I recently watched I, Robot for the first time. It’s set a generation or so in the future, and literally in the first two minutes after the credits Will Smith opens up a package from a future e-bay like company and smiles: “Vintage 2004 Converse running shoes!”
I was sitting there looking at the screen the way I’d look if a friend invited me for dinner and then tried to sell me Amway. It reminded me of the product placement scenes that were a plot device in The Truman Show it was so gratuitous and out of place.
What are some other examples of “beat you over the head with it” product placement? I’ve noticed plenty but I’m having trouble thinking of others at the moment.
The absolute worst I’ve ever seen was in Men In Black II (another Will Smith movie, interestingly). Aliens friggin eating Burger King…are you kidding me?
Well, you pre-empted my example with the OP. I mean, it’s not like those shoes had anything to do with the character or the rest of the movie. They might as well have had an outright commercial break in the movie.
The close-up of the JVC logo on the stereo in the same film was almost as bad.
There’s Happy Gilmore, which literally had a commercial for Subway right in the middle of the movie. And, or course, all the golf tournaments had blatently-on-display corporate sponsors.
American Idol is a bit of a guilty pleasure of mine–I don’t manage to tune in much, but whenever I do, I can’t keep my eyes off the giant freakin’ glasses of Coca-Cola the judges are happily slurping.
And you have to wonder how many volleyballs have been affectionately dubbed “Wilson” ever since Cast Away came out…
SUPERMAN II: punching Nog through the giant neon Coke sign.
In GHOSTBUSTERS, when Bill Murray and Sigourney Weaver are investigating the fridge, there’s a Coke bottle. Not terrible in itself but everytime they shifted camera angles to the left or right of the open fridge the Coke bottle in the background shifted, too.
CASTAWAY. Wilson. Duh.
HAROLD AND KUMAR GO TO WHITE CASTLE. Guess. You got it. Burger Shack.
Subway and Fed-Ex are both total sluts when it comes to product placement. In addition to the ones already mentioned, Subway’s been in Coneheads, Beverly Hillbillies and other equally schmaltzy movies (in major “FREE MEDIUM DRINK WITH ANY LARGE SANDWICH PURCHASE” type messages in each) while Addams Family and Castaway are two very different movies that featured a main character who worked for Fed Ex (a severed hand and a Bosom Buddy respectively).
In Batman and Robin (surely one of the worst movies of the 90s), Gotham is reimagined as a pretentious, futuristic city that nonetheless features a Taco Bell logo on a window.
Some of these examples seem more blatant than gratuitous. To me the Converse shoes in “I, Robo is gratuitous. They are totally unnecessary in the movie and the movie would actually have been improved if they hadn’t been there.
But the “Taco Bell” thing or the jingles in “Demolition Man” or the volleyball or whole Fed Ex placement in “Cast Away” were just blatant IMO, not gratuitous. The whole point of “Cast Away” was that here was man who was constantly pressured by the clock because of his job who suddenly found that he had too much time. And he needed some object to fill the role of imaginary friend. Those things were crucial to the movie. Sure they could have invented some fictitious delivery service and made the imaginary friend a coconut but IMO that makes movies worse, not better. Similarly a large part of the ‘humour’ in “DM” was the very unpredictability and irritating way that what survives is what we hate. Sure they could have had the scene take place at a generic restaurant and had people singing generic jingles rather than armor hotdogs jingle but the movie would have been made even worse (if possible).
Just my opinion but to me gratuitous needs to be totally unjustified in the context of the movie, not just blatant. Someone drinking Coke or using a Nikon camera or other display of a brand name rather than making a point of hiding it is just blatant, not gratuitous.
There was semi-popular game going on in the 80s where part of the experience of watching the new “James Bond” film was to spot the product placement. Bond leaps out of his Brand X car, look at his watch with Brand Y prominently displayed, pulls out his brand Z camera and so forth. They were blatant but not usually gratuitous.
My vote for most gratuitous after “I, Robot” was in one of the “Lethal Weapon” movies. The characters, who just left a hotel with full room service, pull into a Subway and buy some subs and sodas and then spend several minutes arguing about it. It was quite obviously written in after the script had been finalised and actually destroyed the continuity of the movie.
I forgot to mention some product placement deal Ford signed with a novelist (?). I tried Googling, but couldn’t find a lead. Anyhow, Ford paid some writer to include mentions of the Ford Festiva in her story/book. I haven’t read the book, but I think something like that would seem a bit obtrusive.
When Wilbur Smith was selling big time back in the early 80s or late 70s he signed a similar deal with Coke. The hero musta downed a dozen Cokes in that book. Smith was never a fantastic writer being essentially just a step up from pulp, and the book was probably ghost written anyway, but it was a bit obtrusive.
Not independent, but it always jarred with me that “Reality Bites”, a movie that I otherwise liked, had a 2 minute ad for “Pizza Hut” in it under the guise of showing how damaging product placement was to serious movies.
