Mountain Dew is in the news these days, thanks to vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance.
Watch:
Over at The Atlantic, Ian Bogost gives us a fascinating history lesson on the drink that got me through a lot of late night study sessions when I was in my twenties.
A taste:
Before it was a soda name, the phrase mountain dew was, for generations, Appalachian slang for “moonshine.” The soft drink, invented in Tennessee in the 1930s as a whiskey mixer, arrived very late in the evolution of lemon-lime sodas, a topic I have covered extensively for The Atlantic. (Today, the beverage industry categorizes Mountain Dew, which has a yellower color and more intense flavor than other lemon-lime sodas, as a “heavy citrus” beverage.) Most sodas were regional during the early 20th century, due to challenges related to bottling and distribution; the market for Mountain Dew was mostly limited, at first, to the part of the country where its history began. Its brand rights were sold twice in the ’60s, with PepsiCo, its current owner, taking over in 1964. Even then, the country-bumpkin sensibility persisted. Mountain Dew was marketed with a hillbilly character on the bottle and under the tagline “Yahoo, Mountain Dew. It’ll Tickle Yore Innards.” Even by the late ’80s, just before Pepsi introduced Diet Mountain Dew, the company marketed the drink with a country twang: “Dew It Country Cool.”
And this:
When Vance invokes Mountain Dew, he does so as a symbol of this despair, and the bias that comes with it. He does so to appeal to a disadvantaged American population that might feel that the country has forsaken them for other (equally) disadvantaged groups who aren’t white. He turns the shame of drinking Mountain Dew into a source of class and race resentment: They’ll say that anything we do is wrong. According to this reading, Mountain Dew is understood to be the drink of choice for the “basket of deplorables.”
Read the entire piece here.
Here are some early Mountain Dew television ads:
These are the ones I remember as a kid:
And this: