BlackChampagne -- no longer new; improvement also in question.: Freedent's the One
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Freedent's the One
In one of those mysterious quirks of the human brain, I woke up this morning with the jingle for Freedent Gum running through my head.
Freedent's the one that takes the stick out of gum ...and puts the fresh in your breath. It also moistens your mouth... Yeah Freedent's the one!
I've been sick since the weekend with the worst sore throat I can imagine (I literally double over in pain every time I swallow, even with the heavy doses of painkillers and penicillin I'm on), so I'm not sleeping (or doing anything else) very well, and when I do doze off (frequently) I keep having weird dreams. And waking up with remnants of them in my head. None so far have been as weird as a 20 year old commercial for a brand of gum I never once tried and that probably doesn't even exist any longer.
The jingle, once accessed, stuck, and as I showered and gargled and spit in pain, I found myself turning the lyrics over in my head. How odd that they never even claim it tastes good? Isn't that pretty much a prerequisite for a mouth-based product, especially one that people are going to naturally assume tastes awful? Sure, it would be a lie, since it probably does taste awful, but you'd think they would at least make the effort; all other inedible diet products do.
So there I was in the shower, trying to decide if the exclusion of any "tastes great!" type lyrics were some sort of very rare modesty/honesty in advertising? Did consumers back in the 90s not need to be lied to so blatantly? Could adults back then decide to buy a gum for practical reasons, without needing ridiculous lies about amazing, long-lasting flavor? Or is the failure to tout the taste a mark of a failed ad? (But how can it be failed if I remembered it, unprompted, two decades later? On the other hand, I've never bought the product, so the success of their theme song as a lasting meme is kind of irrelevant if it doesn't spur market share.)
Naturally, I had to look it up on YouTube, and the tune was just as I'd remembered, though the commercial was far, far, far cheesier than I would have believed. It plays like a parody of itself, or something from a Black Studies class about how White People see themselves.
I haven't watched TV in a few years, so I'm pretty oblivious to current trends in non-Internet advertising, but unless we've hit some surge of 80s nostalgia, I have to think everything in that commercial struck you as oddly as it struck me. It's hard to believe it was meant to be taken seriously? The whitest man ever seen on TV, in those clothes, pretending to play golf before sort of idly dry-humping the whitest woman ever seen on a TV... It's amazing. I had to watch it twice, since my mouth was just hanging open the first time and I couldn't absorb the details.
But yeah, Freedent's the one. Or was. I don't think they exist any longer, or at least not with that marketing angle, since there are tons of "adult" chewing gums now with no calories, and they all freshen breath and actually taste fairly good. And none of them are prone to sticking to dental work, at least not in my experience with a lot of brands of gum and quite a few crowns in my mouth. Or perhaps there have been dental appliance improvements since 1990, and the amount of people with ill-fitting dentures has dropped to the point that marketing special brands of gum just for them is no longer viable?
