Diksha Sundriyal
Netflix’s ‘Geek Girl‘ presents a modern fairy tale to the audience with a teenager, Harriet Manners, witnessing a drastic transformation in her life when she is scouted by a modeling agency and enters the world of fashion. Before this, she’d spent her days being treated as an outcast and believing that she was hated by everyone around her. She would be bullied by the mean girls at school, with only two people to call friends. But when she becomes a model, she enters a whole new dimension and discovers a world not so different in some ways from her own. Navigating this world becomes even more difficult in the age of social media, where every single mistake is blown up on the Internet, which looks a bit different from what the audience might be used to in real life.
The Fictional Retrivo is Modelled on Google
In ‘Geek Girl,’ Harriet and her friends are seen using Retrivo as the search engine to dig out information about one another and to keep an eye on all the fashion news. It is not a real search engine and was created just for the TV series. Why the show couldn’t just use Google, the most popular search engine in the real world, can be explained by the fact that certain factors need to be accounted for while placing a product on the screen.
Generally, brands pay a TV show or a movie to have their name appear on the screen. This product placement generates revenue for the series or movie, so it makes sense that the creators wouldn’t want to give free space to a brand if they are not being paid to do it. Another factor is the legality of presenting a brand and risking getting sued if the proper legal procedure is not followed. While there are several instances where we have seen Google and other social media platforms appear in a movie or a TV show, it is safe to assume that the creators have cleared up anything that might lead to them getting sued by the brand or landing the production company in any other form of legal trouble.
So, instead of risking all that, filmmakers prefer to use fictional brand names and avoid any potential trouble in the future. For the same reason, we find people using a social media platform called Image Pan in ‘Geek Girl.’ It is clearly modeled on other popular social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat. The audience will notice several features in the fictional app that are notably available in the apps we use in real life. However, because the storyline may have ended up showing the social media platform in a negative life, the creators of the show preferred to steer clear of such issues and used fictional platforms like Retrivo and Image Pan.
Read More: Geek Girl: Is Yuji Lee Based on a Real Fashion Designer?
