 Most Sonic fans agree the two Sonic movies are a delight, with one notable exception. All the awkward Olive Garden product placement. Except, Olive Garden isn't actually a product placement. The production received no money from mentioning the restaurant chain. In an interview from All The Way Back in 2020, the first Sonic movies writer, Pat Casey, explained the true origin of Olive Garden Guy. He said, A lot of that was not product placement. Olive Garden didn't pay us for that, it was just a joke. It was just a little thing, and then it seemed to keep growing on set when I wasn't there. They kept throwing in more Olive Garden references. The joke was originally just that the general gives them a crappy gift card at the end, and then it became a whole thing and worked its way back into earlier in the movie. Casey also claimed that no money changed hands. It was effectively a free ad for the restaurant chain. He added, They should send me at least a $50 gift card. I could go for some endless pester right now. This isn't to say that other brands within the two Sonic films aren't product placement. Casey insisted that the Zillow ad was not his fault, saying, Zillow, that was definitely product placement. That showed up at the last second. The first time I saw that was at the premiere. The earlier cuts, it was just like, I was looking at apartments online. Sonic is of course no stranger to product placement. In Sonic Adventure 2, Sega's mascot wears soap shoes, a brand of real world trainers that are designed to grind on rails, presumably for people who want to hang out at skate parks, but who don't want to learn to use a skateboard. The shoes were added late in development, and subsequent releases of the game notably lack a series of soap billboards that can be seen throughout the city escape level. This, though, isn't the most potent Sonic product placement. Way back at the character's start, his first two cartoon shows, The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog and Sonic the Hedgehog, also known as SATAM, were both designed as full-length ads for the Sonic video games. At the time that Sonic was being workshopped, Sega of America got a new president, Tom Kalinsky, who was fresh from a successful career at toy company Mattel. Kalinsky had a very specific formula for making a toy brand hit big, and it focused on Saturday morning cartoons. Research had proved that young children struggle to differentiate between advertisements and regular cartoons, and so the toy industry had become obsessed with cartoons that were secretly marketing tools. Kalinsky said, From day one, once we saw that Sonic was the character we were going with, I wanted to have a television show, and we ended up actually having two different ones. It was really, frankly, an amazing accomplishment. Kalinsky has said that the Sonic marketing campaign was designed to emulate other popular cartoons at the time. Sonic needed to be as approachable as Mickey Mouse, but have the same radical 90s attitude of the Ninja Turtles. Thus, the Sonic cartoons endeavoured to sell watching children the idea that Sonic is a really cool character. The goal was then to get these kids interested in the Sonic game, and the Sega Genesis or Mega Drive. We all know how well this turned out. Sonic remains one of the most popular video game characters of all time, one of Sega's best-selling franchises, and thus far, one of the biggest movie stars of 2022. The moral of the story? Sometimes, something you think is nefarious is actually harmless fun, as with Olive Garden Guy. And sometimes, something you think is harmless fun is actually trying to brainwash you. Just food for thought.