Yes, once again I will be blogging on the Superbowl, talking mostly about the commercials. I’ll be using this entry space right here and we’ll go live at 6 PM EST. As for the outcome of the game, since most of the pundits are giving it to Pittsburgh although allowing it will be close, I–contrarian that I am–predict that it will be the Cardinals in a blowout. Something like 35-7.
PAD
5:58 EST: And we’re live, eagerly awaiting the kickoff of the first commercial. Commentary will be elow the cut line.
6:01: When did the opening to the SB turn into “American Idol?”
6:02: Kind of sounded like “Addicted to Love.”
6:04: Sprint, launching with a phone ad. Makes the iPhone look pretty lame in comparison; you can’t get a whole stadium out of your iPhone.
6:06: Don’t be an asterisk. Somewhere, Roger Maris is sobbing softly.
6:11: boy, i sure didn’t see that that was going to be a State Farm commercial. I’m not even sure how it connects. Best Buy: Little wienies, check.
6:12: God, for a minute I thought the kid was going to jump off the roof. Other than that brief moment of terror, cute ad for Universal.
613: Stephen King should sue for the Dead Zone.
6:13: Ariel says the boy’s bowling team likes to chant “five dollar foot longs” with a gesture toward their crotches.
6:15: Kathleen is prepping our 3-D glasses for the “Monsters vs. Aliens” ad.
6:16: Faith Hill needs a hat with a huge bow on it.
6:18: Hey! Great! If either of the teams is going down hard, Sully can land them.
6:19: Oh God. Poor Jennifer Hudson. What a place to make her first major public appearance. It’s so hideous what she and her family went through.
6:21: Nailed it.
6:22: Doctor Who is in GI Joe? Cool.
6:24: Best house ad for NBC ever. Wrong on so many levels, and yet so right.
6:27: if Roethelsberger’s name were any longer, they’d have to continue it on the back of someone else’s jersey.
6:28: That’s it! It’s over! Arizona’s won! Man, that was fast.
6:29: Sorry, my bad. I’m informed that apparently they’ve only won the coin toss. Apparently there’s more to the game after that.
6:30: Wow. That was a boring Hyundai commercial.
6:31: My understanding is that neither GM nor Fed Ex are going to be running commercials due to the current economic situation. If so, that’s a shame. Looks like we’re counting on the beer commercials for the true entertainment. That and the Puppy Bowl.
6:32: They just showed the faces of all the Steelers. They went by pretty fast, but I think Ruben from “Survivor” is playing for them.
6:36: Kath thinks I know a lot less about football than I do, so she says stuff like, “A 38 yard gain is good” as if I don’t know that. I’m hardly an expert, but I know SOME stuff.
6:38: So the Steelers get a run. Tough first inning for the Cardinals.
6:39: And the beer companies come through. Great Bud Lite ad that actually takes advantage of the economic downturn.
6:40: I think I need to run that Audi commercial back to fully appreciate it.
6:42: Oooo. Apparently the recently instated review rule indicates that it wasn’t a home run. Or something.
6:44: Is it just me or are there more commercials this year that we have no freaking idea what they’re about until the very end? Unto every generation, a slayer–and Pepsi, apparently–is born.
6:44: A magic eight ball in the crotch. Some jokes just never get old.
6:50: Conan O’Brien is God and Bud light scores again.
7:02: Great ad for Mr. Potato Head. Unfortunately I can’t remember what the product being advertised was.
7:03: Grease Monkeys. How did I miss coming up with that pun?
7:04: Wonder when the Watchmen ad is going to be on? Anyone see the new toys? I picked up the first set of action figures today.
7:05: “Land of the Lost.” Okay. I can’t wait twenty years for the big screen “Space Cases” movie.
7:07: Three years of ads and I still have no clear idea of what godaddy.com does.
7:09: Slapstick rules this year. I still won’t drink Diet Pepsi, but I like the commercial.
7:10: Did the Obamas see the Pedigree Adoption commercial?
7:10: Boy, that was unfortunate placement. I thought the Bud commercial was another one for why you should own a dog.
7:13: Disney could take that Budweiser commercial and turn it into an entire feature film about a lovestruck horse chasing its beloved.
7:14: Remember about fifteen years ago when Harve Bennett proposed the idea of doing a Star Trek Academy first year film with a young Kirk, Spock et al and everyone went nuts and the idea was summarily rejected as the worst notion ever? So…who’s looking forward to this May, hmmm?
7:22: I don’t know what was up with that MissionG thing.
7:23: Cars.com. Cute.
7:35: Well, I’ll always know how to pronounce Hyundai now. Reminds me of that Japanese car commercial where there’s a table filled with Japanese executives coming up with insane names for the next model of car. One of them suggests, with great pride, “Skunk!” That was Larry Hama.
7:38: “Up” seems dubious to me. Then again, so did “Cars.”
7:39: The weakest Bud Light Commercial, but even the weakest Bud light is better than the best of many others.
7:42: Death and Taxes, together again.
7:42: “No one wants to see you naked.” That has to hurt.
7:47: Second in a series of commercials of the many ways that Cheetos can be used to demolish your enemies. I’m not sure how I feel about that.
7:55: I have on my 3-D glasses since the commercials are going to air in a few moments. The world looks trippy.
8:00: Monsters vs. Aliens continues to look like way too much fun. Chuck in 3-D promises to be great. And most impressively, the Steelers pants are just way more exciting when viewed through 3-D glasses.
8:04: In case anyone’s interested, the kitty halftime show is on on Puppy Bowl.
8:06: And the Heroes commercials just get better and better. Let’s hope the series matches that level of inventiveness.
8:07: I wonder if the players in the locker rooms have the coaches trying to tell them what to do and the players are all saying “Shut up! It’s Bruuuuuuce!”
8:10: I ran back the “Heroes” commercial because Kathleen was out of the room. Can someone tell me who the blond guy who showed up was and they said, “I knew he was one of us!”
8:21: See, this is what the World Series needs. For the seventh inning stretch, it goes on for twelve minutes and everybody gets to come down onto the field.
8:22 Great Shatner impression.
8:23: LMAO syndrome. Beats the hëll out of those ads for P.A.D.
8:36: Here I thought the Coke ad was an ad for video games. i feel like I’m constantly behind the curve tonight.
8:37; I think the waitress at Denny’s is going to wind up sleeping with the fishes.
8:40: So if you win two challenges,you get a third challenge? is it just me, or is football starting to sound like “Who wants to be a Millionaire?”
8:41: You know, they really should just make a Clydesdale feature film.
8:42: Don’t go into the pimped out fridge. Always good advice. Generally speaking, you shouldn’t go into ANY fridge if you can help it.
8:57: And another Transformers movie. So two years from now do we get “GI Joe Vs. the Transformers?” ‘Cause I’d pay serious money to see that.
8:59: Is the Career Builders commercial over? Because I was really getting a headache from it.
9:00: Peter and the wolf with bugs? Okay. So far I think the Pepsi commercials are better, although Coke tastes better.
9:11: I wonder if Joe Torre’s new book is going to contribute to Derek Jeter’s “edge.”
9:17: Okay, THAT was a good Coke commercial.
9:18: I’m not sure what cash4gold.com was going for, but considering the well known financial disasters of both Hammer and McMahon, that was quite possibly the single most depressing commercial I’ve seen tonight, if not this year.
9:23: Vizio. The first ad addressed directly to the President. I wonder what product could have appealed directly to Bush.
9:25: GE. I’m almost surprised that they didn’t lift footage of Ray Bolger to go with his voice and graft it onto the new backgrounds.
9:27: Hulu. An alien plot to take over the world. That explains so much.
9:33: What the hëll? They lifted an entire SNL sketch and dropped it into the Superbowl? And yes, that really was Richard Dean Anderson.
9:54: And I STILL don’t know what godaddy does, but I’m becoming more interested.
9:55: This game is close. if they tie it, it could go into extra innings.
10:10: Oh well. Aside from the fact that the score and the winning team weren’t what I guessed, I was close. Then again, I’m overwhelmed by a sense of not caring very much. To me, football is the thing that signals the end of baseball season.
10:16: After giving it some thought, I’ve decided my favorite commercial was the Alec Baldwin Hulu commercial, followed by the Doritos fortune telling commercial. And the Heroes football game was right up there.
• 
best one of the night: “HIGH LIFE!!!”
It took me a few, but then I got it. at $100,000.00 per second, that was pretty economical.
Didn’t she lip-sync it?
If she did, that doesn’t change my point. Her vocals were better than the music behind them, I thought. (My dad and I share a non-fondness for non-traditional versions of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” What she did was pretty traditional, plus it was powerful; the music wasn’t either.)
I’d prefer it weren’t lip-sync’ed, honestly. Bruce Springsteen sang live, and it wasn’t perfect, but c’mon, it’s BRUUUUUUUCE. (And I loved that he slid too far, hit the camera, and look surprised for a moment. A real, little moment that made him, me and others smile.) Hudson has the chops not to need lip-syncing.
It’s been pointed out that the character strongly resembles Spencer Tracy.
I didn’t catch that, but that’s an inspired choice.
That guy on the bike should never have been able to stay that close around even one corner.
Uh-oh. That cuts into Jason Statham’s badassery that he took so long to shake the guy!
ROFLsberger!
Posted by: Christopher Walsh
Uh-oh. That cuts into Jason Statham’s badassery that he took so long to shake the guy!
Heh.
Crank 2 ought to build it back up though – he apparently survived the end of the first film…
But the bike-vs-car bit is just another of Hollywood’s popular myths (like exploding gas tanks) – bikes simply don’t have the stability or traction to stay with cars in 10/10 real world driving.
I’m a sucker for the Clydesdales and I would pay to see that movie. When they were here for the Rose Parade Festival of Horses, I asked one of the handlers about where the on-camera horses come from. They were all originally supposed to be part of the teams that pull the beer truck (the beer boxes are actually a facade, but a very heavy facade), but they generally are too smart and lazy to work in the team but like the camera. All of the on-camera Clydesdales apparently are owned and trained by A-B, and aren’t just horses brought in for the shoots.
But the bike-vs-car bit is just another of Hollywood’s popular myths (like exploding gas tanks) – bikes simply don’t have the stability or traction to stay with cars in 10/10 real world driving.
Mythbusters to the rescue! (In the hope that anyone from Mythbusters is actually reading this.)
Noted. Motorcycles are NOT for chases. *takes notes on how to properly escape*
Rambling even further off-topic (there’s a topic here?):
Given equal skills on the part of the drivers, on a real-world course with real corners and turns, any reasonably-well-handling car can run away and hide from a bike with a similar top speed.
A driver who had won both bike and auto racing championships at equivalent levels once took part in tests, in which he consistently lapped a road course more quickly in a high-end production car than on a high-end production bike.
When you’re letting it all hang out, it only takes one piece of gravel in the cornering line to cause Bad Things to happen to a bike. Cars have redundancy (two rear tires vs one) and physics (weight transfer and leverage factors) on their side compared to bikes.
mike weber: Given equal skills on the part of the drivers, on a real-world course with real corners and turns, any reasonably-well-handling car can run away and hide from a bike with a similar top speed.
Yeah, but that’s assuming both equal driver skill and equal vehicle top speeds. For the purpose of an exciting chase, it’s not that much of a stretch to say the motorcycle and driver were extra good.
I mean, yeah, if there isn’t a single motorcycle powerful enough or motorcycle driver good enough to overcome the advantages of the car, then it’s a myth. But that’s not as ridiculous as most of the stuff that Hollywood asks us to believe.
It’s not that the bike isn’t powerful enough – in fact, some would be *too* powerfui.
It’s simply that the bike hasn’t the traction to make the kind of turns the car can. When Mike Hailwood did the comparo, he was operating both car and bike under ideal conditions, and still couldn’t match his car time on the bike. In the real world, where the pavement is uneven and sand, gravel, paper, beoken glass and other kinds of litter and foobah are going to be scattered around, that car and the kind of driver we are to believe is driving it would literally be out of sight of the bike after the second corner.
(In fact, painted crosswalk markings on the street are dangerous for bikes to cross at anything other than right angles…)
That still assumes the driver of the car is of equal skill as the driver of the motorcycle. Has there ever been a test of a good car driver against an excellent motorcycle driver?
Yeah, but if we’re talking Jason Statham here….
Now, MAYBE if the motorcycle is taking short cuts like crazy and that the shortcuts are just as stable as asphalt, but given what I’m reading here….
I got to see Clydesdale horses up close once at the County Fair. Impressive animals.
“Posted by: Bill Mulligan at February 1, 2009 07:37 PM
I’m a little nervous about just how uninterested my students are in a new Star trek film, an lack of interest bordering on hostility. “
Can you really blame them after the last few movies and TV versions? I grew up on Trek. I like Trek. I like most of the cast (ok, two of them) in this film. I’m freakin’ mostly uninterested in the film. Maybe it’s a self defense mechanism. If we don’t really care about it the movie can only happily surprise us.
Jerry posted: I grew up on Trek. I like Trek. I like most of the cast (ok, two of them) in this film. I’m freakin’ mostly uninterested in the film. Maybe it’s a self defense mechanism. If we don’t really care about it the movie can only happily surprise us.
>>>>>
I’ve got to agree with most of this. (Don’t know about the self-defense part and don’t care about any of the cast. Or the people I assume are the cast. They might be grips on the set for all I know. Or Trek fans who photoshopped their heads on the real cast’s bodies.)
Also, the notion that because some event in time was changed, we end up with this Trek as some sort of alternate time line, seems pretty lame.
Can’t get excited about this.
–Ed
6:22: Doctor Who is in GI Joe? Cool.
They got a Scotsman to play James McCullen Destro and Ray Park for Snake-Eyes. At least the casting is spot on.
They got a Scotsman to play James McCullen Destro and Ray Park for Snake-Eyes. At least the casting is spot on.
Eccleston is English. 🙂
Aw, c’mon! The second Doritos commercial has a Benny-Hill-like moment with the Doritos’ crunch leaving a lovely woman walking a street in black lace underwear and NO ONE can comment on it? Yeah, sure, in Peter’s case, Kathleen was probably in the room, but did the rest of you have spouses or mothers watching with you.
And to follow it seconds later with the Danica Patrick – German teacher godaddy ad? Am I the only one who really knows what to look for in Super Bowl ads?
Danica Patrick is the antiChris.
(Edited for you religious rightwingers who’d get all up in my face had I put “Anti-Christ”.)
Yeah, this place is a regular hotbed of religious fundamentalism.
Anyway, it’s Webster, yeah, Emmanuel Lewis, ’cause he’s the Anti-Christ. C’mon party people!
For the new Star Trek movie, I’m predicting that I’ll like it better the second time I see it.
So far, it just doesn’t look like Star Trek. Sylar looks a lot like Spock, the ship looks like the Enterprise, and the words “Star Trek” are in the trailer, but that’s it. If it weren’t for those things, I wouldn’t know it was supposed to be Star Trek.
Hover, it does look like a decent sci-fi/action movie. I’ve liked some other stuff from the director. So I’ll probably sit through it the first time unable to stop thinking about the differences from the original, then watch it a second time and enjoy it on its own terms.
Danica Patrick: I just don’t find her that interesting and the GoDaddy.com commercials feel kinda oily and unpleasant. If I want to have a crush on a girl who drives really fast, I’ll stick with Sabine Schmitt.
Danica Patrick is beautiful, she’s struts her sexy stuff in commercials, and she looks amazing in the SPORTS ILLUSTRATED SWIMSUIT ISSUE. I’m also told that she drives.
(This is a paraphrase of what a friend once said about Shania Twain: “She looks great, she dances dresses sexy, and I heard somewhere that she also sings.”)
Doesn’t the MacGruber commercial make this the second Super Bowl where Richard Dean Anderson has reprised McGyver?
PAD: Okay. I can’t wait twenty years for the big screen “Space Cases” movie.
Andrew Carl: That makes at least two of us!
Three, at least.
If Danica was an average looking woman she would NEVER have a ride in Indy Cars. That’s what gets me. She just isn’t talented and, more importantly, disciplined enough to be a professional driver. But I Digress.
(Vol. 2 of which I am most looking forward to reading)
I liked it until the end when Elway flies in like Superman. Considering how people treat him in this city (Denver), and considering how much I hate the Broncos, I think could hear Elway’s ego getting bigger.
Yeah, I was hoping Sylar would eat his brains..oh well, there’s always next year.
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