Making Movies...To The XTreme!!

On the front of one of the movies I'd seen recently was a trailer for a movie called First Descent. It appears to be a documentary about snowboarding. I'm thinking, "Somewhat limited demographic, but, whatever." (The same can be said for Family Guy, but I can't help notice Fox keeps putting that back on the air. Oh well.) At the end, I just happened to notice a little blurb for the production company, named MD Films (much like how I noticed the address for this website at the bottom of an Orbitz.com commercial). Normally, I wouldn't think anything of this; there are thousands of production companies that have whatever fucked up names. But, something about the lettering of "MD" looked familiar to me.

When I got home, I looked up MD Films on the web. Turns out, the "MD" looked familiar because it stands for "Mountain Dew." D'oh!!

The idea of a beverage company producing movies is a fucked up one. It's as though Pepsi, the maker of Mountain Dew, became jealous of the fact the Coca-Cola owned Columbia Pictures during the 80s, and decided they wanted to get into the movie game too. But Columbia was a freestanding company that just happened to be owned by Coke; the movies it produced had nothing to do with Coke. MD Films is actually a division of Pepsi. Which essentially means it's nothing more than a marketing tool.

I suspect that sometime during First Descent, at least one of the snowboarders will be shown drinking a Mountain Dew, and that their logo will appear no less than six times. I see it as being a shameless promotion of their product, which is pretty pathetic. When Transamerica owned United Artists, I don't ever remember seeing any product placements for insurance in any of their movies. Yet, I'm willing to bet that First Descent will just be loaded with Dew.

So, I see two possible things happening with this movie: 1) it will flop, and MD Films will never make another movie; or 2) it will be a hit, and we'll see MD movies about skateboarding, BASE diving, and wakeboarding, because, if you believe Mountain Dew's commercials, xtreme sporters are their main consumers, and should have more movies targeted towards them.

Needless to say, I'm hoping for outcome #1. Fuck you, Mountain Dew!!