05 March 2011

it'll tickle yore innards

A few days ago my little girl and I were walking the property looking for a suitable tree in which to construct a treehouse/clubhouse. Ever since she saw an American Girl Doll movie with Kit Kitridge and her treehouse/base of operations for her investigative journalism work, she's been fantasizing over having a treehouse of her own. I told her last year to give me a year so that we could settle in here on the Hill, and then I would build one.

Well, this is the year. And our scouting earlier this week produced about 4 potential treehouse tree hosts. As we walked along the bank of Brush Creek, the snow about half melted from the ground, I saw a dark green bottle glistening beneath the flotsam and jetsam of this and several past winters. I picked it up and read "Mountain Dew It'll tickle yore innards". I have a handful of old pop bottles that I found on my grandparents' property decades ago, but evidently they were not Mt. Dew fans, and frankly neither am I, because I hadn't seen this one before. And I could hardly believe the marketing image of a mountain man and the use of "innards" on something meant for consumption. But I loved it. Unfortunately the top was broken off. I looked at the bottom for a date and it was stamped with "65".



So I came back to the house and did a little research on Moutain Dew. And here it is: The name Mountain Dew was first trademarked by Ally and Barney Hartman in the 1940s, who coined the name from a colloquial term for moonshine whiskey. Early bottles and signage carried the reference forward by showing a cartoon-stylized mountaineer. The first sketches of the original Mountain Dew bottle labels were devised in 1948 by John Brichetto, and the representation on product packaging has changed at multiple points in the history of the beverage. Pepsi-Cola Company acquired the Mountain Dew brand in 1964, and shortly thereafter in 1973 the logo was modified as the company sought to shift its focus to a “younger, outdoorsy” generation.

Outdoorsy generation? Was the mountaineer not outdoorsy enough? And then I found this great link to youtube with an original Moutain Dew commercial-definitely worth watching:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xd8fzk8Rlk

5 comments:

vanilla said...

You're right. That was worth watching. Fun. Thanks for the research and post.

hoosier reborn said...

Cool, wasn't it? Had me laughing pretty hard.

Mark A. Smith said...

Yet another article could be on the amount of "mountain dew" which flowed freely in the Hoosier State during the Great Depression. Some of that was confiscated and dumped into the Deer Creek down by where Sunset Point is today south of Delphi.-Mark A. Smith

Ishmael said...

Kinda ironic that the young hipstas now "do The Dew".

Anonymous said...

I have that bottle sanfordvickey@gmail.com 1/19 /13

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