Michael Jordan's South Side Street Art

19,000 Gatoarde bottles come together to honor Jordan

By EAMONN BRENNAN

Updated 4:14 PM EDT, Tue, Jul 14, 2009

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Street art has a long and impressive history in Chicago, but rarely is street art so corporate. Or, for that matter, so sugary.

No matter. When something's cool, something's cool, and there are few things cooler than Gatorade's latest Michael Jordan-focused promotion. The sports drink company decided to create a host of new flavors for the Michael Jordan Limited Edition Series, each of which has some tenuous relationship to Jordan's career. There's "championship blue," "championship red" and "championship gold," each with a different, iconic photo of Jordan on the wrapper.

But that's not really the cool part. Finding a way to mine Jordan's legacy is nothing new. Finding a way to turn blatant corporate marketing into believable kitsch is the real challenge, and the Gatorade-bottle created street art -- seen at right -- is where this campaign actually shines. 19,000 Jordan bottles came together to make that image of Jordan dunking, and each color correlates to, of course, a different flavor of Gatorade. Pretty incredible stuff.

Jordan wasn't the only athlete involved here. Scottie Pippen and Jackie Joyner-Kersee showed up to place a few bottles in the piece. Which is probably as good a time as any to remember that Pippen was usually far more instrumental in Jordan's greatness than a Gatorade bottle or two. If it takes a Gatorade gimmick to remind everyone, fine with us.

Eamonn Brennan is a Chicago-based writer, editor and blogger. You can also read him at Yahoo! Sports, Mouthpiece Sports Blog, and Inside The Hall, or at his personal site, eamonnbrennan.com. Follow him on Twitter.