America’s tendency to watch the Super Bowl en masse each year, making it television’s perennial most popular event, represents the triumph of habit over experience.
Almost every year professional football’s ultimate contest is a lopsided affair preceded by bloated pregame programming and punctuated by overpriced, often overproduced advertisements. A new ritual sees a trumped up “special episode” of a primetime series added in the game’s afterglow, such as it is.
Sunday’s contest, though, which saw the Denver Broncos upset the Green Bay Packers, was a different megacultural event, something more than an excuse for a winter party. It was
an actual close game, if not a cleanly played one: The officials, not marquee quarterbacks John Elway and Brett Favre, became the stars during a second half so thick with penalty flags you had to wonder if they forgot to clean up the field after the halftime show.
And when the game is close, the pageantry–the ads, the halftime show, the very special edition of “3rd Rock from the Sun”–ducks behind the clouds, a little like that Stealth bomber that flew over the stadium (or did it?) prior to Sunday’s kickoff. The Super Bowl became, again, an actual sports story.
But there was still plenty of meat for pop-culture enthusiasts to gnaw on, some of it, like beef jerky, still containing flavor days after the blessed event.
And by referring to edible flesh, I am not making a taunting reference to what was a Waterloo of sorts for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. If there was a predominant theme to the game’s advertisements, it was cruelty to animals.
Pepsi, an advertiser so hyperactive you’d think it made its buy in the throes of a Pepsi buzz, spilled the blood of what seemed a mosquito imitating Mick Jagger. Determined by dumb repetition to convince people its product is cool, whether or not it actually tastes good, Pepsi also made a goose guzzle its low-food-value beverage.
Tabasco, rerunning a clever old ad, had a mosquito, fresh off the arm of a Tabasco lover, fly away and explode in flames. FAO Schwartz, in a spot encouraging daddies everywhere to spoil their daughters rotten, stuck a pet elephant in a plethora of locales less comfortable than the African savannah, such as a tea party. Zip Drive put a retainer–the rigid orthodontic appliance–on a dog.
And Budweiser, in the day’s most winning ad series, unraveled a plot by its talking lizards to hire a bedraggled ferret to kill its ribbiting frogs. This was animal cruelty thrice over: Not only did the frogs take a beating (but not, ultimately, croak), but lizards were revealed as petty and vindictive, and ferrets were shown willing to do anything for a buck.
In the realm of more advanced animals, there was, in what may be an advertising first, more male flesh on display than female. A couple of ads (Doritos, MasterCard) seemed designed solely to parade women in clingy tops, but a Nike spot was almost all wet naked guys.
The Bud “I love you, man” actor was, thankfully, clothed, though he was shown to have defected from the macrobrewer’s employ. He turned up in a clever ad for PrimeStar television, maneuvering his shiny vintage Mustang in between an onrushing implement of destruction and his PrimeStar satellite dish.
(Another defector of sorts was supermodel Cindy Crawford, who last year advertised Pepsi and Cadillac, but this year turned up as the name guest star in a lumbering episode of “3rd Rock.” Crawford, though, proved at least as funny an actor as Jenny McCarthy.)
Other new-technology ads were less effective than PrimeStar’s. Especially cryptic was Oracle’s elaborate “seat of knowledge” ad, which appropriated imagery of the Vietnam War and the Tibetan freedom struggle in some muddled message about revolution and information. What came through most clearly was that the actual seat resembles a $25 chair from Target.
Oracle was not among the winners, however, in the three-way tie for the game’s worst ad, a waste of the $1.3 million per minute it cost to be there. One was General Tire’s throwback to the 1950s: Our tires will help you swerve; the spot was all taut buildup and no payoff.
Another loser touted a Hormel food product: “In or out of the bowl, it’s out of control” is simply not a good slogan for canned chili. And the third stared down sexist assumptions about who controls the money, who watches football and how women like to spend vacations: a Royal Caribbean and Celebrity cruise ship ad suggested that a way for guys to “make it up to her” for watching 22 weeks of football was to take her on a cruise. What, and miss college basketball?
The cruise lines sponsored the halftime show, appropriate given the usual level of entertainment on cruise ships. This one was a tepid tribute to, yet again, Motown, the music of which apparently remains the only common touchstone in our Balkanized culture.
Better this year’s performers–The Temptations, Smokey Robinson, Martha Reeves–than last’s–a warmed-over edition of the Blues Brothers–but Reeves’ tinny notes, in particular, demonstrated the perils of not lip synching. And always puzzling is the point, year after year, of filling the field with all those dancers–not to mention whether those shiny discs they held were to promote facial tanning or to catch and measure rainfall.
But perhaps they are there to make sure that it’ll take forever to get the field ready for play again, thus allowing more time for ads.
