product placement

Thinking about the proliferation of product placement in movies and such. When did it become so standard and prolific?

To be honest, it's only a problem when it gets really jarring, like when Legolas kept going on about how he find Irish Spring leaves him cleaner than three other leading brands, or when Sam told Frodo what he always does for hemorhoidal itch.

At times, it can get downright clever. The ten minutes of "Repo Man" that I actually stayed awake for and remember were amusing because every single product they showed was generic -- and I mean generic, with the black and white label that said simply beer, cola, or potted meat product.

About 30 years ago, it was the custom at Marvel Comics to run a one-page ad featuring one of their superheroes who would be hard-pressed to defeat the villain until he pulled out the Hostess Twinkies. The criminals would be unable to resist the spongecake and cream filling, and actually wouldn't mind being taken away by the police. Once, Captain Mar-vell even used Twinkies to prevent a Kree invasion of the Earth.

During the infamous Assistant Editor's Month of the mid-1980s, an issue of Marvel Team-Up featured Galactus as the villain who was threatening to devour the Earth. He was stopped by Aunt May, who gave him a bunch of Grosstest Twinkles. It had to be one of the funniest Marvel Team-Ups I've ever read, complete with lines like, "These Twinkles possess surprising amounts of energy!"

A brief aside about commercials

I always find commercials somewhat annoying that feature two people discussing a deeply personal problem -- incontinence, a weak bladder or impotence -- when one of them pulls out the product and starts talking about it. Worse, they're usually in a highly visible setting: a restaurant, a party, or something similar.

A few ad reps have handled it with class by poking fun at the ad convention; i.e., the wife begins talking about how her husband handled his incontinence with Wonder Brand Medicine, and he responds how you would expect in such a situation, "Geez, do you always have to embarass me with these stories?" or other people nearby start looking very uncomfortable and leave suddenly.