Product placement in movies is now so overdone that we may not even notice it unless a particular film or TV show really hits us over the head with a blatant in-your-face product shot. Otherwise, seeing commercial goods everywhere merely seems like everyday life in capitalist America. Just look at any of the websites that tally up products spotlighted in mainstream movies and you’ll probably be surprised (though not shocked) at how many brands appear in each new release. Did you notice that Blades of Glorycontains 38 separate products? Probably not. Many of those products couldn’t have gotten their money’s worth, because the movie doesn’t allow the audience to walk away recalling any one particular item.
At a time when TV’s Top Chef and 30 Rock show us how lame blatantly whorish and ironic product placement can get, and while moviegoers are being subjected to more subliminal, suggestive and unintentional advertisements (Speed Racer, Wall-E and Beverly Hills Chihuahuarespectively have us thinking about McDonalds, Apple products and Taco Bell, though some of these associations are not necessarily the movie’s fault), it’s good to remember that not all product placement is superfluous or despicable. Some of it is actually funny, smart and beneficial to mankind.
It may seem like I’m late to the party on this one, but I swear, I’m not––I saw the TV version of this CNBC story last week, so I knew that Nike launched a limited edition sneaker last weekend called Air McFly, based on the self-tying shoe that will apparently de rigeur for hoverboard flights in the very near future, assuming the very near future looks anything like Back to the Future 2. I knew that fans had been clamoring for the sneaker for years; I knew that there’d be great demand, but extremely limited supply. What I did not know, was that the shoe’s launch, at a single store in Santa Monica, turned into a some kind of fan fest, complete with lines around the block (some waited over 24 hours, according to HypeBeast) and a special appearance by Kobe Bryant, who arrived in a DeLorean (what, Michael J. Fox wasn’t available?) Photo evidence and related links after the jump; above, a video from last year setting the Air McFly lobbying campaign to song.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
filmcouch-114
