
HOH TV Columnist Josh Walbert chronicles this year's Super Bowl broadcast:
The Super Bowl commercials started off with a look at Brad Pitt’s “World War Z.” Given there was no new footage from the previously released trailer, not a great start to what are meant to be the best commercials unnecessarily large amounts of money (reportedly $4 million for 30 seconds of air time) can buy.
When did Red M&Ms become such a fall-guy? Wasn’t he the one always in charge? Whatever happened to Yellow? Last year’s “Sexy and I Know It” was funny, but this year it fell flat.
Godaddy.com commercials worked better when there was a sense of sexy mystery. Watching a close-up of a super model and a nerd snogging really leaves nothing to the imagination, other than how much they needed to pay Bar Refaeli to agree to do it.
The first of the over-hyped Doritos commercials, Goat for Sale offered little humor and a new level of disgust. How succ
essful is it to portray Doritos eaters as sloppy pigs? It is almost like some cheeky marketer is working PSAs into the commercials.
Sure it is early in the game but is it too soon to give the award for best celebrity cameo to Amy Poehler in the Best Buy commercial? Funny stuff.
Should I have laughed so hard at “The Big Bang Theory” gang in football uniforms? Probably not but I did. Way to tie in the marketing, CBS.
“Oz: The Great and Powerful,” very similarly to “World War Z,” does not offer anything new in terms of footage except for a few brief glimpses at the Wicked Witch of the West (known to some as Elphaba).
Coke once again offers a perfect world in a neat collection of security footage capturing random acts of kindness instead of evil. Touching.
That was a boring first quarter.
“Fast and Furious 6” is how Super Bowl movie commercials should be. New footage. Some plot details. And a big twist at the end to really get you excited.
Kaley Cuoco’s much buzzed about Toyota commercial did nothing to cash in on her sexy form of humor. A wasted effort.
Again Doritos portrays their “fans” as crazy, sloppy, chunky, and generally unappealing. The slingshot baby was cute. These are just creepy.
I believe that many a shoe, remote, bowl of guacamole, and/or pairs of panties were thrown at the TV during Calvin Klein’s erm…brief commercial as fans and admirers alike were whipped into mixed emotion frenzies.
Bud Light’s New Orleans-based superstition voodoo mess has a clever concept that ended up jumbled and confusing upon first watching.
“Star Trek: Into Darkness” ups the ante even more than “Fast and Furious 6” did, offering more screen time for Benedict Cumberbatch’s mysterious villain and some cool looking but unfortunate situations for the Enterprise crew.
Got Milk offers an amusing send-up of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s bipolar movie repertoire. Chasing after a milk truck for a trio of pre-pubescent tykes while every action movie cliché explodes around him. Fun.
Is this hockey? That was a full-on brawl. This quarter is picking up. And the lesson to be learned? If you fight back, there are no negative consequences as the penalties are negated.
After several years of creating cute commercials featuring “Star Wars,” Volkswagen offers white guys talking in Jamaican accents. No, it didn’t make much sense. Maybe if Jar Jar had made an appearance…
Coca-Cola’s second commercial didn’t quite live up to the nice message set in the first one. Instead cowboys, Arabs, dirt hogs, and a bus full of showgirls duke it out to reach a mirage bottle of Coke. So much for harmony and good will.
Taco Bell wins the first half battle of the commercials. A group of seniors partying it out to fun.’s “We are Young” in Spanish is something that everyone needs to achieve at some point in their life, I feel.
After the controversy of lip-syncing the National Anthem at the inauguration, Beyoncé came back guns ablazing to deliver the best half-time show I can recall. Stunning visuals, cooling effects, solid singing, and great dancing are all necessary for a good show and Beyoncé delivered in aces.
Halftime sponsor Jeep offered a sentimental message from Oprah about our troops coming home. The message was great and the footage touching and then there was a contrived shot of a Jeep, ruining the mood and taking the focus away from what really matters: troops reuniting with their families.
“Iron Man 3” took a different approach than the other movie trailers, offering instead a thirty second clip rather than a collection of one-of shots from the film. It didn’t reveal any story details but showed the promised struggle that Tony Stark is going to face. It gave me goose-bumps.
E-Trade brought back their popular baby-talking-to-a-webcam spokesperson but what made the original commercials so great were that it was a real baby, dubbed over. It was cute. This new one was clearly altered and just not amusing.
Okay, so now that I know what to expect the Bud Light superstition commercials aren’t as confusing. But they are still not that great.
Axe offers two of the coolest things ever in one commercial. Sharks and astronauts/space. Set it during WWII and you’ve got yourself the ingredients for a Spielberg flick. Also, I want to win a trip to space!
Why was Tracy Morgan yelling in the Mio commercial? Maybe someone forgot to “change” the volume on the sound recording. Ah, see what I did there with the change?
So the commercial for the Gildan t-shirt was kind of amusing but has anyone actually heard of Gildan? Does it matter?
I was wondering when Gangnam Style would work its way into one of the commercials. I did not expect it to be one for pistachios.
Oh, I bet the crowd is going crazy, recalling a certain scene in a summer blockbuster right now. I wonder if it is some sort of power play by one of the teams. Conspiracy!
Oh, Budweiser, you know how to make a commercial. You also win for best one tonight. The story of a Clydesdale and his trainer is just too touching to pass by.
Dodge Ram, I don’t know what your trucks have to do with farming but it was a very powerful commercial nonetheless. For that, best car commercial goes to you.
There was so much cuteness packed into the Kia Sorento commercial that it was almost overload. But it did make me laugh. “Play ‘Wheels on the Bus’ now!”
Willem Dafoe truly makes a great devil. Like he was born to play that role. Why hasn’t that happened before Mercedes made that commercial?
What’s better than Paul Rudd and Seth Rogan riffing about which of them is the next big thing? Not a whole lot. Maybe Judd Apatow can turn that into his next movie and Samsung will sponsor it.
I don’t even know how that game ended the way it did but that one guy cursed. Twice. CBS, hopefully you didn’t spend so much on your commercials that you won’t be able to afford the lawsuit that you are inevitably going to be dealt.
And in case you missed who won, it was the bus full of showgirls. (That, of course, refers to the vote-for-the-ending Coke commercial from earlier in the game.)
Josh Walbert is an entertainment guru with a passion for film and television with no real understanding of sports. He lives south of Orlando, FL, with his mom and relatively extensive DVD/Blu-Ray collection. His column appears every Saturday.

noonies
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... My favorite commercial was the Volkswagon one where the guy in the office was talking to everybody in a Jamaican voice. |
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