The odd thing is that when I saw it on, I think, TNT, they blurred the label out.
Looney Toones: Back in Action made fun of this. They’re wandering around exhausted and lost in the desert and a Walmart appears out of nowhere. The others slowly look at Corporate Lady.
“What? The audience expects it. They don’t even notice it.”
And as they leave …
Bugs Bunny: “It sure was nice of those Walmart folks to give us these Walmart drinks in exchange for saying Walmart so much.”
Did Coca-Cola pay Stanley Kubrick for the scene in Dr. Strangelove where Group Captain Mandrake and Colonel Guano discuss the soda machine?
Several people have mentioned the James Bond movies. Oddly enough, Ian Fleming was doing that in the novels, even before they started making movies. He rarely described anything with a generic word, but always with his favorite brand name. James Bond always wore a Rolex Oyster Perpetual, and mixed his drinks with Gordon’s gin. (His cigarettes, however, were custom-made in Turkey, because none of the commercial brands were strong enough to suit him.) Some book critics referred to it as “the Fleming Effect”.
The movie studios all have people reading scripts simply to find places to stuff product names into the film/TV show. Any time you see a brand name in a show/film, somebody got paid for it being there.
I’m surprised no one’s mentioned the movie Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man, product placement doesn’t get more blatent than that.
A lot of TV shows in the 60s/70s had cars which were provided by a certain manufacturer and even mentioned this in the credits.
Actually, I think the point the scriptwriter is trying to get across is that the main character has a dislike for the new technology (ie, robots), as if he is holding onto to the past, or something. The scene where the female lead was trying to ‘voice activate’ the JVC DVD player is funny, actually.
BTW, one more blatant placement in Man in Black II – the high-tech flying car is steered with a PS2 Controller!!
A good example of this is in Get Smart, which opening always starts with Max parking his car. What kind of car he parks changed several times over the five years the show was on the air because they kept getting different sponsors. According to IMDb, it was a 1965 Sunbeam Tiger Mark I for two seasons, a Volkswagen Karmann Ghia for two seasons, and a 1969 Opel GT for the last season.
Back in 1997 there was a series of tv ads for the Cadillac Catera. One of them encouraged viewers to “lease a Catera”. It ended with the somewhat odd question, “Well, who is Lisa Catera?”
As I recall the spot had been running for a couple of months when the show Chicago Hope introduced a new character, Dr. Lisa Catera. And the ad just happened to air during that show. Convenient, no?
That’s about as bad as it gets, short of actually naming the show after a product (like the aforementioned Don Johnson/Mickey Rourke film).
Or possibly Pizza Hut.
This is not true. While it might be increasingly rare for a mention of a brand name to be unpaid, it still does happen.
In addition, there are plenty of uses of brand-name products in programs that the trademark owners explicitly object to. You can bet that they don’t pay for those placements. There was a recent case in which the trademark owner objected to the use of Caterpillar machines by a movie villain – I forget which movie, but I believe it was a sequel to an animated children’s movie.
I didn’t view the use of Fedex as product placement in Cast Away. Instead, the story was about a guy whose job was all about extreme time management who was forced to deal with existence in a place where the passage of time was far less important. He could just as easily have been an efficiency expert at a manufacturing company.
And according the the IMDB listing, Fedex didn’t pay product placement fees.
Many times when a company objects to the use of their name in a film, they’ll sue. The cigarette companies used to run ads in writing magazines saying that if you ever used their name in conjunction with underage smoking (in a fiction piece, I presume) they’d sue the piss out of you.
Oh, and the whole “dune buggy” business in ST: Nemesis was product placement.
Product placement doesn’t necessarily involve writing a check. I’m quite sure that even if no cash changed hands, FedEx provided the use of its planes and perhaps other facilities, saving the production hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of dollars.
OH! I saw one just yesterday in Clear and Present Danger:
They are doing a military excercise where they are trying to “find the sniper in the bushes”. The commander radios the guy in the field to tell him “2 steps to the left, sniper in the grass”.
The soldier looks down and picks up an orange wrapper…
“He had lunch here, sir. McDonalds. Quarter Pounder. With Cheese.”
Pretty blatant.
(Now, how did he get a quarter pounder out there in the bushes? And if he was carrying it in his boot or whatever you can’t tell me they couldn’t SMELL a QPWC. But he’s a super sniper so I guess he figured out somehow to mask the smell. So then he blows his cover by leaving the wrapper out there…!!! It’s a riddle wrapped in an enigma, I tell ya.)
Waded through the whole thing to make sure I wasn’t being redundant.
I know they were drek-fests, but the Mission Impossible movies had gobs of unsubtle placement for Apple Computers.
Oh, and the false perspective coke can was the LEAST problematic placement move in Leonard, Part 6, I assure you.
They’d sue, but they wouldn’t win. In the Caterpillar case, for example, they lost and they lost big. So long as all they are doing is showing people using the product as it is used (to bulldoze things, or cute animated heroes, in this case) and not unjustifiably implying some kind of negligence on the part of the manufacturer or defect, they can do what they want. And movie companies have the money to stand up to this kind of lawsuit, and they do.
They’re hardly the only ones. In the world of Hollywood films, Apple computers are apparently the only kind made.
Yeah, if they go after the movie company. If they pick the writer of a short story or novel, it can be a different matter. Doesn’t matter that the law’s on your side if you can’t afford the lawyer to defend yourself (and since it’s a civil matter, you’ve no hope of getting a public defender).
This is true, except for the fact that the autos featured in Route 66 were General Motors products – specifically, Chevrolet Corvettes.
dalej42: Looks as if Pepsi Twist is still being produced.
They’re not going to be able to go after a writer if something hasn’t been published. It is standard practice for book publishers to agree by contract to defend authors against lawsuits regarding what’s been published. Publishers’ lawyers thoroughly vet books before publication and take out anything that could be defamatory or constitute trademark diliution.
Just take a trip to a library – it is very common for novels to use trademarks in ways that the trademark owners would object to. Unless your depiction implies that the actual company is involved in some kind of wrongdoing, you have nothing to worry about. You can depict Nazis as loving Levi’s jeans, drinking Coca-Cola, and chewing Wrigley’s gum and using them in nefarious ways.
Fear of lawsuit is just not a realistic fear in such cases.
By “the same company” I meant that the cars were made by the same company every season, not that they were always Fords. I never saw the series, so I couldn’t remember what kind they were, except that they were supposed to be sporty. Thanks for identifying the,.