Bones usually has one awkwardly hilarious bit of product placement per episode. The shoehorned-in dialog which praises the features of a Toyota brand car usually crack me up.
Although to be honest, if I had a car that parallel-parked itself, I’d probably have a similar conversation the first time I used it with passengers in the car. That’s pretty neat.
I don’t think it counts as product placement if you have a character bitch about how annoying the product is!
<3 Bobby
I see Grumpy Verizon is all verizony. Here. Have some verizon berries and calm down.
I would be curious to see what Belfry considers distasteful product placement! Because that Toyota Prius Intelligent Parking Assist ™ on Bones was the most blatant, awkward, ridiculous, obvious, stiff and fake product placement I have ever seen. I do appreciate them at least pretending to still be in character, though. Had they not added that, I would have honestly thought I was in a Toyota Prius Intelligent Parking Assist ™ advertising powerpoint meeting.
Believe it or not, my parents actually got a car that does the parallel parking thing… and they haven’t tried it! They’ve had the car for a month! That would be the first thing I did when I got home!
Last night’s Castle had Castle and Beckett both simultaneously pulling out {some smartphone or another} after leaving an interview - Castle logged on to Netflix to watch a movie featuring a person of interest and Beckett using hers as an actual phone. It was blatant but I thought it actually fit pretty well with the ridiculosity of that show.
And a season before that she had a Matrix “We can all ride over there together if we take Angela’s Matrix” or some such. I noticed that at the time because I had been driving a Matrix zipcar and my boyfriend and I had a lot of fun with that as a silly car name. “Matrixxxxx!” Just like in Commando 
I can’t say it bothers me too much on this kind of show. If I wanted to take offense at something on Bones it would be the absolute rubbish technomagic handwaving or the lack of character consistency (Brennan) - and since none of that bugs me enough to stop enjoying the show, Toyota ads don’t really rate.
On the latest episode of Fringe, a non main character was driving a Ford Focus. He needed to back up in a hurry so he checked his back up camera. It was all clear, (we know this because the camera screen was twice the size as normal.) He backed up fast then came to an immediate stop. The camera was zoomed into the “Ford Focus” emblem right above the rear tire and stayed there a few seconds so even slow readers would know what kind of car it was.
Same episode:
Walter is talking about how the new fruit cups at the hospital (where his injured son is staying), are in their own juice instead of the sugary syrup that he’s use to. He doesn’t say they are Dole fruit cups, but there was a Dole commercial during the show featuring natural juice fruit cups.
I wouldn’t exactly call either of those distasteful but they were quite a bit more obvious than the one on Bones.
Wow. Ok. That tops Bones.
Yeah, the “Fringe” ones are pretty obvious, too.
I didn’t see the Dole commercial (<3 30 second skip function on DVR) but his fruit cup scene didn’t seem very product placementy to me. Just seemed like Walter being Walter. He’s very obsessed with his favorite foods and details like them being changed slightly are exactly the kind of thing he’d talk about.
Agreed. I didn’t think they were product placement either, just Walter being Walter.
Of course, it’s a little hard to miss the phone product placements in Fringe.
I’m just waiting for the day they start advertising cigarettes again.
I actually think Chuck handles their product placement very well. They do it in a very self-aware affair fashion and use it for humorous effect. One character will expound on his unnaturally strong affection for Subway or Toyota, and the other characters will sort of give him a weird look and say “Um…yeah, moving on.”
The worst was in the first season of Babylon 5. When Garibaldi and Lenier rebuilt a 1992(?)Kawasaki Ninja. The opening teaser had more high pressure sales tactics than a used car lot and it had NOTHING to do with anything happening in the rest of the episode, but it was the B-plot for the episode.
Aw, I thought that was a sweet B-plot!
And anyone who uses a regular desk phone has put a CISCO sticker on it for some unknown reason.
As it was in the 70’s with Ford, Toyota is now the “car” everyone drives on TV. The producers in the 70’s at least only took the cars. Now, with all the cable TV channels, and the DVR’s avoiding commercials, Toyota has become heavy handed with the all mighty dollar, or yen? Shows like Bones on Fox, and Royal Pains on USA Network are blatant Toyota Commercials. There are episodes of Bones, that are nearly unwatchable as the Toyota’s are the stars and every employee of the Smithsonian, and the FBI, all magically drive Toyota’s. It get’s so bad that they actually name the model’s and the functions of the vehicle’s while wasting story telling time to advertise the vehicle. It’s bad enough that an hour long program is 36 minutes of actual programming.
Now everyone who watches classic TV or was around to watch it back in the 60’s and 70’s watched mostly Fords. Starsky and Hutch made a gutless, boat of a Gran Torino, ( I own one, not a hater here) a superstar around the globe, especially in the UK. Charlie’s Angels all drove Fords, and the impact of that show made superstars of the 3 Angels. Ford Sales of Mustang II’s and that Orange Pinto spiked due to the show.
Back then it was just in the background of shots, but now it is awful, and I love cars. But I don’t need Bones, or Angela (Bones) telling me how good the Navigation is on their Prius or the rear view Camera on Angela’s Sienna, in real time! It goes on…
Now Art imitates life. With the Demise of the Police officer’s favorite ride, The Ford Crown Victoria, The Honolulu PD now has Toyota Camry’s in it’s fleet and some website advertising…The New Hawaii 5-0 all drive Chevy’s, they are shown prominently, at least Dano has not told us how many horsepower his Camaro SS has…yet! The pilot was shot with all Ford’s like the original 5-0, and was used to bring back the Mustang “5.0” as Dano’s ride. I guess the GM Money was way better than the Ford Money this go around.
What say you?
This showed up in a Warehouse 13 episode recently, where Jinx and Artie borrowed Claudia’s Prius and on the way to stop an artifact Jinx had to extol the virtues of whatever the hell Toyota’s in-dash system is to Artie. The whole thing stuck out like a sore thumb.
Everyone always seems to have to take a minute to show their new car’s Pandora[sup]TM[/sup] connectivity, no matter how much of a hurry they are in.
The episode that was on tonight had another horrible one. If I had not been a fan of the series since the beginning, and this was the first episode I watched i would turn it off immediately.
That episode may be worse than Grey 17 is Missing, and that’s saying a lot.
