Old Movies That Could Have Streamed After the Super Bowl

Just as the importance of the Super Bowl halftime show (is Halftime Show capitalized?) has waxed and waned over the years, so too has the importance of the post-Super Bowl time slot. When I was growing up, the former was extraneous, background noise for bathroom breaks and loading up on more pulled pork while the latter was of great consequence, utilized by whatever network was airing the big football game that year to launch a new show, like “Airwolf” in 1982 on CBS or “The Wonder Years” in 1988 on ABC, or to try and take an already big show higher, like NBC did for “Friends” in 1996, or Fox did for “Malcolm in the Middle” in 2002. Now, though, the pendulum has swung the other way. The Super Bowl Halftime Show (?) has become a showcase event for music’s biggest and the lead-out Super Bowl show has become a half-hearted shrug. This year CBS chose to premiere something called “Tracker,” which sounds like “Poker Face” if Natasha Lyonne was a survivalist. No thanks.

This no doubt stems at least in part from the growing irrelevance of broadcast TV, mostly just existing these days for live sports, not what comes after the live sports. And why stick around for “Tracker” when you could just, like, go stream that new “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” show, or the new last season of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” or “The Equalizer 3” on Netflix. Speaking of Netflix, in 2018 the streaming company tried to an invent a whole new Super Bowl lead-out move by surprise premiering “Cloverfield Paradox.” It did not draw as many viewers as Netflix might have guessed, though, and nobody has attempted to replicate their move again. And though I could pitch some brand-new movie ideas for the post-Super Bowl future, I found myself thinking more about the past, and what movies released the same year as certain Super Bowls might have worked as mythical streaming lead-outs. 

Old Movies That Could Have Streamed After the Super Bowl

Big Trouble in Little China. 1986. The 80s were weird, man, and I like thinking of the people still somewhat sentient after the Chicago Bears’ famous demolition of the New England Patriots, seeing John Carpenter’s (eventual) cult classic, and wondering if they are hallucinating. And if this movie is a little, shall we say, much for broadcast TV, then we will just substitute Willard Hyuck’s “Howard the Duck.”

Who’s Harry Crumb? 1989. This was the John Candy Super Bowl, as in, just before San Francisco 49ers quarterback Joe Montana led this team on their exalted game-winning 92-yard drive, he deflated tension in the huddle by pointing out comedy legend John Candy in the stands. But what if Candy being there was not just a coincidence? What if it was a psyop (sorry), foreshadowing NBC airing Candy’s detective comedy at game’s end, maybe giving it the audience it deserved (from a certain point of view) all along?

The Bonfire of the Vanities. 1990. The San Francisco 49ers beating the Denver Broncos 55-10 remains the biggest blowout in Super Bowl history. Brian De Palma’s notorious bomb from the same year would have been the perfect lead-out, watch 20 minutes and fall asleep, the way it was meant to be seen.

A Night at the Roxbury. 1998. Never mind that Super Bowl XXXII was on NBC and this SNL Studios production could have been an impeccable tie-in, what I’m thinking here is more how the game in which hapless Super Bowl straight man John Elway finally won ended weirdly on an incompletion by Green Bay Packer quarterback Brett Favre that was an injudicious pitch to covered receiver. And how the Butabi brothers dream of a club where the inside is the outside would have fit the mood.

Jurassic Park 3. 2001. There have been a lot of bad super bowls, but Ravens - 34 Giants - 7 gets my vote for worst. Beyond boring, just awful. And if they had premiered the third “Jurassic Park” right after, it would have looked so good in comparison! It would have been a smash!

Along Came Polly. 2004. Only Philip Seymour Hoffman going for broke might have been able to repurpose all that asinine puritanical outrage toward Janet Jackson into after the fact acceptance of the indelicate.

Next Year's Best (Worst) Super Bowl Commerical

Nothing is new anymore, creativity is dead. That’s why “Night Court” is back on TV and you saw Harrison Ford trot out his gruff old bones as Indiana Jones yet again for a commercial spot during Sunday’s Super Bowl. Speaking of which, the Super Bowl was awash in advertisements plundering from movies of the past, throwing nostalgia in our collective faces as much as that one guy, forget his name, born in a feeding trough, died for our relentless dull-headedness, or so they say, can’t remember, it’ll come to me eventually. Anyway. Point is, this, I guess, is what the people want, more of the same, more of what they already had a long time ago, or at least, that’s what the ad execs tell them they want. That’s why Alicia Silverstone was out there cashing in on one of the greatest performances of the 90s to shill for some product I honestly can’t remember (good job, whoever that was!), Sylvester Stallone was repurposing not Rocky Balboa for the 5,000th time but [checks notes] Gabe Walker of “Cliffhanger,” only slightly more rememberable than Kit Latura of “Daylight,” for Paramount+, Ben Stiller went to the “Zoolander” well in the name of Pepsi, Serena Williams was undermining her GOAT status by giving a rote cover version of Al Pacino’s “Any Given Sunday” speech, and a host of athletes (including Serena, again!) and actors kind of remade “Caddyshack” on Michelob Ultra’s behalf. When Leslie Neilsen sat down to plug Coors Light in 1990, he was just Leslie Nielsen, man.

But hey, if these ad execs want to weave nostalgia into ostensible ad gold, baby, Cinema Romantico can dig deeper in the crates than these marketing bros could ever dream. And so, while I’m tempted to recommend an Eddie Kasalivich/Lily Sinclair Amtrak spot or suggest one-upping that Bennifer Dunkin’ Donuts spot with a “Brothers McMullen” Dunkin’ spot instead, and though I will refrain from suggesting a Jackie-O Pascale ad for Intel because that might finally send me over the proverbial edge just as I will eschew proposing Michelob Ultra burrow into the historical obscure by remaking “Wildcats” because, yeesh, leaving an inner city comedy in the hands of some modern mad men sounds like a recipe for absolute disaster, I do have a positively unmissable proposal for Anheuser-Busch nevertheless.

Because remember when the Starfleet gang time travels to 1986 in “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home?” And Kirk meets cute with Dr. Gillian Taylor (Catherine Hicks)? And they go out to dinner at an Italian restaurant? Remember what Gillian orders for them to drink? Michelob, that’s right. Product placement that’s been waiting to be tapped lo these 37 years. Cut To: Super Bowl LVIII. Kirk and Gillian in a fast casual Romulan brewery, raising their glasses to the camera. “Michelob Ultra…the beer of the future.”

Some Drivel On...Prince's Super Bowl Halftime Show

Famously, when Prince attended the mandated press conference ahead of his Super Bowl halftime show in 2007, he forewent answering questions to just play a concert. The three-song setlist opened with “Johnny B. Goode,” an appropriate choice given that Chuck Berry’s single was included on 12-inch gold plated records placed inside both Voyager 1 and 2 when they made their trips toward interstellar space. If Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, also included on the space bound record, encompasses the whole of classical music, so does Berry’s encapsulate rock ‘n’ roll, sonic explainers to any E.T.s out there that despite war and famine and social media discourse, Earth ain’t all bad. And though it can be hard to recall now, ahead of Rihanna and after Shakira, and after Lady Gaga and Madonna, and Katy Perry’s mechanical lion and dancing sharks, and Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty, and Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg and Kendrick Lamar and the time Beyoncé gloriously hijacked the entire show from Chris Martin and company, back in 2007 the big football game’s halftime producers were seeking not so much a return to normalcy after the 2004 affair that got the puritans in an uproar as an upgrade in style, verve, and pure, simple entertainment. In accepting this mission, and in commencing this mission with “Johnny B. Goode,” Prince was essentially stripping the whole operation down, Super Bowl halftime show as musical reformation, going back to the beginning, the beginning of rock ‘n’ roll.

If another Bruce Springsteen might have opened a Super Bowl set with something like The Blasters’ “American Music,” the one we got in 2009 was content to paint between the lines and play pitchman for his own new album by playing its title track, “Working on a Dream.” As an artist, though, who ditched his own name for a while, confusing everybody but himself, Prince was never just going to play the hits, and didn’t, sandwiching his own “Let’s Go Crazy” and “Purple Rain” around a mid-set medley of CCR’s “Proud Mary,” with Shelby J. on co-vocals, segueing into Dylan’s Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower” which just sort of mystically, ineffably, incredibly melted into Foo Fighters’ “Best of You,” all of which taken together felt like The Purple One’s condensed syllabus of rock. What I had forgotten, however, or maybe never even truly realized, was just how much his set-up on the field in Miami Gardens mirrored the small set-up at the Super Bowl press conference. I mean, yes, ok, sure, he took to his preferred Love Symbol stage, and there were fireworks, even simulated lightning, and there was the Florida A&M Marching Band, and there was the literal rain, indelible cosmic accompaniment, but really, when you drill down, it was Prince, his backing band New Power Generation, and Australian dancers The Twinz, Nandy and Maya McClean, and that’s it. Well, them and Prince’s guitar (or: four guitars).

“Can I play this guitar?” Prince asks before launching into the immortal “Purple Rain” solo. As if he needed to ask. As if he really is asking in the first place. It’s a rhetorical question. Can he play this guitar? Yes, he can, and he does. If most Super Bowl performers, good or bad, seek to marry their performance to the gargantuan event’s sense of spectacle, Prince, bless his eternal soul, went the other way by rendering enormity from intimacy, taking the biggest television show on Earth and remaking it entirely his own image, the rare act of ego not run amok but objectively earned. If in any other singer’s voice in the same situation functions as mere backdrop to the pyrotechnics, when Prince unleashes one of his patented shrieks mid-show, it seems to manifest the two pyrotechnic jolts that follow. More than that, though, he noticeably brings his guitar up in the sound mix to ensure it virtually dwarfs everything else, making it the star of the show, recalibrating Super Bowl XLI’s whole reason for being, never more than his version of “Best of You.” 

If some have speculated that Prince covered the Foo Fighters as retaliation for them covering him, well, who’s to say, and even if he did, a little brass, a little swagger is part of rock ‘n’ roll too. Right there, live on TeeVee, brought to you by Pepsi, Prince takes that song, just like Hendrix took “All Along the Watchtower,” by not so much by transforming it as lifting it up into another realm, a rock ‘n’ roll spiritual, excavating fire and brimstone the original didn’t even know it possessed, the serendipitous falling rain underlining how Prince seems to be conjuring his version from the earth and mud, the image of the gyrating Twinz framing Prince as he seems to move the whole planet in the churning of his primal yet futuristic guitar chords an impeccable distillation of the whole genre as both lascivious and religious. It’s everything. Transmit that to the stars and an intelligent species might just finally deem it time to write back.

The NFL forbids embedding so watch here. Please.