Hey, it’s Super Bowl Sunday! You don’t need to be a football fan to be excited about that, and Lord knows I’m not. (Well, I am rooting for the Giants, mainly because if my car breaks down near a dive bar tonight, I’d prefer that its tenants put happy drunken arms around me rather than beat me senseless with whiskey bottles in heated protest of a hometown victory gone astray.) Is it kosher to put sentences that long in parenthesis?

I made the mistake of skipping out on the many Super Bowl betting pools that came my way through the various companies I’m in league with, but the thrill of zillion-dollar commercials and potentially world-changing halftime shows is enough to make me regret the fact that the closest thing we have to buffalo wings in our freezer is…well, one of those Kryptonite Slurpees that I’ve absolutely refused to throw away.

Getting back to the commercials, let’s face it: More than a negligible percentage of today’s TV ratings will come from people who aren’t at all interested in the game, but moreover just want to see which companies can turn a multimillion dollar investment into tomorrow’s water cooler banter. For every success story (Monster.com’s highly regarded black-and-white kiddy testimonial from several years back), there’s a sad tale — like Pepsi spending four hundred trillion dollars to produce a Van Halen-boosted visual anthem for a crystal clear beverage that’d be immediately lampooned as liquid shit. Suffice to say, the commercial competition can be just as intense as the football games.

I’m not here to run through the history of Super Bowl ads, but I’ll be damned if I don’t at least pay some small tribute to the one campaign that could be counted on for unbridled awesomeness year after year after year: Budweiser’s Bud Bowl!

Beginning in 1989 and lasting for far longer than I realized before looking it up just now, Bud Bowl was an absolutely brilliant series of interstitials featuring helmeted beer bottles squaring off for their own version of the Super Bowl ring, or trophy, or whatever the fuck the winning team gets when they kick the ball between those big yellow stick things.

From what I remember (and my apologies if the scope changed in later years; I’m only referring to the first few “seasons” of Bud Bowlage), the games took place in small slices, spanning across several commercial breaks during each Super Bowl. The teams? Budweiser and Bud Light, realized by fitting glass beer bottles with football helmets and angry curvatures. They’d play their games in packed arenas (usually filled with “can fans”), and though Budweiser took most of the victories, the scores were always close enough to where neither brand had to feel bad about itself.

In grade school, we talked about and bet on the Bud Bowl as if it were the true attraction of Super Bowl Sunday, and in an era without Tivo, I’d actually sit through the entire football game if that’s what it took to see all of that year’s Bud Bowl spots. The well-produced and comedic ads were wonderful, but since I usually had ten bucks on one of the teams (my entire bank account at the time), my interest was more than just speculatory.

If nothing else, the campaign paved way for one of my favorite crafty projects of childhood: Grabbing my family’s empty beer bottles, fitting them with those cheap supermarket vending machine toy football helmets, and coaching my own teams of glass athletes toward championships of my own design.

Hard to say if any of this year’s ad spots will inspire me to that degree, but since I’m now more prone to drink ten bottles of beer rather than turn them into action figures, anything is possible.

Click here to watch an old Bud Bowl promo. Click here to learn the story of the magnificent coconut crab.

Posted by Matt. E-mail me!