Colgate: Max Frash

"Mmm. Creamy."

– Old Gregg, The Mighty Boosh.

"I don't know what to do. I just... well... my son's addicted to toothpaste."

– Gregory Burke to his therapist.

"You are a sad, strange little man."

– Gregory Burke... I mean, Buzz Lightyear, Toy Story.

Introduction

Colgate: Max Fresh (AKA Colgate: Max Frash) is a toothpaste product created by the Colgate company. Variants include Max Fresh with Whitening Breath Strips, Max Fresh with Cooling Crystals, Max Fresh with Fluoride, Max Fresh Night, and Max Fresh KnockOut, and flavors include cool mint, clean mint, mint fusion, spicy fresh, and cool night mint.

The Burke Connection

Despite being a well-received but otherwise trivial dental maintenance product, Colgate: Max Fresh had a brief but abnormal place in Samuel Burke's early childhood, one that is still remembered with befuddlement by him and his family to this day. At around age five or six, Burke was in kindergarten when he happened upon a Colgate: Max Fresh commercial on the television in his living room. Almost immediately, his attention became focused on the product in question, and he consistently wrote and drew about his own custom flavors and variants to be sold as food. In his own words from 2022:

"Most of the things I grew attachments to as a little kid were entirely sensory-based. My parents would get me Yankee Candles when I was two years old because I reacted positively to the strong scents and the flakiness of the wax. Playing certain video games and watching certain cartoons evoked very, very specific feelings of comfort and excitement, mostly due to the soundtracks, settings, characters, and animation styles. The same can be said about certain sounds, like music. So, while I can't explain why I was so attached to this [Colgate: Max Fresh], of all things, I could almost feel the gooeyness of the texture and the taste of minty freshness, and I imagined how tasty it would be if it were fruit-flavored, for example. It was one hundred-percent a sensory experience and nothing more."

For no more than a couple of months, Burke drew an unknown number of pictures depicting imaginary concept flavors for the toothpaste (mostly various fruit and candy flavors) and consistently pronounced it as "Colgate: Max Frash", which only further confused his family members. It's likely that they didn't think much of it, as he had been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome three or four years prior and they were therefore informed about such symptoms as strong emotional attachments to typically mundane objects. This attachment in particular faded away quickly, but it remains as a comedic memory shared between Burke and his family members, and other unusual attachments—including many of those mentioned in the above quote—have continued to persist into his adult years.