This super holiday season is far from over

By: ERIC BREIER - Staff Writer | Saturday, February 2, 2008 11:08 PM PST ∞

www.superbowl-ads.com
By the time you read this, you should already have bought the beer, the chips, the guacamole and a host of other snacks that will send you to the hospital for angioplasty by 8 tonight.

But it's worth it, right? It's Super Bowl Day, baby. Forget Easter, Passover, Christmas and Hanukkah. There's no bigger holiday than Super Bowl Day. The freeways will be empty, the malls ghost towns and everybody glued to the tube.

Sadly, much like the seventh night of Hanukkah, the Super Bowl rarely lives up to the hype. Kickoff is scheduled for 3:17 p.m., which means the game should be a blowout by about 3:45 p.m., especially given this year's matchup. And, if you're a Chargers fan, you'll probably just spend the whole day dreaming of what might have been after the Bolts' loss to the Patriots in the AFC Championship Game anyway.

But that doesn't mean you shouldn't tune in. It's the one day of the year where you can fast-forward through the main event to get to the commercials, which are usually more entertaining than the game itself.

Can't wait until kickoff to get your fill of commercials? A visit to www.superbowl-ads.com is just what you need.

Cool stuff

< To paraphrase the Clinton campaign (Bill's, not Hillary's), it's the commercials, stupid. Why visit the site if you couldn't see the commercials? Fortunately, there are tons of them here. They're broken down by year going back to 1998. There's also a small section for the all-time greats.

< There are breakdowns of the cost of a 30-second spot for every year since '98. Talk about inflation: $1.3 million in '98 to $2.6 million in '07.

Check at the door

< Who's putting this site together, anyway? They rank the top three Super Bowl commercials of each year and the top three of all time, but there's no mention of who is making these determinations and potential biases.

< It would be really cool to have the story behind some of these commercials. There are brief overviews of each year's spots, but no details on the commercials themselves. Some behind-the-scenes stories and interviews would really add another dimension.

The grade

There's not a lot of depth to the site, but when you have so many of the classic Super Bowl commercials, who cares? It gets four out of five mouses.

Staff writer Eric Breier has been threatened with divorce if he doesn't stop watching the godaddy.com commercial from 2005. He's willing to take his chances. He can be reached at ebreier@nctimes.com.