The Gear That Made E.T. the Pinnacle of Product Placement - Wired
1981 Audi 5000 S : Yes, the car that spawned everyone's favorite slang term for "I'm leaving" is in E. T. The likely origin of "I'm Audi 5000" comes from a 1986 60 Minutes segment that claimed the car suffered from "unintended acceleration. " This was actually never proven to be true, but it still ruined Audi sales in the U. S. for the next 15 years. ¯\_(?)_/¯ Whether it’s the Ace comb James Dean sweeps through his manicured coif in Rebel Without a Cause or the souped up ’68 Mustang that Steve McQueen drives in Bullitt , product placement has been a part of movies going back to the advent of... Even after three decades, few movies have managed to so seamlessly integrate a product into a storyline like Steven Spielberg’s suburban fairy tale did in 1982. Seriously. Try finding someone over 30 who can look at a bag of Reese’s Pieces without thinking of the film’s pudgy, three-foot-tall alien. didn’t jump at the opportunity to let a 10-million-year-old space visitor with penis fingers and a face modeled after Carl Sandburg, Albert Einstein, and a pug help sell candy. After investing $1 million in an ad tie-in for E. T. , which included the rights to use the movie’s name and characters on its products, sales of the company’s new candies tripled within two weeks, according to Joël Glenn Brenner’s The Emperors of... Source: www.wired.com
