The transformation of the NFL — and by extension all professional leagues — from sports to entertainment can be seen most clearly in the evolution of the Super Bowl half-time show, now an object of such hype and ridicule.
Over its first two decades, the big game’s intermission cleaved to its roots back in the glory days of college football and featured marching bands and drill teams. We have indeed come along way from Super Bowl I in Los Angeles in 1967 with the marching bands of the Universities of Arizona, Grambling State, and Michigan carving up the turf of the Los Angeles Coliseum with military precision, to this year’s absurd pop antics of The Black-Eyed Peas, with electronic stage, and deus ex machina entrances from the heavens, and digitally altered vocals. Where the first Super Bowl presented the Arcadia High School Drill Team, the Black-Eyed pranced and prattled in the midst of scores of poorly prepared dancers strapped up in green neon — a touch Busby Berkeley pioneered back in the 1930s with far superior creativity and campiness. The billion dollar Cowboy Stadium owes more to Las Vegas than its namesake in Rome: and for the half-time show, the place became a phantasmagoric dungeon: the darkened high-tech edifice racing with electronic lights and the field covered with creatures of the underworld, clad in the costumes of neo-Gothic horror.
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