Brain Handles

So, last night I blog about the best way to collect points for the Pepsi Stuff promotion. Today, for the first time, I watch the Superbowl with my son. He'll be three later this month and finally has the attention span to couch potato it for a Sunday with the old man. Me and my boy, my son and heir, watching the Superbowl and eating chips... a tried and true guy tradition.

My wife had put him down for a nap at 2, and he decided to get out of bed and read until she caught him and made him get back in bed, so he maybe got to sleep around 2:30. I tried to wake him around 3:00 for the game, but he wanted to stay in bed. I taped the game on the DVR, then went up and woke him and my wife at halftime.

My wife doesn't really care about the game and I don't really care about Tom Petty, so I ran things back and showed her the funnier commercials. We got to the FedEx commercial with the pigeons and my son was okay until they got to the part with the giant pigeons rampaging in the street. By the time one tosses a car through a window, he's in my arms, burying his face in my chest. The giant pidgies scared him. But it wasn't too bad. He sometimes gets scared by things on TV and just needs a little reassurance. I reassured him and he was fine.

Here's the FedEx commercial...

But then we got to the commercial that really freaked him out. An invisible force yanks Justin Timberlake out of a restaurant and into traffic, then slams him into a building, then pulls him up the building...

My son is yelling "No! No!" and crying as Justin is slammed into obstacles and dragged across various surfaces. It's not that he's a fan of Justin's. He wouldn't know Justin Timberlake from Al Gore. It's just the sight of this grown up being flung around and hurt by this invisible force that is scaring the crap out of him.

My wife and I both have to rush to him and calm him, telling him it's just a commercial, that it's just pretend, and no one is actually being hurt. Finally he calms down. But, though he wouldn't say what was wrong, he gave us more trouble than normal and needed more soothing before we could get him to go to bed tonight.

And here's the Justin Timberlake commercial...

I thought I might have to worry about the violence in the football game itself, but he handled that without problem. It was the Federal Express giant pigeons and Pepsi Stuff beating the crap out of Justin Timberlake that freaked him out. Go figure.

Other stuff... The award for the commercials that most freaked out my wife and I would have to go to the Careerbuilder.com ads, one where a woman's heart leaps out of her chest in a very medically accurate and sort of disgusting way, and the other where a singing firefly gets eaten by a spider. Both commercials were supposed to be funny I guess, but were a little too realistic, so they ended up just being creepy. Oddly enough, they didn't bother my kid at all. They just creeped out the adults.

And in the "commercial most likely to raise a protest by an ethnic minority" category, the winner is Sales Genie, with its cartoon pandas speaking in over-the-top Chinese accents.

And let's face it, the Coke commercials were just lame.

Great game this year. One of the best I've seen in a while. But when it came to the commercials, really subpar.