There's an old Batman episode where Barbara Grayson spends a few minutes showing off her snazzy new answering machine to Chief O'Hara. ("Saints preserve us, what will they think of next!"
Don't know if that was was literally product placement or not, since I don't recall them mentioning a brand name.
Don't know if that was was literally product placement or not, since I don't recall them mentioning a brand name.
White Collar was usually pretty good about this, incorporating the SUV product placements subtly into the story by having the characters use its features to help them ease into traffic to pursue a suspect or something. Though there was one episode where they had a gratuitous argument over a word definition or something so they could look it up on the car's computer, which was just a distraction from the plot.
The worst extreme of this was Eureka devoting a whole season arc to the town doing research products with Degree antiperspirant, culminating in a finale where the product was vital to saving the day by being slathered onto the hero to protect him against an artificial sun's heat -- which paralleled the gimmick in the Degree commercials that aired in the breaks, but was the exact opposite of how antiperspirants actually work, since they prevent perspiration and would thus make the user more vulnerable to heat if they covered the entire body.
I mentioned product placement of RFID credit cards earlier; I was referring to an episode of The Dead Zone where they pretty much inserted a blatant commercial for the credit card into the characters' dialogue, like something out of old-time radio or '50s live TV.
Then there was Harve Bennett's 1993 series Time Trax, where the 22nd-century hero who traveled back to the 20th century had a card-shaped sentient computer who disguised herself as an AT&T credit card -- a product placement nearly as fully integrated into the series premise as the cars in Knight Rider or Viper (a show literally named after its product placement).
I remain convinced that the reason Knight Rider has been rebooted so many times is that there's always a car company willing to underwrite it as promotion for their products.
Quite. I also plug Xerox Ventura Publisher . . . decades after it ceased to be a supported product. And while it might be possible, if I had to go whole-hog on self-publication, to get free use of a PDF-to-offset-plate system, and enough plates to print the thing, in exchange for a plug for the vendor (my protagonist's father is a job printer, a decision I made long before I even knew that the International Printing Museum even existed), my own ethics would forbid me to even try.
Hmm. And in the first (but chronologically last) scene Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along, the audience is introduced to the inventor of the telephone answering machine . . . and then, as the show progresses (regresses?) a few focal points downtime, that same bit-part character is asking a Broadway producer to back his invention, and is immediately rebuffed, with the producer pointing out that there are answering services that will do that. (And yes, that's a plug for Merrily, the theatrically-released proshot of which is now available on DVD. And no, I don't get paid for the plug.)
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I drive an older Prius (and I'm old enough that it feels insane talking about an "older Prius"), and I always think about that whenever I'm near an electric car making it's legally-mandated Simpsons-Cult-Leader-Blowing-Through-a-Comb flying saucer noise when they're creeping along at low speeds, since my car predates that, so it actually is pretty much silent at parking-lot speed. At least, so long as the gas engine doesn't kick on, which isn't entirely predictable.
I remember an article or interview that talked about the exact terms of the Degree deal for Eureka, namely that the product had to be mentioned once per episode, and also had to be key to saving the day in an episode. At least when they started, it looked like they were doing it tongue-in-cheek*, with the in-universe sponsorship deal coming from the sketchy new business-expert character, and the faintly rediculous touch that the labcoats had "Degree" printed on the back like they were a sponsor for a race car pit crew.
*"Can we have our money now?"
I didn't mind the Cisco Systems product placements in Eureka's first season, since communications systems were something they actually had reason to use. And the car sponsorship they did in one season was pretty typical for basic-cable product placement at the time. But the Degree thing was just ill-conceived all around.
I've quite literally never heard the VSP of my 2018 Nissan Leaf. The backup chime, yes, but not the VSP. If I had my druthers, I'd have my VSP hacked to sound like an idling steam locomotive: generator whine, escaping steam, an air brake compressor pumping a few strokes every half a minute or so, and even the occasional safety valve popoff. And that's just when it's standing still: steam exhaust when it's moving slowly, timed at one beat every 90 degrees of axle rotation.
I think that may be why I like the sound that an unmodified F40 makes, when it's idling, but supplying head-end power to a train: with the engine running at a constant RPM regardless of its speed, regardless of whether it's moving at all, it's a Diesel that sounds almost like steam. (Modified F40s, and newer passenger diesels use a separate small Diesel to run the HEP generator.)
Hmm. Does running off on tangents about organs, graphic arts, and trains, for no apparent reason constitute an "annoying habit"?
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I had to look up "VSP," and it took me a while, because it means several different things pertaining to cars, including "vehicle-specific power" and a French initialism for cars that don't need licenses. I presume you mean Vehicle Sound for Pedestrians.
In principle, I like the idea of being able to choose what your car sounds like -- say, maybe, the Jetsons flying-car sound effect that Futurama also uses a lot, or maybe KITT's sound from Knight Rider. But I suppose from a safety standpoint, to alert pedestrians, it would be preferable to have a consistent, recognizable sound.
It is kind of funny that I tried to prevent the thread from getting off-topic into politics, so instead it went off-topic into product placement in TV shows, and cars, of all things. Probably time to go back to author and book things.
Except that there isn't one. One of the times I took my Leaf in for preventive maintenance, I specifically asked them to check the VSP, and they said it was fine, in spite of the fact that it's completely inaudible to me. Whereas I can easily hear the VSP on my dad's Kia Niro* hybrid, when it's running on battery power, and I've heard EVs from a number of different manufacturers, and I'm pretty sure they don't all sound exactly the same.
Then again, engines don't all sound the same, either.
_____
*I've never understood why Kia would name a vehicle after the misspelled name of a somewhat disreputable Roman emperor. Are they going to name one after Caligula, too?
I looked it up... "Niro" is a portmanteau for "Near Zero," as in near zero emissions, and also a boast of having near zero flaws.
This is definitely true.
The last couple of our book club books have really good ratings on Good Reads, but all but one have been duds this year.
See also the folks who post bad reviews because they weren't paying attention and had no idea what they were reading:
"This young-adult novel is too juvenile. One star."
"This short-story collection is not a novel. One star."
"Blood Orgy of the Living Dead is not family-friendly! One star."
And F-150s are great for chases!
I once read that the one star reviews are best to be ignored. They haven't read the book. The two star reviews, where they have read the book, are the ones to look out for.
A lot of car companies were doing product placement at this point in time. Eureka was all about Subarus.
Heroes even joined in with the Nissan Rogue.
They even had a web comic that came out when it aired with Nissan product placement. You can find it on Internet Archive.
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