Movies
Beeman's Chewing Gum Featured In The Following Movies
Beemans gum, with a pleasant flavor like no other, is the only gum in history whose wrapper featured a pig, but its larger role in history took place many years later, when Beemans became the lucky gum of test pilots, astronauts, and those who made movies about them.
Beemans gum figured prominently in three Hollywood movies: The Right Stuff, Hot Shots!, and The Rocketeer. While these interesting historical facts may seem completely unrelated, a little back story will make it all clear.
In 1879, an Ohio physician named Edward E Beeman set aside his medical practice to manufacture pepsin powder as a digestive aid. His bookkeeper suggested putting the pepsin into gum, to disperse the pepsin into the system, thereby soothing the stomach after a meal.
Dr Beeman followed her suggestion, and soon the aforementioned packs of Beemans gum sported a pig logo with the legend "With Beemans You Can Eat Like a Pig."
Flash forward to the twentieth century. Test pilots with the "Right Stuff" were supposed to be swaggering types with nerves of steel. One way to keep their nerves from upsetting their tummies was to chew pepsin gum. Test Pilot Chuck Yeager put it about that the pure oxygen he breathed during test flights gave him dry mouth, and that he chewed Beemans Gum to relieve it. Whether he left out the bit about a nervous tummy is lost to the annals of History.
Hey Ridley, you got any Beeman's?
In the films The Right Stuff and Hot Shots! Beemans Gum shows up as a homage to the historic test pilot and Mercury 7 astronaut gum chewers, both dramatically and satirically.
In The Rocketeer, young test pilot Cliff Secord comes across a jet pack that gets him into all kinds of trouble with the Nazis. Beemans Gum winds up saving the good guys from the Nazis.
There aren't that many gums out there that have such a rich history and taste so incredibly good. Regular production of Beemans ceased in 1978, due to lagging sales, but was brought back on the market in 1985, presumably to settle the tummies of other future risk-takers and pioneers.