Honda owes Matthew Broderick a great, big “Danke Schoen.”
Thanks to him, the Japanese carmaker can boast that it’s got this year’s most buzzed-about Super Bowl ad: a commercial for the Honda CR-V featuring Broderick in an homage to his most well-loved character, Ferris Bueller.
This time around, Broderick isn’t portraying a charming teenage truant who feigns sickness and skips school to drive around Chicago in a Ferrari 250 GT with his best friend and girlfriend, and dance on a parade float while lip syncing Wayne Newton and the Beatles. Rather, Broderick plays a fictionalized version of his actual, off-screen self: a middle-aged guy feigning sickness to take a day off from shooting a movie so that he can tool around Los Angeles in an SUV. The ad, which was directed by Todd Phillips — of “The Hangover” and “Old School” fame — has been viewed over 3 million times on YouTube, is a top trending topic on Twitter — but has divided fans who aren’t sure whether to thrill to the nostalgia or be horrified that the free-spirited Bueller is shilling for an SUV.
The spot is, of course, chock-full of references to John Hughes’ 1986 teen comedy “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” with plenty of cinematic nods meant to delight the “righteous dude” in all of us. Whereas Ferris had to con Principal Rooney, Broderick’s agent is now the authority figure who must be duped in order for the day off to succeed. Ferris boogied on a float in a German parade; Broderick sings a Mandarin ditty while dancing in a Chinese parade. Best of all, perhaps, is the moment when a valet alerts Broderick that his Honda is ready with a monotonous “Broderick … Broderick …,” instantly calling to mind the line that made Ben Stein famous.
(True aficionados will thrill to the more obscure references: a guy in a Detroit Red Wings jersey, a la Ferris’ best friend Cameron, rides the roller coaster behind Broderick; the area code of the phone number Broderick calls using the CR-V’s phone system is that of the Chicago land area where Ferris had his fun; Broderick’s agent is named Walter Linder — which just happens to be the name written right above that of Abe Froman, the Sausage King of Chicago, in the reservation book at the snooty restaurant where Ferris, Cameron and Sloane have lunch. Really.)
So how did one of the most beloved pop-cultural moments of the 1980s become the subject of a Honda commercial, 25 years later? “The film embodies the theme of getting out and doing stuff,” Joe Baratelli of RPA, the agency behind the spot, told Adweek’s David Griner. The Honda CR-V is trying to position itself as a car that allows you to tackle, as Baratelli put it, the “list of things you want to do before the things you have to do,” which jives with the carpe diem worldview that Ferris espouses.
As for Broderick’s involvement, he thought about it for a while, ultimately deciding doing the ad “might be amusing,” as he told New York. “Todd Phillips was directing it, who’s a good director, and I thought it would be fun to send up Ferris Bueller a little bit.” Over the course of the shoot, Broderick said, he was “running around L.A … thinking, ‘I hope this is a good idea.’”
Some would say it isn’t.
While some people are griping about the lack of Alan Ruck and Mia Sara in the spot, and others are pointing out the obvious — a Honda ain’t a Ferrari — still others have qualms on a deeper level. “Remember when it was thought that a corporation couldn’t successfully manufacture a viral sensation?” asked the CBC’s Jian Ghomeshi on his program “Q.” “Remember how those discerning and democratic voices of the Internet would see through that kind of ruse? No more. Now it seems like we’re all just suckers for … an epic SUV commercial that plays on our nostalgia for a time gone by. What do we do in the face of these programmed and planned viral creations that are actually about selling products? We eat them up. But maybe it’s worth asking ourselves, what would the real Ferris Bueller do?”
Cleverly, the commercial sidesteps that sacrilege. That’s not Ferris Bueller in the SUV, it’s Matthew Broderick. Ferris Bueller remains ageless, and this ad is yet another testament to that. He lives on Blu-ray, while Matthew Broderick — though still adorable — grows up, marries, has kids and goes gray at the temples. A better question — and one that many fans are surely asking themselves — is, what would John Hughes (who died in 2009) have thought of the commercial?
Maybe Hughes would have been annoyed that his beloved Ferris was being used to sell cars on TV. (He was quite peeved by the NBC 1990 sitcom version of “Ferris Bueller,” now only remembered because Jennifer Aniston played Jeannie.) On the other hand, he did live to see JC Penney’s 2008 back to school campaign, which distilled the essence of “The Breakfast Club” into a 60-second ad.
But in the movie, Ferris’ father, played by the wonderful actor Lyman Ward, worked in advertising in Chicago. And so too did Ferris’ true father, John Hughes. Indeed, before his extraordinarily successful career as a filmmaker, Hughes was something of an ad-world wunderkind. At just 21, he convinced execs at the ad agency Needham, Harper and Steers to hire him, and he later made the jump to Leo Burnett and Co., where he began working on accounts such as Edge shaving cream. (The well-known ad where a man scratches a credit card along his face to prove there’s no stubble? A Hughes brainchild.) He learned the art of using marketing as a means of telling — or more accurately, selling — a story. He attended monthly focus groups to discover what people wanted to get out of a product, an experience he would later say made him savvy when it came to the marketing of his own films.
Considering his understanding of the power of advertising, and his love of well-crafted humor (which the Honda ad, admittedly, contains plenty of), he probably would have gotten a kick out of the Super Bowl spot. It’s fair to say that, at the least, he would have loved the use of a vanity license plate (“SOCHOIC,” for Ferris’s oft-imitated line “so choice”) in the spot — a Hughes hallmark if ever there was one.
Hughes, one would like to believe, would have found it quite righteous indeed that his movie was still so beloved — 25 years after its release — that it was worthy of a lengthy homage in front of the biggest television audience of the year (and possibly of all time).
When Honda first released a short teaser of the commercial, many fans believed that what they were seeing was actually footage from an upcoming Ferris Bueller sequel. And they’re not the only ones to fantasize about such a thing: “Just for fun,” Alan Ruck told me when I interviewed him for my book about John Hughes’ films, “I used to think, why don’t they wait until Matthew and I are in our 70s, and do ‘Ferris Bueller Returns,’ and have Cameron be in a nursing home,” which Ferris would liberate him from.
Kidding aside, Broderick has said that there was “some talk” about a sequel, but that “John never really seemed absolutely thrilled about it.” Broderick didn’t want to say yes to the role until he saw a script, and Hughes, Broderick remembered, “said, ‘Well, I’m not gonna write a script if Ferris Bueller’s not saying yes.’ I look back on that and I think, of course I should have just said yes. That was just really ridiculous of me.”
At the end of the commercial, after chasing down the kinds of life-affirming adventures that would surely make Ferris proud, Broderick turns to the camera and speaks his most iconic character’s most iconic line: “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” It doesn’t matter if hearing Broderick utter the line in this context has your eyes rolling or misting up — the wisdom of Ferris’ philosophy still rings true. Life does move pretty fast — whether you’re young or middle-aged; whether you’re doing the things you want to do or the things you have to do; whether you’re driving a Honda or a Ferrari.
Susannah Gora is the author of "You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes, And Their Impact on a Generation"
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The Super Bowl is all about tradition. The chili and beer-soaked parties. The interminable, annoying half-time show. The parade of sexed-up, flesh-flaunting ads. But this year, there’s a twist. This Super Bowl comes with a slice of beefcake. In a surprising move toward righting the gender scales, two of the most already-buzzed about Super Bowl ads feature dudes who are not pouring Doritos down their gullets or smirking as they speed around a racetrack. They’re being sex objects.
For starters, there’s Mr. Posh Spice, aka David Beckham, promoting his new line of bodywear for H&M. He flexes his numerous tattooed muscles to the tune of “Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” glowers in an “I mean business here” way that’s remarkably persuasive, and uh, I forget what I was talking about. To quote Emma Stone in “Crazy Stupid Love,” SERIOUSLY? Just watch.
The notion of a hot, barely clad body that happens to be male in a Super Bowl ad has been, until now, nearly unheard of. But far more subversive than the Beckham spot is a Toyota one that really flips sex appeal expectations. In the spot, the car company boasts that after it reinvented the Camry, it decided to reinvent a few other things. Among its creations: a traffic cop who hands out speeding tickets but also invigorating massages, a motor-vehicles department where you can play pinball and get soft-serve ice cream, a blender that plays Lionel Richie, and of course, curtains made of out of pizza. But the real showstopper is Toyota’s “reinvented couch.” A nebbishy man opens his front door to discover his furniture has been transformed into a row of bikini-clad beauties, no doubt just waiting for him to park his rear upon their collective lap. It’s your typical ad-agency-concocted dude fantasy, until the scene changes to a replica row — this time of seven six-pack toting guys and the announcement that “It also comes in male” — prompting the surprised homeowner to give a little shrug of approval.
Just two years ago, Super Bowl ads had been a slew of female-alienating, flat-out hostile spots that chided men for being pussywhipped and defiantly declared “Man’s Last Stand.” (Spoiler: They involved driving fast and not wearing pants.) But last year, the ads began to take on a decidedly less misogynistic tone. The most patently sexist ad back then was a Pepsi spot featuring an abusive female.
Make no mistake, there will still be plenty of old-fashioned T&A to go around during Sunday’s commercial breaks. And you can always count on GoDaddy to be the company that asks the question, “Who won’t notice a hot model in body paint?” But it seems that at last sponsors are catching on to the fact that nearly 46 percent of Super Bowl viewers are female, and that plenty of the game’s male viewers are more inclined to be moved by a shirtless man than Danica Patrick. Sure, it’s still objectification even if a guy is the object, but it does suggest our yearly parade of hormone-driven ads is tilting toward gender equity. Or as Toyota might express it: It’s still the Super Bowl ad, but reinvented.
“The truth is,” Nick Hornby wrote in “Fever Pitch,” his book about his obsession with Arsenal and British football, “for alarmingly large chunks of an average day, I am a moron.”
That’s a wonderful sentence by one of my favorite writers, but if Hornby is only a moron for only large chunks of the average day, he is doing a lot better than I am. I can honestly report that for the last few months I have been an absolute idiot for all but very small portions of the day.
Some football (American football) fans mistakenly assume that the season goes in a straight line, starting in August with pre-season games (wherein five of your team’s 10 best players will suffer season-ending injuries) and ending in February with the Super Bowl. But the true fan, the addicted and obsessive, the kind friends and spouses ought to be worried sick about, knows that the season doesn’t end. There is no start, there is no finish. It just is, and, like life, it ends when you do. This is why, when the New York Giants beat the Green Bay Packers in the divisional playoff a few weeks ago in the Frozen Tundra of Lambeau Field (it was colder in my Manhattan apartment that day than it was in Green Bay, Wis.) and qualified for the NFC Championship game (which they won … no, let me put that a better way: WHICH THEY WON!!!) my wife looked at me and said, “Hey, you can relax now. They won the game.”
But I could not relax. I never can. There is never any respite.
The second the game ended and the Giants won, I had to begin worrying about the NEXT game. (I bet even the team’s offensive and defensive coordinators gave themselves a few hours before they started contemplating schemes for the following Sunday.) And, as soon as the Giants finished off the 49ers in San Francisco the following week, I began worrying about the next game, Super Bowl MLCCDIXXIV or whatever number it is, next Sunday against the New England Patriots.
I don’t know what it is like for most football fans, but for me a season isn’t about exultation or grief — it’s about anxiety. The anxiety soars right before kickoff, lasts throughout the game, subsides a bit after the game, but then begins to climb the following morning. It’s like an airplane taking off, experiencing hours of gut-churning turbulence, and never quite landing.
The Giants-49ers game went into overtime. The game had a 6:30 p.m. time (well, that’s a Network TV 6:30 p.m. — you have to tack on an additional 15 minutes for the National Anthem and plane flyover and Bud Lite commercials). I almost always take half an Ambien on Sundays, especially winter/football Sundays, but with my favorite team fighting for their lives, I knew I would need a whole one. Not knowing the game was going into overtime, I mistimed the whole drug-dropping and wound up doing dishes at 1 in the morning. And already I was worrying. There was no time to celebrate. I worried about Bill Belichick, football’s own Dr. Strangelove, and Tom Brady and how to stop both Bob Gronkowski and Wes Welker; I worried about Gisele Bundchen and the fact that, since the Giants had experienced a spectacular season that was completely unforeseen, they were going to end up with an abysmally low first-round draft pick. Yes, they had won but there was more work to be done.
And that’s what I mean about the season never ending. A team plays its first games in September and, if they’re good and if they’re lucky, is still playing in January and February. But it doesn’t stop there. Just when you think you can exhale and knock off for a few months, you have to worry about the draft, about players being re-signed or getting traded or quitting or shooting themselves in the leg at 5 in the morning at some disco that’s less than a mile away from your house that you never even knew existed. You worry about your quarterback going skiing and tearing his Achilles’ tendon or about Victor Cruz, the Giants exciting new wide receiver, destroying his ACL salsa-ing on “Dancing With the Stars.” Being a fan means nonstop, all-year, around-the-clock worrying — it means worrying when you’re watching baseball in July. ESPN, even in the off-season (ha! Like there is an off-season), airs a show about the NFL every weekday and somehow, when nothing is happening, when there is no news to report, somehow manages to fill an hour. In February comes the NFL Scouting Combine, where fresh-out-of-college football players gather to get weighed, measured, taped, have their intelligence tested, get grilled about their dreams, hopes, fears and drug use and sexual preferences. In April comes the NFL Draft — I will watch a lot it — where teams pick their stars, pleasant surprises and disappointments of the future. Then come the mini-camps and pre-season, and then the teams make their cuts, whittle themselves of their veterans who can no longer do it and of their kids who never would. And then the real season begins. And on and on and on.
It brings to mind Joni Mitchell singing that we’re captive on the carousel of time. But Joni Mitchell is Canadian and probably likes hockey. Football is a roller-coaster ride that never ends, the kind that you think will fly off the rails and land you into the face of a mountain.
The day after the Giants beat the 49ers, I woke up and my very first thoughts were about the Giants, about the game they’d played in rain-soaked San Francisco, and about how they’d beaten the Packers in Green Bay the week before and the Falcons in Atlanta the week before that. As the day wore on, the Giants weren’t off my mind for a minute. As a matter of fact I think I can say that lately the average minute of mine can be broken down this way:
15 seconds: being happy the Giants won and are in the Super Bowl
40 seconds: worrying about the Super Bowl, about the 2012/2013 season and beyond
5 seconds: other shit
The last time the Giants were in the Super Bowl was in 2008. My wife was very pregnant at the time but she and I had a deal, a deal we’d worked out in advance of even conceiving: She could not go into labor during the Super Bowl. If she did so, she would have to go to the hospital with one of her sisters … or maybe the taxi driver could help her along. Well, she and the fetus agreed to this and the Giants won. Even then, right after the game, she asked me what was wrong. I believe I said something like, “I don’t think they’re going to be able to repeat next year and I’m still not a Tom Coughlin fan.” (Our baby came along a few weeks later — my wife was late and had to be induced — and I somehow resisted the impulse to name our daughter Eli or Plaxico.)
So there is little joy in the Mudville of the true football fan. For every minute of exultation, if you are lucky enough to be able to exult, there comes about two hours of dread.
If you, the reader, do not believe me then I ask you to do this: Go to a sports bar in Pittsburgh when the Steelers are playing, or to one in Boston when the Patriots are playing, or in Philly when the Iggles are playing. If the home team loses, look at the players on the field congratulating the winning team, patting their helmets and shaking hands. Quite often, players on the losing team will be … smiling. That’s right. Smiling. They just lost a game and they’re already over it. Now look at the fans in the bar and tell me how many smiles you see.
I’m convinced that fans take the game more seriously than the players do, and it might be because of this: The players are paid with money but the wages of fandom is fear. Money you save or squander, but anxiety is forever.
At my Super Bowl party this year, the choice of wings will be: mild, spicy, five-alarm and Ativan. Guess which ones I’m going for.
A program is sold outside Cowboy Stadium before the NFL football Super Bowl XLV game between the Green Bay Packers and the Pittsburgh Steelers Sunday, Feb. 6, 2011, in Arlington, Texas. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)(Credit: AP)
The Super Bowl has become a true televisual non sequitur — a bizarre “Rocky”-style montage mashing together as many divergent strands of American culture as possible.
This year’s blockbuster was no exception. There was former President George W. Bush sitting next to coach John Madden, who was obsessively texting. There was actress Cameron Diaz feeding popcorn to baseball bad boy Alex Rodriguez. There was Christina Aguilera belting out a “Naked Gun”-worthy version of the national anthem. There was even a melding of hip-hop, hair metal and sci-fi, as the Black Eyed Peas joined Slash for a rendition of “Sweet Child o’ Mine” — all in front of neon “Tron” dancers.
This was a bewildering assault on the senses, to say the least — and nothing was more singularly mind-blowing than the NFL using a Ronald Reagan eulogy to kick off a sports-themed tribute to socialism.
Reagan, of course, made his political name regularly invoking the “s” word to demonize government. For such bombast, he gained many followers, most of whom nonetheless cherished the doctrinaire socialism that undergirded their communities in the form of public infrastructure and services.
This Reagan-inspired paradox of cheering anti-socialist platitudes while supporting socialism in practice was the tale of Super Bowl XLV. The game began with a jubilant Reagan biopic that approvingly flaunted his red-baiting past, including his 1964 warning about America “tak(ing) the first step into a thousand years of darkness.” The game ended with victory for professional sports’ only publicly owned nonprofit organization, the Green Bay Packers — a team whose quasi-socialist structure allows Wisconsin’s proletariat to own the means of football production.
Green Bay’s win, though, doesn’t tell the Super Bowl’s entire socialist tale. The game was held in one of the NFL’s government-funded stadiums. Additionally, training for many Super Bowl players was subsidized by taxpayers when those players honed their skills at public high schools and universities. Meanwhile, fans arrived at the event on public roads, the contest was broadcast on public airwaves, and the Navy spent $450,000 of public monies flying jets over the game in order to stage a momentary TV image.
Except for the Nation magazine’s Dave Zirin, none of the major media examined any of this. The Super Bowl was presented as a seamless jaunt from Reagan hagiography to trophy ceremony with no mention of the socialist context. Why?
Some would argue that the sports commentariat was laser-focused on the game itself. Others might say that in trying to break the players’ union, NFL management intentionally trumpeted an anti-union president — and the management-worshiping media avoided highlighting the Reagan celebration’s underlying hypocrisy in order to avoid humiliating the owners.
Both theories are likely rooted in truth, but there was something reflexive at work, too — a deliberate self-censoring.
Yes, even though we clearly embrace socialism in everything from professional sports to telecommunications, the politicians and corporations who frame our public dialogue have long stifled honest discussions of our socialist reality because they know such discussions would show that America primarily champions a particular form of socialism — a corporate socialism leveraging public resources for private profit.
Like the few municipal services that still remain in today’s era of Reaganomics, the publicly owned Green Bay Packers are a rare exception to this norm. That’s why the story of the team’s organizational structure is suppressed — because it shows the most important question facing our nation isn’t about accepting or rejecting socialism. We’ve already accepted it. Instead, the real question is about what specific type of socialism we want: the current kind that works only for those in the luxury box, or the kind that starts working for the rest of us?
David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com.
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Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones talks about his team during a news conference Tuesday, Feb. 1, 2011, in Dallas. The Pittsburgh Steelers will play the Green Bay Packers in Super Bowl XLV at Cowboys Stadium Sunday, Feb. 6, 2011. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)(Credit: AP)
Roads froze and airports closed. Falling ice sent six people to the hospital. Finally, seats to the big game vanished hours before kickoff. Super Bowl week in Texas was not always so super.
Annoyance over difficult driving conditions and altered travel plans early in the week turned to anger Sunday for hundreds of fans with tickets who were forced to watch Green Bay beat Pittsburgh on TV at $1.3 billion Cowboys Stadium in suburban Arlington because their temporary seats weren’t ready.
Visitors left Dallas-Fort Worth en masse Monday, many wondering whether the region had been prepared to host an event of such magnitude.
“Logistics are a major, major problem here,” said John Boyle, a 53-year-old Packers fan who was waiting at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport for a flight home to Minnesota. “And I think everyone would say the same thing.”
North Texas wasn’t at fault for the seating problem — the NFL officially took the blame Monday, and Cowboys owner Jerry Jones chimed in to say his team shared it.
The region had no control over the weather, either, but that wasn’t much consolation to the owner of a Super Bowl memorabilia shop in downtown Dallas. Matt Smith said business for the week was off 90 percent Friday, when an overnight snowstorm capped a 100-hour stretch of subfreezing temperatures that turned sidewalks into slide-walks and kept many people off the streets.
That was the same day ice fell from the roof of Cowboys Stadium, injuring six workers on the plaza below. Although none of the injuries was life-threatening, the news broke when weary visitors were on their fourth day of dealing with a rare cold snap that included subzero wind chill readings.
Even after the weather cleared, Tim Bastion of Pittsburgh found out the hard way how difficult it can be to get around without a car in sprawling suburbs where organizers intentionally put major NFL events as many as 30 miles apart to emphasize the Super Bowl’s regional efforts.
Bastion and his son had to take a hotel shuttle nearly 10 miles back to the airport in order to get a cab to take them places.
“They should have a better system to get people from location to location,” Bastion said. “This town is so spread out, and there are so many places people would like to go.”
Hundreds of flights were canceled early in the week and again Friday when more snow hit, but airline estimates indicated most of the impact was not on Super Bowl travel. Big weekend crowds at NFL events and in bars, restaurants and malls were further proof that most visitors who were planning a Super Bowl trip actually made it.
Estimates of the economic impact on the Super Bowl vary widely — from $200 million to $600 million — and it’s also unlikely the prolonged and unusual weather event will affect those figures significantly, said Terry Clower, the director for the Center for Economic Development and Research at the University of North Texas.
“What might have changed is where some of the spending took place,” Clower said. “For example, because of the snow and because of the transportation snags that were weather-related, you might have had more people getting a meal from room service or inside the hotel.”
Bill Lively, president of the North Texas Super Bowl Host Committee, stands by his belief that the region will get another Super Bowl.
“I don’t believe the weather issue will be a problem in getting the game back,” Lively said.
The area rallied with about 48 hours of typical sunny Texas weather in the final countdown to the Super Bowl, then the clouds and a chilly wind returned just about the time the NFL’s seating issue because a major story. Now the region and league face a skeptical public going forward.
“I know a lot of people are probably having hours and hours and hours of meetings post-event to try to learn from this,” said Julie Dennehy, a Massachusetts-based public relations consultant. “What they need to do is communicate how much they learned, and how they’ve changed. Not what they did yesterday, but what they’re going to do tomorrow.”
Most Super Bowl viewers were busy feasting on the spectacle of football, multi-million dollar ad spots and that awesome Slash cameo during the half-time. We, by contrast, were distracted by all those crazy Super Bowl tats, and so we collected images of some photos of the best ones. (Though, sadly, we weren’t able to find a clear shot of Packers’ Tight End Andrew Quarless’ fearless tattooed declaration that he is “Gods Gift.”)
Since we couldn’t exactly discern what all the designs were supposed to be, we hazarded some guesses. Take a look and see if you can guess better.
Matthew Broderick 
David Beckham 
Ohio State football fans (Credit: AP) 
A program is sold outside Cowboy Stadium before the NFL football Super Bowl XLV game between the Green Bay Packers and the Pittsburgh Steelers Sunday, Feb. 6, 2011, in Arlington, Texas. (AP Photo/Matt Slocum)(Credit: AP) 
Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones talks about his team during a news conference Tuesday, Feb. 1, 2011, in Dallas. The Pittsburgh Steelers will play the Green Bay Packers in Super Bowl XLV at Cowboys Stadium Sunday, Feb. 6, 2011. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)(Credit: AP) 
