So last night I was watching the “Not A Father’s Day” episode of How I Met Your Mother on My50 (which is a channel that basically airs nothing but syndicated shows). During the scene where Lily is talking to Ted and Robin, I noticed a weird ad for Safe Auto in the background. This threw me for a loop because A) HIMYM seems pretty good at avoiding obvious product placement and it was literally just a sign for Safe Auto in the background and B) Safe Auto isn’t the kind of company that can afford prime time advertising. So I downloaded a copy of the internet, and sure enough, there’s no ad there. It was obviously edited in for the syndication version. Is this common? Anyone else ever noticed this? The episode is gonna be on again in a week on a different channel, I’m going to watch it again to see if there’s anything there.
Was there anything there at all in the version you downloaded? I’m just wondering if maybe they were trying to cover something up when they syndicated it and just happened to use an ad. I’ve seen other shows where they covered up things like a piece of art or a cigarette logo in reruns, though usually they just annoyingly blur it.
Nope, here’s the shot:
http://img845.imageshack.us/img845/2599/vlcsnap2011031119h36m59.png
The ad was in the red circled area, so unless they had a big problem with reference books or pool balls, they weren’t covering anything up.
Four months later, I’ve finally been vindicated! Twice!
http://consumerist.com/2011/07/dvd-cover-for-zookeeper-digitally-inserted-into-how-i-met-your-mother-rerun.html
http://consumerist.com/2011/07/tv-with-2011-country-strong-promo-inserted-into-2009-himym-rerun.html