The proof was in the logo. they've changed it since then, but back in the day it showed a hillbilly running to an outhouse while another one, for some reason, shot at him. Urine and gunplay, a srange combination to sell your product.

My sister and I were trudging up the street to our house one very hot day in August in the 70's. I would imagine that we were bored out of our minds as we sometimes were toward the end of summer. Stevie was sitting on a stoop to the street, sipping a cold Mountain Dew. We were those abused kids you knew who were never allowed sugary snacks , fast food or sodas. My sister and I stared lustfully at the sweating bottle of green goodness.

"You know how they make Mountain Dew Stevie?" asked my sister.

Stevie didn't like how this was sounding one bit and shook his head.

"Hillbillies pee in a bottle," she explained.

"No way," said Stevie, shaking her off as he took another swig of hillbilly piss but with less enthusiasm.

"It's true," she continued. "You never see us drinking it do you? Shoot if it was just normal soda we'd be drinking it all day long, we got money."

Actually we didn't but that was beside the point.

"Man, that's not right" Stevie's denial started out strong but by 'not' it softened and at 'right' the word lilted up with just a hint of doubt.

"Why do you think they have a picture of that hillbilly on the bottle running to the bathroom?" she continued.

Boom. You couldn't argue with that fact. Stevie had viwed the scene on the bottle a thousand times but he never thought about it. Why would there would be a picture of one Hillbilly shooting at another Hillbilly as he ran to an outhouse? Under the drawing were the words

"special blend of mountain waters
and flavored in the traditional hillbilly style"

"What do you think 'flavored in the traditional hillbilly style means'?" She looked at him with pity, like he was the sorriest kid on the block.

For Stevie it all began to click, Mountain... Dew.... He'd never heard of piss being called dew, but it sounded on awful lot like pees brown brother, poo.

"Man, you guys suck"

He set the bottle down with disgust, not because he had been drinking a bottle of Hillbilly piss but because he now knew it was Hillbilly piss. Stevie went home to ask his mom about it.

My sister swooped up the bottle and took a long swig.

"Sucker" she said.

She handed the bottle to me and I took a little taste. She had made a pretty good argument for it being pee and it no longer had the allure it once did. There was, after all, a picture of a hillbilly running to an outhouse on the bottle.