If you grew in the 1970s, what wasn’t cooler than gold belt buckles, stripe patterned shirts, comic books and Hubba Bubba bubble gum?

Sure, Fruit Stripe was okay, if a little chalky. If you liked chalk in your gum, all needed do was buy a pack of Fleer or Donruss baseball cards, during the waning years of trading cards coming with a gnaw-on treat. Topps at least had a palatable stick of gum in their card packs. Fleet or Donruss, it’s amazing we even lived eating that nasty crap.

Big Red chewing gum carried a fun, zesty cinnamon zing on the palette, while Fruitalicious and Bubble Yum were hot contenders vying for our gnawing pleasure back then. Hubba Bubba, I mean, dude, the name sold itself. The fact it had the best reputation for bubble blowing elasticity was the reason to care. It was also on par with Bubble Yum and the tried-and-true Bazooka for the quickest sugar rush.

I was reading through a few of my classic Iron Man, Captain America and Spiderman comics and rejoiced to spot the above ad for Hubba Bubba repeated in the issues from 1979. Hubba Bubba used to air t.v. ads featuring kids as “Gumfighters” in an old West setting throwing down against Black Barts of gum chewing, nonsensical giddiness which were effective in their pitches. We wanted this stuff to get in there amongst our friends to duel in bubble blowing.

Here in print form, a hilarious tutorial on the fine art of “Gumfighting” or as I called it then, “Gumslinging.” Best of all with Hubba Bubba, they’d found the science of non-stick retraction! All-important to a child of the Swinging Seventies’ gumslinging forte.