Bryce Reviews the Superbowl Commercials

Heading into this game, I didn’t really have a favorite team. I leaned toward the Niners a bit, simply out of old loyalty to Steve Young, but the Ravens have former BYU player Dennis Pitta on the team, so I wanted to see him do well, too. (I don’t follow pro football too much. I’m an Eagles fan when I do follow it. Neither of those teams are the Eagles.) All I really wanted was a good game. Thankfully, one power outage later, I got a good game.

Halftime? Meh. Beyonce really should have just given up on singing, gotten a pole, and turned the routine into the pole dance she clearly wanted it to be. She definitely wasn’t lip syncing. You could barely hear her half the time.

The commercials, though. That’s where we all know the real action is. Some are going to soar. Some are going to flop. But we shall be ENTERTAINED. And I was, some of the time. I felt like there were some that really stunk, and a bunch that were just so so. A few stood out to me. And because I have a blog, and I feel like it, here are my thoughts on the ads of the superbowl this year.

There were too many for me to review all of them. These are the ones that I had the strongest reactions to.

What kind of woman dates a piece of chocolate. I mean, really? A giant, talking chocolate morsel? We’re supposed to look at these bits of chocolate like thinking autonomous beings now? I get the joke, people. It’s just not that funny. And it’s kind of creepy. Me no likey.

[I’m not putting a clip of GoDaddy’s ad here. I’m not even linking to it. I wish I’d never seen it, and friends don’t do that to friends. It’s a model making out with a fat computer nerd. Close up. You don’t want to watch it.]

GoDaddy? Um. That’s just plain disgusting. This falls into the category of “Ads so bad I actively don’t want to use your product–assuming I was using it to begin with.” Which is pretty much where GoDaddy has been every year with its ads, so I guess this is par for the course. But this one was particularly nauseating.

I’m also not linking to Calvin Klein’s underwear ad. That was far more of a muscley man than I wanted to see. I guess . . . yay for objectifying men to the same extent women are usually objectified? Sorry. I’m just not buying it.

I really enjoyed this ad, though I wish it hadn’t been an ad. Once the Ram logo appeared on the screen at the end, I felt like it cheapened it. Paul Harvey didn’t make that monologue to sell Ram trucks, I don’t think. Sort of felt like using Martin Luther King Jr’s I Have a Dream speech to shill McDonald’s.

This one was funny. Screaming goats? I laughed. Doritos actually had quite a lot of funny this evening. The guys dressing up for the princess party was pretty hilarious, too. Here it is:

What sort of a librarian would I be to not mention the Oreo library whisper fight commercial? Part of me liked it. The huge fight where everyone’s whispering in the library. I get it. Funny. Part of me didn’t like it, because I felt like it showed a misunderstanding of the modern library. Libraries are about so much more than whispering these days. But then again, I’m a librarian, and probably too sensitive.

This one was just plain awesome. The kid wrestling the bear? Pure genius. I loved it.

This one was awful from beginning to end, and this is coming from a movie nut. Yes, I got all the movie references. No, they weren’t funny. And what in the world would possess me to care enough to actually go online and vote about any of this? And why in the world would it make me want to buy a Coke. Dumb.

Really? We’re down to PSY promoting pistachios? What idiot came up with this? Can’t blame PSY for milking his one hit for all it’s worth, but some ad team should get the can for this garbage. Moronic.

Aside from those . . . the others were a mixed bag. The beer commercials let me down for the most part. You had the stupid ones that were too serious, and then the requisite heartstring-tugging Clydesdale commercial. And then there were the random car ads. Wish-granting car genie? Rastafarian white man? (Which they apparently ran through a test group of Jamaicans to assure themselves they weren’t being racist. Um . . . guys? When you need a test group to prove something isn’t racist . . . maybe you should just come up with a better ad.)

Overall, I had a very good Superbowl. The game was good, there were some good ads, and I ate far too much food. And that’s what the Superbowl’s all about, right?

What did you think?

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