Dew It Again
Brief thoughts on found objects, Vol. 11: Two Mountain Dew ads, 44 years apart.
WHEN I WAS growing up in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Mountain Dew — then not yet the gamer fuel in all the rainbow’s colors that it has since become — aired an ad with an earworm jingle whose first line was: “Gimme a mountain and nothin’ to do.” It showed people playing, a dog frolicking, an inner tube rolling down a hill toward clear water and lots of smiles. “Gimme somethin’ simple and true,” the commercial beseeched.
Last year, the brand refreshed (see what I did there?) the jingle and the ad campaign for a another era. Not unexpectedly, it hits different this time around.
Instead of unplugged people doing unplugged things, it is more frenetic. It features a pickup truck somehow driving across a lake, people in a boat with their friend the grizzly bear, and a man floating on his back down a river gleefully holding hands with a contented marine mammal that to my untrained eye appears to be an otter. Seems we’ve moved on from “simple and true,” though those lyrics remain, playing right as the guy and the presumed otter float along.
The new iteration also apparently needed a wraparound story of boredom to be rescued from. So it features a six-second prologue featuring a bored, remote-control-wielding Gen-Z actor vegging on a colorless couch in a colorless living room before being accosted by the neon-green-fur-clad “Mountain Dude” hiding in the upholstery and teleported off to these escapades in lakeside hyperreality. (I encourage tips for that sentence.)
But here’s the kicker, the thing that really drew my attention. The 1981 ad, forever etched into the grooves of some deep recess of my brain, centered the notion of one lyric: “Gimme a mountain and nothin’ to do.” But in today’s ADHD world (of which I am a part), the lyric has been tweaked: “Gimme a mountain and lots to do.”
And we’re not even touching the semiotics of the earlier Mountain Dew aesthetic, which evoked moonshine and Appalachian stereotypes.
I am loath to overanalyze here (regular readers, please stifle your laughter) so I’ll leave it just about there. But commercials do tell us a lot about ourselves and our times, and having two similar ones across 45 years to compare offers a great opportunity for that — and for pausing to think about how the notion of leisure has changed in the era of game fuel.
And for this aging Gen-Xer who was unofficially diagnosed with “hyperactivity” at age 4 in 1972 and officially diagnosed with ADHD at age 51 in 2019, there’s no small measure of material to think about in the 45-year evolution from wanting “nothing” to do to actively seeking outdoor overstimulation with personable otters and bears.
Postscript
SINCE NO ONE needs TWO posts about Mountain Dew, heaven help us, I’m going to inflict my other persisting thought about the beverage upon you before signing off.
Take a look at the flavors of Mountain Dew these days, and this doesn’t even cover all of them:
I, as a too-frequent Mountain Dew drinker, appreciate the “diversity” — and the saturated color, or at least its appearance. It’s like Play-Doh colors for adults. But I have to ask: How far can a brand be stretched before it ceases to be that brand?
To my generation, Mountain Dew was Hulk green, looked futuristic alongside Coke and RC and Teem and was an often-forbidden caffeinated treat. Today, though, what unites Mountain Dew “Code Red” and“Baja Blast”? What is the core trait of Mountain Dew these days? What is there endemic to the product that says, “Hey, this is Mountain Dew and not some other caffeinated, fruit-flavored soda pop?”
The answer is one Don Draper would appreciate. Because as the images above demonstrate, from early mountaineer caricatures to 1970s outdoor frolicking to 2020s game-fuel-fueled hyperreality, it is less the product itself than the lifestyle implied — the feeling of the brand — that unites the product line.
So whether I’m drinking blue Voltage or orange LiveWire, I am tapping into not just a drink. I am joining an evolving lifestyle — one where I can choose my hue and move forward. In all the colors of the rainbow, I belong.
Mindbending, as usual.