Forgive me if this has been mentioned, but people have founded real companies based on appearances in the movies.
The first one to spring to mind is Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. I was startled when I saw one in Times Square in NYC. The first one opened in Monterey just two years after Forrest Gump was released.
There’s a franchise of Jellystone Park campgrounds named after the one ion Yogi Bear. I’ve stayed at one – they’re not bad.
And you can’t tell me that the Soylent foods aren’t named after the movie Soylent Green You could quibble that it’s named after the stuff (soybeans + lentils) in Harry Harrison’s novel Make Room! Make Room!, but nobody would know about “Soylent” if the movie hadn’t been made
I went to the Universal theme park in Orlando last year. There was a section based on The Simpsons. I think it includes a Kwik-E-Mart and KrustyBurger. It’s a stretch to call a theme park real life, though.
And yes, I looked for a “BORT” license plate in the gift shop.
Your post also reminded me of a story I heard about a fan of Buckaroo Banzai who bought a mug with the logo of Yoyodyne Propulsion Systems. His bosses gave him a raise because they thought he was being courted by a rival company.
When I was a kid in the 70s, after having seen Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, I was amazed and bewildered one day to see ‘Willy Wonka’s Peanut Butter Oompas’ in the candy aisle at the store. I was old enough and smart enough to know that the movie about an eccentric man who runs a magical candy factory employing orange-hued slave labor with no OSHA safeguards whatsoever was not actually real, but I wasn’t sophisticated enough yet to know about product tie-ins.
A friend who worked at NASA was once given as a gift a mug with the Aperture Science logo and “We do what we must, because we can”, and of course that’s the mug he brought in to the office. Some of his co-workers thought that it was some NASA project.
@solost, that sounds about like my amazement (though for a different underlying reason) when I found out that NIMH was a real organization.
I’ve seen the Yoyodyne mugs, and I own a Yoyodyne shirt.
Yoyodyne is an in-joke with my crowd from NJ, because the Yoyodyne HQ, according to Buckaroo Banzai, is in Grover’s Mill NJ, where the Martians/Lectroids landed. My wife grew up in Grover’s Mill, which is a real place. I think the Yoyodyne factory shown in the film is biger than the actual Grover’s Mill (which has no palm trees).
There’s a modernistic building there with pipes on the outside painrted in garish colors (like the Pompidou Center in Paris). We’ve taken to calling it “Yoyodyne”:
By the way – Buckaroo Banzi didn’t originated “Yoyodyne”. Thomas Puynchon did in his novel V. BB just lifted it. As did a lot of other people
Amazon has a full size Bort License Plate, but I’d still like one of those little ones I’d see as a kid in the gift shops. Or just one with my name on it. Just like that brilliant episode implied, they would always be out of your own name. If I put that full size plate on a car would a cop just laugh or treat me like a weird sov cit?
Was it just coincidence or did they sell these things in versions matching state license plate colors? I kind of remember the PA mini license plates being the light orange used by the state in the 60s. I mainly remember MD as white, don’t recall the minis from there.
“For the good of all of us, except the ones who are dead” doesn’t make nearly as good a slogan.
The gift shop at Universal didn’t have license plates at all, that I could find. They did have employee badges for the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant, and plenty of BORTs. I suspect those are cheaper to make than stamped metal like a license plate.
I did a web search at the time, and ran across some mentions of Simpsons fans who have gotten genuine BORT vanity plates in their particular states.
Thanks to these last few posts I’ve just ordered a Yoyodyne coffee mug. Not real cost-effective, but what the heck … I’m a big Buckeroo Bonzai fan and I had no idea this stuff existed. Thank you.
That is one the best all-purpose lines of any movie. It got a lot of use with my late first wife and I.
And in happy news, today my Yoyodyne coffee mug arrived. A thing of beauty. It’s been washed and tomorrow we shall have first coffee.
In classic Chinese style, the mug is sorta made weird. In many silk-screened mugs, the artwork is set so when you are holding the cup with handle to the right, you can see the artwork. So a right handed person drinking will see the art as they’re bringing the mug up to their face.
This one the artwork is installed centered opposite the handle. So lefty or righty, you see one tip or the other of the Yoyodyne delta shape, but never the whole logo or slogan or company name. That’s what you get when you let Lectroids work in your coffee cup factory. Idjits can’t do nuthin’ right.
We’ve all seen personalized souvenir coffee mugs, beer steins, etc., sold with the 20 most common first names pre-attached. It really would have been great if this one had been available with “John”.
