This advertising strategy doesn't seem to be as common for motion pictures now as it was in the 60s and 70s. I remember seeing TV ads for some movies so frequently that I actually got sick of the movies before I even saw them! A few that stand out in my mind are:
* THE CHRISTMAS THAT ALMOST WASN'T - a cheap, Italian import that showed up in theaters every Christmas during the late 60s/early 70s. (I actually bought the DVD a few months ago . . . what a nostalgia trip).
* A FORCE OF ONE - channel 56 (which was a local, independent station here in Boston when I was a kid) showed "teasers" for this on a RIDICULOUSLY frequent basis. (They would show 2 or more teasers during EVERY commercial break!) One of the teasers showed Chuck Norris sitting naked, crosslegged, in a dark room. The announcer said something like, "He feels the darkness; he hears the silence; Chuck Norris is . . . a force of one!")
* THE GODSEND (not to be confused with the recent DeNiro movie) - channel 56 was the culprit for this one, too. They would show the same teaser over and over again. Probably a dozen of times within a 1 hour time-slot. The announcer would say, "The Godsend. For God's sake . . . take it back!"
* SANTA CLAUS - the Mexican trash epic. It showed up in theaters every Christmas, just like THE CHRISTMAS THAT ALMOST WASN'T. They advertised it on TV over and over and over . . .
I don't watch a lot of televsion these days (other than sports), but it seems as though the days of saturation advertising have come and gone. Am I wrong?
I think you're wrong Burgo. I was watching The Frighteners on SciFi channel last night and they ran a teaser for their mini-series Five Days to Midnight during every commercial break.
So when it's over, I turned to CNBC to watch Dennis Miller and I'l be damned if they aren't plugging it over there too. I had a mild interest in it , but now they're quickly draining it away.
I think pop music has more or less taken over the world of advertising. they play the same damn song OVER AND OVER AGAIN until you're practically brainwashed into buying the album! "must buy usher..he is cool...must buy usher...he is..."
>I think you're wrong Burgo. I was watching The Frighteners on SciFi channel last
>night and they ran a teaser for their mini-series Five Days to Midnight during
>every commercial break.
SciFi/USA advertises everything to death. Also, when FX came up with the show The Shield, it was advertised so much that I got sick of the ads and vowed never to watch it. In case you're wondering, I haven't.
The Shield is one hell of a show, but I respect you for sticking to your vow. I'm getting pretty damned tired of seeing Shrek& Spiderman crap everwhere I turn around. It wouldn't be so bad if it was just commercials for the movie, but all these tie-ins with every other thing in the world is ridiculous...I went in the post office this morning to mail a letter, and low and behold, there's that Shrek donkey staring at me....
Advertising is everywhere.
(Buy Coca-cola)
Think about every show you watch; they all drink one brand of beer, they wear whatever-name brand clothes. The success of Reality Tv isn't so much that its relatively cheap to do [all things considered] but the tv companies strike sponsorship deals for any little thing; why else do they always give away a pontiac in survivor?
Product placement is a billion dollar industry and they are quite good at subtly shoving things down our throats.
I remember in one Futurama episode, Fry kept getting ads in his dreams: that's what they do there, they not only give you subliminal advertising but they just cut to the chase and broadcast ads in your dreams. It is a sad world, but I can actually imagine somebody thinking thats a good idea if we ever had the technology, although I'm pretty sure people would make sure that never happened.
Advertising p**ses me off, if a big budget movie is annoying me and my friends, we actually play drinking games whenever there's a bit of product placement: you get wasted easily playing that dangerous game!
(Did I mention buy coca-cola?)
There's been a couple of movies in the past five or so years that I did not go see because I got sick of the dumb ads. They were films I was on the fence for seeing anyway, and truthfully, I cannot think of one specific example.
It's funny (to me), but I LOVED Stargate when I first saw it, and I don't think I saw one single ad for it before seeing it (saw the poster at the theater, that's how I learned of its existence). I tend to stay away from movies that are hyped a lot, with certain notable exceptions.
On a side note, I've been getting really annoyed with theatrical trailers that basically show the whole movie. There's been a few that I was thinking "Okay, so why spend money to go see it, I just watched it with the time wasting fluff cut out."
"On a side note, I've been getting really annoyed with theatrical trailers that basically show the whole movie"
Yeah i hate that. If a particularly bad movie comes out then you can actually predict how the plot goes by watching the trailer. I did this with Taking Lives, that film with Ethan Hawke, Angelina Jolie and Keifer Sutherland. I picked the entire movie apart, and when some friends went to see it, I told one of them what was going to happen [having not seen it myself]. When i saw him next, he was really p**sed off, because I had forseen the entire plot and ruined the movie for him by telling him that, despite the fact that it was bad anyway.
I hate when the trailer gives away something that is obviously meant to be a surprise. I've given both these examples before, but the two that annoyed me the most were showing the giant spider (the surprise the whole movie was building to) in the Wild Wild West trailer, and showing Snake Plissken gun everybody down after throwing the can in the air in the Escape from LA trailer. Somebody goes to the trouble of writing a great surprise into a movie, and we see it twenty times before we get to the theatre.
My other complaint is when they edit together bits of dialogue out of their original context, making the trailer really misleading. Even when it's minor in nature, it's really distracting when you reach that part of the movie, and realize what they've done.
Yeesh. My friends say Shrek 2 is good, but the endless promos bite.
When it first came out, not as much promotion...now, its as previlant as zombies in a George Romero flick!...kinda....
Does not make me a happy camper.