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A Brief History of 'Furious' Product Placements

The Fast and the Furious series has earned well over $2 billion at the box office (a total it is furiously adding to with the record-breaking release of Furious 7), and the franchise has earned plenty of additional dough from product placement. The car brands are, of course, the most obvious — if it’s a model/make of a sports car that can be souped-up, it has been in a Fast and Furious movie, though the franchise has a special place for Dodge Chargers and Mitsubishis. Then there are the ancillary auto-related goods: performance parts, suspensions, and, one of the filmmakers’ very favorites, NOS.

But to really appreciate (or bemoan) how littered these movies are with logos, you have to look at the every-day products the series has shilled for over the course of its 14-year run. Here are nine prime examples:

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Panasonic: The series wasted no time in revealing its willingness to show a little brand: Just 23 seconds into 2001’s The Fast and the Furious we see a truck-full of Panasonic electronics. Then we see said logo about 25 more times as the truck becomes a heist target — because that’s how hot Panasonic booty is.

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Von Dutch: The clothing brand best known for its trucker hats was introduced in the first Fast installment as Toretto’s go-to shirt brand.

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Corona: Mexico’s clear-bottled import has been the official beer of this series since the beginning: “You can have any brew you want,” Dom tells Brian in The Fast and the Furious. “As long as it’s a Corona.” (That doesn’t make any sense, but no one ever accused these movies of making sense.) The Corona love continues right through part 7, in which we get another not-so-subtle reminder that Dom Toretto doesn’t do craft beer. When Mr. Nobody (Kurt Russell) offers a glass of his fancy-schmancy “Belgian ale,” Dom replies that he’s “more of a Corona man.” Mr. Nobody is well-prepared, and whips out a bucket of ice-cold Coronas for Dom to dig into. (Various Corona mentions follow.)

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Brahma: Where was Dom, though, when Han Seoul-Oh (Sung Kang) was spotted with a bottle of Brahma, Brazil’s leading brew, in the Rio de Janeiro-set installment Fast Five?

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Nokia: While Apple is a notorious Hollywood product placer, Dom, Paul, and the gang’s preferred cell hasn’t been the iPhone. The world they inhabit is one where most people speak on Nokia phones.

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Apple: That’s not to say Steve Jobs’s zillion-dollar brainchild doesn’t have plenty of screen time and shout-outs in the series. Just look at the scene in Tokyo Drift where Morimoto (Leonardo Nam) is beating the snot out of Twinkie (Bow Wow) while proclaiming, “That’s for selling me a broken iPod.” And with so many laptops around to plan various heists and missions, you can bet you’re seeing some Apples on the tops of those.

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Converse and Vans: Every time Brian puts the pedal to the metal throughout the series, we get a good look at his kicks. He wore black Converse All-Stars as a young buck in the 2001 original, but as a grown-up dad, he’s spotted wearing black Vans, above. How many pairs of sneakers do we think Brian actually owns?

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Pepsi: The guys aren’t always polite to their sponsors. In 2 Fast 2 Furious, Slap Jack (Michael Ealy) crashes his bronze Toyota Supra right through a Pepsi billboard. You might have trouble finding that scene today, though. According to IMDb, all the Pepsi placements in 2 Fast have been removed in newly released versions or broadcasts of the film since 2008.

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Tabasco: In one of the most creative (or WTFiest, depending on your perspective) product placements of the whole series, a bottle of the famous Louisiana pepper sauce goes flying in the air during an early car tumble in Tokyo Drift. Those of us who keep hot sauce in our car found this scene perfectly plausible.

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Under Armour: Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson) likes his brands literal. When he strips off his actual body armor in Furious movies 5-7, he’s wearing one of these “men’s tactical heatgear compression tees,” which you can buy online, but in which, let’s not kid ourselves, there is no chance you’ll look as ripped as The Rock. (At least the logo looks like an “H” for Hobbs.)

Editor’s note: Many of you pointed out correctly in the comments that those are Vans Brian is wearing in the photo. The post has been updated accordingly.

Meriah Doty contributed to this report.

Watch a featurette from ‘Furious 7′: