Some of our favorite Super Bowl ads:

Mr. Troutbend said his favorite was the one about the rescue dog named "WeeGo" so if you call him "Here, WeeGo" he runs and gets a Bud Light for you. It's a cute ad, and ends up with a nice message about rescue dogs.



Another good dog one was for the VW Beetle - a couch potato dog decides to work out and get in shape so he can fit through the doggy door to get outside and chase cars. The ending is really cute - an updated version of the bar scene from the original Star Wars.



I liked the Doritos ad where the dog bribes his owner to forget he saw the dog burying the cat Fluffy in the yard, actually all we saw was the collar and tags and a "Lost Cat" poster, but we know the fate of Fluffy. It was the million dollar winner in the "Smash the Superbowl" contest.



I laughed out loud at the ending of the Chevy Silverado ad:

"A man drives his Chevy Silverado through an apocalyptic world predicted by the Mayan calendar. Unfortunately, not everyone makes it to the meeting point." I understand the Ford company is upset about this ad.



What struck me so funny was the Twinkies at the end. Spectacular, because the ad has nothing to do with Twinkies. I'm sure you've heard the Hostess Bakery company that makes them recently filed for bankruptcy, so I thought it was a nice tribute.

Not sure which Chevy car it was for, or but the graduation gift ad was really funny, too:



There was another Chevy ad that we didn't really understand at the time, but watching it today on YouTube, it makes more sense, and is actually pretty neat. Since it features a younger people car, I'm sure the younger people had no problem understanding the ad from the very first second.

Here's the explanation:
"The new music video from OK Go, made in partnership with Chevrolet. OK Go set up over 1000 instruments over two miles of desert outside Los Angeles. A Chevy Sonic was outfitted with retractable pneumatic arms designed to play the instruments, and the band recorded this version of Needing/Getting, singing as they played the instrument array with the car. The video took 4 months of preparation and 4 days of shooting and recording. There are no ringers or stand-ins; Damian took stunt driving lessons. Each piano had the lowest octaves tuned to the same note so that they'd play the right note no matter where they were struck. For more information and behind-the-scenes footage, see https://www.LetsDoThis.com and https://www.okgo.net. Many thanks to Chevy for believing in and supporting such an insane and ambitious project, and to Gretsch for providing the guitars and amps."



I don't like vampire stories much, but enjoyed this Audi ad:



Another one that moved a little bit fast for us to really enjoy at the time was the 'Reinvented Camry.' It has some cute ideas, like a time-traveling baby (that they say never poops), curtains made of pizza, and a DMV set up like a fun arcade complete with pinball machines and mini-golf, but they whiz by so quickly, it's hard to understand what is going on, and some of the ideas weren't all that funny. It seemed like Toyota is trying too hard to get us to forget that their Camry can just go berserk without warning and kill you; I'm not buying that floor mat theory for a second, and no time traveling baby is going to convince me that they've figured out what is wrong with their cars.



I thought it was ironic that the big ad right after the half time (it was the Bridgestone half time, but right before that there "Toyota Half-Time Report") so I was kind of thinking Toyota, and then we have this Clint Eastwood-narrated story about how car making or something in Detroit or maybe the United States is rising from the ashes. I wasn't even aware that it was a Chrysler commercial, I thought it was something about how our taxpayer-funded bailout of GM was worth it, or maybe the mayor of Detroit isn't saying he wants to bulldoze the whole city because of all the abandoned buildings. Don't get me wrong, it was moving and hopeful, but I'm still not sure what the exact message was, even when I know what it was supposed to be about. And Clint puts on that special raspy voice when he's 'acting' which I think is so phony. He's got some natural rasp, but I've paid attention to him when he's being interviewed, and believe me, he pulls out the super-rasp when he's going for the Oscar.



I do have to say that one of my all-time favorite ads was the George Washington driving the Dodge Charger ad. (Not a Superbowl ad, I just like it a lot.)



Ones I didn't like as well:

M&Ms naked:



I thought the Coca Cola bear ads were lame. I enjoy animated polar bears, but the ads seemed pointless. I think the animators had a good time making them and forgot about the viewer.

There were some local ads stuck in there. Other states had political ads, but ours were for lawyers. One, all in Spanish, was about ambulance chasers - they literally had actors as lawyers running behind an ambulance, and my favorite part was "quatro-quatro-quatro-siete-siete-siete-siete" - their telephone number 444-7777. Memorable.

Note: I tried to find clips that didn't have the little pop-up ad, but if you get those ads, don't complain about it, just click on the 'close' X in the upper right corner of each ad.