PixlBit

Well, Super Bowl 50 has come and gone, and like most years, I didn’t really care about either team.  But I’ve always liked Super Bowl commercials, and I just like commercials in general.  Sometimes they’re even better than the show they’re advertising.  I know, I’m weird like that.  And it’s always been a tradition of mine to write a blog about my favorites, so here is this year’s. 

Not every Super Bowl ad enticed me, and every year it seems like the Super Bowl ads get less and less interesting.  This year was no exception.  Part of the problem is I’m probably not their target audience.  Since I’ve been blind in my left eye since birth, I can’t drive and have no need for a car, so all the car ads were lost on me.  I’m also not a big drinker, so ditto goes for the beer commercials.  I also don’t get into the latest and greatest in technology, so any cell phone, HDTV, or online services don’t grab me.

Actually one of my favorite commercials wasn’t even on the Super Bowl.  Every year for a long time, Animal Planet does something called the Puppy Bowl.  What started out as a defeatist attitude by Animal Planet thinking nobody would watch their channel while the Super Bowl was on, they just threw some puppies in a football stadium styled arena and filmed them playing and being cute.  Well it turned into a big hit and now they have a kitten halftime show, chicken cheerleaders, hamster camera crew, a tweeting parakeet, and new this year: a referee skunk.  It’s also become more commercialized than the Super Bowl if that’s even possible.  But they promote adopting dogs and cats at animal shelters and rescue places, so I guess it’s all good.

Anyway, one of my favorite commercials was on the Puppy Bowl!  I guess Disney was one of the sponsors, and they advertised their cartoon show Gravity Falls (on Disney XD), by replaying the intro to that cartoon, but with dogs!  It was really funny.  Gravity Falls is one of my favorite modern cartoons, so I really liked this one.  If you want to watch it, just do a search on YouTube for “Gravity Paws.”  I bet it was done by the same people who did intros of DuckTales and Rescue Rangers, but with real ducks and chipmunks.  You can watch those on one of Disney’s YouTube channels, too!

Now on to the Super Bowl.  I’m not a big Lady Gaga fan, but I do like her name.  I have to say that her red eyeshadow that she had one while singing The Star Spangled Banner was a little weird.  Every time she closed her eyes, she looked kind of like Gozer from Ghostbusters.  I guess she was going with a red, white, and blue theme.  But she did a good job singing the National Anthem, so good on her.

McDonald’s had a commercial about them serving breakfast all the time now, and they showed people who stay up all night for various reasons while parodying the Goodnight Moon book.  Although I’m not sure I liked how they portrayed gamers.  I’m a gamer and I don’t stay up all night playing games while people are kissing in the same room.  But oh well, it was just a commercial.  I thought that McDonald’s had been serving breakfast all day for a while now.  I know when I went in there a few months ago they were.  But I do like some of their breakfast items kind of, so that’s pretty good.

And speaking of gamers, one of the big commercials on the Super Bowl was for Pokémon’s 20^th Anniversary.  I’m sure most of us had already seen this ad before the Super Bowl, as they advertised it heavily and I even got a press release about it!  And the commercial really didn’t promote any new games or anything, it was just there to tell us that Pokémon is 20 years old and it’s still a thing.  But it was still kind of a neat ad, I guess.  I can’t believe that Pokémon is already 20 years old, and it’s even more unbelievable that they had millions of dollars to spend on a Super Bowl ad!

Speaking of companies that I’m surprised had enough money for a Super Bowl ad; the avocado ad with the people in B-Movie alien suits was interesting.  And then the Skittles commercial with the Aerosmith guy.  I didn’t think Skittles was popular enough to warrant a Super Bowl ad.  Just goes to show you how much I know about candy, I guess.  Speaking of Skittles and ‘tasting the rainbow,’ boy that halftime show sure was colorful, huh?  Like a rainbow exploded in the stadium.  I miss the dancing sharks from last year’s halftime show, though.

I do have to give a shout-out to the Doritos commercials, as I do have close family members who work at Frito-Lay.  The one with the dad who was enticing the baby in the ultrasound with Doritos was pretty funny, and also creepy when it popped out to get the Doritos.  And the other one with the dogs was also cute.  Can’t go wrong with cute animals and babies.

Well, you CAN go wrong if you use CG to make monstrosities, like Mountain Dew did with their PuppyMonkeyBaby.  That thing was just creepy.  That didn’t make me want to drink that new Mountain Dew/energy drink/juice combo.  But then, I don’t like Mountain Dew, energy drinks, and I’m pretty selective on juice, too.  Another creepy CG animal was the one for Marmot outdoor wear.  Or I guess that’s what it was advertising, I wasn’t really sure.  I thought that thing was supposed to be a beaver, but I guess it really is an animal called a marmot.  Guess I’m going to be looking up facts and pictures on marmots soon.  See, Super Bowl ads can be educational.  Sort of.

The other ads with animals were pretty cute.  I think my favorite was the one with people dressed as Heinz ketchup and mustard while dachshunds dressed as hot dogs were running toward them.  The only car ad that got my attention was a truck commercial featuring singing sheep, and the Butterfinger ad with the guy skydiving on a bull was cute, too.  I was disappointed there was no cute Budweiser Clydesdale horse ad, though.  I mean, I did see a Bud ad with the horses in it, but they were only on for a few seconds and it wasn’t a cute commercial either.  Did I miss one?

There were also a lot of movie previews.  Some interesting, some not, but I won’t talk about them here.  I did like the Coca-Cola ad with Ant-Man and The Hulk fighting over the can of soda, though.  Looked like it had high production values anyway.  Lots of dual ads, too, like two commercials in one.  There was the coffee commercial where the guy was drinking tiny little Vikings in a boat.  I’m not sure I’d drink a coffee that had tiny Vikings in it, much less one named Death Wish coffee.  It was the ad was powered by Quickbooks, so I’m not even sure that’s a real coffee.  Another weird dual ad was for Wix.com with Kung-Fu Panda.  It just looked weird seeing animals in an ancient Chinese setting using a laptop!

Cary’s inner child liked the razor commercial where they turned into robots like Transformers.  It was a lot better than the other ad that had a talking dirty old razor.  It’s a shame that I can’t talk about the local commercials since a lot of you might not have seen them, because the one for Jack in the Box was funny. I like a lot of Jack in the Box’s ads, but I can’t stand most of the food on the menu. 

And that’s really all the Super Bowl commercials that caught my attention.  In the comments section, tell me your favorite Super Bowl 50 ads.  I know most of you will say that you can just watch them on YouTube, but for me, it’s just not the same.  I guess I’m just old fashioned.  Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go re-watch the “Gravity Paws” intro on YouTube!  --Cary