Ok, the first bloody commercial in to the kick off show, and I remember why I Don’t watch broadcast TV anymore. A cow getting showered with the strains of Styx’s Lady. Ok. Lady may not be all that great a song in everyones opinion, but really… it is an important song from my youth and to see a cow taking a shower … I’ll never be able to hear that song without that bloody image. Some may say that the commercial succeeded, but I don’t remember who the commercial was for, or what it was selling—and I don’t want to know either. Pardon me while I turn off the -shit- tube, and delete Lady.mp3 off the hard drives.
Update 2004|02|02:
It sounds like I didn’t miss much for the rest of the game—at least when the talk of the morning wasn’t whether or how the Pats won, but rather how Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake decided they both needed to do something to boost (revive?) their careers—enter the Full Metal Nipple. Glad I missed such a pathetic stunt.
It looks like CBS and others will be wishing they had missed it too—or prevented it from happening entirely—by the time everything is said and done. The FCC is investigating (PDF), the NFL is outraged, and I’m sure there will be plenty of other groups to speak out (if they haven’t already!) There are screen captures (even in HDTV 1920×1020 res) and the Drudge Report and Rotten Tomatoes have closeups of the sequence, if you really need (want) to see it.
MTV has pulled the article on their site promising “Shocking Moments” during Jackson’s show. Of course thanks to Google’s caching you can still read the article online. Looks like MTV stepped on it in a very big way. I can’t help but agree with Sally Jenkins’ conclusion from the Washington Post:
The NFL knows full well that MTV was the network responsible for Madonna and Spears. Just a few days after her Madonna interlude, Spears appeared on the NFL’s Kickoff Day festivities. The league didn’t suddenly develop amnesia about MTV. Timberlake and Jackson merely sent the lumber downstream, gave the NFL and its network partners what they were asking for — only they gave them too much of it.
“On days like this, I miss Howard Cosell. I miss his cold appraisals and scathing judgments, and I can’t help wondering what he would have made of the halftime show. Instead, we had CBS announcer Greg Gumble’s silence, broken by one sniggering attempt to cute-ify what had just happened on stage. I suspect that if Cosell were there, he’d have said that while the Super Bowl halftime was a piece of soft porn theater, it was perhaps no more or less offensive than, say, trivializing the Columbia catastrophe with a song and a dance and a phony astronaut planting a flag on a fake moon.
“…
“The NFL tried to use MTV, and got used back….”
I’m just glad we popped in a movie only 10 minutes into the game, especially as my 3 year old was watching with us. There were already enough commercials during the pre-game show and the first 10 minutes of the game that we were uncomfortable with for family viewing. There was a time when a 3 or 4 year old could watch a little pro sports on TV with his old man—I guess not any more.
Update 2004|02|03:
Now the TiVo results for the super bowl are in and—big surprise—the Jackson Flash is the record holder for the most replayed moment in the history of TiVo. You do, of course, know they keep that type of information, right?
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