Bob Hope's All-Star Superbowl Party (1986)

Though it’s difficult to pinpoint precisely when the Super Bowl went from merely being America’s biggest football game to a true American cultural event, it really did seem to come into its own, so to speak, in the 1980s, echoing the maximalist era. Indeed, while Bob Hope hosted myriad television specials throughout the 1960s and 70s, he did not host his first Super Bowl-specific special until 1983, followed by two more in 1986 and 1989, the years when his contractual partner NBC broadcast the game. Through the miracle of the internet, you can watch the whole 1986 version of Bob Hope’s All-Star Superbowl Party on YouTube, as I did as some sort of ill-conceived experiment in nostalgia. And it feels of its time in that specific way that so much of Ronald Reagan’s America felt, in which looking toward the future meant looking toward the past. It kicks off with a performance, of sorts, by the L.A. Rams cheerleaders, like a more scantily clad Ziegfield Follies, and includes a nigh hallucinatory interlude in which Hope and Donna Mills of “Knot’s Landing” sing old standards like “I Get a Kick Out of You” and “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” over NFL bloopers.  

Oh, it makes concessions to the present, like Hope making a few cracks about Vice President of the United States George Bush being in talks to guest star on “Miami Vice,” a pop culture interlude that I confess to not remembering. “What is this,” Hope wonders regarding the H.W. cameo that turned out not to be, “the government or ‘Star Search?’” Oof. Hope also essentially lusts after not just Mills but Miss America herself, Susan Akin, right there onstage in front of a whole television audience and makes a slew of vicious jokes about Boy George that to a present-day viewer are pretty shocking but in 1986 are received the same as deeming Gaddafi as the Don Rickles of the Middle East. I don’t mean to pat myself on the back or to scold with 40 years of hindsight. I merely mean to point out how this is evidence of the way we can and have advanced and evolved as a species. Then again, as the invaluable David Roth has frequently pointed out, our current President’s sense of attitudes, culture, and luxury is perpetually stuck in the 1980s. 

Reagan often talked of a so-called shining city on a hill, a phrase copped from the founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, who essentially copped it from Jesus’s Sermon the Mount, and in his farewell address, the 40th President explained his vision in greater detail. “(I)n my mind,” he explained, “it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.” Let’s put aside debating whether Reagan’s actions lived up to that ideal and admit that it’s objectively a grand vision, imaginative and idealistic. The 45th and 47th American President, on the other hand, is an unimaginative sociopath, and so when he talks about Making America Great Again, I imagine the city on the hill that he sees would be a place that looks an awful lot like Bob Hope’s All-Star Superbowl Party.