Support Overthinking It by becoming a member for $5/month!
Matthew Belinkie, Peter Fenzel, and Matthew Wrather reminisce about their snobbery toward the Sega Genesis, but somehow Belinkie found his way to the Sonic the Hedgehog movie.
Spoilers.
Subscribe: iTunes Other Apps
Further Reading
- Sonic the Hedgehog
- The New Mutants movie
- Sophie Turner is not Maisie Williams
what’s something you can say during sex but also when you manage a brand twitter account?
— Netflix US (@netflix) December 5, 2019
A counterpoint on New Mutants is that, in 2005 or so, you needed to be a pretty big comic book fan to know who Iron Man was. Weird in retrospect, but the MCU was built dodging around Marvel’s best-known properties–Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, and sometimes the Hulk–being shopped out to other companies. Now, the movie’s set for release in a month, so they’re obviously not marketing it and people may be avoiding theaters, so it’ll probably tank, but it didn’t have to go that route.
The Olive Garden thing sounds like it fits with the idea (which probably has a fancy name, but I’ve never taken a psychology course…) that we can effectively anchor thoughts with emotions. So, even if it’s presented as a bad thing in the movie, people now have the Olive Garden associated with laughing at a joke. And I assume that’s a big part of the rise of the self-aware, self-deprecating brands clogging up media, like that stupid Arby’s stunt of making fake vegetables out of meat to make the point that they’d never be caught selling fake meats.
I wonder where on the spectrum Crazy Ex-Girlfriend falls. After all, but they did have a running joke that Rebecca assumes that all the casual dining chains are high-end mom-and-pop restaurants. It’s more subtle and more spread around between brands, but it’s also weirdly complimentary. Of course, it may well be that none of this is product placement and you’re allowed to refer to trademarks as long as you don’t infringe on them. The DC Comics television shows mostly seem to be fine referring to Disney products, for example, and it’s a safe bet that the Mouse isn’t kicking in to hear that some obscure DC character likes Captain America or Disneyland or whatever.
As for the Sonic franchise itself, I’m still hung up on the one, true platformer game: “Impossible Mission” for the Commodore 64, the game whose manual has a dossier on the villain giving his vitals as “Hair: No; Eyes: Yes” and included surprisingly good (if very limited) voice-overs.