In today’s draining economic times, people are looking for any chance they can to smile, any opportunity to feel good and find pleasure in the simple things that make us all American.
Super Bowl Sunday has historically been one of those times. It’s a celebration of food, fun, family, friends and the healthy competition between two teams who battled it out all season for a chance in the big show. We gather to share our coveted dip recipes, cheer on our favorite teams and watch some of the most outrageous commercials. But where does the show really end?
Sometime between the devolution to a wardrobe malfunction, and Madonna’s choreographed refusal to age like a normal human being, the entertainment value of the halftime-show and the Super Bowl in general begins to beckon on the edge of over-the-top. It nears extravagance. The price tag must be ridiculous, though the halftime show is nearly as culturally significant as a Kardashian wedding.
It would be interesting to learn how much could be accomplished if all of the money it took to light up the field in an incendiary blaze reading, “World Peace,” was donated to various charities or socially aware movements, or organizations that actually promote world peace, instead of fueling a pseudo-Samaritan message veiled by the lights and pyrotechnics.
Year after year of over produced, star-studded and disappointingly average displays of lip-synching begin to wear on the viewer. It’s like a Black Eyed Peas concert that never ends.
According to Twitter's official page, “Madonna’s performance during the Super Bowl’s halftime show saw an average of 8,000 Tweets per second for five minutes.”
One might wonder how many of those tweets contained obscure references to her age, jokes about whatever it was that Cee Lo Green was wearing and cries from the musically deprived for a better line up.
And apparently, the lack of “bang for your buck” extended to the commercials as well.
Ad time during the Super Bowl is perhaps some of the most expensive of the broadcast calendar. Time essentially is money when 30 seconds to plug your product can run in the millions of dollars. It was disappointing to see that some of the best commercials or at least some of the more clever ads, like Jerry Seinfeld’s endorsement for the Acura NSX, have been available on YouTube for the past week.
What happened to the simple, clever, witty or just plain silly ads that used to serve as comical breaks in between plays or water-cooler-conversation back at the office on Monday? This year, it seems the companies placing ads decided to forgo the playful puppies, the Budweiser frogs and the Quiznos rats for more elaborate and over-the-top productions; a decision that was apparently mirrored by the intense and “meta-Madonna” spectacle of the 2012 halftime show.
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