Making a good Super Bowl commercial is hard. It takes months, if not years, of planning and research to make people remember your company’s ad. Conversely, 30 seconds of awfulness can make people remember you too, but for all the wrong reasons. Here are 7 ads which definitely fall into the latter category.

Christopher Reeve walking
Nuveen Investments, 2000

In 2000, paralyzed former Superman star Christopher Reeve “appeared” in this commercial. The message was that in the future, a whole lot of crazy crap is going to happen. Including, apparently, Christopher Reeve’s head being grafted to the body of a giant.

The goal of the commercial was to touch the hearts of Americans everywhere. Instead, everyone just kind of went, “Uh, that was creepy” and awkwardly took a bite out of their chicken wings. Oh also no one had any clue what Nuveen Investments did either because the commercial was really vague and almost made Nuveen Investments seem like an evil corporation from the future. Probably like the one that made Robocop.

Meet the official Holiday Inn transsexual
Holiday Inn, 1997

The gist of this commercial was that being a man getting a sex change was basically what Holiday Inn was doing to their hotels. Why this would make you want to stay there, no one was really sure, but if it’s good enough for Seinfeld’s Kenny Banya, it’s good enough for me.

The commercial was universally disliked and even resulted in some boycotts from various gay/transsexual/transgender groups. Probably not even for the hurtful depiction of their people, but rather for the tremendous slap in the face of being compared to a Holiday Inn.

White guys hunt down Kenyan, give him shoes
Just for Feet, 1999

There are few situations in which white men hunting down a black guy is going to make for a nicely received ad. This ad falls in line with that bold theorem on my part.

No embeddable clips so watch the commercial here

The premise if you’re too lazy to click: A Kenyan guy is walking around, being barefoot and Kenyan when some white guys in a Hummer drug him, capture him, then put sneakers on him. Eventually, he gets up all wobbly and runs, trying to free himself from these strange objects on his feet. The ad was so poorly received that it got a feature story on how bad it was on Salon.com, got the ad agency behind it sued (Saatchi & Saatchi, the agency in question, would countersue for Just for Feet’s ineptitude), and had a hand in Just for Feet’s bankruptcy later that year. So yeah, that turned out well.

Lemmings
Apple, 1985

In 1984, Apple had what some have called the most amazing commercial ever with their cleverly titled ad “1984”, a name with no one has ever been able to decipher the meaning of. Amidst pressure to possibly match that ad, they came up with another artistic bizarre ad that, well, sucked. Hard.

The commercial was so poorly reviewed that Apple stayed away from Super Bowl ads until 1999. And to make the indignities suffered to viewers worse, this is the one Apple commercial that has a bunch of people dying gruesome deaths, yet Justin Long and his smug Mac-loving face are nowhere to be found. Bastards.

Salesgenie.com and their racist panda bears
Salesgenie.com, 2008

After a 2007 Super Bowl ad universally rated as the worst one of the year, Salesgenie.com came back determined to make more awful ads that would stick with viewers for being so awful. Seriously, they even distributed a press release about it. Well they can wipe their hands thusly because this certainly proved to be a job well done.

It may shock you to learn that this ad never ran again amidst protests from Asian groups for A) Being racist and B) Finding a way to make pandas seem utterly annoying (do you know how hard that is? Look at this guy!). Also I fail to see how pandas could be running a profitable business, particularly when it’s a business selling furniture made of their favorite food. I’d find myself wholly incapable of selling Hamburger Chairs so it wouldn’t be fair to expect more from my cartoon pandas.

Spuds McKenzie plays hockey
Bud Light, 1988

I may be all alone in this sentiment, but I find Spuds McKenzie to be a douchebag. He’s a cool dog that gets all the chicks…whatever. But even if you love Spuds, this commercial of him playing hockey doesn’t make a whole lot of sense during the Super Bowl.

Also Bud Light is lucky PETA didn’t have a whole lot of political power back then, otherwise they would have certainly been boycotted. Dogs being forced to play hockey, drink beer, and get intimate with women? That’s got to be inhumane. At least the hockey part.

Fred Astaire dances with vacuums
Dirt Devil, 1997

I don’t think this was the first in the tacky “Dead Guy Sells Product” type of ads, but it was definitely one of the earlier ones. And what better way to honor probably the only masculine dancer ever than by putting a vacuum in his hands.

The commercial itself was cool in the sense that, hey, Fred Astaire is vacuuming but he’s been dead for ten years without the powers of voodoo or zombification. But it was probably less cool in the fact that Fred Astaire was notoriously protective of his image, to the point that he never allowed anyone to recreate his life for film, famously saying “However much they offer me – and offers come in all the time – I shall not sell,” including a clause in his will indicating as much. But vacuuming isn’t a recreation of his life so basically…in your face, famous dead guy!

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If you like awful ads, check out The 7 Most Completely Bizarre McDonald’s Commercials and The 9 Most Disturbingly Misogynistic Old Print Ads. Did I miss any even crappier Super Bowl commercials? Let me know in the comments below.

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