The Superbowl: An Unparalleled Cultural Phenomenon.

The Super Bowl. An event every American has heard about, seen or attended at a party. People who don’t know a thing about the sport of American Football know to buy chips, beer and other snacks in order to throw a party, but not to watch the game of Football, but to watch everything in between. The commercials, the performances and if it's a good game, the drama of it all can appeal to even the average person, but only enough to give them the motivation to finish watching the game and nothing more, but by the 1990s, the Super Bowl had evolved beyond a championship football game and into an annual cultural ritual shared by millions of Americans. This transformation reflects a broader shift in American media culture during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s specifically due to the Super Bowl agenda to incorporate elements of popular entertainment, advertising, and celebrity culture, creating an event that mirrors the interests and values of American society.  If we think about the Super Bowl as a meal in the eyes of the average viewer, the game of Football is a side of potato chips that comes with a sandwich, the chips are good, but everyone is hungry for the sandwich. 

On January 15th, 1967, the very first Super Bowl was played at The Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles California. The NFL Champion Green Bay Packers and the AFL Champion Kansas City Chiefs, played the game that was notably named “The Lost Game” in front of 61,000 people in LA. The game was given the name “The Lost Game” due to the networks that covered the game (CBS and NBC) erased and reused the original broadcast tapes to save money.  (NPR, 2016). This was a common practice at that time, but to me shows how unimportant the game of Football was to American culture during the 1960s that they wouldn’t think to preserve the first ever Super Bowl. To those who did care about the game, there was a war unfolding between two leagues, the AFL and the NFL, in which the two leagues didn’t play each other, but shared animosity due to the competition they had over their viewers. Both leagues struggled to keep a consistent audience each week so as a way to end their viewership troubles, they decided to merge the leagues in 1966 and play the first Super Bowl which was originally called “AFL-NFL Championship Game”. In this championship game, they had a  marching band perform at halftime and a jetpack demonstration. Both are cool? I guess, but what's important to note is that these performances  catered to fans physically at the stadium and not on television. This casual marching band halftime show continued until 1970 when the very first celebrity performed live for audiences. That first celebrity was Carol Channing who was an American actress, famous for her Musical Theater and Hollywood Films. This was the first time a performance at a halftime show had the TV audience in mind, which was received very well. Even Carol Channing who had a long career in Hollywood had this to say about how big her performances at the Super Bowl really were,  “I think I received more attention from my two halftime appearances at the Super Bowl on daytime TV than I did for my entire tour of ‘Hello Dolly!'” (NFL Hall of Fame, 2014). The 1970 Super Bowl IV had around 40 million viewers in the United States, which is a lot, but they are numbers that are just scratching the surface of what the Super Bowl will become. Viewers made their thoughts heard that they enjoyed watching celebrities at halftime shows and that was reflected in the viewership ratings, but what was missing from early Super Bowls was cultural relevance for fans and non-fans during the nuances of the event, the commercials. This all changed in 1984 when commercials became must-see television.

Perhaps the single largest factor in the Super Bowl's transformation from a football championship into a national cultural event was the evolution of its commercials. Prior to the 1980s, advertisements during football broadcasts were largely forgettable product promotions designed simply to sell goods to viewers. However, this changed dramatically in 1984 when Apple aired its  "1984" commercial during Super Bowl XVIII. Directed by filmmaker Ridley Scott, the advertisement depicted a dystopian society inspired by George Orwell's novel “1984”, culminating in a woman destroying a giant screen that symbolized conformity and oppression. Rather than focusing on the technical features of Apple's new Macintosh computer, the commercial sold an idea: individuality, innovation, and rebellion against the status quo. The text in the commercial read: "On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you'll see why 1984 won't be like '1984.'"(Apple, 1984). “The commercial cost 700,000 dollars to produce and then another 1.5 million dollars to air, but made its advertisement investments back in its very first afternoon of Macintosh sales.” (Hansen, 2004). The advertisement only was aired once nationally and it generated widespread discussion and demonstrated that a Super Bowl commercial could be as culturally significant as the game itself. Apple's success fundamentally altered how corporations approached Super Bowl advertising. Companies increasingly viewed commercial slots not merely as opportunities to sell products but as chances to create memorable cultural moments. Brands such as Budweiser, Pepsi,and Coca-Cola began investing millions of dollars into cinematic advertisements featuring elaborate narratives, humor, and emotional storytelling. Examples of these are Budweiser's “Clydesdale” campaign, Coca-Cola’s “Polar Bears” campaign, and Pepsi’s “Michael Jackson” campaign. Pepsi took the competition to a new level, recruiting Michael Jackson to remix his hit song “Billie Jean” into a song named “Pepsi Generation” and performed it all as a promotion for the drink (Joseph, 2012). Pepsi is largely responsible for establishing the idea that celebrities could be as important to the Super Bowl spectacle as the football players playing the game. At this point, commercials themselves took on a life of their own, becoming a form of entertainment where many viewers began watching the Super Bowl specifically to see the advertisements, discussing and ranking their favorites the following day. In some cases, audiences were more interested in the commercials than the outcome of the game. Edgerton in his writing observes this phenomenon just articulated slightly differently, “...the Super Bowl evokes a star-spangled yin and yang, all those equal but opposing forces that create a prime-time culture: Coke and Pepsi, Miller and Bud, McDonald’s and Burger King.” (Edgerton, 296). The rise of the Super Bowl commercial reveals how the event expanded beyond sports and into the realm of popular culture. By transforming advertisements into highly anticipated spectacles, corporations helped redefine the Super Bowl as a media event that catered to a broad audience, including many people with little interest in football. The game remained the centerpiece, but commercials became one of the primary reasons millions continued to tune in each year, reinforcing the Super Bowl's status as America's largest annual entertainment event. In addition to commercials, NFL teams started to market themselves to their audiences via song writing during the hip-hop movement in the 1980s and 1990s. The musical performances on the NFL stage had only been reserved for celebrity singers and musicians, until the year of 1986, right before the Super Bowl.

When discussing music’s relevance in the NFL, the logical guess is that the Super Bowl halftime show is the most popular musical performance on the NFL stage, but the Chicago Bears had other ideas. In 1986, “The Super Bowl Shuffle” was created by the Chicago Bears; the first song and music video written, performed and choreographed by an NFL team that remains as a piece of NFL history today. The Chicago Bears made this song at the tail end of their story book season in 1985 when they went 15-1 with only the Super Bowl left to play before they had the chance to become world champions. On the brink of such a large feat for the team, the Chicago Bears released a music video celebrating their victory in a game that hadn’t even been played yet which they named “The Superbowl Shuffle”. The cocky attitude we know in the NFL today was born in 1986, with the Chicago Bears as its parents and it gave life to the culture of football. In 1986, after the release of The Super Bowl Shuffle, the Bears went to beat the Patriots 46-10 in Super Bowl XX, which showed many NFL fans that the Bears were just as good on the field as they were on the musical stage. “The Super Bowl Shuffle" sold a million copies and was nominated for a Grammy Award in 1987, but lost to Prince’s “Kiss”. The song created by the overconfident Chicago Bears was the first time that an American Sports team had ever combined sports, music and marketing in a way that led to huge successes on and off the field. The song became a cultural staple in America far before the creation of social media, which indicates to me that “The Super Bowl Shuffle” was a precursor to the “Viral” phenomenon we see on social media today. In addition to the fame, the song raised 300,000 dollars to help feed the hungry in the city of Chicago which gave people who weren’t a Chicago Bears fan in the city of Chicago a reason to reconsider. The concept of overconfidence in the NFL on an artistic level was birthed by the Chicago Bears and became a staple of the NFL in the 1980’s and 90’s and very quickly became closely related with the Hip-Hop movement. Chicago Bears pioneered the perfect balance between athlete and artist which many other teams tried to replicate; some succeeded some didn’t. The Cincinnati Bengals had their own “Ickey Shuffle”, a dance by their star running back, Ickey Woods, in their 1988 Super Bowl appearance which is recognized by the NFL and its fans to be the very first “Touchdown Celebration”. In addition to the “Ickey Shuffle”, the Philadelphia Eagles made a rap song in 1988 titled,”Buddy’s Watchin’ You” about their Coach Buddy Ryan. The Los Angeles Raiders also had a song made in 1986 named “The Silver/Black Attack” which was another team rap song similar to the previous ones we have talked about, but this one fell flat on its face unfortunately. The Los Angeles Raiders’ single was not a smash hit like the Bear’s “Super Bowl Shuffle”, but the song's creation is evidence that the culture in the NFL was/is changing with every passing year. With the extracurricular successes of music’s involvement in the NFL, for me it poses the question; How did the Super Bowl halftime show get to be so insanely popular? To answer that question, we must observe one more colossal change to the Super Bowl landscape in the eyes of the public, the full inclusion of celebrities in the Super Bowl Halftime show.

By this point in the 1990s, the Super Bowl had evolved far beyond a championship football game. It was now a full on annual cultural ritual shared by millions of Americans. This transformation reflects a broader shift in American media culture because during the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, the Super Bowl increasingly incorporated elements of popular entertainment, advertising, and celebrity culture, creating an event that mirrors the interests and values of American society. Now, we are observing a Super Bowl that is almost fully catered toward a Television audience with the halftime show being something that the Super Bowl perfected in the 90s. The halftime show that started the fan culture surrounding halftime shows has a specific start date in 1993 with Michael Jackson’s performance bringing in 133.4 million viewers. This amount of viewers was unimaginable at the time, even breaking the Guinness book of world records for the amount of people watching a single Television broadcast at the same time.  “This wasn’t just a televised performance. It was narrative infrastructure. Few left the stands. And for the first time in Super Bowl history, the biggest performer in the stadium didn’t wear a helmet. “ (Tinsley, 2026). As a result of the 1993 Super Bowl halftime performance, the Super Bowl's popularity cannot be explained by football alone. While dedicated fans continue to watch because of their love for the sport, millions of others tune in for reasons that have little to do with the competition on the field. The event's enduring success stems from its ability to combine sports, entertainment, advertising, and celebrity culture into a single televised experience. With this, the growing importance of the NFL in American media became evident later 1993, after the Michael Jackson halftime performance, when Fox aggressively pursued broadcasting rights to NFC games. As Reeves and Epstein note, "The News Corporation's Fox network, which in 1993 rattled the broadcast establishment by outbidding CBS for NFL football, pursued an aggressive strategy with cable operators, going so far as to remove its network from cable systems that would not meet Fox's price" (Reeves and Epstein, 342). Fox's willingness to risk losing cable coverage demonstrates how valuable NFL programming has become. Rather than simply broadcasting football games, networks viewed the NFL, and by extension the Super Bowl, as a powerful cultural product capable of attracting massive audiences and generating significant advertising revenue.  Fox's entertainment oriented presentation style, aggressive marketing, and emphasis on star personalities helped further blur the line between sports broadcasting and popular entertainment, bringing the Super Bowl closer to the media spectacle it is today. 

Ultimately, the Super Bowl is a prime example of how media can evolve into something far larger than what it begins as. What began in 1967 as a championship between two competing football leagues has transformed into a national cultural spectacle that attracts millions of viewers each year for reasons beyond sports. Today, millions of viewers tune in not only to watch football but also to experience the commercials, halftime performances, and shared cultural conversations that surround the event. The Super Bowl's enduring popularity reveals the power of media to merge sports, entertainment, and commerce into a single experience, making it one of the most influential and widely watched annual events in American culture. 

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