Thinly veiled versions of real pop culture

[hbquikcomjamesl]

I will note that on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, any time Fred pulled out some commercial product, even if the color scheme of the package was recognizable, the branding on it would always be "Neighborhood this" or "Neighborhood that." Fred Rogers was very particular about avoiding product placement, or anything else that might be construed as an endorsement.

I think the term for that is "frenching," though I don't remember why.

I think you're thinking of "Greeking,"

Greeking refers to using meaningless dummy text blocks (or even substituting strings of binary digits, or even gray lines, for text). It apparently comes from the classic meaningless text that begins "Lorem Ipsum . . ." (even though that's actually badly butchered Latin). When I recently added a little plastic fake book to my "MacArthur Park" cake decoration set (so that "Love's hot fevered iron" and the "striped pair of pants" could be "between the parted pages"), I just had Google Translate render the entire text of "MacArthur Park" into Latin prose, purely for the sake of adding another layer of in-joke.

At any rate, the term that TV Tropes uses for what's under discussion here is "Bland-Naming." (and since I'm not being sarcastic, the link does take you directly to TV Tropes, not to the dreaded LMGTFY.)

 

[DarrenTR1970]

I caught an episode of Veronica Mars last night and the search engine she used on her laptop was a fictional one.