Total Croatia News has already written about the appearance of a Croatian island as an example of luxury and a privileged lifestyle in an American TV show. Now numerous Croatian products have been spotted in a different TV show, probably even more popular as it’s final season has recently started streaming: Orange Is the New Black.
OK, fair enough, some of the people working for TCN maybe spend too much time watching Netflix. But, when you’re watching the final episodes of one of your favourite TV shows of the recent past and something catches your eye in the background, you really need to pause, rewind 10 seconds just to make sure you’re seeing it correctly. And I was. (For those not familiar with the show, it follows a group of women in an American federal prison, telling the story of their life in prison, but also the stories of how they ended up there. One of the characters, nicknamed Red, is a Russian lady who works on a Russian market in Queens, where the usual market stuff is happening along with organised crime)
It was Jadro Napolitanke that caught my attention first. Then it was Domaćica, and then I paused and tried to find as many familiar products as possible. And there are a lot, if you grew up in Croatia (or former Yugoslavia) you can probably count over a dozen familiar products on the shelf, including pickles, canned beef, some favourite sweets etc. The set designers for the show have worked hard to get their hands on numerous ex-Yu products (mostly Croatian, though) – hopefully, that’s what they wanted their imaginary Russian market to have on its shelves.
One thing has to be mentioned if we want to be fair: the products on the shelves are in their current, modern packaging. The scenes where they are visible take place in the past, before Red got into prison, probably sometime in the nineties. The designs of most of the products (and they all existed then!) were significantly different back then. Maybe that just goes to show that the contemporary product design of Croatian products is not really as contemporary as we’d like to think it is if it fits perfectly as a background in a scene taking place decades ago!
Which products can you see that aren’t listed in the article?
