• by Karl Greenberg , Staff Writer, February 5, 2008

Yes, I watched the Stupor Bowl - which, by the way, was a great game - and yes, I'm going to now comment on the ads. Don't hang up! I'm not going to say the usual and obvious: that most of them seemed to have been designed by what they refer to in my daughter's school as "special needs children."

I sat, laptop in lap, taking notes until the fourth quarter when I got too wrapped up in the game. Also, I had made a point to drink during the game because that's what you're supposed to do. So I drank, but not Bud. Instead, I helped fragment the beer market by drinking a microbrew, "Screaming Clown Pilsner." Or maybe it was "Laughing Ganesh EPA". Anyway, especially after seeing the Bud Light ads I felt good about not drinking Bud.

I actually found the Budweiser spot about the Clydesdale horse that makes a Rocky-esque comeback as offensive as the one in which "a bunch o' immigrants" try fecklessly to score with white chicks. Weirdness. The former bothered me because it was so damned maudlin; I can't deal with the whole Rocky-as-a-horse trend.

Or how about the weird and frankly awful ad in which an infant makes online stock deals before vomiting, which is cute, I guess, if the kid spitting up is yours. Though by the time they started showing the E-Trade ads - maybe it was the third quarter -- I may have been too soused to appreciate it. But it's creepy, a kid like that. Reminds me too much of callow Internet billionaires, or the son of Willy Loman's ex-boss in Death of a Salesman, who winds up firing Willy, or of this really weird video I saw recently of a 10 year old in a 9 month old's body.

Perhaps it's a reflection of pop and cinema culture. Films from "There Will be Blood," and "No Country for Old Men" to dreck like "Mist" end in spastic, literal violence as a stand in for subtlety and irony. A lot of the ads were interesting, but in a mean-spirited and ham-fisted way. They aimed at slapstick, black humor and self-deprecation, sure, but humor ought to have a light touch.

One ad had a heart literally leaping from a woman's chest ("follow your heart") hmm, funny; in another, a guy gets sucked into a jet engine to pitch Bud Light; in another, a guy in "a more refined" Toyota Corolla is warned not to wake the animals in the back seat - weasels? - or "they'll gnaw your face off." He does, they do; a guy luring mice with Doritos gets pummeled in the face by a giant rat.

Also oddly offensive was the Planter's ad in which an unattractive woman has to rub peanut oil on herself to get any attention from men.

Memorable voiceovers: GM's Escalade pre-game advertising. "If it had a bathroom, I'd live in it." The bathroom or the Escalade? Second ad-line of the evening? Fox's own spot for "Terminator Lady" or whatever that show's called, where the title character intones: "Nobody dies till I say so." From your lips to ... oh, why bother. Best example of Fox pitching itself: The ad for its "Prison Break" show, where the two escapees end up on the Super Bowl football field.

And how about bad timing? Canada tourism wins that for a visually lovely pre-game ad touting Ontario as a tourist destination ... just as new border rules have made it lots harder to get to and back.

The good ads: The FedEx carrier pigeon. And kudos to Hyundai's agency for creating a Super Bowl ad that managed to be humorous without being tasteless. The company used the Bowl to unveil its forthcoming Genesis luxury car with an ad that evinced their "Smart" brand theme.

Similarly, Audi's brand spot managed to reference one of the more shocking scenes in cinema without being distasteful. The ad, borrowing from that famous scene from "The Godfather," involving a bed and a horse's head, was set up brilliantly, but at the critical moment we have an old capo waking up covered with ... oil and finding the grill of his lux car (which?) in bed with him. Along with beauty shots of the R8 sports car.

And how about that IdeaCast spot? Here was an ad within an ad, playing on Joe Namath's famous Noxzema commercials. A guy getting shaving cream smeared on his face looks out from the TV screen and notices his viewer -- Tom, I think -- isn't in the room. Off he goes on a lonely search for his demographic target, the guy who wasn't there when he was pitching the shaving cream. Brilliant.

Tide's talking stain was also winner. It targeted a basic truth: not that someone at, say, a job interview would actually notice a stain on my shirt but that my awareness of the stain would take on huge Macbethian proportions in my own mind. "Out, out damned spot!!" Hey, that's a good idea for a Super Bowl ad!