At Last, It’s Over

Finally, the Super Bowl is over. Done. Finito. And am I glad. Oh that was one painful evening. I’m not sure who felt the most pain, me or that guy grimacing as he did a great job of butchering the national anthem at the opening. Clearly, he was in need of some morphine and I was really happy to see Aretha Franklin show up to save the Star Mangled Banner that was being performed to open the show.

Seeing the older MVP’s from times past was really cool! It’s nice to see that Bart, Joe and the others still have spry in their steps! It would have been also nice to see Montana and Bradshaw as well, but if you believe the local reports, they wanted up to $100,000 just to show up for the opening! Nice money if you can get it, but evidently someone decided they weren’t worth it. Good move.

Frankly, I’m not sure what was worse about the last almost four hours that I’ve been sitting here watching this football game.

Clearly the officiating sucked. And it sucked almost as much as Seattle’s lousy attempts at field goal kicking. Listening to Michaels and Madden doing all they evidently could to restrain themselves from reaching out from their high lofty pedestals and scream down for an obvious correction in the official rulings, was stressful indeed. A couple of good Madden rants would have been very therapeutic for those of us in the audience! Frankly, I was expecting Madden to grab that video graph of his and start circling where the real penalties were…hint: they were wearing striped uniforms. And on that non-touchdown touchdown, I would have loved to see him draw a line up from the end zone line and show how far the ball actually got from it… Guys, you’re in a digital world, you can view that frame by frame. Remember this next time.

But who really watches a game this bad for the plays? How about those Super Bowl ads?? Well, there were some good ones…

Fedex takes the award in my book for their cavemen fighting over how the bones weren’t sent via Fedex. And after getting fired for not using Fedex, the poor bastard gets stomped by a passing by dinosaur. Clearly some slapstick vaudeville in action and it was hilarious.

Also add the Cadillac Escalade spots. A totally different style of presentation of a product with some interesting miscues, but no mistake on what the product being marketed was. Very well done. Really cool.

Honorable mentions have to include the beer ads. Weather you liked the streaking lamb or the guy running away with the grizzly bear’s bottle of brew, you had to chuckle.

Add to this the bug zapper guy in the hospital. Clearly creative.

Will someone please tell Careerpath.com and Go Daddy to get a new marketing team? I’ve seen enough monkey ads to last me more than four quarters, although I do admit the new jackass spot was a nice diversification and interesting. And as for Go Daddy, yes sex sells and she’s not hard to look at in any way, but the same ad how many times?? And since I’m not going to get a hot date with her anyway, why the hell should I use Go Daddy as an ISP? (Just thought I asked. Don’t tell the wife I said that.) Somewhere, there should be a law that says the Super Bowl can only run an advert once during the game. Once, no more.

The absolutely worst spot on the whole show was the Diet Pepsi spot with some jerk using a Diet Coke ad as a stunt double stand in. Frankly, I think they should have stomp crushed P.Ditty and saved the Diet Coke can. The environmental protection folks would have appreciated it more, I’m sure. And so would have my ears and taste for music.

No, inspite all the overt and covert references to the house of the mouse, I have no plans on going to Disney after the game…actually, after four quarters of Disney ads, I think I’ve thought enough about the little rat….uh, er, mouse.

And, once again, no ads from IBM’s iSeries division. You’d think that someone, somewhere, would want to run a spot about one of the worlds best servers.

Oh well, there’s always next year.