America’s favourite holiday is this weekend. As we know, the Super Bowl is not actually about football at all. Yes, two teams battle on the grid iron and there will be a winner and there will be a loser but the Super Bowl more than anything is about Entertainment. There will be commercials featuring animals and sexy girls and talking babies, there will be network tie-ins to promote the new NBC Winter Schedule (Is Whitney cancelled yet?) and there will of course be – The Super Bowl halftime show. This year features Madonna and her jacked up arms, continuing the recent trend of safe acts. Madonna isn’t usually considered safe, but has chilled in her old age and will join the ranks of halftime performers of years past. Let us go back and re-live the most notable (for better or worse) Super Bowl halftime shows.
Michael Jackson
Before this, the halftime show was usually a college marching band, or some cheesy production by “Up With People”. The King of Pop brought background dancers, a big-haired guitar player, pyro, wind machines, smoke, and, played the hits. He also sang “We Are The World” wherein the entire stadium held up cards featuring crudely drawn children of different colours holding hands. Jacko then spoke earnestly about the world and the children before breaking out “Healing the World”. The halftime show would never be the same.
Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Forbidden Eye
Yes. This is real. Back in ’95 somebody at Disney decided that a halftime show would be a good way to promote a new Indiana Jones ride. This is the basic rundown. You can probably imagine just how ill-conceived this idea is: Indy and Marion Ravenwood are attempting to raid the Vince Lombardi trophy from a temple and later encounters Patti Labelle and Tony Bennett. At the end, everyone breaks out into The Lion King’s “Can You Feel The Love Tonight?”. Sadly the full video doesn’t seem to exist out here on the Internets, but below we have some of the musical elements with the dialogue mostly edited out. Bizarre.
Janet Jackson & Justin Timberlake
No list of halftime shows is complete without mentioning Super Bowl XXXVIII in which “wardrobe malfunction” entered our collective vernacular. Janet’s nipple was exposed for about .04 seconds and AMERICA WAS OUTRAGED. The MTV produced show’s theme was “Rock The Vote” but I guarantee nobody remembers that little detail. It took seven years for the FCC and CBS to settle this incident. Since this debacle, we have largely had to endure safe baby-boomer choices (The Who mailing-it-in) for our halftime shows.
Prince
As a rule, halftime shows basically all bleed together with largely the same elements with whoever is popular at a given time performing. Prince, as usual, is the standout. Running around on a giant purple prince symbol playing every instrument possible and covering Hendrix, CCR, and Foo Fighters. He ends with a blistering version of “Purple Rain”. Brilliant stuff.
The Black Eyed Peas
Last year, The Long Suffering National Nightmare: The Black Eyed Peas invaded Super Bowl XLV, and brought an end to the Boomer acts. Unfortunately they are The Black Eyed Peas. Everything was routinely terrible and then Fergie launched into a cover of “Sweet Child O’ Mine” with everybody’s favourite Axeman-For-Hire, Slash. Somewhere, Axl Rose rolled in his gave.