Today, I’m curious as to what you think is the most explicit UNOFFICIAL callback by an actor for a national commercial.
Pop Culture Theme Time is a feature where I put a question to you to see what you think about a particular theme. I might later revisit the theme for a future Drawing Crazy Patterns or Top Five.
As we have all seen for many, many years, when you want to use a famous actor in a commercial, you often want to make a callback to the roles that they are famous for. However, typically, when you go all out, you get the official rights, like when Hellman’ did a Super Bowl ad based on When Harry Met Sally.
However, sometimes you don’t WANT to pay for the IP rights, so you just do something FAMILIAR without outright being an actual use of someone else’s intellectual property.
A really unusual one that is running right now is a Secret deodorant commercial with Sarah Chalke playing DEFINITELY NOT ELLIOT REID FROM SCRUBS, NO SIR! Yes, she even SAYS “scrubs” in the commercial, but this is a TOTALLY UNRELATED DOCTOR CHARACTER PLAYED BY CHALKE.
This one takes the cake for me in terms of being very explicit without being official, but I wonder if you all can think of even better examples!
Let me know!
And feel free to suggest future Pop Culture Theme Time topics to me at brian@poprefs.com!
ALF was featured in a series of commercials for Ryan Reynolds’ Maximum Effort commercial/business (that includes wireless internet). They featured him living in a new home with a millennial named Eric. His last name is never given, but since that was the name of Willie Tanner’s second newborn son near the end of the ALF sitom in 1990, it’s heavily implied that it’s the same Eric grown up, and the commercials are canonical to ALF. At least more so than the TV movie was in 1996 (which few saw, yet resolved the cliffhanger from the sitcom, albeit messily).
Now, this is an odd example because ALF, both as a sitcom and franchise, is still owned lock, stock, and barrel by Alien Productions. Pretty much anyone who wants to rerun ALF or his cartoon spinoffs or even make erasers or arrange for cameos (i.e. YOUNG SHELDON) has to deal with his original creators/owners/puppeteers/voice. But it is the first thing I could think of since the commercials are spiritually intended to be an extension of the sitcom’s continuity without being blunt about it. Likely because the last name, “Tanner,” is the same as another famous sitcom family, FULL HOUSE.