Have you seen the commercial where the guy is standing in the middle of the street leaving a message on a girl’s machine?
He’s acting like Mikey from Swingers, using similar dialogue, and even calls the girl Nikki, which IINM, is the name of the girl in the movie.
What’s up?
It’s so blatant a rip-off, they simply MUST have paid Jon Favreau money to use it. Or is there a statuTe of limitations on these things?
Or am I way off-base here?
I know what commercial you’re talking about, but I’m guessing that it’s just such a common joke now (see: any sitcom) that no one can be considered the “owner.” Looks like you’re not the only one to notice it though: Link
Yeah, it’s common now, but as your link shows, the guy LOOKS like Mikey, but also, his name is Mike and the girl’s name is Nikki. That’s WAY beyond just using the same gag.
After looking at my link, I’ll agree with you on this one. Further down that page they received a supposed e-mail from MC saying that they did pay for the rights to it. The site goes on to note that they never actually sent an e-mail to MC, so it’s pretty unlikely that MC wrote back to them. I’m suprised that they kept the names the same. If it’s homage, it’s a little too blatant, and if it’s just straight up ripping off the cult popularity of Swingers, than they need to pay.
… Actually it reads like this further down the page: “Gorilla masks got an email from Mastercard” - not us at AdLand, so “they received” is incorrrect. We never say that we got an email from Mastercard, but that might be due to the fact that we never emailed Mastercard to ask about it, which you correctly point out that we go on to note that. See?
Even further down the page a mrnobody claims that the Homage was legal and paid for, but nobody knows who mrnobody is as he is a new user with that single comment to his name. We still think it’s weird (it’s not like Swingers was this years cult movie, seems a little late to be doing this homage.)