Great Bluedini Kool-Aid:
Since starting X-E's Kool-Aid Section, I've been surprised by the amount of e-mails I get about it. It's not that I ever personally doubted the greatness of Kool-Aid, but convincing you guys of it seemed a few miles closer to impossible. Slowly but surely, the reviews seem to have gained steam, and I'm always thrilled when a perfect stranger writes in with a 2,000 word essay detailing the time they found ancient Kool-Aid flavors at a general store in Utah's seedy underbelly. Point is: Judging from those e-mails, you're growing impatient waiting for me to get around to Great Bluedini Kool-Aid. So here.
What makes Great Bluedini so retrospectively special was how it managed to conquer every conceivable item on the list of things that can transform Kool-Aid flavors from drink mixes into something more interesting. It had a character mascot, it changed colors, it tasted terrific and it -- much like Berry Blue -- met an early end because it looked too much like something toxic. More on that later. Coming and going in the `90s, Great Bluedini is arguably in the top five most-missed Kool-Aid flavors. Here's why...
Only a very select few flavors had characters
other than the Kool-Aid Man doing their hard sell -- six or seven tops out of dozens upon dozens of flavors. And of those, an even smaller number of these characters became immortalized with their very own television realization. From Purplesaurus Rex's giant, spotted clay dinosaur to the pink foam costume that brought Sharkleberry Fin to life, it was this kind of extra effort that enabled a singular Kool-Aid flavor to become a cultural phenomenon. An exaggeration, you say? Only if you were never accosted by one of your more proudly lame grade school classmates to join their "Great Bluedini Club." You fucking dropout.
For Great Bluedini, an enormous, air-breathing octopus was forged. A turquoise blue air-breathing octopus would suffice in almost every case, but Kool-Aid's standards were so much higher. He wasn't just an octopus, he was an octopus
magician, top hat and all, able to spin webs of card tricks at rates by which the world's most renowned poker players could never achieve because honey, they don't have eight arms. Though Great Bluedini's first appearances on television played up his magicilicious intent, future ads turned him almost into a background character -- the guy who poured Kool-Aid for everyone else. That's not to infer that Great Bluedini rode through the skies on Hollywood's magic carpet and ended up cleaning vomit for a living at TJ Maxx -- if you could pay your rent from just pouring Kool-Aid, you'd be a stoner hero and all-around smiley person. You fucking dropout.
The package art was splendid, and none of the other Kool-Aid guest stars contrasted so nicely with the Kool-Aid Man's Kool-Aid red. Upon opening the packet, I was met with a familiar whiff: In the summer before my first year of high school, I tried to dye my hair blue with Great Bluedini Kool-Aid. For those who don't remember this craze now that it's tapered off, Kool-Aid has very, very strong dyeing powers. Crafty types used it to turn yarn different colors, but kids who wanted to fuck conformity up the ass during the commercial breaks between TGIF slot 1 and TGIF slot 2, nothing beat using it to turn our hair a whole bunch of screwy colors.
Methods of doing this varied greatly, but the most commonly accepted ritual involved boiling a pot full of Kool-Aid and sticking your head inside when it cooled down just enough to not melt your skull. It wasn't glamorous. Our skin was stained for weeks, as were our shower tiles, towels, pillows and everything else our heads came in contact with. Normally, the colors faded after a month or so, but since a great many kids sank their heads into the hot pots for a good hour before doing the washout, it wasn't uncommon to see a girl who dyed herself silly still show traces of the activity over a year later. During Great Bluedini's reign, it was the only Kool-Aid on the market able to turn hair blue -- just another bullet for the "special achievements" section of the octopus's resume.
Great Bluedini's overall magic theme stemmed from the fact that it was a color-changing Kool-Aid, meaning the powder did not reflect the eventual juice. This trait was shared among quite a few Kool-Aid flavors -- even for some that never advertised it. Sadly, I must report that Great Bluedini's ability to change colors was rather subdued. It only went from a
pale green to blue, and I'm not really sure anyone would've even noticed it if they didn't go through the trouble of having their designers add a blazing yellow ad burst to the packets at the very last second. This would be a much bigger mess if the ultimate color, scent and taste of Great Bluedini wasn't so freakishly amazing.
With its brilliant turquoise hue and overpowering berry scent, nobody could be in the presence of a pitcher of Great Bluedini and avoid commenting on it. God, I sat and stared at that pitcher for a good three hours straight in preparation for writing this review, and I'm
still in awe. Unfortunately, as legend has it, Great Bluedini suffered Berry Blue's fate: It was yanked off store shelves for looking too much like, in this case, antifreeze. I reiterate that it's not known for sure if this is just "something we say" or a flat out fact, but it's at least truthful to say that people
did complain about it.
The trend of blue beverages coming under fire shouldn't be surprising. For years, companies who produced liquids that were great for cleaning, slicking or saving something inanimate had always depended on the color blue. It was the "safe" color. People didn't drink blue things, limiting the chance of any lethal confusion. It's very rare that a poisonous substance becomes blue from the natural mixing of its ingredients -- the companies purposely make it that way to save us the embarrassment of thinking it's iced tea or something. And wherever the truths end and the myths begin, there's no denying that Great Bluedini looks exactly like
antifreeze.
It's a damn shame that children are generally stupid enough to drink the poisons that rest under your sink just because they look like Kool-Aid, as this Great Bluedini stuff was like whoa. The semi-tart blueberry flavor worked a lot better in action than theory, and by the day's end, I'm confident that I'll be a pitcher of Kool-Aid heavier than I was this morning. Great Bluedini completely deserves its reputation for kicking ass.
--
Matt
