Every year, ad agencies pour ungodly amounts of cash into Super Bowl advertising, and every year, with renewed faux-enthusiasm, non-sports fans, random local news “advertising” correspondants, and pointlessly nostalgic websites end up complaining about “how crappy the Super Bowl ads were this year.” People talk about how the ads ain’t what they used to be, comparing the current state of Super Bowl advertising to some nonexistant Golden Age in which every thirty-second spot induced uncontrollable laughter in even the most jaded consumers, and we didn’t all demonstratively yell “what??” or “that’s it??” after every single ad.
Guess what? Super Bowl commercials have never been that great.
Some years have been better than others, of course, but the selective memory of the Super Bowl-ad morning-after subculture would have you believe that Super Bowl commercials have linearly declined from being these awesome, always-interesting, always hilarious 30-second pieces of art to a bunch of lame, predictable spots that simultaneously try way too hard and not hard enough.
This isn’t to say that this year’s ads weren’t garbage. Those parodies of “The Godfather” and “Rocky” were pretty topical, weren’t they? Why don’t we spoof “Duck Soup” while we’re at it? What about “The Great Train Robbery”? Or some of Thomas Edison’s wax cylinder recordings? And why stop at references to “Dick in a Box” and “Night At The Roxbury” when we could have the Church Lady hocking Dr. Pepper or Chevy Chase’s Gerald Ford impression talking about Careerbuilder.com? Tons of untapped potential here, execs.
But back to my point. There are usually a handful of funny commercials on any given Super Sunday, but honestly, how many truly, truly memorable ads have there been? Does this year’s crop of misguided esoterism and dudes getting hit in the balls actually represent some cultural departure from a magical era of constant, thought-provoking brilliance? Look at ESPN’s list of the Greatest Super Bowl Commercials of All time.
The number two ad in the forty-two-year history of the Super Bowl is the Budweiser frogs commercial from 1995. The Budwiser. F*cking. Frogs. THE SECOND GREATEST COMMERCIAL IN SUPER BOWL HISTORY IS FROGS TAKING TURNS SAYING SYLLABLES OF THE WORD “BUDWEISER.” IF THIS COMMERCIAL AIRED IN 2008, NOW THAT YOU ARE OF THE AGE TO REALIZE THAT SOME THINGS ARE STUPID, YOU WOULD THINK THAT THIS COMMERCIAL IS STUPID AND SAY OUT LOUD THAT YOU THINK IT IS STUPID TO ALL YOUR FRIENDS WHO WOULD ALL IMMEDIATELY AGREE WITH YOU THAT IT IS STUPID.
When was the last time you truly remember laughing at more than half of the Super Bowl commercials? When you were five, and thus laughed at pretty much anything that had colors and sounds and animals? I remember loving the commercial where the baby in the incubator sees the three supermodels drinking Pepsi and becomes a “Pepsi drinker for life,” but if that commercial aired in 2008, at my current age and level of cynicism, in a room full of my comparably cynical friends tensely anticipating a life-altering 30-second short film, we would have been ripping on the ad the second it ended, likely with me saying something like, “What, so the baby’s gonna forever associate Pepsi with f*cking three supermodels?”
I’m not saying there haven’t been plenty of amusing Super Bowl ads. All I’m saying is, why, in our ongoing cultural quest to deem everything that exists now not as good as it used to be, do we feel so cheated when the Super Bowl ads that we spend waaaaay too much time anticipating and consequently overanalyzing end up — surprise! — letting us down? It’s similar to how people have been complaining about how crappy “Saturday Night Live” has gotten every single year for about the last twenty-five years, not making the connection that you might be a little more cynical watching Andy Samberg’s wacky digital shorts at age 25 than you were when watching Operaman at age twelve.
What I’m trying to say, through all this convoluted frustration, is that we can’t make up some memory of how things “used to be”, with regard to Super Bowl ads or any aspect of pop culture, and then compare the present to that made-up memory. Some Super Bowl ads are great. A lot are lame. Neither of these facts represents any sort of monumental cultural shift so as to merit an entire article being written about it.
Wait, whoops.
