Super Bowl Commercially Thing
On a certain Sunday near winter's end, the people of America crowd in front
of their television screens for perhaps the premier broadcast event of the year.
Amidst a haze of cheap beer, chips and cigarette smoke John Q. Public prepares
for three hours of broadcast entertainment the likes of which will be talked
about for months, nay, years to come. That's right: I'm talking about Super
Bowl Commercial Sunday, the one day of the year when we as a country come together
to watch the best that advertisers have to offer.
In previous years we've been treated to some great commercials; some have spiked
trends both on television and in real life (see Budweiser's talking frogs or
"whazzup!" etc.) while others were fleeting but remained in our consciousness
(such as Apple's futuristic mini-film during the 1984 Super Bowl, shown only
once but hailed by TV Guide as the greatest commercial ever). Which of these
types would we see today, I wondered to myself as I watched a bunch of guys
hit each other waiting for the damn commercials to start.
There were some good ones, like the Charles Schwab commercial featuring all-time
home run leader Hank Aaron trying to subliminally convince Barry Bonds to retire,
and the Bud Light commercial set in a Battlebots-style arena where the fridge
on wheels wins by distracting the huge killer robot with a can of beer (because,
apparently, not only do robots enjoy the taste of beer, but ingesting alcohol
serves as a distinct advantage on the battlefield). A Quizno's ad featured an
experimenter tranquilizing his participants to make them 'choose' a non-oven
baked sub sandwich over Quizno's. There were several other commercials that
were about as funny but more or less forgettable.
Near the beginning was an E-Trade commercial in which a tuxedoed monkey did
a little musical number with some cabaret girls. As it appeared to end a bunch
of us said "worst commercial ever!" And suddenly the television said
"the next morning…" and a newspaper displayed the headline "Monkey
flops: worst Super Bowl commercial ever," and E-Trade fired the monkey.
Now, maybe the idea of a monkey being fired from advertising struck me as bizarre
(even more bizarre that the monkey had a job there in the first place), but
that last bit made the commercial worth it for me. Not many of my friends seemed
to appreciate it though. Well, you can't please everyone.
The evening wouldn't have been complete without your stock Pepsi/Britney mishmash,
this one featured Ms. Spears singing and prancing through the last five decades,
all to the tune of that "ba ba ba ba baaaa" song (you know how it
goes). The Britney phenomenon is actually kind of fascinating when you examine
it (not that way, pervert. Well, then again…) considering that she can
draw so much hatred from some sections of America and still act as a cultural
icon (Time Magazine recently had a feature on the variety of defacing done to
Britney posters on New York City subways). Maybe negative attention is good,
as long as it's attention? At any rate, I'm just sad that they skipped the early
'80s - it would've been great seeing Britney break-dance up the wall and onto
the ceiling Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo-style.
There were a lot of television and movie promos too, mostly for bad stuff.
("Ally has a daughter?!? SQUEEEAAAL!") The new Austin Powers movie
does look promising, though I can't say the same for M. Night Shayamalhalayaman's
Signs. Especially entertaining was the "let's conveniently ignore all the
baggage associated with this movie" preview for Collateral Damage, the
new Schwarzenegger flick. There are roughly two people on earth that haven't
heard about this movie getting bumped from release last year due to the events
of September 11th, and I don't see why they couldn't have used this as a new
advertising campaign: "The terrorists couldn't stop him. Jerry Falwell
and his reactionary cabal couldn't stop him. And now, Arnold is fighting for
your freedom and mine on enemy shores. This February, let's roll into theatres
and support our war against terrorism by watching Arnold Schwarzenegger in:
Collateral Damage." I dunno, it could have worked.
I noticed a disturbing number of public service announcements interlaced with
the commercials, most of them anti-smoking campaigns of some kind. Oddly enough,
one set of these commercials was funded by Phillip Morris, one of the biggest
tobacco companies in the country. Apparently Phillip Morris is required by law
to show these types of commercials every so often as part of a legal settlement;
so it was fairly easy to see that a court-ordered guilty conscience was at work
here, as the spot was about as unconvincing an anti-smoking message as I've
ever seen. It was your stock teenagers running around having fun, and at one
point one of the kids says "hey, let's smoke" and the others say "eww,
no." What's funny is this exact commercial has been in advertisements for
decades already, and most teenagers never really took it to heart to begin with.
That's why I at least appreciate the Truth ads - they're attacking the cigarette
industry in a different direction, trying to spread knowledge instead of propaganda
and half-hearted sentiment. So seeing a man in a rat costume choke to death
on the sidewalk probably wasn't good for the party atmosphere, but you know,
sometimes shit just needs to get learnt. Now the government anti-drug ads, meanwhile,
weren't good in any way - in fact, having people tell us "I helped kill
a judge" straight-faced was insulting and belittling, not to mention cheap.
I guess nobody in the government realizes that legalizing or at least regulating
some drugs would help assuage this problem, but that's what you get in Bush's
America.
Since there were so many commercials broadcast that evening, it would be impossible
to really review them all; therefore, instead I'm going to hand out a few 'awards'
to a few other commercials I felt were extra special in some way. So, away we
go!
Most likely to be the "trend-setting" commercial(s): Well,
not much this year has any chance - it was a fairly lackluster year as commercials
go. Sure, there were some good ones, but nothing really spectacular or ground-breaking.
Plus, the actual game was so damn good this year that people could actually
talk about it for more than ten minutes after it had ended, so the commercials
might have been a little over-shadowed anyway. But if this award has to be awarded
to something, it's the "What is mlink?" series, just because it did
a good job of doing exactly what it set out to do, which was to make us scratch
our heads and say "yeah, what the hell is mlink?" The idea of mystery
in advertising isn't used very often, though I like to see it when it does pop
up.
Best commercial that nobody liked except for me: the Lipton Brisk Iced
Tea commercial featuring an army of puppet movie stars (led by a miniature Danny
Devito) being fired from their jobs at Lipton and going on a rampage. Guest-starring
Al Roker, world-famous weatherman and Chambraigne™ spokesman, I thought
the commercial was a great little piece of controlled anarchy. But judging from
reactions amongst the rest of my friends, I was the only one that felt this
way (bastards). Yes, perhaps on the surface it was simply a commercial where
Danny Devito beat the crap out of people 20 times his size. But underneath,
perhaps it was more than that. Perhaps it was about the people of America being
fed up with a hyper-consumerist society in which job security lasts about as
long as the quarterback snap. Although they were celebrities, made fat off of
the grist of the bourgeois cult of celebrity worship, so it probably wasn't.
Best commercial that was funny for no particular reason: the Yahoo!
commercial featuring the talking dolphin (Guy: "Hey, how did you learn
to talk?" Dolphin: "…Yahoo…"). I don't know what it
is - the commercial wasn't even that clever. Maybe it was the dolphin's enunciation,
the disaffected look on its face… who knows? It just had that je ne sais
quoi that made it click with the crowd. And since I'm already sounding pretentious…
Best reason to believe that capitalistic Amerika will soon undoubtedly collapse
under its own mass of frothing bile: the Cadillac commercial featuring the
little sports car fitting inside the larger truck. So, if I buy the sports car
and my friend buys the truck, I might also be able to fit my car inside of his?
(Freud would be having a field day with this.) That's great, because I can think
of hundreds of situations in which this would come in handy. Well, maybe not
"hundreds", maybe more like "one or less". But, I'm sure
that that one time one of us avoids a $20 parking ticket will definitely be
worth the extra $100,000 we each paid out for the Cadillac brand. Either the
Cadillac designers are actually four-year-olds with Legos or they've begun a
radical new ad campaign catering only to the Trump family. Either way, if advertisers
are trying to tell us that the best use of our dollar would be investing in
interlocking cars, I predict nationwide financial ruin and starvation within
the next five years. Is the bloody revolution fast on its way? We'll soon find
out.