Soon Clark Kent will face the one foe that can control his actions and dictate his movements, and he won’t be able to do a thing about it.
Advertisers.
When you watched “Smallville” last night, while you were grumbling about the 27 minutes of commercials for other CW shows that kept interrupting you from watching this one, and all with those green construction-paper style graphics that made you wonder if they decided to save money by hiring kids to do them — you might have missed this:
Chloe and Jimmy Olson were in a car in the woods at night. They talk, there’s some playful banter… and they both stop, wrapped in their own thoughts, giving us plenty of time to clearly hear the commercial for the new Toyota Camry hybrid on the car radio. Ha! Take that, TiVo!
A few weeks ago Clark fought a Batgirl-ish heroine who used Acuvue contacts, according to the carefully placed box. Last season Lois happened to be driving the same model car that was sponsoring the show and she even used its custom features to distract a security guard (guard distraction not guaranteed, see local dealer for details).
Hardly new, of course, and hardly surprising. TV shows started out blatantly sponsored, and with people buying shows on DVD and skipping past commericials with their DVRs the ad people have to do something in defense. So we get Buicks in “Desperate Housewives,” Oreos in “7th Heaven,” Chilis in “The Office,” and probably Home Depot shovels for “Heroes.”
What do you think? Annoying? Invisible? Inevitable? How long before characters in one CW show start talking about how great the others are?
It’s already so obvious and annoying in some movies, I think James Bond for exemple.