Not Tropeworthy: Delicious Fruit Pies

This feels like an extreme case of The Same, but More Specific, in this case Product Placement. It also has elements of Delicious Distraction, Bribed With Food, and Enforced Plug.

It's almost exclusively about a brief period in Hostess' history when they had overt Product Placement in mainstream comics. Nearly every single example listed is a parody of those ads. There are a handful of straight examples, but those can easily be moved to one of the aforementioned pages.

There are only 83 wicks, so I don't think it would be particularly difficult to clean up.

Edited by Primis on Sep 7th 2018 at 6:09:02 AM

I agree that it's The Same, but More Specific for Product Placement.

I agree as well.

Maybe keep the page as a Useful Notes or Advertisement, but move the examples to a different trope?

It's a very blatant form of Product Placement with a strict formula. Most examples are spoofing the concept. Worth keeping in my eyes.

I'd be fine with an Advertising/ page for the campaign (with the tropes in the original post listed; that alone would be enough for a non-stub page), but I think specific instances could easily be listed as examples of Product Placement.

Edit: I also think Product Placement would be sufficient for parodies, with examples specifying what they're parodying.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Sep 7th 2018 at 4:05:26 AM

That's exactly what The Same, but More Specific means...

I'm fine with turning this into a work page.

Yeah, a move to Advertising seems good.

Move this to Advertising.

What does "move to advertising" mean?

^^^ The Same, but More Specific is not a bad thing by itself. All subtropes follow this logic. The question is if this variant of Product Placement is worth having as a separate page and I would say yes. (and that's coming from a lumper)

Move to Advertising means to move to the Advertising/ namespace. Advertising.The Burger King is one page already in that namespace.

But why is it worth keeping? You haven't given any reason other than "it is".

This "trope" is way too specific, and only has a handful of straight examples (all of which might as well be the same example, honestly), making it Too Rare to Trope. Enforced Plug is already a broader, more useful variant of Product Placement that covers this.

Let's be honest, the only reason this page even exists at all is because people like to make fun of these ads. But even that's still not tropeworthy, because it's nowhere near as common as, say, Star Wars parodies.

Here's a counterproposal: Rework the description to be about the Stock Parody induced by the original Product Placement.

Still not worth it, in my opinion. There really aren't that many parodies of it.

Turning this into a work page for the original ad campaign — like the pages for The Burger King or the Batman OnStar Commercials — seems like the best option.

Edited by Primis on Sep 9th 2018 at 1:49:37 AM

This isnt quite product placement which is a specific brand of something placed into a movie, this is more of a straight up advertisement or joke of an ad in the middle of a movie.

The difference from 'someone using an Iphone in a movie' and 'a character going "Here is the Iphone X, lists of features" then go back into character for the rest of the movie.' The latter was done a lot in old OLD black and white shows all the time, nowadays its a Dead Horse Trope only used in spoofs.

Edited by Memers on Sep 9th 2018 at 3:20:25 AM

Straight examples actually are Product Placement. The fact that it later became a Stock Parody doesn't keep its original usage from being The Same, but More Specific for Product Placement.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Sep 9th 2018 at 5:33:02 AM

No. Product Placement does not call out that it is Product Placement, ever. Product Placement just exists in the world and they use specifically that and no competitor anywhere.

Calling it out in a way that does not make sense in the world breaks the Product Placement trope and the Fourth Wall. That is a whole other trope.

From the very first line of Product Placement:

"There really aren't that many parodies of it."

There are several dozen parodies of it from various media in the examples section. You might think that's "not that many," but that should be more than enough to preclude cutting.

And these were not Product Placement in the sense that that trope describes. The product was not of the show (the comic story in this case). They were separate, single page stories featuring comic book characters designed to sell fruit pies (or twinkies or whatever).

This is similar to the Vodafone ads featuring Yoda. As far as I'm aware, these are not considered part of the Star Wars canon, and are certainly not an example of product placement in the Star wars films.

That sounds more like a work than a trope, and we've already discussed moving it to Advertising/.

A lot of these "parodies" aren't really parodies at all, they're one-off references to the old ads in a larger work, more like Shout Outs than anything.

Edited by Primis on Sep 10th 2018 at 7:49:10 AM

I'd say it was worth keeping as well, as a noteworthy moment in comics history and a lasting touchstone of the medium — while it's based on a brief period of time, there were dozens of ads produced in that time by actual DC and Marvel artists of the day. There are Stock Parodies with fewer crosswicks, and fewer, less recent examples (like "Psycho" Shower Murder Parody), and I wouldn't want to cut them either.

If parodies are common enough, I have no objections to having a Stock Parody trope, but I still think the original campaign should be classified as a work. That would bring it more in line with the previously mentioned Star Wars and Psycho parody tropes, particularly in terms of separating the original work(s) from parodies.

Edited by GastonRabbit on Sep 13th 2018 at 9:07:21 AM

Is the distinction from Product Placement not the fact that they created (presumably) non-canon mini-spinoffs just to plug the product, rather than working it into the main story? Like those adverts for Winston cigarettes that essentially feature Fred and Barney as Animated Actors.

That definitely seems like a trope to me; it's not quite Product Placement and it's not quite an ad campaign.

Edit: Actually we have Character Celebrity Endorsement covering that: that seems like a good candidate for rehoming the examples from Delicious Fruit Pies.

Edited by johnnye on Sep 13th 2018 at 5:02:02 PM

I do think there's enough examples to justify keeping it as its own page, but a link to Character Celebrity Endorsement and separate Comics/ page both make sense.

Edited by Unsung on Sep 13th 2018 at 10:18:19 AM