The Walking Dead will start featuring more product placement, starting with World Beyond. Weirdly, it also may help date the start of the zombie apocalypse.
On this weekend’s new episode of The Walking Dead: World Beyond, Huck (Annet Mahendru) will surprise zombie survivalist Felix (Nico Tortorella) with a prize item: a bottle of Mountain Dew, a rare find in a world ravaged by the undead. “Is this legit?” Felix asks, mentioning the soda by name. “I will never stop missing these. I mean, I used to drink this like water, back in the day.”
He won’t actually turn to the camera, smack his lips and say “Ahhhh, now that’s some good drinking,” but he might as well.
AMC is leaning more into product placement, something that’s always been hard to do on The Walking Dead shows, since they take place in a post-apocalyptic world with no electricity, fresh foodstuffs or other modern-day conveniences. The early seasons of the show did feature a kiwi-green Hyundai Tucson, but it was written out before season 5. “While we had a great run with The Walking Dead, the plot of the show changed and moved in such a way that the car ceased to have a role,” said David Matathia, Director of Marketing Communications at Hyundai, at the time.
The Mountain Dew appearance is part of a new partnership with PepsiCo, so you might wanna brace yourself for appearances from 7UP, Aquafina and maybe even Sierra Mist in the future. “This is definitely something that we love doing and want to do more across this universe,” said Kim Granito, the senior vice president of integrated marketing of AMC Networks.
That said, Granito assured Variety that any scene featuring a product “needs to be authentic to that world.” But I could see how it might get out of control. Is there gonna be an episode set in an abandoned Pepsi bottling plant?
It could be easier to fit these kinds of products into scenes set in the past. We recently learned that an upcoming episode of The Walking Dead will feature Negan’s wife Lucille, played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s real life wife Hilarie. If we have scenes set before the zombie apocalypse, it could be a little easier to buy a character opening up a refreshing can of Pepsi.
Speaking of the timeline, Mountain Dew’s appearance in the new episode of World Beyond actually helps clear up the timing of the zombie apocalypse, which has always been kept vague. The bottle will feature a Mountain Dew label seen around 2010, meaning that the bottling plants were operational at least that late.
The next episode of The Walking Dead: World Beyond, “Truth or Dare,” airs this Sunday. Do the Dew.
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h/t SyFy Wire