Last weekend I was watching one of my favorite movies, Blade Runner, with my kids. All of a sudden, my son bursts out laughing, and points to the screen.
“Wow, look at that old product placement!”
I looked at him confused, rewound the movie and noticed what he was pointing at: there are numerous Coca-cola ads throughout this film. Blade Runner has been one of my favorite movies for the past 25 years and I had never noticed those ads until now. It made me wonder what else had been subliminally placed into my generations films that we have missed.
Fortunately our children seem to have been weened on this sort of thing, even though they don’t realize cartoons are just a 30 minute commercial, or a 20 minute commerical with 10 minutes of additional commercials.
My son also reminded me of all the blatant product placement throughout the Transformers movie, and we spoke about what ET did to Reese’s Pieces. Guess product placement isn’t as conspicuous as I thought.
-Jason Orkin, Oblivious Viewer
