I’m about three weeks too late to jump on the Product Placement Is Bad, Mmkay talk that was on the Twitters a short while back, no doubt fuelled by the fact that Bunny recently found a new sponsor for his right arm (or was it his left?). Anyway, I’d like to present a brief thought exercise for you to ponder upon.

For context, examine the screen cap above, taken from the fourteenth episode of Sora wo Kakeru Shoujo, in which Bougainvillea there is enjoying her first ever slice of pizza so much that she’s been brought to tears. Touching, eh?

Now, examine the two screen caps below, making the assumption that these are being used as the establishing shots for the scene displayed above, and consider how they would effect your impression of the scene in question.

Have you thought about it?

The natural assumption to make, for those who haven’t previously seen the show at least, is no doubt that the first example makes this a rather sickeningly, or at least distractingly, blatant example of product placement. You’d kind of be right, thought that’s simply because I’ve refrained from given the full context of the scene in question. As anyone who has seen the show is no doubt aware, a good half of the show is very much a self-parody of Sunrise productions throughout the last decade, and indeed, Bougainvillea and her partner Mintao are a walking My-ZHiME reference of sorts. Actually watching the scene in question, it’s quite obvious that it’s a joke – it’s a callback to the Pizza Hut saturation in Code Geass, and it’s almost pornographic in it’s depiction of Pizza and the process of eating it. It’s purely played for laughs, the first of a series of gags featuring the pimping of Pizza Hut in a number of ludicrous circumstances.

To explain the two screenshots above, the first one (with Pizza Hut intact) is from the Japanese BD of the show, and is the same as what was broadcast. The second shot is from what I’d assume are the “international” masters – that is, the video being used for the US (and presumably UK, though they aren’t that far yet over here) releases of the show. It’s consistent with what they did with Code Geass, in so much as they’ve stripped out the specific Pizza Hut iconography immediately recognisable to the Western audience, though in the couple of episodes of Geass I just spot-checked they’d simply blank-filled them.

What’s kind of the problem here is that the net effect of the lack of Pizza Hut in both the US versions of Geass, and in scene in Sora Kake Girl, is that the tone of the scene in question is changed completely by it – it changes the directorial intent, it now coming off more as tragic than funny, putting it in stark contrast to the tone of the rest of the show. It’s going to make a couple of sequences in later episodes come across as real non-sequitors as well…

(It is amusing how they’ve tried to mimic the actual Pizza Hut logo with their fake one, though)