The most shameless product placement seen in a movie. (and ruins the movie for you)

The thread on fake product placements on The Lord of the rings made me wonder about the real placements that ruined movies, by “destroy” I mean that the ad’s appearance damaged the enjoyment of the movie for you.

On TV, in the 80’s, I was enthralled by Capricorn One (1978):

The government fakes a mission to mars and when the astronauts are declared dead on reentry, they escape the desert facility were they worked in the deception,
The movie was fun and suspenseful, in a mindless sort of way, until:
Alone in the desert the last escaping astronaut reached an abandoned gas station and opens a fridge in the hope of finding a drink.

The Coca Cola ad on the fridge door COVERS THE WHOLE FRAME OF THE SCREEN!…. for ages!

That totally destroyed the enjoyment of the movie for me. (Much later, I realized how moon hoaxers have a soft spot for this conspiracy movie, that make me dislike it now for other reasons; besides, it had OJ on it :)…)

Do you have more examples of blatant product placements that ruined a movie for you? (Both the mindless and the good ones).

  1. The internet bubble is getting bigger and along comes Inspector Gadget starring Matthew Broderick. In a scene were a car crashes or something smacks into a billboard, and what is on the billboard? A giant Yahoo ad. As the billboard comes crashing down you hear the “Yahoooooooooooooooo!” that was the company’s ad campaign at the time.

Superman hawking Marlboro’s-- yecch.

Also, I spent most of Cast Away fuming about the obtrusiveness of the FedEx logo. I can remember sitting through twenty-five minutes of its near-constant presence thinking, “God, just get to the damned desert island so I don’t have this logo in my face anymore,” never suspecting the length of the ordeal ahead of me.

I’m not 100% sure, but I think it was Hannibal that had a smart, sexy FBI agent that did her research on the internet with a NetZero “free” dialup account.

It didn’t really destroy the movie for me, but it does stain an otherwise wonderful movie when I rewatch it these days. One of the few DVD’s I have bought: The director’s cut of “Blade Runner.”

The Atari ads are so dated as to make the concept of the future date seem lame.

That Carlsberg truck in Spider-Man. Beer product placement in a comicbook movie is just wrong.

I know Jackie Chan has an endorsement deal with Mitsubishi overseas, but the movie Thunderbolt was too much. Besides being a very lackluster Chan movie, almost as bland as some of his American movies, but it might as well have been a near two hour commercial for Mitsubishi.

I’ve only seen parts of the movie, but the Hewlett-Packard logo on the subway wall during the fight between Neo and Agent Smith(?) in The Matrix. It was in such a bizarre place to be an ad in a real subway, and couldn’t be explained away as graffitti. It was obscured by grime and faded to make it look like it had been there awhile, but it still just screamed out at me.

Damn, I was gonna say the Fed Ex one.

The Heineken thing in the Austin Powers sequel was pretty annoying.

Also, in Independence Day, when the Coke can is placed on the spaceship, with the logo perfectly centered, of course.

And I just saw The Matrix sequel - there seemed to be some conspicious placements of Cadillacs in there. I guess they’re trying to shake their image of the car that old people drive.

Just about all of Minority Report was one long frickin’ product placement. The ending where all the advertising kiosks are blatting at Cruise was really painful. Yeah, I realize that the scene was semi-pertinent to the plot, but it was downright irritating.

The Atari logos just look funny to me considering the company’s fate. You could always pretend it’s an alternate future where Atari never went into decline with the failure of the 5600. Maybe that’s why the planet is in such bad shape in that film, we were saved from that dystopian vision by Nintendo!

But the one that throws me in Blade Runner is Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) nearly being crowded out of the shot during part of his rooftop pursuit of Deckard by the neon TDK logo.

I have to disagree with the Cast-away/fed-ex thing.

Normally, I am not a fan of product placement (i.e, a coke can centered on a table for no reason).

The inverse is true, however, when watching a movie or TV show (usually older ones) and it is painfully obvious that there is no such such product.
An example would be if a character is using laundry soup called “Super Bubbles” in a box that looks nothing like a real product. Worse yet, would be an orange box with a yellow target on it that is labled “Ride”.

I guess I am so used to Fed-Ex, that I tuned it out in the movie. It would have seemed more painful to watch if he worked for “Ed Fex”.

To answer the OP, James Bond movies seem to be the worst in regards to product placement.

007: I wonder what time it is?
(screen shot of seiko watch for 1 minute)
007: oh, I see, it’s time to drive away in my BMW.

Or maybe it’s this one.

See: http://www.atari.com/

That was in relation to the Atari/Blade Runner posts.

The Stephen King miniseries Storm of the Century contained some pretty blatant product placement for the Apple Powerbook, even a bit of dialogue where a character describes how much he loves doing crossword puzzles on it. But that’s not the bad part.

The bad part is that Storm of the Century is set in 1989, seven years before the Powerbook became available, and certainly long before laptop computers were widespread enough for a yokel on a remote island off the coast of New England to have one to do crossword puzzles on. It’s that kind of innattention in the name of profit that really makes my blood boil.

I can’t believe nobody has said the Reeses Pieces in ET The Extraterrestrial. That just bugged the crap out of me when I was a kid (partly because I didn’t really like Reeses Pieces)

How about the Flintstones hawking Winstons? That crossed the line from shameless to obscene.**

Oooh! Oooh! Did it cut her off every few minutes because she hadn’t clicked an ad? :rolleyes:

Minority Report really bugged me because of the hypocrisy. I saw the ad-saturated future as a Bad Thing, and I guess that’s the intention – but they did that by using actual product placements. Many of those brands are likely to be gone fifty years from now, so they didn’t even provide the verisimilitude that might excuse the use of Fed-Ex in Cast Away. They should have made up some brands of future products and services.

(Somebody should make a movie of the classic Pohl/Kornbluth novel The Space Merchants, in which ads are inescapable, even appearing on people’s bathroom mirrors.)

So I guess what I’d like is the verisimilitude of having real products around, without making a point of showing the logos. I have to wonder how much good it does anyway. Have you ever bought something because you saw a logo in a movie?

The blatant displays of CAR-FRESHNER® Air Fresheners in every automobile (and motorcycle!) in Repo Man.

Actually, it’s true. According to the DVD commentary track, the only sponsors they could get for the film were CAR-FRESHNER® and Ralph’s (who provided many of the generic products and allowed a scene to be shot in one of their supermarkets).

Thanks for that. I had no idea. I take back what I said then.

originally posted by Bad News Baboon

Some of those have stuck in my mind - Yam-Ha drum sets and Onisonic tape recorders. :smiley:

(Does Unisonic still exist?)

b]Top Gun**

The product: the navy

Don’t think that it’s a joke, the amed forces sponsor lot’s of movies.