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.
Yesterday, we presented a clip pretending to be a film from the ’60s. Now, here’s a clip that’s pretending to be from the ’90s. Are the ’00s really that bad that we can’t own up to making films in this decade? Perhaps, but I still love both retro recreations. Today’s video is part of the viral marketing campaign for The Wackness, a movie set in 1994. And fitting for its period, the promotional clip is in the form of a mock public-access show hosted by the film’s protagonist, teenage drug dealer Luke Shapiro (as played by the film’s star, Josh Peck).
It’s been a long time since I last watched public-access television (though it had to be more recently than ‘94), so I never thought about the idea that it was almost like the predecessor to YouTube, on which we are now all watching this fake public access spot. Think about it: Wayne’s World today would be about two guys taping an internet-based talk show; Tom Green would have been famous first on YouTube; and ten years ago, all your favorite YouTube stars would have had to go to the local college in order to broadcast themselves. Only they wouldn’t have reached a fraction of the population they reached through the internet.
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.
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