February 11, 2011

Press play to listen

45 years ago, the Super Bowl…
wasn’t even the Super Bowl.  They called it the NFL-AFL Championship
Game, until one of the founders renamed it after watching his grandson
play with a “High Bouncing Ball” – a super ball.  Super ball
– Super Bowl.  Get it?  And thus, an artificial event was
born.     

Tickets were just fifteen bucks
for that first game – and they barely sold half of those, leaving
some 40,000 empty seats in the Los Angeles Coliseum.     

A thirty-second ad cost only
$42,000 – and they weren’t any different than the ads they showed
the previous weekend.  The half-time show featured three college
marching bands – including one you might have seen from the University
of Michigan.  

Over the next couple decades,
of course, the event became a veritable national holiday.  Tickets
now sell for thousands of dollars, and ads for millions.  The game
attracts more than 100 million viewers in the U.S. alone.  

The hoopla surrounding the
game has exploded, too.   Instead of sticking to college marching
bands for halftime, they branched out into other forms of entertainment. 
For reasons I’ll never understand, that included four appearances
by a group called “Up With People!”  Or, as the Simpsons called
them, “those clean-cut young go-getters, Hooray for Everything!’” 

“Up with People!”? 
As opposed to what, exactly?  “Down With Humans!”?  Besides,
I don’t think we can afford to be that
conclusive.  “Up With People” sounds great – so long as we’re
not talking all people.   

One year they devoted the show
to America’s 200^th anniversary, followed by the 100^th
anniversary of Hollywood, the 40^th anniversary of the Peanuts’
comic strip, then the 25^th anniversary of… the Super Bowl
itself.   You kind of got the feeling they were running out
of ideas.  

That all changed in 1993, when
Michael Jackson performed the half-time show, and his hair caught on
fire, or his sister suffered a ‘wardrobe malfunction’ or maybe they
conducted the OJ trial live on the fifty-yard line – I’m sorry,
but these events have started to blur for me.   

The point is, the half-time
show became a big deal.  Such a big deal, in fact, that the ratings
were higher for the show, than for the game.  A survey showed most
fans said they would rather miss a play than an ad.   Style
had officially triumphed over substance.  

That might have been a good
thing, because the game itself usually stunk.  Of the first 30
Super Bowls, only seven – less than a quarter – were within a touchdown. 
But more than half the past 15 Super Bowls have been that close.   

And that’s good, too, because
now all the stuff around the game itself – the national anthem, the
half-time shows, the ads – have become almost unwatchable.   

On Sunday we heard Christina
Aguilara butcher the Star Spangled Banner, which was bad enough. 
But then we heard the Black Eyed Peas butcher their own songs, which
was even worse.    

The only thing that matched
the quality of the game – which was great, once again — was the now-famous
Chrysler ad.  It was as much about their car as it was about the
city that spawned it.  It certainly beat piling on the poor city,
which every hack out there has already done.  And it was better
than the dopey old campaign, “Say Nice Things About Detroit.” 
Yes, and “Up With People!” too, while you’re at it.   

No, the ad was authentic, it
was serious, it was sincere.  It was real.   

When you look back at the checkered
history of over-hyped Super Bowl games and shows, that understated ad
stands out as something truly super.