I’m not much of a pop culture guy, even less of a pop culture critic. It’s hard to properly criticize that which you don’t know much about. But I have seen enough TV commercials in my time, so I’m going to take a crack at saying a few things about the commercials on the Super Bowl last Sunday. I re-viewed them since the game via hulu.com, just to make sure I know something of which I will now attempt to speak.

Overall, I found the Super Bowl commercials to be quite unpleasant and depressing. OK, part of that is age. The ad companies are aiming at a younger audience during the Bowl, not at people over fifty. But still, I was once under 50, and back in those days, I found commercials to be much easier to take. Why? It’s hard to put a finger on it, but if you’re gonna try to be a pop culture critic, you’ve got to try. So here goes.

Back in my youth, the commercials didn’t seem to be trying so hard to get one’s attention. They seemed to be more subtle, more mood-setting, more pleasant. The best ones tried to make you feel good, as to get you in a good mood about the product being pushed. They used music and cinema to set a positive tone. Some of the best commercials were all mood, e.g. Michalob beer commercials featuring tunes by Eric Clapton and showing dusky scenes. Or they used subtle humor and wit, e.g. the old Alka-Seltzer ads (“can’t believe I ate the whole thing”, or the professional pie-eaters at work). Or they came up with a catchy jingle, some of which I still remember 40 years later (“Schaefer is the one beer to have when you’re having more than one”, or “There’s just one Schlitz, nothing else comes near; when you’re out of Schlitz, you’re out of beer”).

Sure, there were plenty of cheap-o commercials shouting out for cheap furniture or food blenders that double as wood routers and tile cleaners. But when a sponsor spent big money, they usually got a smooth, soothing, subtly entertaining product. And if it wasn’t subtle, it wasn’t dumb and puerile either.

I guess that the public has lost much of its attention span since then. Today, the most expensive commercials need to be a bit outrageous, even slapstick and gross (by my standards). There’s plenty of violence and eschatological humor. Sex of course is pushed to the limit for family TV. Music and rhyme are not important. Taste is pretty much gone. If there is any mood, it’s dark and cynical, self-aware and self-depreciative. Life as one big video game. That’s what I mostly took away from the Bowl ads. The big money and big audiences involved with Bowl air-time seem to propel a “race to the bottom”.

But let’s go over some of these ads, to see if this is truly the case.

• Go Daddy, the “five showers a day” sexy woman being watched on a web site by some young guys: I find it interesting how web porno has now become “cute”.

• Doritos, the crystal ball: A celebration of mayhem, with an old guy getting hit in the crotch. Yea, my fifth grade class would have loved this.

• Pepsi, McGruber / Pepsuber: A semi-witty parody of high-tech adventure shows, with a bit of self-reflective cynicism regarding the big-sell; i.e., an anti-commercial commercial. But in the end, it’s just another big fireball explosion, just more “harmless annihilation”. Good old fashioned cynicism triumphs.

• Audi, the car theft chase: More video-game mayhem, but made cute by the fact that nobody really gets hurt or dies, e.g. when the guy on the motorcycle wipes out.

• Pepsi, “I’m Good”: Even more “cute violence”, more human injury just for fun.

• Bud Lite, “Drinkability on the slopes”: Mayhem, continued. A skier hits a tree and some picnic tables at high speed, but once again it’s all made cute; no massive head injuries, just a body cast that “the chicks all love”.

• Doritos, “Crunch Power”: Mayhem once again. Once again, we watch as a human body takes massive trauma (being hit by a fast moving bus), But everything’s fine here in ad-world, the guy is just a bit dazed and sprawled out on the windshield. Wow, how amusing and entertaining . . .

• Career Builder, “Signs That You Need a New Job”: Sort of witty at first, but the guy in the bikini shorts puts this one back into the 12-year-old humor zone. The repeated physical abuse of a Koala Bear gets the required gratuitous violence in.

• Denny’s, “Thugs”: an ominous “Godfather/Sopranos” scene over breakfast, but the plan to kill are interrupted by an enthusiastic waitress applying canned whip cream to the pancakes. Cute in a way, but sad that even Denny’s has to resort to mortal threat in order to sell old-fashioned comfort food.

• Coke, “Palmero and the Kid”: Nice at first, a kid giving an NFL star a soda. But no, they couldn’t just leave it at that; Palmero has to get violent with the corporate guys who object. (Oh, yea, it’s just an NFL tackle, even though in real life such a move would slam your head into the concrete so fast that you’d never wake up.)

• Bud Lite, “Meeting”: A guy sitting in an office meeting gets hurled out of a third-story window. Then gets up and brushes himself off; no severed spine, no shattered hips. Sorry, that’s just not the way that gravity works on this planet.

• Monster, “desk under the animal’s butt”: OK, here comes the classic fourth-grade eschatological humor.

• NBC, LMAO Clinic: Oh yea, NBC is so outrageously funny that you need a doctor to reattach your butt. Eschatology 101, continued.

• Teleflora, “Boxed Flowers at the Office”: How nice, the crummy boxed flowers from a competitor are in a bad mood and insult and degrade the woman they were sent to, right in front of her co-workers. Not very uplifting; after that ad, I wouldn’t want any flowers at all, no matter how fresh and quickly delivered.

• Bud, “Conan in Sweden”: Yuck, anything with Conan is a non-starter. A machoed-out Conan doing weird stunts is even worse.

• H&R; Block, “The Grim Reaper”: death and taxes versus the little guy. OK, no one dies or faces severe injury in this one. Maybe there’s even a bit of wit (a rare commodity during the Super Bowl) when the reaper leaves with a fatal threat, then comes back and asks for parking validation.

• Castor Oil, “The Grease Monkeys”: Strange days, indeed; to sell something bland like motor oil these days, you gotta get weird (monkeys invade a suburban home garage).

• Pedigree pet adoption service, “Weird Pets”: It’s sad to see a good cause, like finding homes for unwanted dogs, needs to send out ostriches to threaten senior citizens, and have a rhino take down a living room wall just to get some attention.

• Kelloggs Frosted Flakes, “Growing Fields”: The background reality is stranger here than the growing crops linking arms together in the video. Kellogg’s wonderful sugar bombs are helping to feed the child obesity crisis, so the PR folk back at corporate HQ started a donation program to build or improve playing fields in middle-America, as to help real-life kids sweat off the mega-calories that Tony the Tiger shills to them.

• Cash4Gold: OK, here’s one for the older crowd. It’s just a retro 1 AM commercial camped up a bit with Ed McMahon and MC Hammer.

• Hulu, “Alien Brain Mush”: This one is another self-parody, an injection of irony on top of retro sci-fi. It’s almost interesting, but it doesn’t hold after Alec Baldwin turns into an alien; the implication always has to be brought home with a sledgehammer at the Bowl.

• Bridgestone, “Taters” (Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head take a spin): Well, now we start with the more harmless stuff.

• Taco Bell, ”
  Guy Meets Cute Girl”: Again, harmless and bland.

• E-trade, “Talking Babies”: Again, harmless and bland.

• Gatorade, “Mission G”: Again, harmless and . . . oh, wait, that really is Tiger Woods, isn’t it.

• Hynduai, “Angry Competitors Now Get Our Name Right”: Once the shouting is over, harmless and . . .

• Bud, “The Clydesdale Adventures”: One more time . . .

• GE, “Wind Energy”: A boy captures the wind in a bottle to help grandpa blow out his birthday candles. And GE will use that wind to save the world. It’s bland all right, but I’m not ready to say that any message from GE is harmless.

• Monster / NFL “Fandom Contest”: How depressing, a reminder that 99.999 percent of us are just specs in a huge crowd. How wonderful that the great NFL God promises to raise one of us up to experience “mega-TV-pro sports-world”, the true definition and meaning of life . . . oh Socrates, where are you now?

• Hyndaui, “Assurance”: wait, here’s an old fashioned commercial, with soothing guitar music and artistic mood shots. How did that one get in?

• Toyota “Venza”: more modern art and good taste. Well, maybe the car makers get a pass on needing to be brash and gross in hawking their product. I guess they don’t want to seem TOO eager to sell their stuff; they don’t want car prices to crash in this recession.

• Pepsi, “Generations Refresh”: Wow, Bob Dylan singing the praises of the military! Talk about big-cola revisionism. I guess it all makes sense if you do stay “forever young”, as the theme song goes. Sorry, I’d rather be getting old but still able to remember what the 1960’s were really like.

• GE, “The Smart Grid Scarecrow”: A twist on the classic Ozzian formula, you know, Dorothy and Toto and The Wizard and all that. So, I was wrong; some old-school commercials still slip in. But this is NOT an example of the better stuff from the old days.

• Bridgestone, “Mars Explorers”: Actually, this one was a bit like the better stuff from the old days. Someone steals the tires on the Martian planetary rover. Houston, we have a problem.

• Priceline, William Shatner in a Wiretap Van Outside Your House: Not exactly the good old days, but not the new junk either. Sort of a witty takeoff on high-tech espionage shows.

• Cheetos, “Chester the Tiger”: Well, a little bit gross with those messy pigeons attacking the chatty girl at the next table, but Chester pulls it off in the end.

• Sprint, “Roadies On Takeoff”: Finally, a commercial that I really liked! Yea, flying today would be a lot more fun if roadies ran the show. Instead of calling off “V1, V2” as the plane prepares to “rotate” skyward, the roadie pilots yell “let’s rock!”. And then the runway fireworks go off. Cool!

• Springsteen and E-Street, “Mini Concert”: Oh, that wasn’t a commercial? That was supposed to be real? Whatever. Bruce was trying a little too hard, but it was nice to see Stevie Van Zant and Clarence Clemmons being them selves. After all the years, some guys hold up.

So, there were one or two good commercials amidst the dross. And the game was pretty good too. But I always feel better somehow after football season is over. Spring and a season of new hope will get here yet.