The Super Commercials

Okay, even with my Steelers winning, the Super Bowl was a lackluster game that seemed like a contest between two teams trying to do everything they could to lose. We still had the main attraction, the thing that everybody looks forward to....we had the commercials.

As they have for the past several years, USA Today has done its "Super Bowl Ad Meter", and with no real news being reported yesterday and nobody wanting to talk about the actual game, the commercials have been analyzed to the point where, just two days later, everyone's sick of hearing about them, so I'm going to keep this short. I'm just going to run down my three favorite spots, the three I liked least, and I toss in a couple of extra dishonorable mentions that rubbed me the wrong way.

THE BEST SUPER BOWL ADS

I'm a sucker for animated dinosaurs. I knew who Ray Harryhausen was before I started first grade. So the FedEx "caveman" spot won me over. In it, a caveman tries to send a message by tying it to the leg of a pterodactyl. However, it quickly gets eaten by a T-Rex, and the caveman gets fired for not using FedEx, even though it doesn't exist yet. Two more animated dinos give us a double punchline. This is one you can watch over and over again.

If I did drink beer, I probably wouldn't drink Bud Light, but you have to give its ad team credit for coming up with the most memorable commercials year after year. "Magic Fridge" made me laugh out loud, and that doesn't happen too often during commercials. This spot was the favorite on the Ad Meter. Maybe one reason that these spots are so funny is because they have to accomplish their comic goals in 30 seconds. Brevity is the soul of wit, something that Saturday Night Live would do well to remember.

Another great commercial for a product I would never buy was for the H3 Hummer. A Kaiju Monster is destroying a city when it comes face-to-face with a giant robot (yeah, they had me at "Kaiju Monster"). Instead of doing battle, they walk off hand-in-hand. In a montage, the monster is shown to be pregnant. Finally we see the proud parents cradling their baby -- an H3 Hummer. A great commercial for a gas-guzzling monster.

THE WORST SUPER BOWL ADS

Speaking of gas-guzzling monsters, the Cadillac Escalade commercial, where the truck for rich sissy-boys poses as a fashion model, took an ugly vehicle and made it look even uglier. That spot was a total waste.

Gillette's Fusion is a razor with five blades on one side, one blade on the back, and you can get a version that runs on batteries, so it can vibrate. What the hell were they thinking? You take something with more sharp edges than a Ninja weapon, use it to shave, and THEN you want to make it shake all over the place? My face is bleeding just thinking about it. No commercial could sell me on that tiny suicide machine. No wonder the commercial shows them treating it like a WMD.

The spot for GoDaddy.com was just lame. That's an unpardonable sin for a Super Bowl commercial. It's time to retire this lame gimmick of mock censorship and find some other way to sell whatever the hell it is that they sell at GoDaddy.com. Nobody cares.

MY SUPER BOWL COMMERCIAL PEEVES

The ad for the upcoming movie, "V For Vendetta" really got under my skin. It wasn't because the movie looks bad or anything. It was the tag line, "From the creators of the Matrix trilogy." See, this movie is based on a classic graphic novel written by Alan Moore and drawn by David Lloyd. Moore wants nothing to do with any movie adaptations of his work, so he insisted that his name not be used in promoting this film. He won't even take any money from the movie. The Wachowski brothers, who were responsible for the confusing mish-mash that was the Matrix trilogy, wrote the script for this movie, and reports are that they made arbitrary changes that take away from the original story. Giving them credit for this movie is just wrong.

Topping that on my own personal Peeve-O-Meter was the promo for ABC's Lost. I'm talking about the one where they took the late Robert Palmer's song and video for "Addicted To Love" and had some badly matched vocalist dub in "st" at the end of "love," which was supposed to make it sound like Palmer was singing "Addicted To Lost," but which really sounded like he was singing "Addicted To Lust." I think that's actually a psychological disorder. Either way, it didn't do anything to make me want to watch what I hear is actually a very good show.