Ah yes, I can remember it just like it was yesterday: my first experience with misleading marketing. It was very memorable, for you see, it was with regard to a product we used quite frequently when I was a little kid: Tang, the breakfast drink that tastes sort of vaguely like orange juice. (<I think that's what MAD Magazine said about it years ago.) You see, we drank it because we thought it was neat-o that the Apollo astronauts drank it. Only, apparently they didn't drink it. And when you think about it, it would have been ridiculously impractical for them to have drunk it in space.
Yes, you see, Tang is a powdered drink mix that you must mix with water to make into a drink. Can you imagine mixing a spoonful of sticky, sugary Tang instant breakfast drink in a weightless environment? You’d scoop a spoonful out of the jar, lift it up, and all the granules would float of their own accord all over the inside of your space capsule. Then you’d have to garb some with your hand and maneuver it into your glass of water, which you’d have to be very careful with to avoid having the water simply float out of the glass. And then you’d take your spoon and stir the Tang into the glass of water, causing it all to come swirling out of your glass and into your space capsule, like some orange liquid tornado, sloshing all over everything, ricocheting off ever surface, eventually covering everything in sight, making it all sticky and disgusting. Yuck!
Of course, I suppose you could pre-mix the Tang before you blast off into space, but that’s totally cheating; because after all, what’s the point of using an instant drink mix if you don’t mix it instantly? You could just bring orange juice instead if you’re bringing something that’s pre-mixed. And orange juice makes it bearable when everything screws up all day long (I am referencing the current orange juice ad campaign), like with the Apollo 13 mission. They never would have made it through that without their orange juice!
So this shows how silly this whole marketing strategy was, trying to say that astronauts drank Tang in space. And I think lots of people bought it because they wanted to be like the astronauts. Which is why everyone took wet-nap baths and went to the bathroom in zip-lock plastic bags all the time in the 1960s and ‘70s: to be like the astronauts! (Or maybe it was just fun or something: I don’t remember.)
Actually, now that I have looked it up on Wikipedia, it seems that Tang really was used on John Glenn’s Mercury flights. But they didn’t use it on the Apollo missions, which is what I think was clearly being implied in the Tang ads from my childhood. After all, John Glenn’s stuff was well over by the time I was born, and the moon shot stuff was all the rage by then, so I doubt they were still touting the Mercury missions by the 1970s. But you know, maybe I imagined the whole Tang Apollo ad campaign stuff. Maybe it was more gossip marketing, like the thing about Bubble Yum being made with spiders’ eggs. Bubble Yum didn’t actually make ads claiming that, because I think maybe the FDA would have objected and cracked down if it turned out Bubble Yum wasn’t really using spiders’ eggs; but it’s clear that Bubble Yum wanted kids to think it was made with spiders’ eggs, seeing as how spiders’ eggs are such a delicacy for children, so they must have simply started it as a rumor that they hoped would take on a life of its own, and luckily for them, it did. And this Tang Apollo tie-in marketing was probably guerilla gossip marketing like that, don’t you think?
(Of course I am only being silly here. I’m sure Tang would never have wanted to associate itself with the Apollo stuff anyway. Everyone knows the moon is made of cheese, and it only makes sense to tie-in cheese products with the Apollo missions, like Cheez Whiz. Just think of how much fun it would be to spray that stuff around in zero gravity: kind of like odd-tasting Silly String.)
