The Best of the Super Bowl's IT Commercials

07-Feb-10 2:45 PM by
Filed under Television; Comments Off on The Best of the Super Bowl's IT Commercials

The Super Bowl is about to begin, and for many people, the main attraction is the commercials. Since recent studies show that a three-hour telecast of a football game has only 11 minutes of actual gameplay, this evening will be a greater bounty for advertisement viewers than for sports enthusiasts.

If history is any indication, it'll be an especially good evening for geeks. Computerworld is running a gallery of ten favorite IT commercials from Super Bowls past (and two terrible ones). Yes, Apple's iconic and much-parodied 1984 ad is there — how could it not be? — but I think my favorite of the lot is "Cat Herders", reminiscent of one of the AFI's funniest films of all-time, City Slickers:

Meanwhile, Network Associates' ad came 15 years after that seminal geek film, WarGames:

What are some of your most memorable Super Bowl ads, from either this year or ones past?

Super Bowl Trailers

02-Feb-09 12:13 PM by
Filed under Trailers; 2 comments.

So I guess there was some sort of game on television last night, and it was supposed to be a big deal. Or something. I must've missed whatever it was — but when I woke up the next day, I found a bounty of newly-released movie trailers. Let's take a look at a few of the geekier ones.

First up is G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. Though I'm encouraged to see one of my favorite actors, Dennis Quaid, the team he's leading does not have much chance to shine in this particular trailer. We see too little of the colorful heroes and villains like Snake Eyes (played by Ray Park) or Destro that made the cartoon so memorable.

Next up is the return of G.I. Joe's Eighties contemporaries, those robots in disguise, in Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen. Readers to Showbits will recall that I absolutely loathed the original film, and nothing in the sequel's trailer indicates a departure from that model — though the scope of the new robots piques my interest:

Finally, there's yet another adaptation of a television show, this one a live-action series from the mid-Seventies: The Land of the Lost. With few exceptions, almost anything Will Ferrell stars in is going to be a silly spoof, and this film looks to be true to that trend. Though the original series could definitely be described as campy, it was no Gilligan's Island, which this version appears to be:

The above movies are just three of the many upcoming films being adapted from television shows. Other trailers that debuted yesterday and are now available online include a mix of new and old: