Rating the Ads

Since the Super Bowl game itself wasn't all that interesting until the last quarter, it makes even more sense to talk about the commercials, like we did last year. I'd say that my favorites would be:

• The Budweiser ad with the Dalmatian training the Clydesdale, a la Rocky


• The Bridgestone ad with the computer-animated squirrel (actually, their other commercial was pretty funny too, even if it would be scary to run into the likes of Alice Cooper and Richard Simmons on a darkened road)


• The ad with Shaq playing a jockey (as often happens in the Super Bowl, the ads have little to do with the products, so I had to think for a moment to recall that it was for Vitamin Water)


• The Coke ad with the Stewie and Underdog parade balloons fighting over a Coke bottle balloon


• And of course, I liked the NFL promo about the football player who started out playing the oboe.

And which ones didn't do anything for me? The ones with people dancing--the guy trying to start the car, the dancing iguanas, and the Pepsi one where everyone ended up doing the head-jerk like in A Night at the Roxbury. I also was puzzled by the Salesgenie.com commercials; I'm pretty much the polar opposite of a fan of political correctness, but I was surprised that a company that I'm guessing few people had ever heard of before tonight made its national debut with some cartoons that exaggerated ethnic stereotypes like that. But if you could get past the "can they really do that on TV anymore?" mode of thinking, they were kind of funny, and the animation on the one with the pandas reminded me of John Kricfalusi of Ren & Stimpy fame, and that would explain the "edginess," I suppose.)

And I missed the silent commercial; I was reading a magazine during the less-interesting parts of the game, and I guess it just slipped by me unnoticed.

If you missed one or all of them, or just want to see one again, MySpace has them all in one place. Which ones did you like best?