Does anyone outside of fans of the two competing teams still watch the Super Bowl for the football?
If you’re old enough to remember back to the beginning, the games were crummy and the halftime shows were worse. The first game wasn’t even sold out.
Green Bay pounded Kansas City and the halftime show was a glorified version of a high school show, marching bands and all.
Imagine how mundane that show was to make Up With People a step up.
Actually, Up With People performed at Super Bowl XVI in 1982. Up to that point, most of the shows appealed to so-called family audiences. That 1982 show might have been the most conceptually horrific with Up With People — maybe the whitest white people in the world — doing a Salute to Motown.
The shows got better. Although there were certainly some weak ones, most of the biggest name stars eventually performed at halftime on the big stage. The one Super Bowl I saw in person — SBXXVII in 1993 at the Rose Bowl — had the person who was the biggest star in the world at the time.
Jacko.
Just about everyone who rates halftime shows has Michael Jackson’s performance in the top two or three of the 56 shows to date. I don’t remember that much about the show because even though it was halftime, I was working and not paying complete attention to the entertainment. Plus I wasn’t really that big a fan.
Mostly since then, I haven’t watched Super Bowls. Too much hype, too much advertising. In fact, the last two games I watched were XXXII and XXXIII, in January 1998 and 1999. Those were the two games John Elway led Denver to its first two championships and walked away from the NFL with back-to-back victories.
Thirteen years earlier, I had started working in Colorado and saw Elway for two seasons as a young quarterback. He was then and remains my favorite athlete.
One thing I haven’t mentioned was that some people say they watch the game mostly to see the advertisements. With the biggest audience of the year watching the game, companies have worked to outdo each other in getting attention for their products. Some of the most famous commercials have debuted on the Super Bowl.
Ads like Mean Joe Greene’s Coca Cola spot or Apple Computers’ rollout spot. Humorous bits like Britney Spears and Bob Dole for Pepsi. But the king of Super Bowl advertising has to be Anheuser-Busch with its annual ads. A few years ago, they even got into the immigration debate on the side of immigrants.
As the maker of the best-selling beer in America, Anheuser-Busch sometimes bypasses the hard sell to stand up for America. Getting into the immigration issue was controversial, and A-B also had an ad that ran only once at the first game after 9/11 that had the famous Clydesdales bowing down to honor the New York victims.
But the ads aren’t enough reason to watch anymore, especially since they all show up on YouTube almost right away.
So a few hours before game time, all I can say is that for the 24th consecutive year, I won’t be watching.