While having dinner out with some friends last week, it was brought to my attention that Mountain Dew had chosen a new logo to adorn their drinks. Intrigued, I immediately wiped off my greasy, pizza-covered fingers and looked it up on my phone:
Pardon my music, but what the funk? Maybe my memory serves me wrong, but when I think of Mountain Dew my mind immediately conjures up images of raw, hardcore, unbridled Menergy in a can: the kind of thing those crazy Asian gamer kids drink so that they can stay up till 5 in the morning ganking n00bs. I mean, look at the original logo:
Sha-ZAM! MOUNTAIN DEW, in your face. Right from the get-go there are zig-zags and pointy curves galore, so you know they’re not messing around. The words are big, bold and shiny – it’s like the drink is screaming to be unleashed from its can so it can climb down your throat and completely re-arrange your molecular structure.
Here’s the logo in a more fitting context:
Now, scroll up and look at new logo again. Your eyes do not deceive you: it’s a completely wussified version of the original. They’ve even resorted to using sickening, oh-so-trendy txt-msg speak. I mean, c’mon – mtn dew?
“Daddy, what’s a mtn dew?”
“Well, son, it’s a thing you wear on your hand so you don’t get burnt pulling baked goods out of the oven. Now piss off, I’m busy.”
For a company that makes nothing but sugar-based products, it’s ironic that they’ve got such bad taste. But wait! It doesn’t stop there!
I guess the people at PepsiCo had a problem with the old, iconic symbol that’s been adorning vending machines, billboards, sports cars and free-flow fountain drink cups at Taco Bell for the last twenty years. I’ll have to admit, though, the Pepsi re-design isn’t as bad as what they did to Mountain Dew. While not as iconic, it does carry an interesting sense of class, and the subtle Pepsi-esque design of the e is pretty clever. My only real miff is that the logo looks a bit like bad Clipart for a bloody, peeled-off scab, but that’s really due more to my own sick imagination than it is to the graphic designers.
Alas – just when I thought things were all clear on Pepsi front, further internetical research brought up the re-design for the bottle:
It might just be a personal preference of mine, but usually when I’m enjoying a refreshing carbonated beverage, I prefer not to drink it out of something that looks like an eighty-year-old janitor’s wrinkled ball sack. There’s no way you can blame my imagination this time – the phallic imagery is so blatant that if you did a survey of 50 random people on the street, 100% of them would tell you that the top of the bottle looks like the pulled-back foreskin of an uncircumcised penis, regardless of whether they’ve seen one or not.
Still, I’m sure that there are some people who will react favorably to this new bottle design. They’re just not your regular bunch of folks.
-Kev
These travesties were brought to my attention by my buddy Jack Brungardt, who incidentally drew an awesome comic on Halo’s Mountain Dew Game Fuel a while back. Check it out over here.
Damn, that was…UNCALLED FOR. I guess. How can they DO that. I thought the world started to get a grip on art again. But nope. The world proves me wrong again. Good post.
That was hilarious. I thought exactly the same about the pepsi bottle. Their main consumers would probably be really horny chicks.
When they're done with it, they just go crazy.
Anyway good post, keep things the same great way they have been for however these products have been out there.