The ScreenGrab has posted a top ten list of “The Most Notable Product Placements in Movie History”. Most of the examples come from the past quarter-century, though the oldest specimen is the Pan Am logo on the spacecraft in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968; my comments). The list begins with the following statement:
It’s hard to think that there was a time when movies and TV didn’t regularly feature major subplots touting the life-affirming, alien-attracting, desert-island-loneliness-averting, catastrophic-explosion-shielding properties of popular consumer products. But it’s true. Once upon a time, when a character pulled out a can of beer from a fridge, that can was simply marked “Beer.” . . .
This is probably very true. But brand names did pop up in films way back when. I remember being quite startled when I saw Horse Feathers (1932) in a theatre some years ago, and a woman falls out of a rowboat and cries out for a “lifesaver”, prompting Groucho Marx to pull out a roll of you-can-guess-the-brand candy. Did the makers of Life Savers pay to have their candy seen in a Marx Brothers movie? Maybe, maybe not, but either way, I’m sure the appearance of their product in that film didn’t hurt their sales.
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