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Product placement is oftentimes a necessary evil. When studios don’t have the funds to produce a project, corporations often step in and make offers: advertise my product, and I’ll help this piece of entertainment get made. And while many series avoid making such deals, others couldn’t even exist without the aid of marketing opportunists.
Though product placement runs the gamut from blatant to subtle, more than a few anime have been cheapened by the flash of a Pepsi can or the crushing weight of a Pizza Hut tie-in that spans multiple episodes. Here’s a toast to the product placement moments in anime that aren’t just obvious, but truly jarring.
10 Tiger And Bunny’s Blue Rose Goes Overboard With Pepsi Nex
Tiger and Bunny should be exempt in general when it comes to product placement. After all, the producers of the show were clever about incorporating product placement into the worldbuilding of the series. In Tiger and Bunny, superheroes are treated like NASCAR vehicles, sponsored by various companies, forced to wear the logos of these companies if they want to get paid. While this is a smart way to critique capitalistic culture, the show certainly got paid to do it, which seems a bit hypocritical.
The most blatant of the placements has to be the relationship between Blue Rose and Pepsi Nex. Unfortunately for otaku elsewhere, Pepsi Nex is an exclusively Japanese product.
9 Ghost in the Shell Is Cyberpunk, But Is Nissan?
Cyberpunk is supposed to be cool and futuristic, but most people don’t think “Nissan” when they hear those words. Ghost in the Shell takes place in the mid-21st century. Even so, Nissan prototype vehicle designs were used in Stand Alone Complex – Solid State Society, and mostly they look extremely mundane. Though the anime was released in 2007, the car concepts debuted in 2005.
Car fanatics will remember this era for the Nissan Versa playing an obvious role in Heroes. It’s clear the company was trying to get creative with promoting their vehicles.
8 7-Up and Pepsi Have No Place In JJBA, But There they Are
Look. It’s completely understandable that Hirohiko Araki, acclaimed mangaka of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, would want to collaborate with Gucci. The fashion industry is an interesting place, and Araki’s art is the definition of interesting. Araki partnered with Gucci and fashion magazine Spur for an exhibit when Gucci’s Shibuya store re-opened in 2011.
What makes less sense is Dio walking outside in Cairo, Egypt, and smiling proudly at a 7-up sign, but that’s precisely what happens in an early OVA. Other JJBA product placement moments involve Pepsi, Givenchy, Sony, and Pocky. Credit where credit is due, however: JJBA is just about weird enough to get away with all this.
7 Macross Welcomes You To FamilyMart Cosmos
Konbini, Japanese convenience stores, aren’t the same as convenience stores in the States. People can pay their bills, buy groceries, eat lunch by the window, and even take part in monthly games that earn them collectible merchandise. Given this, it’s not surprising that convenience stories often make deals with anime producers and indulge in cross-promotion.
Few cases are as blatant and cringe-inducing as FamilyMart’s arrangement with Macross Frontier: The False Songstress. Alto follows Ranka into a FamilyMart in the film, and Ranka actually sings a song called FamilyMart Cosmos on the soundtrack.
6 Snickers Surpises Nichijou Fans
Perhaps this isn’t straight-up product placement, because it’s uncertain whether SNICKERS or Mars, Inc. had any say in the antics of the Nichijou cast. In a gag comedy series where anything goes, the sudden appearance of a SNICKERS bar may have been merely a whim, right? We can only hope.
Countless anime have incorporated real products and companies more indirectly to avoid copyright violations. This is why Maou-Sama of The Devil Is A Part-Timer works at MgRonald’s and Rintaro of Steins; Gate drinks DK. Pepper. But Nichijou actually named and showed an actual SNICKERS bar, a clear sign that the show was paid to do so.
5 Nike’s Stamp Is All Over Basquash!
Nike has managed to maintain a reputation as one of the coolest shoe brands for decades, but it’s doubtful Basquash! has anything to do with that. Despite a lucrative deal with the company, the show itself is considered a flop, and the average otaku may have never even heard of it. A mecha-slash-basketball series, Basquash! even features the Nike logo in its opening credits. Nike released a limited edition line of Basquash! shoes in 2009, and even the robots are wearing them.
4 Yamaha Dominates Musical Anime
There are a lot of musical instrument companies in the world, but looking at anime, fans might deduce that Yamaha is the only company that ever produced a piano in the history of mankind.
Possibly because it’s not just a renowned company but also a very Japanese one, Yamaha Corporation has sponsored more than a few musical anime series. Yamaha instruments appear in Evangelion 3.0, K-On, Kids on the Slope, and Nodame Cantabile. Meanwhile, Your Lie In April clearly made a deal with Steinway & Sons, as no other kind of piano appears in the series.
3 The Rebuild Of Evangelion Is Weighed Down By Doritos, Lawson, And Everything Else
Evangelion is one of the most successful franchises of all time, but when it originally aired, people didn’t know that it would become, and the original series had no product placement to speak of. The snacks were generic, all items Brand X. But by the time Rebuild came around, companies were scrambling to feature in the film. Evangelion merch of every stripe has subsequently been produced, for good or for ill.
These days fans can get Hello Kitty x Evangelion plushies, Evangelion razors, Shinji and Kaworu-themed body spray, and Evangelion Tamagotchis. The first two Rebuild films showcase Doritos extensively, as well as Lawson convenience stores (there’s one in the NERV headquarters!) and Yebisu beer. Evangelion has a dark outlook on humanity, but perhaps its tendency to rake in easy money is even darker.
2 Garden of Sinners, Or Garden Of Haagen-Dazs?
Garden of Sinners is a rather hefty title for a series of anime films, and the content certainly isn’t light. Set in the 1990s, the show features a paranormal storyline that tackles topics ranging from suicide to incest. The one thing that doesn’t belong at all in a story about such delicate topics? An entire subplot that centers on Haagen-Dazs ice cream.
That’s right. More than one Garden of Sinners movie incorporates strawberry Haagen-Dazs ice cream. Apparently, the fact that a character eats only Haagen-Dazs is actually also part of the original source material, but if that’s not shamelessly begging for a tie-in, what is?
1 Pizza Hut Cheapens Code Geass (And Several Other Series, Too)
You know product placement has gotten out of hand when a whole filler episode is all about making a giant pizza. Yes, this happens midway through the would-be melodramatic political thriller that is Code Geass, and to say the episode aged poorly is giving it too much credit: it was terrible TV to begin with.
Pizza Hut did a lot of anime marketing in the early 2000s, especially with Sunrise. And though Code Geass may have been walloped the most with it, in part because the creators of the show thought it would be funny to add even more flashes of Pizza Hut than they were required to, shows like Darker Than Black and films like The Girl Who Leapt Through Time also fell victim. Code Geass was already a series designed solely for profit, but shameless product placement made it much worse.
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