Super Bowl ads not all that great
Sometimes the commercials are way better than the big game.
Not this year.
The Super Bowl was actually a very entertaining football game this year.
As one of the announcers said near the end of the game, “We should just have these two teams play each other every year.”
Well, maybe not. I still want to see the Vikings in the Super Bowl one more time in my lifetime. And I’m getting older fast.
My take on the ads is that there were a lot of them, and many were entertaining.
Not like a few years ago, when they were fantastic. Overall, this year’s crop of Super Bowl commercials were quite good, but not on a “Wow!” type of scale.
There were the ads for beer, the ads for movies, and the ads for Doritos chips.
But mainly, there were a lot of ads for automobiles.
And the recurring theme? Dogs.
My favorite? There were several. And all of them had to do with cars. And dogs.
Oh sure, I see where the day after the Super Bowl, the national polls showed the two Dorito ads were the top two favorite commercials.
One had the dog bribing the guy not to rat him out about the buried cat. The other had grandma slingshotting the kid to grab a bag of Doritos from his brother.
Both kind of funny.
My favorite was the dog who had to go on a diet to be able to get through the doggie door and go chase the passing VW.
That was good enough, but what sent it over the top was the ensuing Star Wars bar scene where the alien says it was better than the Darth Vader kid commercial the year before.
The kid is in the bar and mentally chokes the alien – ala Darth Vader himself.
A dog and the Darth Vader kid, how can you go wrong.
But, I also really liked the Jerry Seinfeld commercial for the new Acura MSK where he tries to bribe his way to be the first person to buy one. At the end, Jay Leno comes swooping in on a jet pack and spoils Seinfeld’s plan.
It was interesting, funny and had a little soup Nazi cafe scene at the end.
Basically these two seemed to be the most “clever” of the ads.
In number three spot for me was the Clint Eastwood ad about this being halftime for America.
I thought it was a powerful commercial. Almost political in nature.
All three of my top three ads have one thing in common. They were all for car companies.
And, they were all subtle.
The VW was barely seen in the diet dog/Darth Vader kid ad. The Acura is barely seen in the Seinfeld/Leno ad. And only at the end of the Clint Eastwood commercial do the symbols for Dodge Chrysler and Jeep show up – very briefly.
My fourth favorite ad?
Matthew Broderick reprising his Ferris Bueller’s Day Off role for another subtle car commercial, this time for the CRV Honda.
In fifth place, the ad near the start of the game where a vampire shows up for a vampire party in the woods and his bright headlights “zaps” all of the blood suckers by mimicking daylight.
Again, a car commercial, this time for Audi, and again, clever. And, again, Audi was just barely mentioned in the whole ad.
One more choice, for sixth place. The Chevy truck ad featuring the apocalypse end of the world, with the Chevy drivers wondering where Mark is.
Mark didn’t make it because he drove a Ford.
Clever, interesting and subtle. Chevy is never mentioned and barely seen as just the emblem on a dirty truck. The only vehicle manufacturer verbally mentioned is Chevy’s competitor, Ford.
Of course, you probably have all kinds of other favorites and I wouldn’t argue with you.
The Doritos ads were cute. So was the promo for “The Voice” with Betty White.
But, the beer commercials seemed dumb to me, as did the Bridgestone tire ads and others. Or, they were almost boring, as in the Budweiser prohibition and history ads.
There was one more ad I have to mention. It must have been good, because it made me laugh out loud.
It featured a little kid swimming in a pool and having to, you know, use the bathroom. But the bathrooms were all in use, so he jumped back into the pool and did his business there.
And gave a mischievous grin as a little girl jumped in next to him.
It was funny. Problem is, I have no idea what the commercial was for. Nor does anyone else I talked to.
So, I guess that was $3 million urinated down the swimming pool drain.