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Live from our couches: Super Bowl XLII
Super Bowl XLII has a chance to be historic, with the New England Patriots trying to complete only the second perfect season in the Super Bowl era.
We're watching the game, sure, and we'll be talking about that and FOX's coverage of it. But we're also very interested in the $90,000-per-second stuff in between. Zap2it's Rick Porter and Daniel Fienberg will have instant analysis of all the ads, plus whatever else passes before our eyes during the biggest television broadcast of the year.
First Quarter
If you have the first ad placement during this game, do you root for a three-and-out by whoever gets the ball first? I wonder because the Giants eat up a fair amount of clock on their opening drive, meaning we don't get our first commercial until 6:35 Eastern time, and only because of an injury to a Pats player.
That first spot? An underwhelming Bud Light ad that continues its "And now..." list of new features, this time imbuing the ability to breathe fire on those who drink it (an earlier one promised teleportation). It's marginally cute, but I'm not sure I want fire-breath to be associated with my beverage.
Audi, though, fares much better with its parody of the Godfather horse-head scene -- although we feel obligated to note that Alex Rocco was not in that scene in the movie. He played Moe Greene.
LL Cool J, really? You're taking part in a Night at the Roxbury takeoff for Pepsi? For shame. Nice to see Chris Kattan get some work, though. And the SalesGenie ad, I thik I've already forgotten.
FOX makes up for the long drive by going to another break right after the kickoff. Bud Light has another guys-being-guys spot -- hee, they don't like wine and cheese, they like beer and football! -- and the Under Armour ad would've been cooler if the guy had screamed "Caaaannn yooooouuuu diiiiig it!" instead of "The future is ours." But what can I say, I'm a Warriors fan.
Apparently, all the ads will be here, if you want to see them again.
Screaming squirrels? Pretty much always funny to me. Bravo to Bridgestone. I'm not, however, in a rush to download that Doritos song from iTunes. I don't care if I am missing out on a message from my heart.
Second quarter
Hey y'all. Dan here. Rick was lucky enough enough to get the quarter with the fewest commercials in Super Bowl history. At least the Pats found a way to pull into the lead before it was my time.
The second quarter begins with an ad for Wanted, a movie that proposes to make James McAvoy into a kick-butt action star. It looks like Timur Bekmambetov's Nightwatch-style visuals remain intact, but I have my doubts on their ability to transfer the tricky, meta-textual narrative from the comic. It looks fun. Bullet-time ads with the Super Bowl helped make The Matrix into a hit. Maybe this'll do the same.
I'm less interested in Derek Jeter wandering through New York City. I get that Manhattan's becoming a football field thanks to G2 Gatorade, but why is the whole look just making me think about I Am Legend.
Meanwhile, Go Daddy has decided to make an on-air impact by driving people to their website to see some commercial where Danica Patrick threatens to expose herself. They're get more traffic if they advertised that Danica Patrick was about to win a race on their site. I guess the Anna Kournikova of Racing is good for business.
Also good for business? The idea that Dell is such a sexy computer line that people will pat you on the rear as you walk by them. Since I prefer that strangers keep away from my rump, I'm sticking with my Apple.
It's good to see the coroner from Pushing Daisies grabbing a Super Bowl commercial paycheck as a boss who's impressed that his delivery service is using carrier pigeons with GPS and night-vision. Of course, they learn that it blows to have giant pigeons running amuck in the city and that they'd be better off using FedEx. Surely there was a pigeon poop joke that should have been used here? Right?
Yawn. Sorry, Cars.com. You just blew a couple million dollars on your stone-circle death match thing. Yawn.
Tide does far better with its spot, which features a talking stain that distracts an interviewer from the apparently valid points being made by a job candidate. You laugh, but it isn't funny when it happens to you.
You can always count on the Clydesdales and Budweiser to deliver a winner and this year's Rocky-themed spot is no exception. A poor horsie doesn't make the cut for one year's commercial and spends his off-season getting trained by a Dalmatian to the tune of "Gotta Fly Now." Brilliant.
I also like the new Iron Man spot, which accentuates effects and high-tech gizmos, rather than the origin story and retro-costume featured in the theatrical teaser and in the spot that played so well at Comic-Con last summer. We're there either way.
Toyota makes the argument that the new Corolla is so quiet that ferocious sleeping badgers will be able to suckle inside the car while the revolutionary war takes place outside. They won't, however, sleep through your cell phone ringing, which seems fair to me.
Canons also play a role in a Garmin commercial in which Napoleon finds his way to battle thanks to his GPS. Yawn.
I'm much more interested in Leatherheads, the new George Clooney comedy which looks like it should have been made in the 1930s.
Like Zap2it, Careerbuilder.com is part of the Tribune Empire, so I don't want to see mean things about the grotesque "Follow Your Heart" ad in which a bored office worker, tired of watching her boss sitting in his office chowing on lobster (lobster?) has her heart literally spring out of her chest, quit and walk out the door. At least nobody can say that their heart wasn't in it. Get it? Sigh.
That was Naomi Campbell with the lizards doing the Thriller dance, right? I'm not going to remember what the ad was for (Life Water?), but dancing lizards are fun. More fun? This classic YouTube clip.
The Life Water affiliation with the lizard commercial is positively memorable compared to the Yukon Hybrid spot with a line-drawing of a man pushing a boulder up a hill as a voice-over asks a series of "Why?" questions. Why, indeed.
And why is Carlos Mencia still around? Seriously? Go away. And take your cavalcade of hilarious racial stereotypes with you. Please.
Leave me to revel in the majesty of the Jesus Lion, as featured in the Prince Caspian trailer. Since The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe bored me to tears, the trailer looks like more of the same. However, lots of people loved that movie and more of the same would be a plus for those people.
The first half is winding down, but several major commercials are still to come including that Justin Timberlake Pepsi commercial that you've been hearing about for weeks. It's basically JT being abused for a minute. He gets bashed into walls, dragged up walls, exposed to Andy Samberg in drag, emasculated by a mailbox and knocked upside the head with a hi-def TV. Thank you, Pepsi, for giving the people what they want.
Hilarious abuse also plays into the user-generated Doritos ad in which a man attempts to catch a mouse with a cheesy chip only to lure a giant mouse (or man-in-mouse-suit), who proceeds to beat the snot out of him for his corn wedges. Let that be a lesson to all of us.
Halftime
While we're all up getting beer and more salsa (includind Daniel; this is Rick again), FOX turns over some ad time to local stations. But halftime, of course, is also where Janet Jackson launched a million FCC complaints, so attention must be paid. Right after we flip over to Puppy Bowl IV for a minute. I don't remember the music and crowd sound being this intrusive in years past. I thought the idea was for it to be an adorable and soothing alternative to the game. Sigh.
Tom Petty takes the heart-shaped stage, and once again I wonder who the people who get to rush the stage are. Do they have tickets to the game, are they paid extras -- what gives?
But if you don't like "American Girl," then you're un-American. And King of the Hill's Lucky still sounds pretty good -- better than some of the other geezer-rock acts the Super Bowl has booked since l'affaire Janet.
Also? None of this, although the giant Flying V that pierced the heart at the top of the show could, I guess, be construed as something vaguely pervy. I won't be surprised if that generates a couple letters. And while I might've liked to hear "Refugee" or "Don't Do Me Like That" instead of "Free Fallin'," it was still a pretty solid 12 minutes of entertainment.
Third Quarter.
Although my eyes are still burning from Tom Petty's guitar-penis, it's Dan again and it's time to go back to football, where the scoreboard indicates that nothing but turnovers and punts happened in the second quarter. On the bright side, that meant lots of commercials. On the down side, that meant lots of commercials.
The first ad of the third quarter features Friend of Zap2it T.J. Thyne shilling for Cars.com. We love T.J. on Bones. He was one of our Underrated Performers of 2007. I hope he got paid well. Very well.
Meanwhile, the Asian at our football-watching party may spend the next couple weeks barfing over the animated pandas in the SalesGenie.com commercial. Because they're cartoons, it isn't yellow-face, but you don't usually see something so bigoted without the presence of Carlos Mencia.
I'm still a bit sick to my stomach as we watch Shaq as a jockey in a spot for the third different energy water of the night. None of them have been stand-outs, at least not in terms of helping me distinguish.
Even reliable advertising performers have bad times and the Bud Light spot with cavemen and stones isn't even vaguely funny. Seriously, how do they have bottling technology and not the wheel? Seriously!
Much better is the Bridgestone commercial, in which a driver uses his tires to easily avoid a deer and rocker Alice Cooper, but then demonstrates his ability to change course at the last second by terrifying an oddly placed Richard Simmons.
I also preferred the second disturbing CareerBuilder.com spot of the evening, this one featuring a singing bug whose message of hope is interrupted by a hungry spider and the message, "Wishing Won't Get You a Better Job."
Why don't Tim Allen and Tom Hanks have better things to do than helping Pixar promote a movie they're not in?
Dear E-Trade... We get the point that your service is so easy to use that a baby can do it. A creepy talking baby. A creeping talking baby with digestive problems. Wait. If your product will make me spit-up on myself, why do I want to use it? Heck, if I want to lose my lunch, I can just go see Cloverfield again.
Meanwhile, the ability to fly is no longer available from Bud Light.
Fourth Quarter
Dan has to go into serious fan mode now, so it's Rick once more. We agreed to this arrangement beforehand, both thinking it'd give Dan adequate time to bask in the glow of his team's about-to-be perfect season. So far, not so much. You have to believe, though, that FOX executives are spraying each other with champagne.
Nice NFL spot with two linemen, Chester Pitts and Ephraim Salaam, from the Houston Texans -- "Now, we're in the Super Bowl. Kinda. Sort of." Hey, it's the closest any Texan's ever been to being in the game.
I am officially tired of the Coors Light press conference ads. Uncle already. Also, apparently the fourth quarter is local-spot time too. 'Cause I don't think y'all just got an ad for Battlefield Ford in Charlottesville.
What do Marilyn Monroe, Shakira and Madonna have in common? They all just got used in a Sunsilk ad. Somehow I have a hard time buying the latter two actually use it.
OK -- the Underdog vs. Stewie Coke ad, with Charlie Brown finally winning? Best of the night so far. Not so much the James Carville-Bill Frist one at the next break though. I'll take kids singing about teaching the world to sing as my unity message, thanks.
Don't care about the giant Toyota SUV, but I'm so checking into whether my town has a Big Wheel racing league.
You Don't Mess with the Zohan. Fine. Zohan doesn't get my ten bucks.
Like the Glenn Danzig song with the Sarah Connor Chronicles ads.
Baby Bob E-trade baby is back. Baby underestimates creepiness of clown, but I think E-trade underestimates the creepiness of talking babies. First one, kinda cute. This one, too much.
Hey Taco Bell -- why not just serve your Fiesta Platters as a regular combo, like you always do, and save some plastic?
And while there was something charmingly minimalist about the Gatorade ad with the slobbery dog, I don't think I want to give my puppy a sports drink.
The combo Semi-Pro/Bud Light ad makes me no more likely to consume either product, although "Bud Light -- suck one" does make me chuckle.
Apparently the ad inventory is just about exhausted at this point, because even during a couple of long injury timeouts during the Pats' touchdown drive, FOX stuck with the game. Our final blast comes at the two-minute warning ...
And it's a come-on from Victoria's Secret, followed by a very strange spot for something called Amp. The small type at the bottom says "Warning. Do not attempt" -- just in case you're tempted to strap jumper cables to your nipples and dance to Salt 'n' Pepa.
Ben Roethlisberger is a good sport. Still not watching American Idol tlll the competition actually starts.
So the commercials end with a whimper, not a bang. The game, however, is more than making up for it. FOX has got to be doing a crazy happy dance, because there's no way people are turning this off. This is the longest two minutes of game time I've ever seen.
Dang. Giants score with 35 seconds to go. 17-14, New York, but the Pats have all three timeouts left.
Last shot -- 10 seconds left, 4th and 20. One last heave is broken up, and that's that. Almost -- the refs have to clear everyone off the field so the Giants can run out the final second on the clock and celebrate one of the biggest upsets ever in this game. That's all she wrote, folks. Take some Tums, and enjoy House.
Favorite ads? Favorite moments? Talk about Super Bowl XLII.
I'm in total agreement with you about the Under Armor ad. Dude most definitely should have closed with "CAN YOU DIG IT". Warrior fan or not, the phrase just has a better ring to it.
Kept re-winding the Iron Man spot. Wonder if someone would post a DVD-screener of that flix before May. :)
So - who's winning the game so far?
Not Rick or Dan | Feb 3, 2008 5:36:16 PM | #I'm here watching from Glendale AZ. The Tom Petty crowd were volunteers who had to wait outside the stadium.
Marcus M. | Feb 3, 2008 5:43:44 PM | #Thanks for the knowledge, Marcus. One of life's small mysteries answered.
Rick | Feb 3, 2008 6:09:36 PM | #Our crowd throught the Terminator beating up the annoying jumping robot football player as well as the two subsequent spots were the best commercials of the night. Too bad they were "in-show" spots so will likely not land on any list.
Mr. Peppers | Feb 3, 2008 8:14:37 PM | #Can't believe that your only comment on Chester Pitts and his oboe was "Nice NFL spot"! That was far and away the best ad of the game. Give me a good oboe player over singing/talking/dancing animals any time.
Lorne | Feb 4, 2008 5:02:15 AM | #Mostly agree. Though I could actually sit through a game without forgetting the new terminator show exists. I swear I could. You don't have to remind me every 10 second. I don't watch it anyway, nor will I.
Puking baby makes someone want to trade stocks? No.
My favorite was the stain shouting in French. Giggled nonstop through that one.
I do not need to see another sneaker/car/sports drink ad that implies some sort of apocalypse during which people worship a sneaker/car/sports drink. Boring and lame.
Wil Ferrell needs a new schtick. Follow Your Heart ad was gross.
Nonnie Muss | Feb 4, 2008 8:58:19 AM | #I thought the E-Trade commercials were great, personally. Where was the Charles Barkley-Dwayne Wade one?
Puppy Bowl kicked more ass than the first three quarters of the game combined
Corey | Feb 4, 2008 9:23:44 AM | #Oops. Forgot the Barkley ad -that one was fantastic. "Do you like popsicles?"
Nonnie Muss | Feb 4, 2008 10:10:33 AM | #Any commercial that features the Budweiser clydesdales has to be good. I especially liked how the dalmatian trained him to be strong like "Rocky".
I thought the Pepsi ad with Jutin Timberlake was lame because you could totally tell that it was a stunt man taking all the abuse, not really JT! I'm sure there are a lot of people out there who wished that Justin really could get hit in the crotch! ;-) It seems like he is EVERYWHERE these days.
The one commercial that didn't make any sense was the Life Water ad where Naomi Campbell was dancing to "Thriller" with CGI lizards. I understand that the lizard is the company's mascot, but what did Naomi represent? The prisoners on You Tube would have been a better choice than a has-been supermodel who is more famous for throwing cell phones at her assistants!
Paige | Feb 4, 2008 10:29:16 AM | #DEREK JETER WASN'T THE ONLY ONE IN THAT ONE - WHAT ABOUT PEYTON MANNING! LOVE HIM! WOULD HAVE LIKED TO SEE HIM IN THE ROTHLISBERGER ONE INSTEAD!
AMY | Feb 4, 2008 11:18:27 AM | #Bridgestone ads were the best, along with Budweiser.
Trish | Feb 4, 2008 12:05:18 PM | #Favorite was Stewie, Underdog, Charlie Brown & the Coke bottle. A close second was the Fedex Carrier Pigeon ad.
Shannon | Feb 4, 2008 1:39:39 PM | #Despite having the Superbowl game on the whole time, I missed most of the commercials and the game itself. Justin Timberlake has always annoyed me so I got great pleasure out of that commercial. The ones with the talking baby cracked me up and I don't even like babies.
EL | Feb 4, 2008 4:50:17 PM | #loved seeing JT getting a beating!!!!!!!
Think you can play sport well, upload a video to www.your60seconds.com and you could, very easily win an ipod touch!!!
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