5 items
Shredded bubble gum packaged in a foil tobacco-style pouch — dreamed up in the Portland Mavericks bullpen by pitcher Rob Nelson and launched in 1980 with backing from ex-Yankee Jim Bouton. A staple of 80s and 90s little-league dugouts where kids mimicked the professional players they idolized.
A little flip-top plastic jug of powdered bubble gum you poured straight into your mouth. Made by Amurol — Wrigley's novelty-gum shop, the same one behind Bubble Tape and Big League Chew — Bubble Jug was an early-'90s corner-store dare: tip in too much powder and your whole mouth seized up.
Six feet of bubble gum coiled inside a plastic tin the size of a hockey puck, dispensed like a roll of tape. The whole pitch — "for you, not them" — was a license to hoard, and the move was to peel off a long ribbon and cram the entire thing in your mouth at once.
The yellow pack, the sugar-blast first chew that faded in ninety seconds, and a jingle that never left: the taste is gonna move ya. Juicy Fruit tastes like... well, nobody officially knows — and it's been that way since 1893.
Wrigley's blue-wrapped wintergreen stick gum, launched in 1994 and pitched entirely on the promise of icy-cold, long-lasting breath. The foil sticks were a fixture of the gas-station and grocery-checkout racks all decade — the cool-blue pack sitting right beside Wrigley's fiery-red Big Red.