In contrast, the actual game was certainly compelling football. After getting blown out early, the Steelers dug themselves out and were in the game during much of the second half, right up until the two minute warning. Considering how historically easy it’s been for a Super Bowl to become a lopsided snoozapolooza, that’s pretty much all you can ask.
Though in all honesty, once President Obama announced his preferred team, was the game ever really in doubt?
But seriously, as Yahoo’s Dan Wetzel writes, “Cheeseheads, game’s drama save this spectacle:”
The game started with 400 fans getting forced out of their rickety seats in a ticket disaster, continued with Christina Aguilera butchering the national anthem and finished with the Green Bay Packers batting away a final-minute, fourth-and-desperate Ben Roethlisberger(notes) pass to seal a 31-25 victory.
From calamitous to classic, football saved the day, as it seems to always do in the NFL. For every off-field scandal and personal life soap opera, the game remains the game, in this case the Pittsburgh Steelers and Packers going back and forth, tackle to turnover to create 60 more minutes of gut-check emotion.
Enjoy the happy afterglow for now, because it won’t last. “And to think, we’re a few weeks of news conferences and posturing from a work stoppage that threatens the greatest show on earth,” Wetzel ominously warns.
(Apologies to Frank Zappa for the headline.)
Related: At the Washington Examiner, “Chrysler releases $9m Super Bowl ad while requesting more taxpayer dollars.”
Update: At the Tatler, much more on that Chrysler ad from Bryan Preston, Christian Adams, and Charlie Martin, who notes:
The laughable taxpayer-fueled Chrysler Super Bowl ad says of Detroit, “that’s our story. Now it’s probably not the one you’ve been reading in papers. The one being written by folks who’ve never even been here.”
The folks at Chrysler, and their federal benefactors, would prefer you avert your eyes to the real story of Detroit – of car assembly moving to southern states because of UAW contracts and urban rot presided over by one-party rule for decades. Even if you’ve never been to Detroit, judge for yourself, peruse for a minute this photo essay “Detroit in Ruins” from the UK Guardian to see real pictures of a once grand city reduced to something from the other side of the apocalypse . Or watch this video of urban decay so severe wild game is returning to inner city Detroit. Millions of dollars in taxpayer backed advertising can’t conceal what bad government and labor policies did to a once gleaming monument to American ingenuity. (The photo above is from the advertisement; the man appears to be crossing “Congress” St.)
Meanwhile, James Lileks and Neal Justin, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s TV critic, review the best and worst of the Super Bowl commercials. They split their opinion on the nine million dollar Motor City message mayhem:
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And finally, at least for now, Motorola produced a fun parody of Apple’s iconic 1984 ad:
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Though given the choices involved — looking equally cast-in-the-mold whether as a hipster doofus or an Apple user who looks like he walked off the set of THX-1138, I feel a bit like Jack Benny being asked, “Your money or your life.”
Which come to think of it, brings us back to the Detroit ad.
The Chrysler ad reminded me a lot of the Schlitz beer “You Want to Take My Gusto Away?” ad campaign from the mid-1970s — otherwise known as the “Buy Schlitz Or I’ll Kill You” ad campaign, which combined with the company’s attempts to cut costs by lowering the percentage of higher-priced grains in its beer, managed to take Schlitz from No. 2 brewer in the nation behind Bud down to the point they were bought out by Stroh’s in the 1980s.
Also, given the way Christina Aguilar butchered the National Anthem, it was kind of appropriate to have a commercial with Rosanne getting hammered by a log. A place awaits Christina in a Snickers ad around 2020 or so.
Having singers (?) who “butcher” our traditional patriotic anthems, is a slap in the face of everyone who loves this country. I feel that FOX and the NFL are going out of their way to insult all the men, women, and their families who truly love this country and what it stands for. There must be singers out there who truly care for this country.
Until then, I will let my spending habits demonstrate how very insulted I was yesterday.
Horrifying how most of the mega-bucks adds displayed such a macabre failure to even begin to understand the American psyche. Where in hell do they dig up their focus group audiences? These are the corporate asshats in control of the world? We’re doomed.
Well, according to proponents of health care reform the Commerce Clause can require that everyone must go out and purchase health insurance from private vendors or face legal sanctions. It’s no great stretch to use the clause to madate that everyone should own at least one Chrysler or Chevrolet. (Hell – Why stop at one!)
I too thought the halftime show was just weird, and not weird in a good way. At least the Packers won.
Imagine if the game was sullied by such things as a cool factor or affirmative action giving the side with more minorities 6 points to start out. Even with Noam Chomsky as a coach in the United Nations Multicultural Football League, one would still see the better team win until enough rules were put in place to assure this never happened.
Reality and common sense rule the day in the course of an NFL game and unlike the Palestinian Arabs who want to start the game all over again after a 7 man Israeli team beat a 12 man muslim team, football reminds one of how American society used to be.
There was no excuse making and privilege to account for victory or lack of it but a zeitgeist based on discipline and self-motivation.
In a UNMFL, racism, generational hangovers from colonialism, privilege, good ol’ boy networks and more, would all be factored into the final score like a computer ranking for college football.
The announced final score would say one thing but the better team would still win every single time in reality and know it and reap the rewards. The only way this would ever be countered is to water down the best teams with forced transfers until all was equal.
Individuals would still shine but the team concept would wither and die.
I personally love that Chrysler ad. but it doesn’t make me want to buy the car, it makes me want to move to Detroit! Mayor Bing should start using it as an ad to increase tourism.
Maybe you should go LOOK at Detroit before you decide you want to live there.
It’s a ghost town. A sickening monument to what unions and bad government can do to prosperity.
All in the name of social justice, of course.
I also loved that ad, the best one of the night. When Eminem came on the screen I literally cheered! There is a lot of talent in and around the Motor City. Sure, Michiganders have had some tough times in the last couple of decades and let’s hear it for the people who keep on, keepin’ on.
Wow…that was a special kind of out-of-touch delusion.
Ann Arbor is much better, trust me.
Yes, that ad was an expert piece of propaganda. I can appreciate the craftsmanship that went into the ad without being swayed by it in the least. Anybody who moves to Detroit, at least until such time as the Democrat regime and the unions are permanently ousted, can only be described as self-destructive.
Never, ever, ever going to buy GM or Chrysler again. Period.
Dead on! Not with a gun to my head,……Obama’s,…maybe
The Chrysler ad may have some questionable connotations, and I personally have no use for Eminem, but as a Detroit native and former resident (yes, former, for all the obvious and unfortunate reasons), I must own up to a strong feeling of pride and nostalgia, seeing my old hometown lauded, however briefly and despite its genuine plight.
And I also keep the faith in US automobiles. Dumb, maybe, but….
I, too, have faith in American automobiles. My wife and I both own Hondas built by Americans. That’s no surprise, since most Honda owners are Americans. So are most Honda employees. So are most Honda shareholder. When a car company employs mostly Americans to build most of its cars in the USA, sells them mostly to Americans, and sends the dividends mostly to Americans, it isn’t a Japanese car company anymore.
Two weeks of hype and four hours of pre-game analysis, followed by four+ hours of post-game analysis and interviews with every Green Bay Packer still standing, for a 3-hour game(extended by more time for the countless paid commercials and Fox plugs for upcoming shows!) It’s time for the NFL, the NFL Network, ESPN, and the network that wins the bidding to get over themselves and cut this circus down to one tent! And please, can’t we even have one day without having to hear Obama reiterate his campaign talking points as he jumps in front of yet another parade?
It was a good game whose outcome hinged upon an unfortunate fumble, between two evenly matched and well-prepared teams. There were stars on both sides, but far too few in the broadcast booths. I would have been happy with Al Michaels and Chris Collinsworth for a half hours before and after the game, with a few interviews that they chose!
Political assassinations and Superbowls are just grist for the mill for “Mr. Hope and Spare Change”.
Perhaps he can find a way to use his own teleprompter jaws of life to chew a baby out of a trash compactor on live TV or rescue a marmoset from a tree when the cherry blossoms are in full bloom and at dusk with a red sunset and rainbow too.
I found the whole Chrysler 200 thing strange. The name “Chrysler 200″ reminds me of the Chrysler 300. The original Chrysler 300s were given that name because they had 300 HP engines. The 200 has two engine options. The standard engine is 173 HP. The bigger engine is 283 HP. So why “200″? Maybe we are supposed to assume that the 200 is 2/3 as good as a Chrysler 300?
The Chrysler 200, now with less zoom!
I found the Chrysler ad perfectly hilarious. Over two minutes of Eminem trying to sound profound — and only a few glimpses of the *bloody car you’re supposedly selling*.
“Imported from Detroit?” How about “bailed out, screwed the shareholders, and sold to Fiat”? Forget the lovely grit of “the motor city”: these bozos can’t even make an intelligible ad, much less sell cars and run a company.
I’m being taxed to pay a “noted rap star?” Wait, I’m being taxed, and we are in debt for trillions of dollars, and we are paying “a noted rap star?”
Why? The government already stole the company from its owners and ripped off its creditors. These are the same folks who literally could not run a whorehouse.
You can’t even mock this stupidity. It’s overwhelming.
Dresden – destroyed by the US 8th Army Air Force and RAF Bomber Command in World War 2.
Detroit – destroyed by 50 years of Democrat/liberal policy and the UAW in the War on Poverty.
Well, the Silverado commercial made me laugh. As for Eminem and Chrysler? Why such a Eurocrap ad for Motor City? Methinks you protest too much.
What a stupid ad. If you have to ask yourself at the end of it what it was selling then it failed. Detroit? I wouldn’t want anything I built to be associated with that loser of a city. And the Chrysler 200? Come on it’s a f**king Sebring! It is the only car that at one year old has no trade in value. On top of that it’s our money they were using to run the stupid ad. Only in America!
America is so soiled that the advertisers believe this piece of offal will ‘sell soap’? Are we that degenerate that a foul mouthed misogynist makes a good spokesman?
I pity our children. We inherited paradise and are bequeathing Detroit.
Salut.
As a former Michigander, my standard issue of Detroit is taken from the old sci-fi movie, Robo-cop. Detroit therein is renamed New Delta City, a place of crime, drugs,violence and broken buildings. What other city can boast about dropping its population from 3. M to 0.8 M (75%). In 1967 the riots tried urban renewal with firebombs, today they use bulldozers. The robbery of the Chrysler bond holders is beyond a travesty.
The commercial actually seemed like a mini-documentary to me, particularly when almost every other one tried to be funny.
The city of Detroit, though, is like the hole in a donut. Once you get on the other side of Eight Mile, most of its suburbs were doing at least reasonably well when I visited a few years back. (This was when 5.5% unemployment was a cause for concern among economists as opposed to the ‘new norm’ of 10 percent.) These suburbanites are the people who occasionally come downtown to support the Lions, Red Wings, or Tigers, go to the casinos, or catch a show at the Fox Theatre (which was shown in the spot.) Ironically enough, the (mostly black) inner city denizens would have to go to the suburbs to support the Pistons if they could scrape up the bucks for a ticket.
I don’t mind pumping up the virtues of the Detroit area – for some, it’s their home and there are those who like the region for its lakes and four seasons’ worth of recreational opportunities. I just wish that Ford had come up with the commercial or Chrysler was able to fend off the need for another government handout.
Super Bowls are tough to watch because of all the stupid ads and halftime shows. Much of this year’s ad crop was pretty crass, especially given that the Super Bowl attracts audiences of all ages. But it’s been trending that way for years. There’s so much ancillary pop culture-zeitgeist hype around the “event” that the game itself can sometimes get obscured. But this year, aside from all the celebrities, the glamour, the hype and the trying-too-hard-to-be-clever ads with all their annoying, mindless pop culture references, the Packers and Steelers played a pretty interesting football game (unless, of course, you’re an old school, pound-the-ball-between-the-tackles football purist).
As for the Eminem ad, its easy to understand why there’s no love for Chrysler among conservatives, given the shady nature of its UAW/government Chrysler takeover and the slim chance that we the taxpayers will see our supposed “investment” pay off. But I’m not afraid to say that I liked the ad … that’s the way I am. The ad itself was visually stunning and powerful. You could easily lose yourself while watching it. Will it sell cars? Who knows! You don’t know and I don’t know. Will it turn Chrysler’s business around? Superman might not even be able to do that, but from an aesthetic standpoint, the ad was beautiful.
Actually the Chrysler ad wouldn’t be so bad if it looked like they were making a comeback, but as is, it looks more like wishful thinking.
The Chevy ad is pretty funny, though it wouldn’t have worked with any of their trucks other than the Silverado line, primarily because the Silveado and Suburban lines are about the only lines that Chevy and GMC produce competitive vehicles in.
That said, last I heard Toyota was making a real push for the full-size truck segment with the Tundra, and given how the Tacoma has stacked up in the small to mid-size truck market, GMC/Chevy aren’t going to be able to sit on their tails if they want to stay competitive.
The entire production was a brutally painful reminder that the NFL is the sleaziest professional sport in America, despite having the best on-field product. The league is so completely invested in the worst elements of our sickening ghetto culture that every Super Bowl must include a halftime dedicated to the scummy music industry, a national anthem butchered by a pop-music nitwit, and a blizzard of commercials written by and for juveniles, using all of the wit of a locker room joke about your sister.
Pardon me while I vomit at the notion of uber-douches Colin Powell and Roger Goodell reading the Declaration.
I thought the tag line “Imported from Detroit” confusing…
Is Detroit, MI now a foreign country? Is it going the way of Dearbornistan… Muslimed to death or even the way of Flint, where it is being tractored back to farmland?
Only Ford products for me now …. every time I turned on the ignition of a government motors vehicle would be a reminder that I screwed my fellow taxpayers…
Yes M old boy and that is why when I back out of my West Michigan driveway intent on going to the city, I head west for the joys of Chicago. I think you captured the dark city of Detroit perfectly. Sad but true. It didn’t even do a good job of telling us what they were selling. I take that back, except maybe your next foul mouthed album.
None of the ads were outstanding or even very funny this year. I weep for the demise of quality management of US companies if this is the best they can do.
I lived in lower Michigan in the early ’60′s and we went shopping to Detroit a couple of times a year. Michigan State starting in the fall of ’64, with many many friends from Detroit and visited there a lot that first semester. Enlisted in the Army with two friends from Detroit in February, ’65. My God, it’s a ruin! Is it true what is reported, that there are no “big box” stores like regional supermarkets and Wal-Marts and chain fast food stores in Detroit any more? I think that when we watch that video, we’re seeing what our future will look like across the nation if we don’t turn things around. Thanks for the link to the video and for the commentary of course, but the sights and the voices of the residents of Detroit with their tones of resignation will haunt my dreams.
Fox’s coverage was literally the worst I’ve EVER seen. There were times when the flight of a pass couldn’t even be seen. One sec a QB drops back, next a receiver has the ball, but nothing in between. Couple that with the fact that the game appeared scripted to the Baltimore-Pittsburgh game (Baltimore gets a big lead, Pittsburgh comes back and wins.)Thing is, GB didn’t play by the script. There’s no way the upstart Packers’ inexperienced ball club should have beaten the Steelers, BUT THEY DID. Sniff sniff…what’s that smell.
Then these crappy and unmemorable commercials.
Mr. Driscoll:
What do you expect? Chrysler is owned by FIAT now, and while the Italians do many things superlatively, the dramatic arts has never been one of them.
(Seriously…do people anywhere beat down the doors to attend a Verdi opera?)
I can imagine FIAT giving the okay for the Eminem ad because in their Euro-view, this was “bling”. It’s like a Japanese domestic cigarette commercial…to our eyes,a whole lot of “WTF?” going on afterwards.
What I cannot forgive FIAT for is that you just KNOW that they imported a few 2009 Hemi Challengers over to Italy, and you also just KNOW that some FIAT boffins got to “test-drive” those sleds down the autostrada…say along the Amalfi Coast.
What sticks in my craw was that one of those lucky bastards wasn’t ME!
Let’s get real about this Chrysler ad. When Eminem said, “This is what we do here,” he should have said this is what we USED to do here. All three Detroit auto makers are hollow shells of what they once were due solely to massive incompetence on the part of senior management and the greed of the unions. The big three have dragged down an entire state, not just a city. Detroit looks like Hiroshima did the day after that city was hit by an atomic bomb.
I don’t see how $9 million spent by Chrysler for a one-time Super Bowl ad is such a marketing coup. The Internet is full of videos that were produced for zero that have gotten millions of views.
I did business with the Auto Industry in Michigan for 25 years and watched its steady descent into the present hell. The parallel with the decline of the Soviet Union under Communism is hard to ignore. I also can find fault with Big 3 Management, however, the industry could only attract those who were willing to accept union power aided and abetted by Government. Most were just visiting the Titanic, taking what they could get and knowing that when their duty on the bridge was over, their personal lifeboats would keep them afloat while the rest of Detroit began sinking.
As for the Unions, the self delusion is breathtaking. They continue to blame the Corporations. They believe that if they could fix labor wages globally, car prices would rise to make GM, etc profitable – a stunningly self-serving and/or ignorant economic “theory”. Their victims, the jobless slum dwellers of Michigan’s industrial cities, do not know enough to put the blame were it belongs – on “progressive” government, politicians and the unions that elect them.
“They believe that if they could fix labor wages globally, car prices would rise to make GM, etc profitable….”
Which is why union management often attend overseas communist meetings to typically rail against “slave wages paid by capitalistic corporations”. Union leaders are coming out of the closet and openly admitting to their communist leanings. They somehow believe that the reason the USSR failed is because they weren’t the ones in charge.
Sorry, the above is a reply to Geeze.