Friday, December 28, 2007

Mountain Dew is Making Me Sick For Other Reasons Than its Taste

As always, I'm up late sitting at my computer with my iTunes on and the tv on at the same time. Why do I do this? Because everyone else between the ages of 15 and 30 do this. We all sit in front of our computers, typing away, whether it's in an IM box, a Facebook wall post, whatever, and we keep our music on with the tv on at the same time.

It's part of our culture: to have as many screens in our faces at any given time, being overloaded with as much media as possible. We literally want to stuff out faces with as much stimulus as we can get our hands on.

What will our predecessors think of this? Not much, considering they'll be too busy uploading the latest episodes of The Real World to their rotting organic brains, slowly being replaced by cybernetics like something out of "Ghost in a Shell."

Speaking of "Ghost in a Shell" I haven't watched that in forever. Damnit I miss my tivo.

Anyway, I'm getting super off track. My gripe tonight is this commercial I saw while watching Kevin James' stand up special on Comedy Central. Apparently the people at Mountain Dew want to experiment in open democracy by having their... um, drinkers? Fans? What do you call people who religiously buy a product, anyway? ... Consumers falls short. Whatever, not important.

Anyway, Mountain Dew wants YOU to join the "Dew-ocracy" (groan). You, the consumer, get to choose the color scheme, name, possibly the flavor, how much Yellow-Five, whatever, goes on the new Mountain Dew. This tells me two things: Mountain Dew has either fired it's entire ad department/the ad department is on vacation, or Mountain Dew wants to take it to the "Extreme!" and have a carbonated drink named "Shizzle Dizzle Fa Rizzle Soda" or "Yo This Shit Be Good Soda."

At this point in the article it'd be easy for any of my readers to claim I have zero faith in democracy in any capacity, from Presidential Elections on down to the naming of soft drinks, and my readers would be right. I mean, we got the Presidency wrong - twice - America, do I really trust us with naming a can of soda?

Fuck to the no I don't.

And besides, who the hell drinks Mountain Dew so religiously that they would jump at the chance to be the guy who names and designs the latest Pepsi product to be born stillborn? Need I bring up Mountain Dew Red Alert? How about Chrystal Pepsi? I could name a hundred more, but I don't keep a long-term memory for things that totally suck on balls.

Hence why I can't make hilarious "Fraiser" episode references.

The point I'm trying to make is that as noble of an attempt it is for the people down at Pepsico to get kids (and it's primarily kids this is targeting. You should see the ad, it's a ridiculous amount of production. I'll try to find it and embed it at the end of this article, but you'll see who exactly this is geared towards. They make no attempt to try to hide what demographic they're targeting.) interested in voting for something. But it's all for not; no one is going to be interested, no one wants to be that guy who's going to be walking down the street, see "his" Mountain Dew being consumed and go "Yo DUDE! I fucking named that SHIT!"

What would the response be? What would you say to someone who came up to you and said "hey I named that product you're using." You know what I'd say? I'd say:

"So?"

So here's the bottom line (cuz Stone Cold said so...), ignore this propaganda. The fact that I'm talking about it sickens me anyway, but I've been dry on articles since resurfacing into reality last week, and I'm trying to catch up. But c'mon, to insinuate that your average skate boarding 17 year old is the next jungle war fighting revolutionary because he picked which berry the next Mountain Dew is going to taste like is disrespectful to actual jungle war fighting revolutionaries.

Besides, jungle war fighting revolutionaries drink actual mountain dew, from a dented canteen.



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