I couldn’t talk about the Super Bowl, yesterday. I’m sorry. It’s still quite painful for me, but I will try to set aside my personal feelings (they go something like this: Whyyyyyyyyy, Patriots, WHYYYYY???) and just examine the commercials, today.

Watching the Super Bowl is an American tradition for many families, and over the years it’s become not at all unusual to look forward to the commercials as much as to the game itself. And with the game starting well before bedtime for even the youngest kids, often you have children of all ages glued to the set. The commercials are—more often than not—funny, although it’s debatable as to whether they’re truly all-ages-appropriate, some years.

USA Today’s Ad Meter has a great round-up of the Big Game’s commercials, including video of everything that was shown and commentary on the various offerings. This was one of the first years in recent memory when I didn’t find myself cringing repeatedly and sending my kids out of the room. Some of the commercials were dumb, or weird, but there seemed to be less “mature” content than usual. Thankfully.

[An aside: Did anyone else find those SalesGenie commercials incredibly racist? Oh, right. Moving on.]

What we did see was a heaping helping of CGI magic, from SoBe’s dancing lizards (who were not, contrary to popular opinion, also going to try to sell you car insurance) to FedEx’s giant carrier pigeons to ETrade’s talking baby. If you were looking for impressive visual effects, you found it. That’s aside from the content, of course, though Ad Meter gave the top spot to the touching Rocky-esque Budweiser commercial, one of the few “touching” rather than just flat-out hilarious commercials. (Though we still found it plenty funny, here at my house.)

At least that took out a tiny bit of the sting I was feeling. If I can’t have the Patriots undefeated, I guess I’ll have to find comfort in expensive commercials. (Yeah, I know. It didn’t really work for me, either.)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 5th, 2008 at 6:33 am and is filed under Random acts of television. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.