Some leftover thoughts on what is, rout or nail-biter, Diana Ross or Michael Jackson, Deion Sanders for Dallas or Deion Sanders for San Francisco, usually the most watched event of the year:
Not that the ratings–NBC says 138.49 million people watched, making it the most popular television program in history–demonstrate it, but the Super Bowl is an event in desperate need of a new set of cliches.
Most of them are used by the time the game starts, spent in a barrage of determinedly awe-struck features. In the pregame feature world, all athletes are courageous heroes whose travails reflect one piece or another of the American Dream. But that dream is not to make the most money possible at what is a brutal, grinding, desperately short-lived profession. It’s–cue stirring music–to rise to the top and help the team win.
Please. The game announcers have grown more openly skeptical of pro sports and athletes in recent years, as have the fans; let’s get the rest of the broadcast with the program.
The cliches that remain–prominent among them the upending of the Gatorade bucket, the halftime vaudeville extravaganza, the hoopla about the ads–were looking as thin during Sunday’s broadcast as the cartilage of a 15-year veteran’s knee.
The Gatorade problem is an easy fix. All it’ll take is an imaginative head coach. Such a coach could turn the tiresome dousing ritual into a great, if borrowed, sight gag simply by, just before the deluge, holding up a tiny umbrella.
The montage with which NBC kicked off its pregame show on Sunday tried to place Super Bowl games, as opposed to pageantry, among the key moments in popular culture. It was no sale.
Better would have been a look back at halftime spectacles through the years. There lurks popular culture in its purest, most jaw-dropping form.
Sunday’s entry did not disappoint.
Scaffolding was erected on the Sun Devil Stadium field in Tempe, Ariz., for the purpose of holding national treasure (circa 1969) Diana Ross and her 11,000 dancers.
Ross showed her respect for her Motown hits by performing them in medley format, quite possibly the least sincere method of musical expression yet invented. As she pranced and preened about, the one positive effect of her winded vocalizing was that we could tell she wasn’t lip-synching.
En route to setting the Super Bowl record for costume changes (at least four), she was caught by the cameras as her attendants helped her apply yet another gaudy cape.
It was a bit like watching a David Copperfield performance: The frequent, frantic regarmenting left her audience wondering simultaneously, “How did she do that,” and, “Why is she spending so much energy on a trick nobody cares about?”
These things always provide a sad comment on the balkanization of our tastes. Is there not some form of American music or show palatable to a wide audience that also is not knee deep in dust? Is there not something we can all agree on beyond old Motown?
(Ross, in a way, provided the answer: We can all agree that her grand exit, in a helicopter that descended onto the field, was goofy–like the costumes, spectacle for spectacle’s sake.)
Among advertisements, there were no blockbusters and the pressure to be special proved too much for most of what did run.
Penguins and Cowboy Deion Sanders vied for the Most Valuable Shill trophy. The flightless bird silently pitched BMW and Bud Ice, while Sanders spoke, unmemorably, for Pepsi and Wheaties.
Another recurrent theme was ice-cold metal sticking to mouth parts: Both Budweiser (with its frogs’ tongues) and Pepsi (with an Alaskan’s lip) spots incorporated their cans and the old playground dare.
In general, Pepsi’s series of ads seemed to bear a curious warning: Drink Pepsi and be punished.
Not only did the Alaskan liplock a 12-ouncer, but a Coke vendor, recorded on a store’s video camera, snuck a Pepsi and a cooler full of cans tumbled to his feet. Message: Pepsi coolers are poorly packed. Never open one.
And when an animated goldfish played dead to coax sips of Pepsi from his owners, he got flushed down the toilet for his troubles. That he later shows up free in a lake is no life lesson, only a happy accident of waste disposal.
The favorites at one Super Bowl party were Nike’s series of peewee football highlight reels narrated by the somber, gravelly voice of NFL Films–or a close imitation.
Nike already failed earlier this football season with an ad featuring Sanders and Cowboy owner Jerry Jones that emphasized the owner’s riches and the player’s willingness to be bought. It taunted the audience with everything it dislikes about professional sports.
The peewee ads’ hilarious contrast between uncertain coordination and self-serious narration helped tilt the balance back toward giving sport the benefit of the doubt.
But NBC wasted no time in extinguishing that feeling. An ad featuring the Budweiser blimp was followed closely, and surely coincidentally, by the network decision to break away from the first close Super Bowl in years in order to share with us an overhead shot of, yes, the Budweiser blimp.
Somewhere on the field, Sanders shed a sentimental tear.
