These are the five best Gatorade flavors:

1. Citrus Cooler: It was Michael Jordan's favorite, so that's how everyone knows it, but it was also perfect and delicious, so that's how everyone should know it. (By the way, "perfect and delicious" is a good way to describe Jordan's game if you want to be a total weirdo but also aesthetically correct.)

2. Fierce Grape: I would give my life for an ice-cold Fierce Grape Gatorade.

3. Lemon-Lime: It ranks this high mostly on account of the weight it carries historically, with it being the original flavor and whatnot, like how people mention George Mikan with the best NBA centers ever even though he'd get dusted by basically any center considered marquee who played after him. (Mikan retired before Bill Russell's first year in the league, and I don't imagine that was a coincidence.)

4. Glacier Freeze: What a lot of people don't know is that the captain of the Titanic actually drove that ship straight into the iceberg because he thought it was a Glacier Freeze Gatorade.

5. Fruit Punch: The Tim Duncan bank shot of Gatorade flavors.

I don't know that everyone has a personal history with Gatorade, but I know that at least every athlete does, or at least every athlete in America does, or least every athlete that I know does, or at least I do, so that's why I thought the Gatorade 30 for 30 short was so interesting.

Gatorade is 50 years old this year. That's neat. Gatorade as a drink is wonderful. Just as much fun, though, is Gatorade as a pop culture entity, mostly in regard to the commercials the company has made. This is one of its first, from 1969:

This was back before athletes were brands, which is easy to tell because the commercial is anchored by baseball teams rather than baseball players. The script is very matter of fact:

Narrator: This is Gatorade, the greatest thirst quencher ever made.

Dissenter: [Angrily.] Says who?

Narrator: Says the New York Yankees, the Minnesota Twins, the Cincinnati Reds …

And on and on. Two things are funny (to me) about this: First, this was 1969, so it's just real easy to imagine a version that played like this getting cut right before airing:

Narrator: This is Gatorade, the greatest thirst quencher ever made.

Dissenter: [Angrily.] Says who?

Narrator: Says the New York Yankees, the Minnesota Twins, the Cincinnati Reds …

Dissenter: [Angrily.] Fine. I get it. But tell me how it's going to help get all of these minorities back out of baseball.

Oh, man. The '60s were not very chill.

The second thing that's funny is that the commercial that came on directly before this one (at least in this particular commercial block) was one encouraging people to smoke because cigarettes taste good and smell good. Here's the full clip:

I'm surprised Tipalet wasn't able to overtake Marlboro, what with its cherry-flavored cigarettes and all.

Let's jump ahead a bit. Here's a Gatorade commercial from the '80s. It's a bit dull.

The only very interesting part of this one is the 0:17 mark:

Gatorade

It started out well enough (the guy with ball is about 11 feet up in the air), but I need to meet the coach who told this poor kid that the best way to shoot a jumper is to "bend your spine back as far as it can — really, really crank it. You want it to look a capital letter 'C' but turned the other way. And then just throw the ball straight up into the air. Like, I mean straight up." They played basketball weird in the '80s.

Gatorade got its shit together in the '90s and started making cool commercials. There are a bunch we could show you here, but there's only one that was truly iconic:

It's still the greatest Gatorade commercial of all time, and I can't imagine a scenario in which anything could ever be better. Jordan was becoming the biggest athlete in the world and also stepping into what would become one of basketball's most influential and revered eras. And this came the same year he won his first championship, too. (Gatorade had started working on it before he actually won, so its bet had been made.) It really was epochal, and it engineered what Gatorade would come to represent creatively.

These are the five best Gatorade commercial tropes:

1.