| Submit your comments on this article |
| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Super Bowl Ads of Cartoonish Violence, Perhaps Reflecting Toll of War |
| 2007-02-05 |
| Only the Times could come up with this angle... By STUART ELLIOTT No commercial that appeared last night during Super Bowl XLI directly addressed Iraq, unlike a patriotic spot for Budweiser beer that ran during the game two years ago. But the ongoing war seemed to linger just below the surface of many of this year’s commercials. Really? I, like, totally missed that. More than a dozen spots celebrated violence in an exaggerated, cartoonlike vein that was intended to be humorous, but often came across as cruel or callous. Super Bowl Commercials Suck: Bush Blamed... For instance, in a commercial for Bud Light beer, sold by Anheuser-Busch, one man beat the other at a game of rock, paper, scissors by throwing a rock at his opponent’s head. Vicious, alcoholic, carnivore, heterosexual, warmonger BEAST! In another Bud Light spot, face-slapping replaced fist-bumping as the cool way for people to show affection for one another. In a FedEx commercial, set on the moon, an astronaut was wiped out by a meteor. In a spot for Snickers candy, sold by Mars, two co-workers sought to prove their masculinity by tearing off patches of chest hair. Super Bowl Commercials Suck: Women, Minorities, Gays Hardest Hit.. There was also a bank robbery (E*Trade Financial), fierce battles among office workers trapped in a jungle (CareerBuilder), menacing hitchhikers (Bud Light again) and a clash between a monster and a superhero reminiscent of a horror movie (Garmin). It was as if Madison Avenue were channeling Doc in “West Side Story,” the gentle owner of the candy store in the neighborhood that the two street gangs, the Jets and Sharks, fight over. “Why do you kids live like there’s a war on?” Doc asks plaintively. (Well, Doc, this time, there is.) They should've had the 101st walking down the street gunning down puppies and kittens. But I don't think this guy would've got the symbolism. During other wars, Madison Avenue has appealed to a yearning for peace. That was expressed in several Super Bowl spots evocative of “Hilltop,” the classic Coca-Cola commercial from 1971, when the Vietnam War divided a world that needed to be taught to sing in perfect harmony. Ooooooh! That was soooooo...gay! Coca-Cola borrowed pages from its own playbook with two whimsical spots for Coca-Cola Classic, “Happiness Factory” and “Video Game,” that were as sweet as they were upbeat. The commercials, by Wieden & Kennedy, provided a welcome counterpoint to the martial tone of the evening. I wish Halliburton had bought ads. This guy would've had a stroke... Those who wish the last four years of history had never happened could find solace in several commercials that used the device of ending an awful tale by revealing it was only a dream. There's no place like home, Toto! There's no place like home! The best of the batch was a commercial for General Motors by Deutsch, part of the Interpublic Group of Companies, in which a factory robot “obsessed about quality” imagined the dire outcome of making a mistake. I dunno. I was watching the game with my robot, and that one kinda freaked him out. We had to have a long talk. The same gag, turned inside out, accounted for one of the funniest spots, a Nationwide Financial commercial by TM Advertising, also owned by Interpublic. The spot began with the singer Kevin Federline as the prosperous star of an elaborate rap video clip. But viewers learned at the end it was only the dream of a forlorn fry cook at a fast-food joint. No. That's his actual job now. Then, too, there was the unfortunate homonym at the heart of a commercial from Prudential Financial, titled “What Can a Rock Do?” The problem with the spot, created internally at Prudential, was that whenever the announcer said, “a rock” — invoking the Prudential logo, the rock of Gibraltar — it sounded as if he were saying, yes, “Iraq.” This guy needs help. He's got the BDS realty, really bad... To be sure, sometimes “a rock” is just “a rock,” and someone who has watched the Super Bowl XIX years in a row only for the commercials may be inferring things that Madison Avenue never meant to imply. "A rock"= "Iraq". Get it? Me neither... Take for instance a spot by Grey Worldwide, part of the WPP Group, for Flomax, a drug sold by Boehringer Ingelheim to help men treat enlarged prostates.“Here’s to men,” the announcer intoned, “to guys who want to spend more time having fun and less time in the men’s room.” It was not difficult to imagine guests at noisy Super Bowl parties asking one another, “Did he just say, ‘guys who want to spend more time having fun in the men’s room?’” He should also get maybe a hearing test. Another off-putting moment was provided by a stereotyped character in a commercial by Endeavor for a hair dye, Revlon Colorist. He was described as the stylist for the singer Sheryl Crow, and he was clearly miffed about her using the product. “Revlon? Color?” he asked, pouting and rolling his eyes. “I am the colorist.” A "colorist", man? That's gotta be bad in Timesworld, right? I mean, there's an "ist" on the end of it, and that can't be good... |
| Posted by:tu3031 |
| #16 Right on Joe, and don't hit the QB below the knees/above the shoulders/wrap him up, etc. -NFL = Non-contact Football League. As to the article - it's a wonder this guy can boot up a computer - what a clown. |
| Posted by: Broadhead6 2007-02-05 21:43 |
| #15 The All-Midwest = "Battle of the Midwest" turned out to be more "Battle of the Referees/ Regulations", considering how many challenges and counter-challenges were made. SIGN OF THE TIMES - Head for the Hills and hide the women, the NFL is now the People's Gubmint Ministry of Regul Pigskins. |
| Posted by: JosephMendiola 2007-02-05 19:20 |
| #14 eLarson has it: Some people will see whatever it is they want to see, and to make this happen, will bend reality into shapes that would make your eyes curl. This man is probably not well - seriously. Bookmark his name and check rehab clinics booking sheets... |
| Posted by: Tony (UK) 2007-02-05 19:12 |
| #13 a story... A man is asked by his therapist to identify what he sees in a series of inkblots. "That? That's two people having sex." "So's that one." "Whoa... that one's a guy and two girls. Dang." The therapist nods sagely and says "I think you may have a preoccupation with sex." "ME? YOU'RE the one showing me all the dirty pictures!" |
| Posted by: eLarson 2007-02-05 16:55 |
| #12 I thought the Federline ad was hilarious, m'self. At least K-Fed is self-aware. |
| Posted by: Mike 2007-02-05 14:55 |
| #11 This guy likes the Federline commercial? Does he not get the irony in supporting that commercial? I mean, it belittles the poor™, and shows rap in a bad light. How many LLL "groupies" can you offend in one commercial? |
| Posted by: BA 2007-02-05 14:52 |
| #10 For a while in the 80s, it was a fad, almost a fetish, for pop-culture critics (People magazine etc.) to make outlandishly strained claims of political symbolism and motivation in their reviews. One critic blasted the 1953 version of War of the Worlds as a McCarthyite propaganda piece designed to incite Cold War hysteria. He could not explain the relative impotence of the military in the film or the ultimately pacifist and internationalist symbolism of the film's conclusion, though he did mention these as a "strange anomaly," strange only because they didn't fit his forced characterization. This is rather similar to the current "Blame America" fetish among graduate students, which seeks to attribute events as long ago as the mid 19th century to current administration policies, and quotes such long dead critics as General Smedley Butler (1881-1940) in an effort to prove American malfeasance. |
| Posted by: Atomic Conspiracy 2007-02-05 13:30 |
| #9 It's increasing clear that working for the NYT is the cause of serious mental illness. In adhering to sound lefty policy, we should offer them the services of Dr. Kevorkian. |
| Posted by: Silentbrick 2007-02-05 12:48 |
| #8 Video review of the Superbowl ads here (7 minutes, pretty good). |
| Posted by: Mike 2007-02-05 12:39 |
| #7 The fact that Katie was trying to drum up ratings with Superbowl ads says a lot about what's become of CBS news. |
| Posted by: rjschwarz 2007-02-05 12:31 |
| #6 And your ratings are shit, Katie. Ever sit down and try to figure out why that is? |
| Posted by: tu3031 2007-02-05 12:08 |
| #5 This guy better put earplugs in pronto, his brains have melted and are leaking down the side of his neck... |
| Posted by: Seafarious 2007-02-05 12:05 |
| #4 The one that got me had Katie Couric declaring "we hear lots of bad stories about America..." Talk about a tin ear. |
| Posted by: Grunter 2007-02-05 12:03 |
#3 Best comment I've seen so far on the game:IÂ’m happy that I live in a country where a young African-American child can dream that one day, he too will grow up and coach a team that loses the Super Bowl because his white quarterback isnÂ’t very good. |
| Posted by: Mike 2007-02-05 11:51 |
| #2 It was all too obvious in the Go Daddy commercial. I thought that the girl with the wet t-shirt was a perfect metaphor for the occupation of Iraq. |
| Posted by: Danking70 2007-02-05 10:52 |
| #1 What's funny about a comb over beard? |
| Posted by: Sneaze 2007-02-05 10:41 |