Top Gun Product Placement Analysis

Introduction
As Top Gun reached into the audience’s nationalist instinct and impacted the way the audience viewed the world, war, and the military. Few viewers, however, realized that they were also influenced by product placement. Further, few film watchers are aware that product placement occurs. Although Top Gun moved the audience through the sounds, sights, actions, and other cinematic techniques, as will be discussed later, the biggest influence was the product placement of the Navy and Ray Ban sunglasses that was accompanied by an emotional and political message that resonated with the American people. Product Placement has a long history, it has been occurring for a decade and a half but did not receive much attention until the 1980s. In this time, many films brought attention to products and services. The centrifugal role of the Navy in Top Gun was a commercial that provided the Navy publicity without having to endorse the film. The product placement effected the social, political, and militaristic views in the latter
Product placement first occurred in films that were created by Auguste and Louis Lumière and their cinèmatograph. The brothers began placing branded products in their 50-second-long films of everyday life occurrences to help reduce the cost of production and receive publicity. The first recorded occurrence of product placement was as Newell, Salmon, and Chang suggest, “In the spring of 1896, the Lumière brothers entered into a distribution and production arrangement with Francois-Henri Lavanchy-Clarke, a Swiss businessman who functioned as a European distributor and promotor for the U.K. soap manufacturer Lever Brothers” (579). This product placement allowed the Lumière brothers production to be filmed in Switzerland and distributed throughout Europe and the United States in exchange for placing Lever Brothers Soap in their film (Newell, Salmon, and Chang