I may be in the minority and I do not want to take away from the brilliant performance of the Seattle Seahawks, but I thought last night’s game was one of the least interesting in my lifetime, including one of the worst crops of commercials. The game itself was so dominated by the Seahawks it was only fascinating in the same sense as a really bad car crash at Nascar and even then you almost felt like averting your eyes. I appears that the transit nightmare afterwards was more of a blood sport. Indeed, my family did not think the halftime show was that creative (though I am not a Bruno Mars fan) and thought the commercials were downright boring. That later point has my fascinated. There seemed a real decline in the number of funny commercials this year and many commercials were rehashes or conventional pitches. If there are bad years for wine and Superbowls, 2014 is likely to go down as a particularly bad vintage.

One controversial commercial aired after all. Scarlett Johansson was on with her pitch for SodaStream after the company dropped its last line — “Sorry, Coke and Pepsi.” Of course, that was not the controversy that generated the pre-game buzz. The company’s factory is located in the West Bank and was denounced by human rights activists as a violation of international law. After the international charity Oxfam criticized her involvement (while being one of its ambassadors), Johansson decided to quit the charity and keep the company. I am still interested in the business decision by the company to push for the Superbowl attention, which has made it the primary focus of the boycott movement.

We love watching the commercials each year and the whole family was struck on how boring most of the pieces were this year. Companies went heavy with celebrities over creativity. Some were moderately funny but there was not the usual collection of water cooler favorites.

There was the usual formula pieces with cute kids and puppies that ranked near the top this year with The Budweiser doing a Clydesdale spot of an unrequited love between one of its horses and a yellow Lab puppy while Doritos had a cute little girl riding a Mastiff.

http://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o5192E9Pnfo

I thought the photography work on the Bob Dylan commercial was impressive as long as you really want Bob Dylan building your car:

Then there was the Scientology commercial, which led me to wonder how many people looked up from their chips and beers and said, “Hey, I would to give Scientology a try.”

Did you have the same reaction as my family that the commercials (like the game) was a bit of a let down this year?