Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash
By Miles De Rosa, Contributing Writer
The 2021 Super Bowl was supposed to be a passing of the torch from football’s greatest player of all time to the game’s greatest of today, a high scoring shootout for all ages. Instead, Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ defense steamrolled the unsuspecting Kansas City Chiefs. The game felt over by the end of the first quarter. Luckily, every so often CBS would take an ad break, providing viewers with a brief window of entertainment before the slog began again. Here are the ads that entertained us the most:
General Motors’ Electric Car Battery https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCy-a_E2I3s
Many of this year’s Super Bowl ads clearly approached production like an SNL season finale—throw as many celebrities in front of the camera as possible and hope the rest falls into place. GM’s ad featuring Will Ferrell, Kenan Thomas and Awkwafina was one of the few that actually did anything with that celebrity talent. Will Ferrell’s spoof of toxic masculinity never fails to garner a laugh and he uses it here to launch a campaign against the nation of Norway, all in an effort to get the United States to become the country that sells the most electric cars. Unfortunately, he ends up in an adorable town in Sweden. But who knows, maybe this ultra-competitive approach is the messaging we need to get men who take pride in the horsepower of their Ford F-250 to switch to electric.  Â
Cheetos’ “It Wasn’t Me” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7yvrDTtsHw
Cheetos gets extra credit for building an ad around the Shaggy and Rick Rock classic “It Wasn’t Me.” Featuring Mila Kunis, Ashton Kutcher and Shaggy in a shiny purple blazer, the ad follows Kutcher as he catches Kunis eating his Cheetos in all of the places in the house Shaggy’s (assumedly former) lover caught him cheating—the counter, the shower, even on camera. When Kunis turns to Shaggy for advice, he simply tells her to say, “It wasn’t me.” Shaggy even parodies his verse on the original song. It’s a fun ad that makes good use of a classic without completely ruining it. Though hopefully, Cheetos will have the sense to let this ad die with the Super Bowl, as having to hear this parody version over and over for the next three months would be downright painful.Â
Bud Light Seltzer Lemonade https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6CVKs77X74
Max Muncy being pelted with falling lemons while rounding third base was not something I had on my Super Bowl bingo card. Bud Light offers a somewhat surrealist take on the classic, “when life gives you lemons” moniker to joke about the sour nature of 2020. The add is full of slapstick humor—a man on his bike is hounded with lemons until he loses his balance, the man who laughs at the biker from his front yard is swiftly taken out with a lemon to the dome—but the high point of the ad is the man running through the airport while a glass ceiling is obliterated by legions of descending lemons. Coming up with a plague of biblical proportion such as this, just to pitch your hard seltzer is the definition of going the extra mile.  Â
Cadillac’s Electric, Self-Driving Car https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KAlqthD6Gc
Cadillac casts Timothee Chalamet to reprise the lonesome role of Edward Scissorhands. This ad does not do anything you wouldn’t expect it to, but it hits all of its marks. Plus, it’s always fun to watch Chalamet mope around on screen for a couple minutes. He can’t catch a football without popping it, he gets caught in a fence, after presenting a woman at Panera Bread with a hand-crafted piece of salad-art, his manager tells him to stick to the menu. It’s a sad, lonesome life we get shown and miraculously it is all made better by a self-driving electric car, which somehow just adds to the goofiness of the whole thing.  Â
Doritos 3D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLuqtTn4610
This ad uses some tricky CGI to follow a paper-thin Matthew McConaughey as he blows around downtown LA. After nearly getting killed by a football, whipped around in his convertible, sucked up by a Roomba and made fun of by Jimmy Kimmel, he finds himself at a vending machine filled with Dorito’s new 3D chip. After slithering into the machine and eating one, he regains his 3D form and is immediately thrust face first against the inside of the glass. If you’re ever feeling down, just watch that five-second clip on a loop and it should pick you right up. Â
This Super Bowl was improbably dry. Luckily, we had some great ads to keep us going along the way.