Ebert’s review of Happy Gilmore notes these product placements: Diet Pepsi, Pepsi, Pepsi Max, Subway, Budweiser, Michelob, Visa, Bell Atlantic, AT&T, Sizzler, Wilson, Golf Digest, ESPN, and Top-Flite golf balls. For Subway alone, he saw “one Subway sandwich eaten outside a store, one date in a Subway store, one Subway soft drink container, two verbal mentions of Subway, one Subway commercial starring Happy, a Subway T-shirt, and a Subway golf bag.”
When they grabbed the car to make the get-away, I thought “Ok, what hot vehicle are they going to be using in this movie?”
A few minutes later, I was saying to my S.O. “A Cadillac?!? They’re in a Cadillac???”
Surprised me too.
Not that it was a particularly enjoyable movie (thus it wasn’t the product placement that ruined any potential enjoyment), but Popeye’s Chicken was pretty blatantly plugged in Little Nicky. And, of course, there’s the whole “all restaurants are Taco Bell!” nonsense in Demolition Man.
Nitpick: Atari today is Infogrames (French video game company) with a new paint job. The original Atari died about five years ago.
(There’s a Carlsberg beer truck in Spider-Man? Must not be very effective product placement, since I still can’t remember seeing it…)
It’s in the scene where Spider-Man chases down uncle Ben’s killer, he even jumps on top of it if I’m not mistaken.
Yah, all Spider-Man was doing was riding on top of the damn thing.
Nobody’s mentioned You’ve Got Mail yet? With the AOL logo in the opening credits?
Didn’t even notice that…I DID notice, however, that eariler, in the lab, they threw a Coke can into a recycling bin…and ALL the cans in there were Cokes. Every single one of 'em. (Pssst, writer? REAL lab techs drink Dew ;))
Smapti:
Macintosh PowerBook 100. Introduced: October 1991
Your point still applies, but only as a two-year credibility gap, not seven. I have no idea how many of them were sold to folks living in coastal New England island communities.
Robert Zemeckis has repeatedly stated that Federal Express did not pay anything for its presence in Cast Away. I would imagine they let them film some planes, but still, my revulsion at what I thought was the most blatant product placement since You’ve Got Mail! is somewhat mollified by this.
How about all the candy wrappers in The Lost World? And that scene in which a Mercedes 4WD is used to pull a trailer back from the brink of a cliff (or not, can’t remember)? All I can remember about that was the five foot high Mercedes logo slowly moving back and forth across the screen and thinking “subtle.”
And Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me had an irritating Heinekin placement that was just like the commercials Myers was doing for them at the same time. I found this irritatingly ironic since Myers mocked product placement pretty thoroughly in one of the Wayne’s World movies (though for all I know he got money on that one as well).
Bravo, Baldwin!
As an avid collector of every work by Pohl and Kornbluth, I must say you have brought this entire thread to its logical conclusion in one short little paragraph.
The Space Merchants, would essentially be one long product placement, ocassionally interfered with by a plot. As one of the most translated sci-fi books of all time, I’m sure the only thing keeping this off of the big screen is the intense lampooning that commercial enterprises receive in the story. Intentionally addictive drinks, simultaneously subliminal and suggestive advertising, literally all of the industry’s worst and most insidious practices are cheerfully exposed in this one book.
I commend your splendid insight into modern product placement.
The Wizard was awesome. Especially when they unveil the newest game at the end of the Nintendo competition, Super Mario Bros 3, and all of the characters scream how unfair it is to have them play a game they’ve never seen before. Then, once the game starts, they start yelling out hints as if they’ve played it before: “The whistle! If you get it, you can warp to the next world!”
In The Peacemaker, Nicole Kidman, the government operative, e-mails files found on a Russian mobster’s computer to herself. Back in the hotel room with George Clooney, her laptop lets out a loud “You’ve got mail!” and she states that she used her AOL account for this covert operation.
Of course, the e-mail must have taken 3 hours to be delivered, movie-time.
The best part about those Cadillacs is that according to the first Matrix movie, the Matrix was created to simulate the year 1999. The two Cadillacs are a CTS and an Escalade EXT, neither of which existed before 2003. I guess it’s been 4 years between movies, and no Agents occupied the body of any GM designers over those 4 years. 
As for the OP, my example actually did ruin this movie for me. The Thomas Crown Affair. In one scene, Rene Russo stops what she’s saying, opens a Pepsi One, and sits there drinking the entire can, all while holding the logo perfectly aligned facing the screen, while everyone in the Police station watches her. Totally inexplicable, totally unacceptable. Especially since they make a big deal out of the fact that she only drinks this certain kind of green wheat germ juice drink earlier (and in another scene later) in the movie.
Happy Gilmore actually used product placement as a plot device. Adam Sandler was doing endorsements for Subway as part of the story. That’s about as blatant as it gets.
I was going to mention Wayne’s World-that was a pretty good one. Let’s see, there was Pepsi, Doritoes, Nike, and Nuprin, right?
Scupper-- I remember hearing that the Heineken placement in The Spy Who Shagged Me was also not paid for, that it was in the script as a joke. Kind of a lame joke not to get paid for, don’t you think?
I agree with Bad News Baboon about the placement of fake products when the real ones are so omnipresent in real life. As ruined as any of these movies were by the real logos, fake ones substituted in would have been just as irritating. Maybe.
From a narrative standpoint, a fake business logo in a modern-day (i.e. non-science fiction) setting makes me pay far too much attention to it, and makes me expect that the company is going to play a major role in the plot of the film.
What gets me is that every once in a while a movie will try to poke fun at product placements in movies by showcasing a few really obvious ones and playing it for laughs. So they try to have their cake and eat it too by having big name product placements and earning cool points by making fun of the very thing they’re doing.
Wayne’s World actually managed to pull this sort of joke off really well, making for one of the funniest moments in the film.
Josie and the Pussycats was just a really bad movie though. The whole theme of rampant consumerism and marketing is evil just played like an excuse to cram in as many product placements as possible.
The FedEx one in Runaway Bride is the worst. She jumps in one of their trucks and someone asks “Where is she going?”.
Hector Elizondo, to his eternal discredit, says “I don’t know, but she’ll be there by 10:30 tomorrow morning”.
Totally shameless.
He probably got paid under the table.:rolleyes: