We explore some of the oddest movie related corporate marketing campaigns from Darth Vader’s cough sweet ads to Winston Wolfe’s contents insurance callouts.
This article first appeared in Film Stories issue #49.
To date, E.T. The Extra Terrestrial is the highest grossing 1980s movie at the worldwide box office. Unlike most of the rest of the top ten, it’s also blessedly free of sequels, prequels, spin offs and other franchise instalments. Yet it’d be remiss to say there’s been no second life for the film: its title character has made a fair few commercial appearances.
While Steven Spielberg’s 1982 movie was a commercial phenomenon at the time – with, it should be pointed out, no shortage of attendant merchandise (including, famously, a terrible and over-produced video game that ended up in landfill) – a major ‘return’ of E.T. came in 1999, when British telecoms giant BT revamped its mass-marketing campaign with new communication technology at its centre.
For most of the 1990s, we heard the unmistakeable voice of the mighty Bob Hoskins telling us “it’s good to talk” in BT adverts. But following successful negotiations with Universal Studios and Amblin Entertainment, the company secured E.T. as a mascot at the turn of the millennium.