BUCKFIELD – Everybody over 12 knows what happens when you drop a breath mint into a bottle of soda.
It fizzes.
So what happens when a couple of Buckfield guys drop more than 500 Mentos into 101 bottles of Diet Coke, choreograph the volcanic explosions and set the whole thing to music?
Fame.
Less than a month after taping a three-minute Internet video filled with dynamic fizzy fountains (and some 20-foot geysers), Fritz Grobe and Stephen Voltz have become national celebrities. Three million people have downloaded the whimsical video since it landed on the Web. The men have been featured in the Wall Street Journal, on VH1 and on “Inside Edition.” Thursday night they performed on the “Late Show with David Letterman.”
And today they appear on the “Today” show.
But anyone can plop a mint into a bottle of soda and get it to spray. Why have these guys and their gushy geysers won people over?
“They really made it an art form,” said Mike Miclon, owner of the Oddfellow Theater, where Grobe and Voltz first performed their soda show.
Grobe, a math whiz and professional juggler, and Voltz, a lawyer and amateur clown, describe themselves as “mad-scientists” on their Web site. They were looking for something quirky to do, something fun, Miclon said, when they first set off 10 bottles of Diet Coke.
People loved it. So they upped the ante.
With Miclon filming, Grobe and Voltz set up 101 bottles of soda, dropped in 523 Mentos and choreographed a show they billed as a “mint-powered version of the Bellagio Fountains in Las Vegas.”
They did it in one take.
“That was crazy because they’d never done it before,” Miclon said. “It just worked.”
They submitted the video to an online competition, Miclon said. It wasn’t even a finalist.
So the guys posted it on their Web site, EepyBird.com.
“It took off from there,” said Grobe’s father, Charles Grobe.
The video got 15,000 hits the first night and a million hits since. Other Web sites picked it up, including the official site for Mentos.
This week, Grobe, Voltz and two friends – including one who created music for the show – traveled to New York to demonstrate their fizzy frenzy in front of fans.
It’s been a wild ride. But Miclon predicts they won’t stop at Mentos and Diet Coke.
“They’ll keep coming up with new, strange things to do,” he said.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
Success. Please wait for the page to reload. If the page does not reload within 5 seconds, please refresh the page.
Enter your email and password to access comments.
Hi, to comment on stories you must . This profile is in addition to your subscription and website login.
Already have a commenting profile? .
Invalid username/password.
Please check your email to confirm and complete your registration.
Only subscribers are eligible to post comments. Please subscribe or login first for digital access. Here’s why.
Use the form below to reset your password. When you've submitted your account email, we will send an email with a reset code.