Sam Howzit / CC
Guys, I get it. It seems like almost every year there’s some sort of massive disappointment in the Super Bowl half-time show. Whether your differences rest in genre, performance, modesty, production level or whatever suites your tastes, almost EVERYONE has a different opinion on how bad/good the performance was, but no matter what you’ve thought of the last 20 years or so of Super Bowl performances and how bad they were, they will ABSOLUTELY pale in comparison to what you’re about to see.
The 80’s were certainly a different time. We didn’t have a mass conglomerate of technology to steal our attention and information traveled at a snails pace. The NFL mostly could focus on the game and didn’t have too much to worry about from an entertainment perspective. Never has that fact been more evident than with the performer that they chose for the half-time show in 1989.
With the Cincinnati Bengals and San Fransisco 49’ers in a 3-3 nail-biter, amidst the first half-time tie in Super Bowl history, the NFL gave us Elvis Presto. An Elvis impersonating, lip syncing-magician. Yes, you heard that right. Normally, that would be kind of interesting, except that it wasn’t, like, not even a little bit. The worst part has to be the first magic trick, which required the un-enthused crowd of 75,000+ at Joe Robbie Stadium (now Hard Rock Stadium) to clap for their favorite card. You can barely hear the crowd and the camera pans away at the reveal.
The reason? Welp, when you ask the crowd to pick a card, and then you put “the card they chose” under their seats prior to the game, well before the show even starts, there’s not a ton of mystery in how you guessed which card it was……Oh, and he gave his instructions for the trick by SINGING THEM in his Elvis style vibrato…and if you haven’t puked yet, don’t worry, that’s only about 5 1/2 minutes into a 12 minute performance, that included a smoking guitar that was supposed to be a magic trick (1:36), except that you can see the smoke machine inside of the guitar, an awful Elvis song medley, and what is obviously a completely different Elvis impersonator driving a white motorcycle around the stadium (8:38). Yes, an Elvis impersonator…impersonating, the current Elvis impersonator. So before you subject yourself to this, remember that we’re in a better place, and that we can always hope for more. Be thankful, for how far we’ve come:
Wuhuh, hey, hey, I’m all shook up….no seriously.
