I’m not just your friendly neighborhood Internet film critic. I’m also an occasional freelance copyeditor for a major New York book publisher. And this week’s question is inspired by the manuscript I’m currently working on, a nonfiction memoir that is jam-packed with pop-culture references, including celeb names, movie and pop-song titles, brand names, and suchlike, every single one of which needs to be fact-checked for accuracy. (I’m good at this work and I’m glad to have it, but I really wish I didn’t need to do it. By which I mean to say: Please subscribe to my Patreon or my paid Substack, or make an obscenely generous PayPal donation, so I don’t have to do this anymore.)
So: What’s the best pop-culture product placement ever?
I’m going with FedEx in 2000’s Cast Away, which works on multiple levels. Today’s youngsters may not realize this, but back in the day, FedEx had a reputation for reliability that was second to none (it has gone to shit since). So within the story of the film, the idea that a FedEx plane could crash added an extra layer of horror… like, forget about Tom Hanks’s FedEx employee, what about all those FedEx packages on his crashed plane? It was a disaster that was damn near inconceivable. On a meta level, the usage of the FedEx brand — which the company did not pay for — has reportedly been very good for the company. Which isn’t surprising. The devotion of Hanks’s FedEx-employee character, fictional though it may be, is incredibly powerful, and — at least in the context of FedEx’s powerfully positive reputation of two decades ago — incredibly plausible.
I remember finding the blatant verizon plug in 30 Rock (“can we have our money now please?” direct to camera) funny for how it refused to attempt verisimilitude in the slightest. And I do enjoy the metatextuality of pretty much any product placement in Mad Men, but will specify Kodak by name for the beautiful kodak carousel monologue in the first episode.
I remember finding the blatant verizon plug in 30 Rock (“can we have our money now please?” direct to camera) funny for how it refused to attempt verisimilitude in the slightest. And I do enjoy the metatextuality of pretty much any product placement in Mad Men, but will specify Kodak by name for the beautiful kodak carousel monologue in the first episode.
Not the BEST product placement, but the one I remember the most: Radio Flyer. Holy crap, did that traumatize me! Also, Eggos in Stranger Things.