Star Wars has had a very interesting relationship with merchandise ever since it was conceived 40 years ago, but one retro ad (or rather series of ads) from the 2000s is making the rounds online just because of how silly the whole thing looks.
As it turns out, during a broadcast of the original Star Wars trilogy for Chilean television, rather than cut the film for a commercial break, they would instead splice the Cerveza Crtistal ad into the film and make it look like it was all part of the movie. Here are a bunch collected by IGN:
When the original Star Wars trilogy aired on Chilean television back in the early 2000s, a controversial move to splice in beer ads to avoid commercial breaks was made and the results are equal parts baffling and hilarious. pic.twitter.com/q9lDXIFVu6
— IGN (@IGN) March 4, 2024
Some fans are actually wondering how many of these were spliced into the movie, but there is now a call for anyone who had worked on the station, or Cerveza Cristal themselves to deliver the whole trilogy of films with the ads spliced into them.
With ads becoming increasingly invasive in today’s pop-culture, any new version of this kind of splicing would probably be frowned upon; but for now, it does seem like a fun relic from early 2000s marketing that definitely caught fans off guard. I’m just curious if they would just replay the part of the movie that they spliced in, or they would just continue playing the film as if nothing happened.
What I can say is, it was definitely an interesting concept for an ad, and they tried really hard to make sure they matched the cuts in the film. Who knew they would find internet virality 20 years later on a platform that didn’t even exist at the time?
For now, you can watch the original Star Wars now streaming on Disney+.
