Scott Stinson charts exactly what will happen over the long, long, long, long, long, long, long hours of the pre-game show leading up to kickoff sometime in the next 48 hours:
Planning to watch the Super Bowl? A little leery about the six-and-a-half-hour pre-game show? Fear not, we can provide you with an approximate guide for what you will see. Read this, then spend time with your family instead. Win-win! (All times approximate, by which we mean made up.)
12:00 p.m. NBC’s broadcast is coming to you live from Indianapolis, which means we begin with Bob Costas trying to: (a) argue that Indianapolis is a great place and that the game is somehow more meaningful for being there; and (b) keep a straight face
12:32 p.m. First shot of Patriots tight end Rob Gronkowski walking on his injured ankle. Will he play? Will he be effective? Fortunately, we have six hours to listen to people come up with ever more inventive ways to say “maybe.”
12:45 p.m. Costas gives an earnest speech about Indianapolis, home of the iconic Colts franchise. Not mentioned: Most of the iconic stuff happened in Baltimore, before the owner snuck the team out of town in the dead of night. In Indy, the history of the franchise’s fortunes can be summed up as “crappycrappycrappyPeytonManningcrappy.”
1:02 p.m. Time to soak in some of the exciting moments from the official “tailgate” party, which is in fact nowhere near a parking lot. Musical act falls under the category of “Popular Enough Once That Some People in Audience Have Heard of Them, But Not So Popular That We Would Want Them on TV For Long.” So, Fleetwood Mac, Alabama or 3 Doors Down.
1:04 p.m. The real question here is whether the performance rivals that of the tailgate party a few years back, when Journey appeared and caused America to collectively wonder when Steve Perry turned into a Fillipino guy with long hair.
Update: For those of you who only watch the Super Bowl for the ads (and I know there are lots of you), Reuters has most of the “big” ads collated into one post for your convenience. This is especially useful for those of us north of the 49th parallel, where many of the ads will be overlaid with the same crappy commercials we’ve seen all year. I’m not normally a fan of “there ought to be a law” solutions, but I’d be less than upset if CRTC regulations prohibited showing the same commercial 6-8 times per hour. (If nothing else, that level of repetition probably irritates potential customers more than it attracts them.)
Update, 6 February: It looks like the Reuters collection in the first update was intended to emphasize the lamest of the ads. There’s another collection in the National Post with more. (I don’t follow hockey, but I did think the Budweiser hockey ad was well done, even if they just stole the idea from an improv group.)
Michael Rand offers some well-intentioned guidelines for euphoric Green Bay fans who happen to live in Viking country:
Here is our statement, on behalf of Vikings fans living in Minnesota: Congratulations to the Packers and their fans. Sunday’s Super Bowl victory was well-deserved. Aaron Rodgers is one of the best — if not the best? — quarterbacks in the NFL. Everything that happened from Jan. 24, 2010 (Vikings/Saints) until Sunday was pretty much the greatest thing that could have happened to Wisconsin. We understand this. You have the right to enjoy this. And you have bragging rights for the foreseeable future.
However … here is our advice to Packers fans living in our fair state: You will want to adhere to the guidelines set forth below — the Articles of Celebration — in order to bask in the post-Super Bowl afterglow safely, in moderation, and without getting punched by a pack of surly Vikings fans. (Note: Much of this, of course, assumes there is an NFL season)
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Given the ubiquity of video sites on the web today, it can be hard to believe that major TV networks only started systematically storing tapes of shows in the early 1970s. One of the “holy grail” recordings that historians were looking for was SuperBowl I:
Football fans know what happened in Super Bowl I. The game, which was played on January 15, 1967, was the first showdown between the NFL and AFL champions. It ended with the Green Bay Packers stomping the Kansas City Chiefs, 35-10.
Unless they were one of the 61,946 people at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum that day, or one of the fans who watched it live on NBC or CBS, there’s one thing that all football fans have in common: They’ve never actually seen the game.
In a bizarre confluence of events, neither network preserved a tape. All that survived of this broadcast is sideline footage shot by NFL Films and roughly 30 seconds of footage CBS included in a pre-game show for Super Bowl XXV. Somehow, an historic football game that was seen by 26.8 million people had, for all intents and purposes, vanished.
My favourite bit of information from the article is a lovely juxtaposition between the massive popularity (and wall-to-wall TV coverage) of modern SuperBowl games and this:
The recording also includes a shocking sight for a Super Bowl: empty seats. The game didn’t sell out, even with ticket prices that topped out at $12.
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The Two Scotts spend a bit of time talking about the teams, but most of their column talking about how the brave network sports guys are bearing up under the unexpectedly cold weather:
Reid: Top three undeniable facts about Super Bowl XLV:
1. Sports Reporters Are Pussies. So far the most reportable item from the 2011 Super Bowl appears to be that it’s very coldy woldy. We had to spend days listening to ESPN’s Mike and Mike wussy aloud about how cold it was broadcasting outside until they finally moved their show indoors. And it seems every other reporter in Dallas assumes what the football-loving public wants to learn first is how they’re all holding up in the frigid air of north Texas. Yo candy apples, it’s barely dropped below freezing. Grow a pair!
[. . .]
Feschuk: Reid is right — how can you people think about football at a time like the Super Bowl? Have you not read the stories of valour and bravery from north Texas? Are you not aware of the HARDSHIP and SUFFERING being endured by members of media, who have been subjected to horrible injustices such as wind and having their corporate golf junkets cancelled? Reading their harrowing dispatches from the front lines, it’s clear that these reporters are pretty much exactly like the pro-democracy protesters in Egypt, except even more courageous because some of them forgot to bring warm socks. WE STAND WITH YOU, HEROES!
Honestly, did the US networks hire all of their current crop of sportscasters from Toronto? It would explain the whining about the weather . . .
Then again, the reporters had to write about something, and there are only so many times you can go on about Aaron Rodgers’ talent or interview the family of gypsies that lives in Brett Keisel’s beard. One news outlet in New Hampshire was so desperate that it actually ran a story about a local man who has the same name as Packers coach Mike McCarthy. Think about that. Think about how hard-up for a remotely engaging Super Bowl story the editor must have been to say out loud, “There’s someone else on this planet with the name Mike McCarthy?? AND HE LIVES HERE IN NEW HAMPSHIRE???? To the newsmobile!!!“
Aside from the terrible, terrible burden of the weather, the next biggest problem (according to Reid) is this:
There are Not Enough Slutty Women in Texas. In what would constitute a crisis in any circumstance, an embarrassing shortage of prostitutes in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area during the Super Bowl may irreparably damage the city’s reputation among hard-up pigs. It is estimated that 10,000 hookers are needed to satisfy the drunken demands of fat corporate slobs who, left to their own charms, couldn’t pick up a slice of pizza. Dallas currently has less than half this number of ladies of the evening (not mention ladies of the afternoon, the late morning, the early morning and the Warren Sapp). In response, the Dallas mayor has been forced to implement emergency measures: Free tickets for Charlie Sheen and ‘friends’.
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The Super Bowl is one of those great annual events that is uniquely American — except for the Roman numerals. I think those still belong to the Vatican.
If you missed it, the final score was Saints, XXXI and Colts, XVII.
The Super Bowl represents what we Americans are all about: creative commercials occasionally interrupted by violence. During the six-hour broadcast, there were only 11 minutes of actual, live football action. Some of the commercial breaks were so long that, when we finally came back to the game, I had forgotten which teams were playing.
And what better Norman Rockwell-esque ritual could I have with my kids than to watch 20 erectile dysfunction commercials to every snap of the football? “Daddy, why are those people in bathtubs watching the sun set?” I just tell them the people lost their homes to foreclosure.
Football is a lot like sex: countless hours of advertising how good it will be with only 11 minutes of actual action. Then, for me, there is always that awkward moment at the end when my credit card is declined.
Lorne Gunter also appreciated Audi’s “Green Police” Super Bowl ad:
Far and away the cleverest ad from this year’s Super Bowl was Audi’s “Green Police” commercial for its A3 TDI clean diesel sedan, which is greencar.com’s 2010 Green Car of the Year. It’s easy to find on YouTube and well worth the search. The 60-second spot is a brilliant send up of the excesses of the environmental movement, so brilliant that green and lefty blogs have been angrily denouncing the ad ever since it aired on Sunday during the NFL Championship game.
Too bad nobody told the carmaker it’s OK to laugh at its own production. The company’s timid explanation is that Green Police are “caricatures” designed to gently steer people through “a myriad of decisions in their quest to become more environmentally responsible citizens.” (I am at this moment sticking out my tongue and making a poking motion toward the back of my throat with the index and middle fingers of my left hand.)
To the soundtrack of a re-recording of Cheap Trick’s 1979 hit song Dream Police, the ad features jumped-up little eco cops — often wearing fetching shorts and driving Segway-like, three-wheeled, enviro scooters — harassing ordinary people about the green morality of their everyday consumer choices.
On its website, Audi insists its ecocops are “not here to judge, merely to guide,” yet the first scene of the commercial features a young man paying for his groceries who chooses plastic over paper. Suddenly, a Green Police officer springs up from behind, slams the shopper’s face into the price scanner and exclaims “You picked the wrong day to mess with the ecosystem, plastic boy.”
Yep, that’s both gentle and non-judgmental, alright.
Audi’s ad is an incredibly useful example of how a message can be interpreted in radically different fashion by different audiences. To many in the green movement, Audi is poking fun at their expense and minimizing the danger to the environment posed by allowing people to make their own decisions. To many libertarians, Audi is illustrating the kind of dictatorial control over peoples’ lives that many in the green movement believe to be essential “for our own good”.
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At least, for Canadians watching the game on CTV, we didn’t get to see most of these ads, including Audi’s brief trip into the very near future:
Audi’s effort won both best and worst titles from the readers at the Wall Street Journal.
Update: Nick Gillespie also thought this ad to be quite noteworthy:
. . . the great ad in last night’s game was, IMO, the Audi “Green Police” spot, and not simply because it showcased a classic Cheap Trick tune to astonishingly great (read: totally nostalgic for late-era boomers who grew up thinking Robin Zander was cool and Bun E. Carlos was an animatron and Rick Nielsen was crazy funny and that Tom Petersson was, like Kurt Von Trapp in The Sound of Music or Jan Brady in The Brady Bunch, well, I don’t know but he must have done something to be there) advantage. No, it was also right up to the moment I realized that it was a pitch for a car that I will never purchase, it seemed like a Mike Judge vision of a future that is almost the present (finally, a reason to thank SCOTUS for flipping the coin toward George W. Bush in 2000).
Will it move cars? Who knows. It moves . . . minds. Which rarely come with the sort of 100,000 mile warranty that is standard even on overpriced, underpowered, and breakdown prone vehicles like Audis.
Some interesting comments to Nick’s post:
grrizzly|2.8.10 @ 9:04AM|# Imagine a Holocaust movie. Jews are in concentration camps. Regularly sent to gas chambers. Suddenly one man receives documents proving he is not a jew. He’s set free. He walks away. Happy End. This is what the ad is.
iowahawk|2.8.10 @ 9:10AM|# I thought it was the best Super Bowl ad of all time, and not for the reasons Audi was hoping for. Hilarious, creepy and upbeat all at the same time. And the punchline: The sponsor (Audi) merrily approves of the dystopian fascism. My jaw hit the ground.
Enjoy Every Sandwich|2.8.10 @ 9:16AM|# When I saw the ad I was thinking “this will give Al Gore a hard-on, assuming he still gets those”. It’s a left-wing dream world.
PM770|2.8.10 @ 11:20AM|# Right. I think Audi probably owes Al one clean television.
Tulpa|2.8.10 @ 11:28AM|# It’s called extremely skilled advertising. Give different messages to different target audiences, hopefully a message that makes them want to buy your product. I looked at it and liked the (obviously ironic) portrayal of the Green Police, while your average lefty is saying “Yeah man, they should totally send swat teams to people’s houses looking for light bulbs!”
Update, 9 February: Added the tag GreenGestapo, as this appears to be trending in the blogosphere . . . I expect to have further use for the tag in the future.
Update, 2 February 2014: The original video has been removed, so here’s another link instead:
And Mark Steyn‘s original comments, recently republished:
A man asks for a plastic bag at the supermarket checkout. Next thing you know, his head’s slammed against the counter, and he’s being cuffed by the Green Police. “You picked the wrong day to mess with the ecosystem, plastic boy,” sneers the enviro-cop, as the perp is led away. Cut to more Green Police going through your trash, until they find … a battery! “Take the house!” orders the eco-commando. And we switch to a roadblock on a backed-up interstate, with the Green Police prowling the lines of vehicles to check they’re in environmental compliance.
If you watched the Super Bowl, you most likely saw this commercial. As my comrade Jonah Goldberg noted, up until this point you might have assumed it was a fun message from a libertarian think-tank warning of the barely veiled totalitarian tendencies of the eco-nanny state. Any time now, you figure, some splendidly contrarian type — perhaps Clint lui-même in his famous Gran Torino — will come roaring through flipping the bird at the stormtroopers and blowing out their tires for good measure. But instead the Greenstapo stumble across an Audi A3 TDI. “You’re good to go,” they tell the driver, and, with the approval of the state enforcers, he meekly pulls out of the stalled traffic and moves off. Tagline: “Green has never felt so right.”
So the message from Audi isn’t “You are a free man. Don’t bend to the statist bullies,” but “Resistance is futile. You might as well get with the program.”
Strange. Not so long ago, car ads prioritized liberty. Your vehicle opened up new horizons: Gitcha motor running, head out on the highway, looking for adventure. … To sell dull automobiles to people who lived in suburban cul de sacs, manufacturers showed them roaring round hairpin bends, deep into forests, splashing through rivers, across the desert plain, invariably coming to rest on the edge of a spectacular promontory on the roof of the world offering a dizzying view of half the planet. Freedom!
Update, 9 February, 2017: The original and revised video links have all gone sour, so here’s a current version of the ad, triggered by Audi’s latest Super Bowl ad fiasco.
Amusingly, the tag line shown at the end of the commercial, Audi: Truth in Engineering, is proven to be false by the company’s systematic cheating on emission testing software in their cars (being part of the Volkswagon group, where the cheating was first discovered in their diesel models).
In late 2015, Volkswagen Group became embroiled in an emissions cheating scandal that also involved its Audi brand. Delicious irony — here was a brand that had touted itself a leader in environmental stewardship only to be unmasked as a fraud of epic proportions.
As late as November 2016, new revelations about the extent of Audi’s emissions scam were still coming to light. It was revealed that the scandal was not limited to diesel-engine cars, as previously thought, but included gasoline-powered Audi models as well.
So it was a curious choice for Audi to pat itself on the shoulder for yet another politically correct stand — pay equality for women — when its credibility was torn to shreds in its core competency: automobile manufacturing. Perhaps Audi thought this would provide good cover from their credibility woes, or perhaps they banked on an inattentive public with amnesia. A pretty good bet, I admit. But I have a long memory and a nose for hypocrisy.
So what is the answer to George Clooney’s questions? What should he tell his daughter?
I would tell her (and mine) that once a person has lied to you, then you can no longer trust that person. That if the person is truly repentant, they will find a way to make it up to you and rebuild the trust. But if they they try to distract from the extent of their dishonesty, you might as well put that relationship in the junkyard.
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This year’s Super Bowl halftime act is The Who, a band that would be eligible for Medicare if its members were American — Roger Daltrey is 65, Pete Townshend is about to turn 65. Now, I like senior citizens who scream into microphones as much as the next guy, but isn’t the Super Bowl halftime format getting a bit geriatric? Last year we got Bruce Springsteen, age 60. The year before — Tom Petty, age 59. Yes, recent halftime shows have been more up-tempo than the 1970 Super Bowl halftime act: Carol Channing. But there have got to be some younger groups out there that merit the Super Bowl stage, and could broaden the appeal to those younger than the Baby Boomer demographic.
Surely The Who will sing “Won’t Get Fooled Again.” When rock anthems are heard on television or in advertising, often they are electronically edited to emphasize well-known lines and downplay or delete anything that might make audiences uncomfortable. When this song is heard, the refrain “We won’t get fooled again!” is amped up — it sounds bold and defiant. Done away with are other lines such as “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss” or “We’ll be fighting in the streets/with our children at our feet/and the morals that they worship will be gone.” And the following lyrics — what, exactly, do they mean? “I’ll move myself and my family aside/if we happen to be left half alive/I’ll get all my papers and smile at the sky/for I know that the hypnotized never lie.” What does any of the song mean?
Originally, the song was received as anti-war or an extremely vague call to revolution. Some thinkers maintain the song is conservative — a disillusioned revolutionary declaring that street-protest tactics are useless. Townshend, who wrote the song, maintains the lyrics are apolitical, and mean, “Don’t expect to see what you expect to see. Expect nothing and you might gain everything.” Huh? My guess is that, like a lot of what was received as “deep” in this field — Bob Dylan’s music, some of Springsteen’s — the lyrics don’t have any coherent meaning, they’re just a bunch of interesting individual lines cobbled together. I wince to think that a billion people watching the halftime show will nod happily as the line “We won’t get fooled again!” echoes around the world, when the majority of those watching will, most assuredly, get fooled again.
