Whatever Happened to Hubba Bubba?

In the days of yore I would go to the local drug store (M&R Drugs at the time, then Arbor Drugs, now CVS) to buy comics, rootbeer, Kit Kats, and whatever other shiny things struck my fancy. Eventually I had other things to buy than rootbeer, drug stores stopped selling comics, and my interest in bubble gum waned.

I didn't think about gum for maybe twenty-five years. Then, I had kids. My oldest has no interest in gum, but my second child, he loves it. Gum, mints, really anything. So he asked for some gum when we were at a CVS recently, and I lead him to the candy section. To my surprise, there was an assortment of, basically, Trident. There was some Mentos gum, and other brands, but they were all, without exception, adult-oriented gums. Not a single oddity among them, nothing that would make the eight-year-old me want to buy them. They were all pale in color, mint-based, and kind of dull. He got some gum, and even seemed happy with it, but I felt like I'd been betrayed.

Okay, not betrayed, but maybe that a piece of my childhood had vanished without my knowledge.

Okay, not even that. I just thought it was odd that none of the gum of my youth was available in that store. No Hubba Bubba, no Bubblicious, no Bubble Tape, Fruit Stripe, nothing. I promptly forgot about the whole thing.

Then, Rom...in which I found this ad from 1980:

I remember this ad campaign, in which two kids would square off in an old west town, trying to see who could blow the best bubble. There's a record of these commercials on Youtube, too.

Gum fighters. Clever.

So I decided to see if Hubba Bubba is still out there. Turns out, it is.

It's made by Wrigley, the same folks who bring you the Chicago Cubs. Their website even has a nice little timeline detailing everything about the brand since its first appearance in 1979. At some point in the 1980s, they ceased producing this brand (for reasons unstated, though it was probably low sales), then they acquired Bubble Tape in 2003, and brought back Hubba Bubba in 2004. As recently as 2015 they have introduced new flavors (mostly based on soft drinks, which I recall seeing back in the days of yore).

Looks like the bubble gum industry is still there (or is there once again, after a hiatus). All kinds of it are available places like this.The Wikipedia entry even has a picture of gum available in Australia and New Zealand.

So there's that.

The beginning of a journey through comics, with Rom.

Over the past few years I've been slowly putting together a full run of the Marvel Rom comics from a few decades ago. It started when I saw a batch of them at Vintage Phoenix in Bloomington. I got about twenty of them for a couple of bucks, and the ones I read seemed pretty good, so I figured why not get them all?

I stuck to physical retailers, and I never made special trips just to look for them, but whenever I was in a comic shop, I'd look for them. Until just recently, anyway, I kept to that. Then, when I'd exhausted the supply in the shops in Fort Wayne, Indy, various places in Michigan...I got sick of not finding then and bought the last four I needed on ebay. In doing so, I increased the average cost of issues to about $0.75 in all, including the shipping on those last four (which were issues 5, 11, 60, and 61).

Rom: Spaceknight began publication with a December 1979 date for issue 1, so it was probably out in October or so. It was an early toy tie-in comic, though apparently the toy line only ever had one figure in it, of Rom himself. The whole series ran 75 issues and 4 annuals.

Comic Vine has a little history of Rom, including the Marvel and newer IDW comics. The (sadly) defunct Comics Alliance has a lengthier version, which I haven't read in its entirety because it's got a rundown of the plots and whatnot. Io9 has a write-up on it, too.

Here's an article, written because the guy who directed the Guardians of the Galaxy movies likes Rom, from Comic Book Resources. There's a bog of legalities surrounding Rom.

So the toy was tabula rasa when Marvel got the rights to it, just something put out there by Parker Brothers. Marvel gave it to the writer Bill Mantlo, and he came up with the ideas surrounding the look of the character. Basically, Rom is a cyborg who gave up his humanity in order to be able to fight space villains called Dire Wraiths, who had attacked his people and who were in the process of taking over the earth in order to build their power. Sal Buscema drew the first issues.

Seven years later: Beta Ray Bill.

 Anyway, I've finally got the entire series, so I'm going to read it straight through. I'll post occasionally about the worthwhile stuff in these, such as the opening narration:

The comet appeared out of nowhere, catching earth's early-warning systems off-guard! If it was a comet! Ground-based radar tracked it down, losing it finally in the lower altitudes over West Virginia! A seismograph registered its impact in the Allegheny Mountains! Tomorrow, somebody from the university will investigate...

...if there is a tomorrow!

How's that for a start? Just look at all those exclamation points!