With it getting harder all the time to force a TV audience into watching commercials (mostly thanks to advancements in technology), advertisers and the networks have gone back to a tried-and-true method - product placement within the show itself. Sometimes it's handled well - after all, with 'Chuck' working in a Buy More electronics and appliance store, the latest products in those categories need to be seen on the shelves. Other times, the attempt to integrate the product is fumbled. And badly. The way Claired gushed over her new car in 'Heroes' and Shawn and Gus bringing the pace of 'Pscyh' to a dead stop as they extolled the virtues of Dunkin Donuts coffee are two good examples. The best example would be the insertion of Degree anti-perspirant into every episode last season on 'Eureka'. It got so bad, my blogging buddy Joe at "I Am A TV Junkie" dropped the show entirely, so he never got to see the aliens of Kextra Four invade the planet. (Just kidding!)
No, but really! The ploy to integrate Degree into the show was cute at first - the government experiments in Eureka were to be subsidized by Degree. But each week they became more intrusive, until the anti-perspirant practically became the hero, coming to the rescue of the guys trying to save the town from a second sun!
Back in the "Golden Age of Television", they used a gimmick that I always found charming - commercials with the stars of the program actually enjoying the product that was keeping their show on the air. Some good examples:
Clark Kent of 'The Adventures of Superman' and 'The Beverly Hillbillies' enjoying Kellog's Corn Flakes
The cast of 'The Andy Griffith Show' having Grape-Nuts cereal and Sanka coffee
William Windom and Inger Stevens discussing Lark Cigarettes at the breakfast table
And best (worst?) of all - Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble smoking Winston cigarettes while their wives do all the work!
But the idea of getting a product placed right into the show was being used back then as well. I came across a frame grab of George C. Scott from the classic drama 'East Side, West Side' which showed his character of Neil Brock in a grocery store. And there are on the wall behind him was a poster for Alpine cigarettes.At first I thought they were like Morley's - a fictional brand of smokes, since I never heard of them before. (And after all, the universe revolves around me!) But a quick bit o' googlin' showed me otherwise. There are several Alpine TV commercials out there, including one which features the late Roy Scheider as the pitchman!
I guess I can't fault the show for putting the poster so prominently in the shot. After all, like 'Chuck', the scene is set in a retail situation. You'd expect to see products on sale and being advertised for sale. And besides, the show - of which I've only seen three episodes at best - was a noble effort that needed to find ways to stay on the air. So if it took some product placement to keep it going, so be it.(Scott would have to do something similar many years later when trying to get the word out about his movie "The Savage Is Loose". He and his wife Trish Van Devere appeared on a week of episodes for 'The Hollywood Squares'.)
Anyway, Toobworld would have preferred a fake brand of cigarettes which could one day be used again in some other show and thus link them together. Better still, any other product besides cigarettes, but that was the reality of the day. But at least this was handled with a bit more subtlety than seen with the Degree inserts into 'Eureka'!
BCnU!
Toby O'B
Thanks for the help!
"Please Sir!" .... Rita
"Danger Man" .... Sue
"Harpers West One" (1961) TV series .... Susan Sullivan
When Ms. Richard left 'EastEnders' finally in 2006, her character of Pauline Fowler was killed off; I believe that for many it would have been unthinkable for anyone else to come along to play the role. But I'd like to think that Shirley Brahms is still with us in Toobworld, perhaps still helping to run that bed and breakfast manor in which the Grace Brothers sank her pension fund...... 
As Red Skelton would say, Good night and may God bless.....
Since 'Lost' has whole-heartedly embraced the concept of time travel this season, I'm thinking that ultimately we'll find out that we already know who these two people had been when they were alive. And since they're male and female, it'll turn out to be someone we know as a couple, somehow thrust back into the past.
In the episode "316", we learn that Ben has gone off to "fulfill a promise to an old friend" before joining the others for that Ajira flight, which leads us to believe that he's gone to kill Penny Widmore Hume, Desmond's wife, as he threatened to do when he confronted her father, Charles Widmore. And later, when we see Ben all bloody phoning Jack from a marina, we fear the worst. 
Of course, they'll have to take along their son Charlie (named for Charlie Pace and not for her father, most likely), who in the "present" day is about 3 years old.
And I'm thinking it'll be around 1937, the same year that Amelia Earhart vanished during her around the world tour. (Because of my earlier post about Julie Adams as Amelia in 'Lost', I've got the famed yet doomed aviatrix on my poor excuse for a mind.)
I think Charlie was raised among those people on the Island and came to think of them as HIS people. And something about that life hardened him, darkened his soul, certainly not the young man his parents would want him to become.
This is why I think the Humes arrived on the Island at some point around the year 1937. Charles Widmore told Locke in the latest episode that they met in 1954 when Widmore was 17 years old. Because of the actor playing him, he looks a bit older. So although his life began - as far as the Island is concerned - in 1937, he was already three years old by that point. I think he was more like 20 when he met Locke and the other time-bouncers.
In the beginning of "The Life And Death Of Jeremy Bentham", Caesar was flipping through a 1954 
In putting together this post, I've seen some online theories that her character of Amelia could in fact be Amelia Earhart! The idea being that living on the Island since her crash in the 1930s has prolonged her life; maybe not in the same way as it has for Richard Alpert, but still....
The author of "V For Vendetta", "The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen", and "The Watchmen" appeared as himself, toon version, in the episode "Husbands and Knives". He was seen reading the comic book "Little Lulu" in a sub-plot that had the Android's Dungeon comic book shop closing up shop when a new comic book store opened.
