Freddy Krueger and the Unintended Consequences of Product Placement

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There was a time when I was afraid to drink Coca-Cola.  It had nothing to do with high fructose corn syrup or caramel color.  It had to do with the old Hollywood money marketing strategy known as product placement. Damn those sneaky marketing techniques.

Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge was on TV one night and it really messed me up. Nightmare 2 was not the first or even second Nightmare movie I had seen.  I had already watched the first one as well as the Dream Trilogy (Dream Warriors, Dream Master, and Dream Child) and that's okay.  Nightmare 2 isn't really canonical.  Aside from obvious homosexual overtones in the film it doesn't really fit into the series formula.  The hero of the story was a male.  Typically Freddy squares off against a heroine.  In Freddy movies he gets you in your sleep. If he's in your dream he kills YOU.  In Nightmare 2 when the hero falls asleep Freddy possesses him and then kills people in the WAKING WORLD.  Now there really is no place to hide!

In Nightmare 4 the heroin is eating popcorn and drinking soda (later I would find out it was Pepsi, but whatever...) at a movie theater when Freddy uses the mysterious weather patterns of a suburban cineplex to suck her into the film playing on the silver screen.

A year or so later Jesse in Nightmare 2 is on my TV popping pills and drinking Coke but ends up turning into Freddy and murdering his friends. No way in Hell would I ever drink Coke!  How the Hell did the FDA allow this to hit the market?

I lacked context and experience.

I didn't realize that Coke was a tool to stay awake.  I didn't know that it was sleep that led to him getting possessed.  Good thing too, or else I may have never gone to sleep again.

It was not my experience yet that some things on TV aren't real.  You cannot trust everything you see on TV.  Heck, I believed old TV shows and pictures and movies were black and white because the world used to lack color.  I didn't think there was color in the world until sometime in the 50's. Crayons must have been pretty boring back in the day. Nobody explained this to me.  When your own eyes see things you are left to believe what you see until you are given a reason otherwise.

As an adult I eventually got a job working in....Television.

Playing in the snow with my sister in my backyard. 1988

If I had to pick a song to be the soundtrack to this post it would be...