X-Entertainment just addressed an issue very close to my heart: the bizarre purpose of the impossible secondary Big Red slice in 15-to-25-year-old Big Red commercials. I once accounted for its existance by thinking it was some sort of bastard prototype--something Wrigley's had rushed off to the deadline-oriented advertising agency while still functioning at a sort of gum-drafting stage. (I didn't know gum-drafting stages didn't really exist.) I also used to think that this advertising agency was once (the late 1970s) a grand behemoth of the industry, with a news-room like central office very closely resembling the fake Washington Post's in All the President's Men, and that they, being deadline-oriented pragmatists, steadfastly refused to revise their costly commerical for some superficial change brought on by the caprcious gummakers. I also also used to think, faced with Big Red's relentless, harsh, pinkish-red-and-dusty-looking-with-treadmarks reality, that every goddamn gummaker in the whole world starts their creations with a sense of naive optimism wherein they earnestly try to give their creation a nice white stripe, and then, within a month, Wrigley's starts up its machinery, they get old and cynical, and the desire to fight the system--to ensure stripey looking gum--gets far too hard and pointless to fight. (Hence the appeal of Fruit Stripe Gum: marketed counterculture. Even though the functionally preferable bubble gum variety came with that fucking pastel color.)

But no; they're just comparing the size of a slice to a fake piece of Dentyne or someshit. I feel stupid.

Also, speaking of things I barely remember: the original opening to Newton's Apple. I miss that show, and it's pretty neat to see the opening sequence before they changed it to the have-the-apple-display-what-construes-the-random-object-flying-by motif that I remember slightly better. I remember seeing an old tape of the show once (recorded because Andy probably really wanted to see the episode but was stuck at the science fair or something) when I was about 8; it had the old intro on it, and I suddenly got nostalgic for a time predating the DNA-baby and the 3D computer-generated oscilloscope. And then, they changed the opening again, this time along with the entire format of the show, made the set look like a cross between a Seattle teenager's attic room c.1993 and a nature preserve's visitor center, and added a whole bunch of non-David Heil or -Peggy Knapp hosts, one of which may have been SuChin Pak, who's on MTV now, and it started to suck, and was cancelled. Maybe is was because they dropped the early Kraftwerk (band used to be about the flutes you know!) themesong. Thanks to Andy for pointing out the fact that Kraftwerk did that themesong. Also thanks to YouTube for yielding a bunch of Apple Newton-related clips in the search this needed. One YouTube search yielding two discrete types of cool things: 'spretty awesome ratio.