Product Placement Reaches New Heights
Wondering how out of control product placement in film has gotten? Check out this reel of highlights from The Marine, a crappy Twentieth Century Fox action flick from a couple years ago which apparently stars Miller Genuine Draft. It points to an emerging form of cinema — the low-quality, low-budget Hollywood movie that serves as an extended two-hour commercial.
Television Networks Rewrite History Through Product Placement
There sure is a lot of time traveling on television these days. The Consumerist provides an example of the subtly unsettling practice of messing with cinematic/cultural/TV continuity by digitally inserting advertisements from the present into old shows and movies. Just wait until they start slipping “Zookeeper” billboards into footage of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech or Nazi stadium rallies:
For the past few years, networks have been digitally inserting ads and product placements for new products into old reruns. Shannon just noticed one in a rerun of a 2007 episode of “How I Met Your Mother.” In the background on the shelf is a magazine with an ad on the back for the new “Zookeeper” starring Kevin James.
2012: The Year Product Placement Will Destroy All Integrity in Movies
I (almost) promise this will be my last post about 2012 … did anyone else notice the product placement in Roland Emmerich’s disaster-fest? Ryan Sager is all bent out of shape about it, at True/Slant:
I won’t be giving away too much to tell you that 2012 involves one of the most ludicrous seeming product placements in movie history: The hero’s 7-year-old daughter wearing Huggies Pull-Ups. The pull-ups problem is introduced in the first act (and, if you see a gun in the first act…). They don’t appear in the second act. But — and truly, I’m not giving anything away here, I don’t think, but possible spoiler alert — the Huggies Pull-Ups end up featuring in the last two lines of the movie, which go roughly as such:
Annoying 7-year-old daughter: I don’t need Pull-Ups anymore!
The insufferable John Cusack: Nice!
That’s the end of the movie. Trillions of dollars worth of special effects. Years…
