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I watched the Superbowl last night, notebook on my lap, pen in hand, waiting to take notes on the commercials so I could write a devilishly clever entry here about the wonderful ads that I had seen. I mean, the ad time goes for $2 million for 30 seconds, so the companies would probably put some serious thought in how to craft a commercial that would really grab people's attention and try to impress your company's name on them, right? Right?!

Wrong.

Everyone's heard the joke about the guy who goes to take his Philosophy final, and there's one question for the whole exam: "Prove that the tree in the courtyard exists." The guy scribbles, "What tree?" on his blue book, and gets an A. The joke is funny because it catches the listener (expecting a longer answer) off guard, and it pokes fun at the air castle construction that philosophy tends to encourage. The guy gets the A because he's the only person to think of it. If ten other smart alecks did the same thing, they'd all have gotten an F. Guarantee it.

Well, sort of the same thing happened at the Superbowl this year. Way too many commercials on the theme of "This cost $2 million dollars. This is our grade-school quality commercial.". Don't get me wrong, I'm very happy that all the dot.com companies are doing so well that their founders can buy a new Ferrari for every day of the month. I just wish that some of the talent that started up (some of) those companies had thought that not wasting their 30 seconds of PR was a good idea.

Now that I've gotten that out of the way, here are the commercials from companies that actually put some thought into their ads, and were good enough that I remember them the following day, without my notes:

• EDS's Cat Herders. Wonderful. The perfect example of what a Superbowl commercial would be. I'm still not their market, so I'm not going to be buying their stuff, but at least they didn't waste their time.
• The two Mountain Dew commercials, Cheetah and Mock Opera. The cheetah one sort of disturbed me a bit, but the Mock Opera, with the Bohemian Rhapsody parody was excellent.

That's it. Some of the E*Trade commercials were all right (not the monkey one), but I had to be reminded about them.

The halftime show sort of irritated me the more I thought about it. The Superbowl was televised on ABC. ABC has some sort of connection with Disney (I can't remember if they're owned by Disney, or if they just have a "strategic partnership" with them or what). Guess whose songs and theme parks were featured during the halftime show? I won't elaborate more, except to say that I wasn't surprised when I went to the IMDB and found out that Tarzan is coming out on video this week.

I wish I knew why that sort of wink-wink nudge-nudge style of business bothers me so much. I can't really explain it. Maybe I'm just not right in the head or something.

Anyway... I just went and read Liz's journal entry, and she'd remembered some commercials that I'd liked and forgotten (the Britannica.com one was neat, and the Christopher Reeve one was sort of spooky), so maybe I've just got a rotten memory and the commercials this year were just top notch.

Ah, what do I know, anyway?