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The non-Football Parts of the Super Bowl

Image result for Sprint Super Bowl 2018

Big companies and big advertising agencies see the Super Bowl as a chance to break through the fog and set themselves apart. So the event has seen some very creative ads over the years.

This year the ads seemed mostly ... meh. The best of them was one of the first: Sprint had a very expensive looking ad with an 'artificial intelligence' theme. That's a still from it above. The robots who have come to full sentience mock their human inventor for the fact that he isn't smart enough to switch to Sprint. Well ... if you didn't see it, I can only say, you gotta be there. It is funny.

What makes it stick in my mind even more than its intrinsic humor is that two of its competitors in the wireless phone market ... dropped the ball, no pun intended. Verizon, at half time, wrapped itself in a saccharine way around the nobility of 'first responders.' And near the end of the third quarter, T-Mobile tried to make a point about human equality by showing us a lot of cute babies of different ethnicities. The babies were cute, thus all men are created equal, thus we should switch to T-Mobile? I'm thinking the sentient robots will find THAT amusing. 

And there was Justin Timberlake's half time show. For the most part he played it safe. His last appearance at a Super Bowl halftime show sparked a furor over Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction. This year, JT seems to have been especially concerned that nothing should go wrong. And nothing did. Bully for him.

Also, in the course of this set, JT did a duet with a projected image (NOT a hologram) of Prince. That's a nice tribute: Prince was born in Minneapolis, where this Super Bowl was being held, and all his life he was associated with Minnesota, until he died at his Paisley Park estate almost two years ago. 

So ... thank you for that, JT. 

I gotta say, there was a bit where Timberlake was singing and dancing in front of what looked like a traditional marching band. I think this must be an allusion to the earliest Super Bowls, where marching bands were the half time entertainment.

This conclues my Super Bowl meditations for another year. 


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