Posts tagged as:

beer

Netscope

August 28, 2010

Netscope – when you need an instant dossier on the victim of your next serial murder, accept no substitutes.

It can be pretty much guaranteed that Dexter will never touch a real brand or frequently patronize a real business on-screen. There aren’t many companies that would take kindly to being a psychopathic killer’s “____ of [...]

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Brandz in da Hood

August 25, 2010

There’s a category of spoof film that attempts to skewer every cliché of a given genre within the span of about ninety minutes. I don’t feel like I’m going out on too much of a limb by making a blanket statement that they are all horrifically bad and unfunny. You’ve seen the unappealing [...]

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Goldslick and Binyon’s

July 20, 2010

You know, I heard from my cousin Walter that the tiny flakes of gold in Goldslick Vodka lacerate your throat on the way down – allowing the alcohol to enter your bloodstream directly. Also, did you know that every can of Old Muskogee beer is packed with extra air pressure for more effective “shotgunning”?

Okay, [...]

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Break Me Off a Piece of That… Big Cat bar?

June 20, 2010

Someone recently asked me whether the purpose behind the use of fictional brands in film and television was a new form of marketing via reference. My first response was to scoff, but it’s not an outlandish concept. You may see a Big Cat or Tit-for-Tat bar, but you instantly think of Kit Kat. [...]

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Wacky Packages

June 16, 2010

Shortly after Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans became part of the Zeitgeist, an opportunistic artist from Topps pitched the idea to release a set of trading cards that simply featured illustrations of popular branded products. One of the junior staffers, Art Spiegelman, suggested that they put a satirical twist on the cards, and thus [...]

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Olde Frothingslosh

June 10, 2010

Lately it seems like a lot of things from the fifties are making a comeback, like fedoras, the Red Scare, and mainstream racism. One thing that hasn’t resurfaced from that period, however, is zaniness. For those of you who aren’t REALLY OLD, zaniness sounded something like this:
Olde Frothingslosh commercial from KDKA Radio
Olde Frothingslosh, [...]

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Heineken?!? Frak that Scat!

June 7, 2010

This mashup attempts to portray David Lynch as a hypocrite for unequivocally denouncing product placement while conspicuously featuring beer brand names in Blue Velvet.

What the masher-upper seems to be missing is that Lynch is using beer brand loyalties in Blue Velvet as readily identifiable character anchors. This brand subtext is so painfully obvious that [...]

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Dr. Cocktail – Chapter One

April 20, 2010

If you’ve seen O Brother Where Art Thou (you have) then you have to remember the iconic Dapper Dan pomade brand used by the well-coiffed protagonist. I wrote an entry a while ago about the brand and its counterpart, Fop. [see Will Not Turn Hair Red]

One of the people who stumbled upon my post [...]

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We’re Gonna Make Our Dreams Come True

April 3, 2010

If you feel like your career is (or will soon be) coming into focus, then I advise you to take a pass on watching the video below. It’s pretty much guaranteed that your current path will be completely derailed when you see the perennial bliss on the faces of Laverne and Shirley – clearly a [...]

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We’re Watching You, Perello

March 27, 2010

Ever late to the must-see TV party, I just started watching Mad Men.  Within the first handful of episodes I spotted a rare case of accidental fictional product placement.

Mad Men prop master Gay Perello is widely lauded for his faithfulness to props grounded in the reality of the early 60’s.  Although centered around the Machiavellian [...]

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This Blood’s for You

March 25, 2010

This commercial for Tru Blood (from the HBO show of the same name) packs a fictional multiverse whammy. Not only is it hawking a defictionalized product, but a close look about five seconds in reveals that the alpha males are clinking “de-Simpsonized” Duff Beer cans!

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