I watched the 1977 movie “Slap Shot” last weekend to prep for a future podcast, and as I have several times before, enjoyed it immensely.

But it did get me thinking about Paul Newman, who is the star of the movie.

Now, of course, I know Newman as one of one of the biggest stars in Hollywood history, a leading man’s leading man. I would suspect everyone reading this here knows him as that as well — we’re all old enough to have known the name even if we’re not movie buffs, and he was still acting into the early 2000s. (Technically, even long past that! His voice was still being used in the Cars franchise circa 2016 because he’d pre-recorded a whole bunch of lines for them.)

As I was talking to a friend about watching “Slap Shot” though, he started laughing. He’s a high school teacher, and said that he bet the kids in his class probably know Newman not from movies, but as a the face on Newman’s Own salad dressing.

My first thought was to balk at that. But on second thought, I realized it was possible. Those salad dressings were inescapable in the ’90s and 2000s, and since starting with those, the Newman’s Own brand has expanded into dozens of other products that seem to have been pretty popular. Even McDonald’s used Newman’s Own dressing packets in its restaurants for many years, which seems to be a level of cultural saturation most brands can only dream about.

So it makes total sense that kids might know him better for salad dressing than acting. And I’m not usually a “oh that makes me feel so old” person about linear time passing. But the idea of that there is a point where more people likely know him as a smiling brand image versus, say Butch Cassidy … oof. I dunno, man. The past truly is a foreign country.

It’s Friday. Onward.