A Super Bowl Ad-diction

Whassup?

More than 50 vintage Super Bowl commercials will screen beginning Friday through Feb. 11 at the Museum of Television & Radio in Beverly Hills.

Narrated by Frank Gifford, “Super Bowl: Super Showcase for Commercials” will feature commercials, beginning with Ridley Scott’s seminal “1984” Apple Macintosh computer spot that aired in 1984 and turned the ad industry on its ear. Scott directed this lavish Orwellian-themed ad that focused on a woman trapped in a society of bald automatons. She tries to liberate the minds of those around her by throwing a sledgehammer through a huge propaganda screen.

Also included are 2000 Super Bowl spots, including Budweiser’s “Whassup/Call Waiting,” Schwab.com’s “Retired Athlete” and Budweiser’s “Cheesecake Ferret.”

Since “1984,” these elaborate, lavish commercials have become almost as anticipated as the football game itself. The presentation explores why the 2000 Super Bowl was dubbed the “e-bowl.” It also casts a spotlight on such favorite beverage commercials as Ray Charles’ spot for Diet Pepsi and Michael J. Fox’s popular series for Pepsi, as well as such famous beer spots as the Bud Bowl and Bud’s wisecracking lizards.

Museum curator David Bushman recently talked about the Super Bowl commercial program by phone from New York.

Question: Has the Super Bowl commercials lineup changed significantly since the museum began this program in 1994?

Answer: We update it every year, adding a selection of commercials from the most recent Super Bowl. We have narration, which sort of contextualizes everything. We will change the narration when something dramatic happens that calls for a reanalysis of the situation. Because of the whole dot-com situation [of the January 2000] Super Bowl, we rewrote the narrative.

Q: Some of those dot-com companies that aired commercials in January have gone under, like Pets.com.

A: A couple of companies are gone. Some of them stopped advertising shortly after. It was a tough year [for dot-coms]. They spent a lot of money. A lot of them were new companies. They were trying to do something to stand out from this huge crowd of dot-coms. For some, they didn’t pay off.

Q: Has this Super Bowl festival been well attended?

A: It does really well. We get a lot of attention. People love to come in and look at ads. Every four years we do a presidential campaign commercial program that is similar to this. They always do very well.

We are being very selective in the ads. A lot of times it is stuff people haven’t seen for a long time. There have been been a lot of truly great ads over the years. A lot of them are funny and especially with the older ones, people like to be reminded what their lives were like. Ads are so reflective of what was going on in the country. It’s fun to relive this stuff.

Q: Do non-sports fans tune into the Super Bowl just to see the commercials?

A: That’s really true, especially because the games historically have not been that close, though there have been exceptions. That was one of the interesting things about this year. There were several ads clearly directed to women. Oxygen [Web site and cable network] did one with the baby girl [a baby girl in a hospital nursery raises her fist demonstrating she is a force to be reckoned with].

There are people who are watching the game whom you might not think of as typical football viewers. A lot of those people are watching for the ads.

Q: Were commercials important when the first Super Bowl took place in 1967?

A: No, not so much. There were a few things that happened during the course of the evolution of the Super Bowl that made them important. The National Football Conference had won the first two--the Green Bay Packers won. In 1969, the New York Jets [of the younger American Football Conference] won against the Colts. Joe Namath was this brash young quarterback for the Jets and he guaranteed a victory. The Jets were this huge underdog, and they ended up winning. That had a huge effect on the [advertising] rates the following year because advertisers took the game more seriously.

Another thing that was hugely important was the Apple Macintosh ad “1984” in 1984. Advertising people looked at that spot. It was an incredible spot that impressed everyone who saw it. Suddenly, the creative people in advertising had this new benchmark they wanted to emulate.

Q: Do you have any favorites in the program?

A: I try not to play favorites. I can name some I think are great. There is a McDonald’s spot about peewee football players that Richard Dreyfuss narrates, which I think is cute, amusing and poignant in its way. And “1984” is one of the great, great ads of all time.

Q: I hope you included some commercials that bombed for one reason or another?

A: Definitely. We are certainly not making any comment on the creativity [of the commercial]. One considered not very successful was when Burger King introduced the “Herb the Nerd” campaign, where they created this character named Herb. If you saw him walking into a Burger King in your neighborhood, you won a certain amount of money. That was in 1986. It didn’t last very long.

* “Super Bowl: Super Showcase for Commercials” screenings Wednesdays-Sundays at 1 p.m., starting Friday through Feb. 11, at the Museum of Television & Radio, 465 N. Beverly Drive, Beverly Hills. Admission is free; suggested contribution is $6 for adults; $4 for students and seniors; free for children under 13. Museum members are free. For information: (310) 786-1000.

* CBS will broadcast Super Bowl XXXV on Jan. 28 from Tampa Bay.