.39. The site pegs the drink as “like drinking a real hurricane,” referring to the tropical storm and not the New Orleans-birthed alcoholic drink. Fandom notes the drink was created for Taco Bell and has been exclusively available there since August 2004.
The Daily Dot has reached out to the creator via TikTok comment and to Taco Bell via email.
Update Aug. 1, 3:19pm CT: Still no word from @jweav772 about the viral clip, which boasts more than 2.2 million views as of Tuesday. However, he followed up the video by posting an epic Metallica guitar solo. In related soda-Taco Bell news, a recipe is floating around saying that you can make “Tropical Skies” soda by mixing Baja Blast, strawberry lemonade, and Starry lemon-lime soda. Try it at your own peril.
