My family went out of town to see the new movie E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. Before it started, I studied the candy counter and saw something intriguing called Reese's Pieces that looked like M&Ms with peanut butter inside. The clerk said they were brand new and sold me some. I was munching those delicious morsels during the movie and saw Elliot clearly luring E.T. with Reece's Pieces. Now it all made sense- it was a promotional tie-in. And that's how we all learned about product placement. Reece's Pieces became a hit. It's happened with other movies, sometimes intentionally, but often accidentally, as in the adoption of Monty Python's "spam" as the perfect term for junk email. And dramatic stories sometimes unrealistically raise our expectations for the real thing.
Life is rarely as neat and tidy as a one-hour plot. Read about 15 of the ways TV shows and movies have influenced the real world at Cracked.
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