(paraphrasing)
HOMER:I need something to get that awful taste out of my mouth.
ARAB GUY:We have clam juice and Mountain Dew.
HOMER:Eeeeww!..Give me a clam juice.
I told them I’d change the logo, put Mickey’s pants back on, but they wouldn’t listen. Some jerks you can’t reason with.
Linda McCartney’s line of veggie TV dinners got a totally serious plug when she and Sir Paul guest-starred.
The kids are trapped on a secluded island. Sherri (Terri?) says, “I’m so hungry, I could eat at Arby’s.” The other children look on solemnly as the desperate nature of their plight sinks in.
And how can we forget:
“Mountain Dew or crab juice?”
“Bleech. Eww. Seesh. I’ll take a crab juice.”
People do weird things in commercials- like eat at Arby’s.
Who’s We?
From “Bart’s Girlfriend”:
Bart: “She’s like a Milk Dud. Sweet on the outside, poison on the inside.”
The episode where Bart gets the fake driver’s license and Lisa goes to work with Homer.
When Homer and Lisa are at work, they scam a bunch of free candy from the snack machine. Smithers comes over and is offered a variety of Candy snacks.
"Smithers: [walks up] Simpson! What in God’s name are you–
Lisa: [offers Smithers some candy] Zagnut bar, Mr. Smithers?
Razzles? Skittles? Whachamacallit? Twizzlers?
Homer: They all have hilarious names and are delicious.
Smithers: Well I am partial to Jolly Ranchers. "
I got a kick out of Smithers saying this because if you use some synonyms there, “Jolly Ranchers” becomes “gay cowboys.” I wonder if they planned it that way?
But with regard to the OP:
“Faster, Neddy! He’s gaining on us!”
“I can’t, it’s a Geo!”
You know, I’m positive I put at least one case worth of Chicken Tonight on the shelves at work last night (made by Continental, IIRC), but after a while one jar of Stir In Sauce starts to look like another, be it Teriyaki, Honey Soy, or Soylent Green, so I may have been mistaken (or mis-remembering).
There is an episode that involves Marge’s old friend who has become a big city reporter who Lisa idolizes. The car the reporter drives looks a lot like a Cadillac CTS, down to the wheel design. The Cadillac was pretty new at the time, as I recall. I thought it was strange because other vehicles in the show are pretty generic. Doubt it was paid, but I thought it was kind of weird at the time. Anybody else remember this?
“CNNNBCBS, a division of ABC”.
This is minor, but I believe the Simpsons referenced IKEA when the family go to a hard-to-pronounce European furniture super market.
So has Futurama, though they called it πKEA.
No longer marketed in the US, but it still exists in the UK, Ireland , and Australia (per Martini Enfield’s post above).
I see that Continental is an Australian brand of Unilever, and Chicken Tonight is still available in Australia, so there you have it. (I work at a supermarket, too. Unilever’s logo is hypnotic. I could stare at that thing all day.)
Actually, the fleabag motel Roger Myers is reduced to living in after he loses his cartoon studio is a “Worst Western.”
Then there was the episode where the Simpsons praised NBC’s “Dateline” and Stone Philips before Homer is forced to retract the statements during the credits.
That song is indelibly burned in my brain. The stuff came out during my freshman year in college, and two of my buddies (who had just recently arrived in America) thought the ads were hilarious. The sight (and sound) of them dancing like chickens while singing the jingle their respective heavy Chinese and Bangladeshi accents will be with me as long as I live.
Most of these aren’t really “product placements,” of course, but rather just references to well-known products from our universe appearing in the context of the Simpsons universe. I don’t know if the show has ever actually had an actual product placement (although one Doper who worked for the company at the time said Sylvania had stated in one of their newsletters that they paid for their name to appear on a lightbulb box in the “space coyote” episode). Apparently, fir legal reasons, they can say the name of an actual product, but they can’t show the name written out. This is mentioned on the DVD commentary for 22 Short Films About Springfield, where Comic Book Guy offers to sell Milhouse a Hamburglar comic book in exchange to use the bathroom at his store. Comic Book Guy says the name “Hamburglar,” but when he holds up the comic book, his hand covers some of the letters in the “Hamburglar” name. The plot of Scenes from the Class Struggle in Springfield involves Marge entering high society after finding a discounted Chanel suit. Marge says the name “Chanel,” but the “Chanel” name on the tag is partially obscured by her hands, and the nameplate on a Chanel store later in the episode is blocked partially by a tree. (This presumably doesn’t extend to parodies of a product or what appears to be one product actually being another, such as a funny gag in Homer the Smithers where Homer tells Smithers he could work anywhere he wanted to, and apparently he can- the next shot is of a sign reading “AT&T” in the familiar corporate typeface. We then pan out to reveal the full text of the sign: “NEAT&TIDY PIANO MOVERS.”)
There was one funny occasion in which product placement was parodied: Kids Newz was bumped off the air by the obviously much more important program, The Mattel & Mars Bar Quick-Energy Chocobot Hour.