Super Bowl XLII: Best And Worst Commercials

Posted by Cubicle QB

Super Bowl XLIIWe make sandwich. I am meat.

Wow. That was unexpected. The Giants killed the Pats’ perfect season in the biggest way possible. I’m not quite ready to accept that we’re now going to hear “Super Bowl MVP Eli Manning.” But I’m not here to analyze the X’s and O’s of the game. I’m here to pick my seven best and worst commercials. It’s a better crop than last year, but still pretty lackluster. (You can watch them all again on MySpace. See what other people thought on USA Today’s Ad Meter.) Here are my picks:

The Best

7. Bridgestone Tires. Driving on a dark highway through the woods, a driver spots a deer in the road and swerves around it. Then a driver spots Alice Cooper picking up a snake in the road and swerves around them. Then a driver spots Richard Simmons doing aerobics in the road and is tempted to run him down … but then swerves around him. So Bridgestone tires will help you evade Richard Simmons, if you chose to do so.

6. Victoria’s Secret. Smokin’ hot Adriana Lima reminds us that when the Super Bowl is over, the real games begin. Yes! Hot chicks can sell me anything.

5. SoBe Life Water. A lizard gets a taste of SoBe Life Water. Suddenly there are a dozen lizards doing the zombie dance from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video. Dancing lizards. “Thriller.” What’s not to like?

4. Toyota Corolla. The super quiet cabin of the Toyota Corolla is demonstrated by locking a guy in the car with some sleeping ferocious badgers. If the badgers wake up, they’ll gnaw his face off. They shoot cannons off outside, but the badgers are undisturbed. Then the guy’s cell phone goes off inside the car. The badgers don’t like that so much.

3. Tide To Go. A guy is on a job interview, but the stain on his shirt is literally talking louder than he is, totally distracting the interviewer. A stain on a shirt talking jibberish is good stuff, and this commercial gets funnier with repeated viewing.

2. FedEx. FedEx rarely disappoints with their commercials. A company thinks it’s got their shipping problems solved when they equip carrier pigeons with GPS systems and night vision helmets to make deliveries. But what do they do for the big shipments? Really big carrier pigeons, of course. So the giant pigeons wreak havoc on the city, dropping crates in the streets and tossing cars through buildings. Eh, they’ll just switch to FedEx.

1. Diet Pepsi Max. Joe Buck’s head starts bobbing as he’s nodding off in the booth. Then people all across the country start bobbing their heads, falling asleep. Then Haddaway’s “What Is Love?” kicks in, and we know where they’re going with this. A little Diet Pepsi Max fixes that, and everybody’s heads bob with the energy of SNL‘s Butabi brothers out clubbing. Yeah, it’s been like 10 years since anyone mentioned that skit, but that’s probably what makes this commercial so funny. The kicker comes with Chris Kattan picks up his dry cleaning and yells, “Stop it!!” Kattan upstaging Will Ferrell on Super Bowl Sunday is like the Giants beating … oh, you know.

The Worst

7. Dell. A guy with a Dell (Red) laptop gets love from everyone around him. When you have a Dell (Red) laptop, you’re helping fight AIDS in Africa. So you can have a clear conscience when you fill that Dell’s hard drive with porn.

6. Salesgenie.com. The guy from salesgenie.com took great pride in the fact that his commercial last year was roundly considered the worst. This year, salesgenie.com did some animated spots that played on ethnic stereotypes a little too much. They were better than last year, but still bad. I’m trying to decide if they’ve turned the so-bad-they’re-actually-good corner.

5. GoDaddy.com. Granted, FOX wouldn’t let them air the commercial they wanted to, but it didn’t matter. It’s sad, because we could usually count on GoDaddy.com to give us a nice jolt of shameless T&A. The commercial on GoDaddy.com starring racecar driver Danica Patrick was crude and not at all funny — and it contained neither T nor A.

4. Bud Light. Who still finds cavemen funny? Some cavemen don’t quite understand the proper use of a wheel one of them invented to help transport Bud Light to a party. Wheel sucks. Bottle opener sucks. Commercial sucks.

3. Hyundai Genesis. True, these commercials weren’t awful. They were just a little too self-aware that they weren’t good, and they didn’t mind telling you that they weren’t good. Because, you see, it’s not the quality of the commercial that matters — it’s the quality of the car. On any other day this is true, but this is Super Bowl Sunday, and the quality of the commercial is all that matters.

2. Planters Nuts. An unattractive woman can still turns guys’ heads. What’s her secret? She rubs cashews on her face. So rub some nuts on your faces, ladies. Here, let me help.

1. E*Trade. Damn you, E*Trade. I hate talking babies in commercials. I’m just now recovering from that Quiznos Baby Bob campaign from a few years ago. The E*Trade spot with Bobo the Clown was a little more tolerable than the one with the kid puking up some stuff, but this was unoriginal, uninspired, mildly disturbing crap. To quote the commercial itself, I think E*Trade “really underestimated the creepiness” of talking babies.

2 Comments

  1. Ohhhhh now, Cubicle QB. I was all excited to have you set me up a platform in which I could wax philosophical about how bored I was through 3 entire quarters, save for the part where I was actually pretty interested that I was bored through 3 entire quarters of a game that was supposed to be boring for being 77-3 at the half instead of 7-3 at the half. And then about how, there in that magical Beli-checking, Brady-munching fourth quarter, I began cheering till my spit flew for the self-same team I wanted to pulverize 2 weeks back for killing the dream of my little 12-3 Packers.

    And you go and type this instead:
    “So rub some nuts on your faces, ladies. Here, let me help.”

    And now I have to spend the rest of my day giggling unproductively right here just a cubicle away.

    Thanks. Thanks a lot.

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About Ryan Berenz 2166 Articles
Member of the Television Critics Association. Charter member of the Ancient and Mystic Society of No Homers. Squire of the Ancient & Benevolent Order of the Lynx, Lodge 49, Long Beach, Calif. Costco Wholesale Gold Star Member since 2011.