Don't you long for the days when Super Bowl ads were about beer and Doritos and cars, not the latest tech bro get-richer-quicker scheme? So do I, so let's bring those days back...in a sense. Let's set the WABAC for 2005 when the Eagles faced the Patriots for Super Bowl 39, "Al" was more likely to be prefaced by "Weird," and all phones were dumb.

I waffle back and forth between counting the Kickoff Show ads as part of the experience. In my judgment, it depends on whether they're good enough. I cut them out of 2004's coverage for being just bland things about cars and business. This year they're much better, so they go in.

Of all the "this car makes you look tough" ads that have ever been, and there have to be thousands, this opening act from Ford ranks among the best. The joke with the cows in Ad #3 is also pretty good. And typically McDonalds makes me want to slam my head against a brick wall, but this effort of theirs is ludicrous enough to work. We're off to a better than average start. Anyone remember Yahoo Auctions?
Oh boy, you know what'll save Blockbuster from oblivion? Rental by mail. It wasn't THAT bad a bet; you have to realize at the time, this is all Netflix was, and Blockbuster was a far more recognizable brand. It was more recognizable as a brick and mortar institution, though.

The Muppets make their second consecutive Bowl appearance, and this time not only is the felt alive, so is the food. The new product of the day was "Dippin' Strips," pepperoni pizza cut into vertical slices that you were supposed to dip into one of three sauces (or all three if you were feeling dangerous) before biting.
The third and final break of the preshow was taken up entirely by another Ford ad, about some fool who bought a convertible in North Dakota. He seems like he died happy, though.
Like the product that won't fill you up, Bud Light Super Bowl ads rarely let me down. What makes this one work is that it doesn't go for what seems the most obvious, but finds a funnier punchline.

We were still in the era where comic book movies had to pretend they weren't comic book movies. You'd never know this Constantine guy came from the DC Universe if you didn't already have that knowledge. One would wonder why use the IP if you're going to pretend it means nothing.
In case you're wondering how long it took this particular Bowl to show someone who is now publicly disgraced...11 minutes after kickoff! Here's Diddy. Halftime, by the way, was Paul McCartney because recently popular acts had been banished for several years due to the Wardrobe Malfunction. People griped about it back then, but this ad implies it might've been Diddy otherwise.

Ads for failed gadgets are sometimes the most interesting. The mLife is long gone, but here comes camera maker Olympus attemtping to stay afloat in the digital age by introducing...a camera that doubles as an iPod. They call it the mRobe!

That has got to be the only ad for bubble gum that has ever appeared during a Super Bowl. 15 seconds was all Bubblicious could afford.
Whelp, time for Vin Diesel to become a joke. He's the star of a very lowbrow family comedy with poop jokes and ducks. Maybe he can repair his rep with a movie about street racing, not that it'd ultimately be any less silly.

EDIT: Someone has informed me the first two F&F movies predate this one.

By this point a lot of Super Bowl ads were tending to rely on specific gimmicks, and rather than fight them, Fed Ex decided to point them all out...conveniently using them all at the same time.

Compared to his last few experiences, Cedric the Entertainer has a much easier time starring in this Bowl ad...though it all seems to have gotten to him; he can't have fantasies anymore. You may not like the joke. Just when I thought "women are nag-hags" ads were dead.
Due to the events of the previous year, the content of both the Bowl and the ads that ran during it was now severely neutered. You weren't allowed to reference the Jackson incident in an ad, as Bud Light found out when one of theirs was rejected. The closest anyone could get was GoDaddy, who got this rather tame spot through (it pretends it's a lot more outrageous than it is). That pretending was apparently successful though. GoDaddy would be a presence for the next eight or nine Bowls after this, their ads getting sleazier and more gratuitous until #MeToo killed the whole idea.

So you tell me. Did Volvo really send the winner of their contest to space? I'm skeptical.
Oh no, the buyer of the Lincoln Fry was from Japan? That means he's gonna lock it up in a vault and never leak it online! ...sorry, I'm thinking of video game prototypes.

Cell phones could take pictures now! Really grainy super low-res pictures that could only appear on a tiny screen, but they were pictures. No wonder Olympus was so nervous. You could even take illicit ones...though you couldn't get even close to showing what they looked like on the Super Bowl, nope, not anymore. Surprised they could even do the gag.
In the wake of 15+ years of Marvel Cinematic Universe oversaturation, this comes off rather differently than it did in '05. For one, it's easier to tell every single superhero in the shot had to be from one specific company. For two, wow, those costumes look cheesy now. Hardly worthy of a Super Bowl budget! Spider-Man sounds like that because the Tobey Maguire version was the one people were the most familiar with.

I may have said this the last time one of their ads came up, but I'll say it again. I miss Quiznos. I miss a national chain that actually sold real subs with edible ingredients. I miss being able to order roast beef for crying out loud. Baby Bob I miss far less.
To this day, I still don't understand how, out of everything Will Smith did in his career, one of his most rerun-on-cable and seen-in-thrift-store-DVD-racks movies is Hitch. Why Hitch? It's not that interesting. It's not Will at his most witty or charming. More to the point it's got no aliens, so why care?

This is a weird way to say to the world that Hitch is coming. The Super Bowl trailer does not mention the plot. It doesn't go into who Smith or James's characters are. It's just James shaking his blobby body. I guess it worked though. Here we are 20 years later and Hitch is still omnipresent!

Speaking of weird ways to promote something, this other ad with Gladys Knight may be the weirdest Super Bowl ad to date...but there are far weirder coming in the years ahead, believe me.

I remember that 24 episode. They had to stop all the nuclear power plants in America from simultaneously exploding. I think Jack Bauer did it with one punch.
Well, that Clydesdale Donkey ad from last year was so good, why not a sequel? I know it's a better option than trying to top it, because that'd be impossible.

Here's the solution that the Sandlot kids never tried: potato chips. They not only get their ball back, they get everything else, including....MC Hammer just to be random. I do like the kids throwing Hammer back (he had a good sense of humor to be up for that).
There's no possible way to predict what the last ad in this latest batch is selling from just the first two-thirds of it. In addition..."How can it be anything? How can this make any product look appealing?" I kept thinking. It's for deoderant.

The Pepsi song giveaway from last year was successful enough to try for a second year. This ad takes the very ad-like idea of a soda pop bottle that plays songs and just riffs on it like a stand-up comedian.
And this is just the same Pepsi ad we already saw, except the Stefani part is expnded into the whole ad. "Rich Girl" was already everywhere, I didn't need it here too. That song was the first time I heard her mention "harajuku girls" -- that subject would become her unhealthy obsession before long. Did you know this song is from Fiddler On The Roof?
Hmm. I'm not sure what Budweiser was going for with this. I think they were hoping the parrot would catch on like the frogs did in the 90s and the pit bull terrier did in the 80s. But despite their hopes, it turned out the 2000s were not the decade where sassy Mexican cockatoos could sell beer.
Finally, a trailer for a GOOD movie! And a superhero movie that didn't hide its own superhero! Batman Begins, and its successor The Dark Knight, would change a lot of things. In fact, maybe it worked too well. Now you can't get a NON-superhero movie made.
Don't waste your money on a second freaky pop-lock dance ad, Olympus! No one wanted this thing!

I guess I have to take back what I said about the sex-appeal ads being more restrained from this point. This tabasco sauce ad shows a lot more skin than GoDaddy seems to have been allowed to.

This 24 spot claims it cost $2.4 million for the 30 seconds, but I don't think Fox had to pay for its own house ads. Especially its "House" ads.
Someone said recently "Being right too early is indistinguishable from being wrong" and everyone repeated it and now no one knows who said it first. I bring it up because it applies here. A subscription service for music -- what a concept. But it was coming from Napster, most famous for free illegal music and a brand on the decline ever since they had to stop. Someone eventually pulled this off, but it wouldn't be these guys.
The reason these companies blow so much money on a few seconds of time in this game is because every now and then, it works. The Staples Easy Button, one of the most iconic campaigns of the 2000s, got its start here.

Anything I could say about this Ameriquest ad would just spoil it. It has nothing to do with mortgages but I don't care.
I guess Cialis survived the cleansing, so it got to say "erection" on the Super Bowl twice. But like I pointed out last year, Cialis was part of every other ad break on television at the time and skipping the Bowl wouldn't have made much of a difference. Your kids were going to learn a thing or two about human biology whether you liked it or not.
"Broadband quality" video on a screen that size? Don't make me laugh. I guess "broadband quality" covered a lot of ground in 2005 though. They didn't say HD. But hey, we can step on Kid Rock now! Thanks, Verizon!
And with that, we're in the fourth quarter and the endzone, where things get less exciting. There's an ad for a hybrid car that has to explain what one is. There's a crossover between a bunch of grocery product mascots (getting uncomfortable flashbacks to Food Fight here). There's a trailer for Sahara and another Cedric the Entertainer bit (but he has an important message this time). Otherwise, you could skip this half-hour and wait for The Simpsons and the American Dad premiere. Unless, y'know, you were into football.

Super Bowl 39 ended with the Patriots soaring over the Eagles 24 to 21. By the way, that American Dad promo at the end was the only one I could find in the entire game. Compare that to the incesssant plugging other post-Super Bowl shows have gotten. And the show is still running today!

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