September 15, 2004:
Yes, I've finally found it! When I first heard murmurs online of the impending arrival of holiday-themed Mountain Dew flavors, I told everyone I knew to stay away for a few weeks so I could lock myself in a calm, dark room so my heart wouldn't explode from excitement. This comes from a person who'd sooner drink the juices from your very ass than an eight-ounce can of Mountain Dew. I don't care if it's poison -- if it's limited edition and tied to Halloween, I'll drink it twice. If I can drink poison twice, it's not doing it's job.
Don't get too excited; Mountain Dew Pitch Black isn't exactly King Halloween reincarnated as soda. The connection is there -- it's dark, it's mysterious, it's easily the most evil Mountain Dew flavor of all time. It compliments Halloween, but it's not really ready to take its place at autograph sessions. With a fizzly purple hue, the beverage boasts "blasts of black grape," and comes with a perfectly acceptable-for-soda shiny foil collector's wrapper. It's not just a drink...it's an investment. Bottles of Crystal Pepsi sell for about 50 bucks on eBay. Crystal Pepsi wasn't a limited edition adventure, and it didn't have a special foil wrapper. By 2015, we'll be able to hock bottles of Pitch Black for at least seventy-two thousand dollars each. I wonder how much eBay fees will be by then.
I gotta admit, it's not bad stuff. I expected to totally hate it, but it's way better than the regular Dew. Tastes like a more subtle cherry cola than a crazy graper to me; then again, I've sworn that red paper tastes like cherries in the past. It DOES. Figuring the effectiveness of selling a Halloween soft drink is tough. On one hand, you can definitely see groups of people buying Pitch Black in endless supply to mix with whatever liquid death they've got on tap for their spooky October parties. On the other hand, even those who like regular Mountain Dew wouldn't deny that it takes a good ten years to acquire the taste, and who wants to go through that kind of torment for a drink they know will be gone by November? I'm split. And the stuff turned my lips colors. Guess which ones.
In any event, it's cool that Halloween's got a drink again. We haven't seen a whole lot of that, at least not since Ghoul-Aid. I can't say I'll be downing bottles of this crud very often for the next month and a half -- I love the idea, but in the end, I know there's Mountain Dew hiding somewhere beneath the substantial layer of grape syrup. Never was a fan of artificial grape. I don't think we should hold Halloween accountable for the predominant "dark fruit color" being grape. Very wise men have said, time and time again, "nobody likes the grape." I long for the day the rest of the world starts listening. Halloween's a great holiday -- it deserves strawberry, if not even better.
It looks like a spittoon filled with chewed tebacky, but it's really just Mountain Dew Pitch Black in an old Star Wars glass from Burger King. I could fool anyone with this gag. Here's a few parting notes...
- Even the bottlecap deviates from the norm. It's fashioned in a pale metallic gray plastic. PMGP for short, pronounced "pimgip." Seriously, I just tried it.
- Smells like sangria. Would probably work great in sangria. Sangria is not the name of an island nation.
- A 20-ounce bottle generally runs for buck, maybe a buck fifty. Except in places that sell it for lower or higher than that. Line should've been deleted.
- There's some weird curvature to the bottle -- some kind of styled texture on the clear plastic. Makes you feel like it's more than just a soda.
- Mountain Dew's a friend of mine, he resembles Frankenstein.
- Matt (9/15/04)
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