Drink Freshy! It's the low-calorie Feh soda!

More vintage commercial goodness from Roadsidepictures: a set of vintage soda pop bottles, bottlecaps, cans, and signage. In addition to Coke and Pepsi, all sorts of obscure brands and generics are represented in this collection: Cragmont (the Safeway store brand), Del Monte, White Rock, Witches Brew (a licorice soda!), Foodtown Imitation Grape Soda, and Coffeetime carbonated coffee drink.

Once, in the early '80s, I was staying at the Statler Hilton in Manhattan, and the vending machine carried only White Rock products. In desperation, I bought a White Rock Orange Soda. Nasty stuff, but the little water nymph on the can was cute.

This photo shows an old-fashioned 10 oz. Mountain Dew bottle (back when it was sold as a hillbilly drink) and a squatty, non-conforming 12 oz. bottle for non-conforming 7-Up.

I don't know where they marketed the soda in the picture, but it can't have been anywhere in the northeast. The can looks like something MAD's Al Jaffee would have worked up as a parody. Feh! is probably too regional an expression for Wacky Packages to have used it. Note to product designers: If you're going to use alternating colors for a product name, make sure that each color's set of letters spells something like "Yum!" or "Good!" not "Ecch!" or "Ebola!"

(Update: Apparently Freshy was a Fresca knockoff for a line of Winn-Dixie store-brand sodas. Feh on a soda can wouldn't have registered in Winn-Dixie country, but it probably amused a few visiting Yankees.)

That "NO CYCLAMATES!" label takes me back. Remember the big controversy over cyclamates in the early '70s? Suddenly, saccharine became the artificial sweetener of choice, and then a few years later it was suspected of causing cancer. (Gilda Radner, Jane Curtin, Laraine Newman, and Linda Ronstadt sang about it on SNL.)

More: The pretty nymph on White Rock beverages is actually Psyche, from Greek mythology. "Psyche has the wings of a butterfly to depict immortality. Her story represents the pre-existence of the soul suffering in this life, going astray but remaining faithful to her ideals. She accepts her fate while showing courage and counting on love to lead her to life."

But the Witty Banter guys say, Soda = Death.