Abram Sauer Online

I’ve already pointed out a bunch of the Apple product placement going on this summer.  One of those notes was for the MacBook in Funny People. It appears there is a PowerBook as well. (Below)

But there is another Apple in Funny People. Except, there isn’t. An extended scene featuring a couple of the so-called funny people prominently features n iMac. But the Apple logo has been scrubbed.

Oddly enough a similar iMac can be seen in Apatow’s last film, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, logo intact.

So does this signal the beginnings of entertainment producers getting tired of Apple overload in films and TV? Now that Apple isn’t exactly a unique, scruffy brand with attitude, but istead a mass-market juggernaut, will we see more and more of the Apple logos ghosted? This is already happening in advertisements and some television, as seen below in Veronica Mars and a Health mag ad.

Of course, it culd also just be that Funny People is embarrassed of its product placements, showing cleaned versions of itself in trailers, reserving the full brands and their logos for the film audiences. Indeed, the non-iMac above is a screenshot from a trailer while the MacBook and PowerBook shots are official production stills, not widely circulated to potential audiences.

Showing more that this latter theory may be true is another example of an online and in-theaters only long-form trailer screenshot (left) vs. a shorter, widely-seen TV ad screenshot (right). In this case though, Funny People seems to be embarrassed about its clear Diet Coke placement.