by PATRICK ROBERTSON Section Editor
Whether you watch the Super Bowl for the game, the commercials, or the halftime show, millions of people tune in every year on the first Sunday of February.
This year, if you were looking for funny commercials, you would only get a few. Most were just regular, plain old ads we are used to seeing, but we were also blessed with one very inspirational, and a few controversial.
The controversial commercials came from Nationwide Insurance, Mercedes Benz, and Cure Auto Insurance.
The least controversial was Mercedes Benz’s commercial. It was a new version of the age-old tale of the tortoise and the hare. Mercedes put their own twist on it by having the hare stop to gamble instead of falling asleep; then, the tortoise stops in a Mercedes factory, gets into their latest model, and flies past the hare.
As the hare tries to catch up, he sees the car flying through the air with his girlfriend accompanying the tortoise, who winks and points at the hare. Some people viewed this as a sexual innuendo, but this was the least controversial out of all the commercials.
Junior Steph Auerbach said, “The commercials they’ve been showing are ridiculous. I can’t believe that the Super Bowl is still considered family entertainment when they’re showing commercials like this and the Fiat commercial with Viagra in it. It’s becoming disgusting, honestly.”
The Cure Auto insurance commercials were considered controversial because of the hashtags they used at the end of each ad, and the content of the commercials. The spokesperson is just a floating blue ball, which he joked about, saying “at least the deflated balls don’t look like me,” and then he proceeded to wink. The hashtags used were #donttouchyourballs #leaveyourballsalone.
This made some conservative people very upset, and many people were outraged by the commercials content.
Junior Nick Broglio said, “I don’t understand why everyone is so mad about these commercials. They are just jokes for the fun of it. They aren’t racist or involving any type of slurs, it’s just all in good fun.”
What was probably the most controversial commercial was Nationwide Insurance’s ad. It features a young boy talking about all the things he won’t get to do. The boy says things such as, “Ill never be able to ride a bike, or get cooties. I’ll never learn to fly, or travel the world with my best friend. And I won’t ever get married.” It seems like a smoking commercial at first, with semi-happy music playing in the background, but then it totally surprises everyone. He ends by saying, “I couldn’t grow up, because I died in an accident.”
This surprised everyone. It was an add for makesafehappen.com, a new website by Nationwide. The website promotes stopping easily preventable accidents that cause young children to die, like drowning, a TV falling, and having toxic items within reach of a child. The message is good, but the delivery shocked everyone, which could be a good thing, because it was left imprinted into everyone’s brains.
Now from the bad to the good, the best commercial of the Super Bowl came from Always. The commercial asked a group of young boys to act out throwing and running like a girl. The boys all jokingly or lazily threw and ran, using “like a girl” as an insult.
They then asked a group of young girls to act out the same thing, but their acting was much different. They threw the imaginary ball as hard as they could and ran as fast as they could.
They asked one little girl to describe “running like a girl.” She responded with, “It means run as fast as you can.”
In my opinion, this commercial is absolutely amazing. The message they are trying to display is a very important one. No one should use “like a girl” as an insult. Being a girl is not an insult. Just because they may not run the exact same as a boy does not mean they aren’t running. There should be no “like a boy” or “like a girl,” there is just running, throwing, and fighting.
So what do you think? Are these commercials controversial? Do you think the Always commercial is good or bad?