IT DID WHAT IN YOUR MOUTH? (Lessons from the Eighties.)

In the 1970’s,  a uniquely engineered chewing gum called, Freshen Up, began advertising on television. What made the gum unique was that it was not a stick like the familiar Wrigley’s, but instead resembled a lozenge. This lozenge-shaped gum was in fact hollow in the center, where it contained a semi-liquid, synthetic mint or cinnamon flavored gel-like substance. 

This certainly revolutionary but highly dubious feat of confectionary manufacturing was advertised heavily with an energetic, colorful ad campaign that featured a catchy jingle, attractive people living an active lifestyle and the promise of a whole new level of refreshment. 

But the experience of privately biting into a piece of Freshen Up was not a reflection of the images seen in the colorful, jazzy ad campaign. You didn’t bite into the thick, soft pillow of gum, encounter the surprise in the middle and go, “Wow!”

Instead, you were a ten-year-old kid like me, you bit into the gum and shrieked, “Oh my God.” Then you laughed and couldn’t wait to make one of the grown ups try it. But grown ups were suspicious of Freshen Up. The slogan, “The gum that goes squirt,” probably made them think of plastic squirt gums. And it was easy to dismiss Freshen Up as a too-sweet candy for kids. I loved it and so did every other kid I knew. But I couldn’t even get my mother to try it. 

So in the 1980’s when everybody wanted shoulder pads, an office job, and artificial sweetener because they hated sugar now, a new sugar-free gum called, Chewels, began advertising on the brand—new music television network, MTV, and caught the public’s attention. Like Freshen Up before them, the Chewels campaign also employed high-energy visuals with a catchy jingle, but they merely alluded to the gel center of the gum and by calling it, “a secret” in the middle. And letting it go at that.

The unsuspecting, BMW-aspiring, pre-internet public was intrigued. And when I brought Chewels into the office with me at my first ad agency job in 1985, I got everybody to try it. 

Especially the men. And especially, especially the men with wives.

The reality of the Chewels sensory experience was nothing like the refreshing fiction of the ad campaign. When somebody first bit into a Chewels, they looked like something wrong had happened inside their mouth; something ugly and uninvited; something which shouldn’t have happened. It thrilled and amused me to watch their expressions transform before me from the initial surprise to the more sullen dawn of recognition and then distaste. I still wonder if Chewels had been a billionaire’s dirty joke all along.  Even its name seems to be composed of a“chew” followed by an, “eww.”

When you bit into a piece of Chewels, your teeth instantly punctured the gum envelope containing the gel center and this viscous substance quickly dispersed over your tongue and drizzled down the back of your throat. More gel collected under your tongue. Chewels simply deposited too much goo inside the mouth all at once to make spitting it out right then and there an option unless you happened to be standing next to a sink or a urinal. You kind of just had to swallow it all down, then you could spit out the gum that remained.

When I offered a piece of Chewel’s to my middle-aged art director boss he said, “What is this, gum?” and absently took a piece, while he continued working, hunched over his layout. But he quickly sat upright and looked at me, wide-eyed. “Oh, Augusten,” he said, thoroughly grossed-out. “What is this, it’s repulsive; what did you give me?”

I laughed. I may have pointed at him and laughed. 

He swallowed, then spit the gum into his hand.  This was San Francisco in the eighties.  If you were a straight guy, you were accustomed to the assumption that you must be gay or in the closet. So you could pretend you didn’t know what Chewels reminded you of; you couldn’t just play dumb. He said, “Well, at least I don’t feel like I have to get up now and go brush my teeth or gargle with Listerine.” It was a vividly minty product, that’s for sure. 

Chewels was short-lived, though. And I suspect the reason why is because most people who tried it weren’t really familiar with the whole concept of it. Or if they were, they probably hadn’t thought-through just exactly how this gum might make them feel, beyond refreshed. 

Heterosexual men must have felt downright assaulted. It gave them a very distinctive in-mouth experience which they had not asked for and absolutely did not want. I bet if you’d been able to ask them why they didn’t like it, they wouldn’t have wanted to talk about why. “Yeah, I tried that faggy gum. It sucked. I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I like mints.”

Which I think precisely answers the question my art director posed, “How the fuck did this shit make it though focus groups?”

Because, who, in a room full of strangers, will be the first to compare the experience of biting into this experimental gum with a sexual act many considered a deviant act of sin, a slap in the face to God himself.  

Not even married women would want to voice the analogy this gum brought so effectively to mind in room with one-way mirrors, a moderator and probably half a dozen men sitting at the conference room table around her.  Most likely, you would feel something was wrong with you for immediately thinking of something so graphic and objectionable, surely nobody else in the room thought what you did. So you’d say, “Yeah, it’s minty, all right.”

But the consumer of 2012 has seen the bare vaginas and exposed nipples of their favorite pop recording stars; the sexual shenanigans of princesses and politicians has been relentlessly detailed across all media. Today’s consumer is not shy about discussing or even performing sexual matters in public.  If a gum like Chewels was consumer tested today, it would fail because some old lady with Betty White hair would say, “Oh, my Goodness, this gum just came in my mouth.”

And that would be the end of it. Everybody would nod because, yeah, exactly. Eww. 

And this is why pretending doesn’t work for long. Everyone responsible for the development and marketing of Chewels back in the 1980’s had to know what it brought to mind when you bit into it; but nobody wanted to be the first to admit it. Besides, it really was refreshing when you got past the initial shock and that first swallow. So they cloaked the truth in a jingle about a refreshing secret in the middle and then they stocked the shelves with the stuff. People tried it, gagged and felt violated. Now Chewels is gone almost entirely from the record of civilization, with nothing more than an anemic mention on Wikipedia. 

But to those of us who embraced this joy-buzzer of a gum and offered it to the double-breasted army around us, Chewels will always be the chick with a dick we set up on a date with our best friend.