Super Bowl Thoughts

Another Super Bowl has come and gone. As with previous years, I didn’t pick a team, because I was in it for the commercials. It’s really the only time that the commercials are good. Expensive as hell, but good.

A few quick thoughts on the game:

Steelers had to EARN this one. This wasn’t the cakewalk that they kept on hyping it to be. The Cardinals had a chance and they blew it big-time on more than one occasion. I think their biggest mistake was not going for a field-goal at the last seconds before halftime, which set up that incredible 100-yard interception and touchdown. It’s good that they were able to come back after that, but it just wasn’t enough.

There were also a LOT more penalty flags than I can remember ever seeing during a Super Bowl. It’s like every five minutes there was a penalty.

Let’s talk halftime. “The Boss” put on a very good show. No skin, no scandal, no politics. And it had good energy, which was needed because nobody else had an alternative to the halftime show.

Now let’s get to the REALLY big stuff… THE COMMERCIALS! Hey, at three million a pop, they need to be great.

Sadly some of them sucked.

The good ones were movie previews for “Up”, “Star Trek”, “Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen”, and the pre-game preview for “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra”.

The 3-D gimmick sucked. The SoBe lizards combined with football players was lame. The preview for “Monsters Versus Aliens” was tepid. And “Chuck in 3-D” was lame in any dimension. Listen, guys, 3-D gimmicks generally suck. When you can provide 3-D imagery WITHOUT the need for stupid glasses, THEN it would work. Otherwise, it SUCKS!

Pepsi’s tepid trips down memory lane proved to be a failure compared to the edginess of Coke’s avatars, the bottle-stealing insects, and Coke Zero’s remake of the famous Football Jersey commercial. MacGruber? Will someone PLEASE thrash the people who came up with that idea? The only Pepsi ad that was good was the “I’m Good” spot for Pepsi Max.

And of course Go Daddy came up with yet another lame teaser for their website videos. Okay guys, Danica Patrick may look hot, but you will NOT see her in anything less than a bikini, and especially if you just go to the Go Daddy website. It’s a TEASE, okay? I saw it coming even BEFORE the ads aired! In fact, I saw the ads BEFORE they aired! (It pays to surf ahead.) They paid six million dollars to do two tease commercials.

The two Doritos ads for the magic crunch and the magic snow globe were funny.

Toyota? Why are you wasting three million dollars telling us about the durability of your truck when most people are paying more attention to gas mileage than taking it up a real-life Hot Wheels track? The only thing missing from this was the loop.

Teleflora’s talking flowers was funny. CareerBuilder.com and Monster.com ads were funny. The singing and football plugs for the new season of Heroes were not funny.

Well that’s what I got for this year’s Super Bowl. Well, that and some leftover hot wings, carrots, and apple slices. Because the only other really great thing about watching the Super Bowl was that I got to watch it in HDTV, and because I was able to cook up a MONSTER spread.